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c6ff2b9ca50b7d4699e97be3e00e699d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-10-me-flournoy10-story.html | Legislator and 2-term state controller lost ’74 gov.'s race | Legislator and 2-term state controller lost ’74 gov.'s race
Houston I. Flournoy, a former political science professor who exchanged his college classroom for the rough-and-tumble of California government as a legislator, state controller and gubernatorial candidate, has died. He was 78.
Flournoy, a heavy smoker for years, had emphysema and died Monday of heart failure during a flight from San Diego to Santa Rosa, said his daughter, Jean Korinke, of Davis.
The native New Yorker, who moved to California in the late 1950s to teach at Pomona College, had served two terms in the state Assembly and was in his second term as state controller when he became the Republican nominee for governor against Jerry Brown in 1974. Brown won with 50% of the vote to Flournoy’s 48%.
Flournoy laid most of the blame for his narrow loss on President Ford’s pardon of ex-President Nixon only weeks before California’s general election. The pardon of Nixon, who left the White House during the Watergate scandal, damaged the political fortunes of many Republican candidates, even moderates like Flournoy.
He was one of the last of a breed, a moderate Republican in the tradition of former Gov. Earl Warren, who served in Sacramento during a bipartisan era when no aisle separated Republicans from Democrats in the Legislature.
“We were progressives. We wanted to solve problems, and we did,” former Assemblyman William T. Bagley of San Rafael, who joined the Legislature with Flournoy in 1960, said of his longtime friend and colleague.
As a legislator Flournoy supported a state land-use plan and a full-time air-pollution control board. He also advocated a larger state role in equalizing the funding of rich and poor school districts, in part by imposing a statewide property tax. As controller, he reformed the state’s system for selecting county tax appraisers, who often earned their appointments through political donations.
“Hugh got rid of that system,” Bagley said Wednesday.
Despite his progressive stands, he was portrayed by Brown as a “watered-down” version of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, whose conservative ideology helped sweep him to Washington in 1980. A graduate of Cornell and Princeton, where he earned his doctorate in 1956, Flournoy first tasted politics in 1955 when he worked as a researcher for the New Jersey Legislature. He later was an assistant to U.S. Sen. H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey.
He moved west in 1957 to teach political science at Pomona College and quickly earned tenure.
“His goal was to become a tenured professor at a very young age. He said, ‘OK, I’ve met my goal, now what do I do?’ ” Korinke said.
In 1960, he ran for the Assembly from Claremont and won. He was one of four Republican “young Turks,” all moderates, who entered the Legislature that year.
Toward the end of his second term, in 1965, he decided to quit politics because he couldn’t support his family on $12,000 a year -- he earned $6,000 a year as a part-time professor and another $6,000 as a part-time legislator. Two days before the deadline, Bagley and fellow Republican Assemblyman John G. Veneman of San Francisco scraped together the $500 filing fee for state controller and entered Flournoy in the race. Flournoy learned of his candidacy the next day in the newspaper.
He won the office by beating incumbent Alan Cranston, who went on to become a long-serving U.S. senator.
When Flournoy decided to seek the Republican nomination for governor in 1973, he was not well-known across the state and was seen as the most unlikely of six contenders to win his party’s favor. Moreover, he was not a member of Reagan’s inner circle.
His stiffest competition was Lt. Gov. Ed Reinecke, Reagan’s handpicked successor. But gradually, his rivals, including former Lt. Gov. Robert Finch and Atty. Gen. Evelle Younger, dropped out of the race. Flournoy found himself the winner of the Republican primary after Reinecke was charged with lying in connection with a federal investigation of an offer by International Telephone & Telegraph Co. to help underwrite the 1972 Republican convention.
Described in a 1974 Times profile as having all the charisma of a banker, Flournoy was not the type of candidate who connected emotionally with voters. He was outpolled by Brown, former Gov. Pat Brown’s son and a one-time Jesuit seminarian, who repeatedly linked Flournoy to Reagan and Nixon. He countered with a television spot in which he told viewers: “My name is Houston Flournoy. Houston Flournoy. I repeat my name because Jerry Brown seems to be running against Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.”
Watergate was another major hindrance. It deprived Flournoy’s campaign of news coverage (the House Judiciary Committee hearings into impeachment were dominating the airwaves and front pages). It also made matters more complicated for the Republican underdog, who feared alienating the GOP bedrock if he criticized Nixon and committing political suicide if he defended him.
When Ford pardoned Nixon right after Labor Day, it stirred new resentment of Republicans and “threw a big political monkey wrench into the Flournoy campaign,” Bagley recalled. Flournoy’s fate seemed certain, despite a late surge in the polls that narrowed the gap between him and Brown to the relatively close margin of 177,000 votes out of 6 million cast.
He accepted his loss gracefully and returned to academia, accepting a faculty position at USC. He was a professor of public administration for two decades, teaching at the main USC campus in Los Angeles and at its graduate program in Sacramento. He recently contributed $500,000 to USC’s State Capital Center to help create an endowed professorship in state government, Jean Korinke said.
Flournoy, who had homes in Bodega Bay, Calif., and Florida, is survived by another daughter, Ann Day of Carmel; a son, David of Livermore, Calif.; and two grandchildren.
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elaine.woo@latimes.com
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52f01cdd48688b3fa967c1282cf09083 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-11-et-persuasion11-story.html | Regret, hope and Austen | Regret, hope and Austen
There is perhaps no better friend to the movie, TV movie or miniseries than the 19th century British novel; with their colorful characters, speakable dialogue, temporally exotic set pieces, and reservoirs of deep feeling, these books are made to be enacted. As the first entry in its refitted “Masterpiece Theatre,” PBS is mounting “The Complete Jane Austen,” with new and old adaptations of the six novels Austen completed -- a rock on which something like a church has been built. It has been in operation for about 200 years now, and 200 years from now, if there are still people left to put on costumes and run around the English countryside, if there still is an English countryside, they will be adapted anew.
One reason for this longevity, hazards new “Masterpiece Classic” host Gillian Anderson in her introduction to Sunday night’s series opener, “Persuasion,” is that Austen “makes the difference between true love and false very clear.” Anderson is a different sort of host from her leather-bound predecessors -- smart but, you know, sexy. And younger, of course. She sets the film up well; it’s exciting even before it begins.
The series has been cobbled together from three new adaptations that ran last spring on Britain’s ITV; the same network’s 1996 adaptation of “Emma” (with Kate Beckinsale); the 1995 Jennifer Ehle “Pride and Prejudice”; and a recent BBC production of “Sense and Sensibility,” which gets a full-blown, two-night miniseries treatment. The ITV films -- “Persuasion,” “Northanger Abbey” and “Mansfield Park” -- are more compact. And although length usually benefits such adaptations -- it gives you a better sense of the long, passing days and makes more room for the conversation that in Austen is a form of action -- they tell their stories smartly, each in its own voice.
First up, on Sunday night, is “Persuasion,” the last and perhaps least effervescent of Austen’s novels. It tells the story of Anne Elliot (Sally Hawkins, perfectly luminous) as she deals with the removal of her vain, debt-ridden father and older sister from the family country estate to more humble quarters in social-whirling Bath, and the return of Frederick Wentworth (Rupert Penry-Jones), a navy man who eight years earlier she had been persuaded by her father and godmother not to marry. Longing, regret and hope are the dominant notes.
Like many other literary heroines of the 19th century, Anne is good-hearted, lovely in an original way, deep, clever, wise and independent. (Though she is wiser and more independent at 27 than she was at 19 -- that is the point of the story.) She is also, common to her kind, underappreciated, her qualities obvious to people of real quality -- like us, dear viewer -- but unseen by those who value wealth, position and the superficial trappings of fashion. Anne is little regarded by her family. (There is a hypochondriac younger sister as well, well played by Amanda Hale.) “She was only Anne,” wrote Austen, not for the first time ironically.
Although Austen rearranges the furniture in the room from book to book, to a different instructive end, she has a fondness for certain pieces: the reticent hero; a good-looking, well-mannered scoundrel (Tobias Menzies, who was Brutus in HBO’s “Rome,” takes that role here); flighty girls in over their heads; a comical older couple; strange distant relations. And of course, the heroine, for whom the course of true love is ever being diverted by questions of money and class.
This is a rather melancholy, quiet film, played out under white or gray skies and in wet weather with a camera that seems to float as if in a dream. Scenes are played out in long shot or very close-up, and a low, rolling score emphasizes the feeling of being unmoored. As directed by Adrien Shergold (“Low Winter Sun”), there is something dark even in what might otherwise play as comic relief. Where Anne’s father might be conceived as merely a preening boob, Anthony Head (who will always be “late of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ ” to me) goes for the rotten soul beneath the puffery. As his mirror-image oldest daughter, Julia Davis (creator of “Nighty Night”) is similarly disturbing.
But this is a comedy, after all, and when girl finally gets boy, Shergold has her run full-tilt through the streets of Bath to find him, to be rewarded at the end, in extreme close-up, with what is surely the longest approach to a kiss on record.
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robert.lloyd@latimes.com
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‘Persuasion’
Where: KCET
When: 9 to 10:30 p.m. Sunday
Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)
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68f9ca7389936f109c723263bdd2432e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-11-fi-amazon11-story.html | Sony to sell digital music via Amazon | Sony to sell digital music via Amazon
Sony BMG Music Entertainment plans to sell digital music without copyright protection through Amazon.com Inc., stepping up competition between the Internet retailer and Apple Inc.'s iTunes.
Sony BMG is the last of the four major record companies to sell music without piracy protection through Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer. Songs in the MP3 format from artists including Bruce Springsteen, Justin Timberlake and Beyonce will be available later this month, the Seattle-based retailer said Thursday.
“Some people have resisted buying digital music because of the restrictions,” said Pete Baltaxe, director of digital music for Amazon.com. “I do believe we’re adding new buyers of digital music.”
Sony BMG’s announcement was its second this week that it would finally sell music without the digital rights management, or DRM, software that prevents illegal copying and distribution. On Monday, the company said it would start selling unprotected albums through cards purchased in stores that can be redeemed online.
Sony BMG is the world’s second-largest music company.
The music industry is betting that rising digital sales will make up for the decline in compact discs. Digital album sales rose 53% last year while CD sales fell 19%, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
“The great thing about the MP3 format is you can play the music on any of the devices,” Baltaxe said.
Amazon.com is trying to expand in a business dominated by iTunes, the biggest seller of music downloads in the world. ITunes sells songs without copyright protection from only one major record company, EMI Group.
Last month, Amazon.com added recordings from Warner Music Group Corp., the third-largest record company, to the MP3 service it began in September with EMI Group and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company.
Amazon.com sells downloaded tracks for 89 cents or 99 cents each and most albums for $5.99 to $9.99. Most tracks on iTunes sell for 99 cents.
Amazon.com shares fell 96 cents to $84.26. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., lost $1.38 to $178.02.
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485ecb87ba620c3683e6806eff0a4a52 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-11-oe-stein11-story.html | Casting a black president | Casting a black president
A lot of liberals say they’re not supporting Barack Obama in the primaries because an African American can’t carry the South in the general election -- which is a liberal’s clever way of saying that he won’t vote for a black person. But, it seems, they’re wrong. Because while Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t technically in the South, they are full of hicks, which is what rich liberals actually mean when they refer to “the South.” You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they’re saying. You’ll never believe what they mean by “middle class.” They mean themselves.
America is ready for a black president because we’ve seen them before. Black presidents, in fact, have been our awesomest presidents ever: Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact” and Dennis Haysbert in “24.” And their approval ratings -- box office grosses and Nielsen ratings, the only approval that matters in the U.S. -- have been huge. The Freeman and Haysbert administrations, which endured Carter-level challenges such as a comet headed toward Earth and working with Kiefer Sutherland, have specifically prepared us for Obama. Like him, they confront without being confrontational. They’re calm, earnest, utterly decent and way, way cooler than white presidents -- which is what I’m sure Joe Biden was trying to say when he called Obama “articulate” and “clean.” If only I had translated for him sooner.
If there is a choice between winning a culture war or a political war, take the cultural one. Sure, the blunt force of the law can make something happen quickly -- unless the law equivocates to make only three-fifths of something happen, or to just not ask and not tell -- but culture affects how people think, which is how real change occurs. You can only send the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., so many times, but Norman Lear can make people see the absurdity of racism every week. “Will & Grace” did as much for gay rights as Stonewall, although less amusingly.
The creators of “24" were totally misguided in their reasoning for casting a black presidential candidate. They thought the threat of his assassination would up the stakes because it might spark a race war. But viewers didn’t care about his race. Haysbert knew by Season 2 that America was ready to elect a black president because white people would stop him on the street to say they wished he were the real president.
Obama is strikingly similar to Haysbert’s character, President David Palmer: Both were senators, both campaigned in their mid-40s and both deliver JFK-style speeches in a cool, jazz baritone. “I think we both have a similar approach to who and what we believe the president is. Barack doesn’t get angry. He’s pretty level. That’s how I portrayed President Palmer: as a man with control over his emotions and great intelligence,” Haysbert says. In fact, it’s weird to imagine the two of them in the same room, as they were during a small fundraiser at which Obama pointed him out and said, “I see we have a former president in the room.” Haysbert also chartered a helicopter after a shoot for his new show, “The Unit,” to make it to an Obama fundraiser at Oprah Winfrey’s house near Santa Barbara. “That was not cheap. You add the price of the ticket to get in, that’s a significant endorsement.” Each one of those Allstate ads was an Allstate ad for hope.
Freeman, another Obama campaign contributor, was born in 1937 and grew up in Mississippi, never thinking we could possibly have a black president. But after 1998’s “Deep Impact,” Freeman says, white people told him, too, that they wished he were really president. “If you think of these roles and how the country reacted, you kind of get the notion that perhaps they could handle it,” he says. In fact, he started to sense that in 1984 -- when Jesse Jackson sought the Democratic nomination, and, more important, when Bill Cosby’s sitcom made him the highest paid entertainer in the country -- that we’d one day have a black president. Maybe one similar to the one he portrayed. “It remains to be seen if Barack Obama would be the same kind of president as Bob whatever-his-name-was,” Freeman says.
It’s not completely insane for America to have tested out, in fiction, the idea of a black commander in chief. Because, really, all presidents are fictional characters. Sure, the president has very tangible effects on some people: soldiers, Iraqis, welfare recipients, guys facing jail named Scooter.
But for the rest of us, the president primarily influences how we feel about the country. We love Ronald Reagan not just for helping end the Cold War but for smiling like a used car salesman and convincing us that morning had broken. Haysbert, Freeman and Obama can do that without even smiling.
If you think about it, Obama wouldn’t stand a chance if Geena Davis had been a little more compelling in “Commander in Chief.”
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jstein@latimescolumnists.com
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4a345d81211d1aa78f5c9a46897c5617 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-12-fg-iraq12-story.html | Iraqi troops move into area | Iraqi troops move into area
Singing and cheering, Iraqi soldiers rolled through snow and sleet in open trucks Friday to set up a base on the outskirts of the reputed nerve center of Sunni militants who had forced the northern Diyala River valley into their self-styled Islamic caliphate.
The two companies from the 1st Iraqi Army Division that arrived from Anbar province were the first Iraqi forces to penetrate the former militant stronghold in more than a year.
U.S. commanders hope the Iraqis can quickly take over security responsibility there to free up their forces, which launched a nationwide push this week against the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Meanwhile in Baghdad on Friday, an influential Shiite leader in Iraq’s ruling political alliance called for Sunni and secular parties to rejoin the government and help break months of deadlock.
Ammar Hakim, the son of Abdelaziz Hakim, the head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, urged former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s secular parliamentary bloc and the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni political bloc, to retake their place in the government.
Representatives of the blocs denied that they had any plans to return to the government.
U.S. intelligence reports indicated that about 200 insurgents had been holed up in the Diyala River valley, some of them displaced by U.S. operations in Baghdad and the provincial capital, Baqubah.
As U.S. soldiers went from village to village, residents identified Hembis as the base from which the militants enforced their rigid brand of Islam on surrounding villages.
But by the time the soldiers of Company I, 3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Combat Team, took control of the town Wednesday, most of the fighters had melted away.
Local leaders told American soldiers that the insurgents began relocating after a number of them were killed in a U.S. air assault last month.
They left behind bombs buried in the roads and houses rigged to explode. U.S. soldiers found a car-bomb factory around the corner from the mosque, and three booby-trapped houses surrounding a nearby courtyard. The sites were destroyed with controlled explosions that echoed across the town.
U.S. forces believe some insurgents remain hidden among the population. Two freshly planted bombs were found Friday along a major road through the valley that U.S. forces had cleared.
Backed by U.S. infantry, the Iraqi soldiers moved into an abandoned school on the outskirts of Hembis, a muddy town inhabited by orange, pomegranate and date-palm farmers.
Within hours, Iraqi soldiers were headed out on their first mission: to search a mosque that U.S. soldiers said had been taken over by the militants and used to issue their decrees.
The Iraqi soldiers got a mixed reception. The region is home to many former officers of Saddam Hussein’s army, whose families resent the religious extremists and are eager to have Iraqi soldiers in their villages to protect them.
But others in the overwhelmingly Sunni region are suspicious of the predominantly Shiite security forces.
The soldiers, who said they had learned where they were going only two days ago, appeared to chafe at the secrecy surrounding their joint operations with U.S. forces.
The Americans are reluctant to brief their Iraqi counterparts much in advance because there have been frequent leaks of their plans.
“If we are doing a mission with you, you need to tell us all the details,” a company commander, 1st Lt. Mulazim Mohammed, chided U.S. soldiers when they turned up at the school asking for two platoons to search the mosque.
But the Iraqis also appeared eager to make an impact. Within an hour, soldiers armed with U.S.-made M-16 rifles and grenade launchers were lined up outside the mosque, a tan building with a dark green dome. U.S. soldiers in Stryker armored vehicles guarded the periphery.
Another company commander, who gave his name only as 1st Lt. Waleed, knocked three times on the gate before sending his soldiers in to secure the grounds. The mosque attendant was sent for and he arrived, trembling, to unlock the building.
One Iraqi soldier accidentally discharged his weapon as he entered the compound, and another dropped a rocket-propelled grenade, causing some wary Americans to keep their distance.
Nothing was found at the mosque or the school next door.
Elsewhere, U.S. soldiers spent much of the day meeting with community leaders, urging them to set up citizens’ forces to help secure their villages. The decision of more than 70,000 Sunni and Shiite tribesmen to help U.S. forces fight the militants they once tolerated is credited with helping reduce violence nationwide by about 60% since June, according to U.S. figures.
In the village of Sinsil Tharia, the white-bearded imam shook his head with worry. Masked gunmen had paraded through the village with a severed head and warned the people that they could meet the same fate if they tried to organize their own security force, he said.
“People here are afraid,” said Imam Abid Hassim. “They say the Americans are going to leave and the terrorists will be back.”
Also Friday, a car bomb exploded near a bakery in east Baghdad, killing four people.
alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
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Times staff writer Ned Parker in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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0a70ba4dc581768ee5cb8209b433ee96 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-12-me-clery12-story.html | Crusader for increased campus security after daughter’s murder | Crusader for increased campus security after daughter’s murder
Howard K. Clery Jr., who crusaded for increased campus security and a landmark federal law requiring colleges to disclose crime statistics after his daughter was raped and murdered in her dorm room, has died. He was 77.
Clery died of a heart attack Jan. 1 at his home in Palm City, Fla., according to Security on Campus Inc., the nonprofit organization he co-founded with his wife, Constance.
His youngest child, Jeanne, was a freshman at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1986 when another student gained entry to her dorm through three locking doors that had been propped open. She was a random victim, and as the Clerys learned about the case, they became convinced that she died because of “slipshod” campus security and accused the school of covering up campus crime, The Times reported in 1989.
They sued Lehigh, contending that their daughter never would have attended the university if the record of crimes on its campus -- 38 assaults and other violent crimes over a three-year period -- had been made public, according to a 1999 Times story. The lawsuit was settled for $2 million, which the couple used to found the nonprofit Security on Campus in 1987. Their daughter’s assailant is serving a life sentence.
Lobbying by the Clerys led to the passage in 1990 of what is now known as the Jeanne Clery Act. The law requires colleges and universities to reveal information about campus crime and security policies.
The couple also helped secure passage of more than 30 state and federal laws that deal with campus public safety, according to Security on Campus.
“When your daughter is slaughtered, you have two choices -- curl up and let the world go by or fight back,” Clery said in 1990, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In fighting back, Clery said the couple was “helping others, but also ourselves.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1930, Clery contracted polio as a teenager and used a steel leg brace and canes for the rest of his life.
After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration at Dartmouth College, he worked for the Gillette Co. in Boston, where he met his future wife. They were married in 1956.
He later was an executive with the Raytheon Co., Royal McBee and Safeguard Industries. In 1971, Clery purchased Rapidforms with a partner. As chief executive, Clery helped turn the regional printer of business forms into a national direct-mail company with $40 million in sales in 1987.
By 1991, he had become a full-time campus security activist.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Howard Clery III and Benjamin Clery.
valerie.nelson@latimes.com
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175155e77aea3a893effb327cedd7573 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-bk-lalami13-story.html | Bound by tragedy | Bound by tragedy
Yalo
A Novel
Elias Khoury
Translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux
Archipelago Books: 318 pp., $25
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City Gates
A Novel
Elias Khoury
Translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar
Picador: 128 pp., $13 paper
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Little Mountain
A Novel
Elias Khoury
Translated from the Arabic by Maia Tabet
Picador: 168 pp., $13 paper
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Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to start over, to rebuild itself on top of its ruins, but it is also a place where memories are long and myths are persistent. In his new novel, “Yalo,” Elias Khoury grapples with the idea of truth and memory, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to forget. In fact, “Yalo” is composed of confessions -- whether forced or voluntary, true or laced with self-aggrandizement, redemptive for the confessor or entirely useless.
Khoury was born in Beirut’s Ashrafiyyeh district (also known as “Little Mountain”) at a crucial historical moment: 1948, the year that witnessed the founding of the state of Israel and the resulting dispossession that Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”). These twin events have had a profound significance for him as a novelist, playwright, journalist and literary critic. In 1967, at age 19, he visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, and, revolted by what he saw, he enrolled in Fatah, the largest political faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Three years later, in the aftermath of Black September, he left Jordan for Paris, where he finished his college education. Over a long, prolific career, Khoury has regularly written about Lebanon’s troubled political life and the Palestinian question. Several of his novels and stories have dealt with the Lebanese civil war; his previous novel, “Gate of the Sun,” brought him wide critical acclaim in the United States. Khoury edits Al-Mulhaq, the weekly literary supplement for the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar, and is global distinguished professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University.
With “Yalo,” Khoury returns to Beirut in the 1980s with a book that is a series of jagged narratives shifting in time, location and point of view. The novel gives us, like pieces of a puzzle, the story of Daniel Jal’u, nicknamed Yalo. He is a soldier who, after 10 years spent on one of the many sides of Lebanon’s sectarian civil war, gradually becomes a deserter, a thief, a vagabond in Paris, a night watchman in Beirut, a traitor to his benefactor, an arms smuggler, a voyeur and eventually a rapist. Then Yalo falls in love with the young Shirin, and that single act of affection ends in his capture; she turns him in to the police and accuses him of rape.
An interrogator sits Yalo down and orders him to confess to all his crimes, but every time Yalo tells the story of his life, the interrogator interrupts him, accuses him of gaps and inconsistencies and threatens him with torture. “You know what happens to liars,” he warns. The result is that Yalo has to start his confession anew, again and again. It is these successive and contradictory confessions that the novel gives us, almost without preamble. It soon becomes clear that the interrogator wants a very specific confession: one that contains not only Yalo’s real crimes of theft and rape, but also crimes he has not committed, like planting bombs.
Given his actions, it’s initially impossible to feel any sympathy for Yalo, but as he is forced to confess, and as we hear different versions of his life, our empathy grows. We learn how a young Christian boy, growing up in the home of his grandfather Ephraim, an ascetic Syriac priest, and his mother, Gaby, a romantically frustrated woman, became involved in Lebanon’s long and bloody civil war. This war -- any war -- changes people, and its effects on Yalo are soon apparent. He is not just a soldier in one of the many sectarian factions; he is a victimizer of his countrymen and a victim of torture himself. Khoury’s great talent lies in his ability to let us witness the making of a monster, but without giving us the possibility of judging him or feeling morally superior to him.
This confessional format challenges the reader to find, each time, a new interpretation for one man’s story. It is difficult to choose just one reading of this complex life. Even something as seemingly straightforward as Yalo’s religious, ethnic or linguistic affiliation turns out to be muddled. Yalo’s grandfather Ephraim was born a Syriac Christian but was raised by a Muslim Kurd, and eventually he returned to his Christian faith and to his ancestral language. Yalo, meanwhile, was raised as a Syriac but is only able to express himself in Arabic. These ambiguities are significant and challenge the labels upon which Lebanon’s community-based politics depend. Similarly, the title of the novel is ambiguous; Yalo is not just Daniel Jal’u’s nickname, it is also the name of a Palestinian village that no longer exists, having been destroyed by Israel in 1967.
Of course, “Yalo” is not the first book in which Khoury uses the civil war as backdrop. His novel “Little Mountain” (first published in 1977 and translated into English by Maia Tabet in 1989) is a loosely autobiographical account of his experiences during Lebanon’s long civil war: as a child, soldier, civil servant and intellectual. It is a deeply lyrical book, full of yearning for peaceful times in Beirut and yet also retaining some nostalgia for the camaraderie that develops among soldiers in times of conflict. The narrative is disconnected, and the point of view changes several times, sometimes within a single paragraph, thus replicating the chaos of civil war.
Similarly, Khoury’s novella “City Gates” (published in 1981 and translated into English by Paula Haydar in 1993) deals with the effects of the Lebanese civil war. It is a fable in which an unnamed stranger arrives at the doors of a deserted city. He manages to enter it, but he remains unable to make much sense of its labyrinthine streets or of its sole inhabitants, a group of virgins standing guard over the tomb of a king. The city is meant to be a stand-in for Beirut, and the phantasmagoric landscape serves as a warning to those who continue to fight over the land. The language is spare, sometimes unfinished (“The man sat, but the suitcase.”) and occasionally deliberately ungrammatical (“Then no, not possible to, perhaps, or.”).
In “Yalo,” as in his previous work, Khoury relies upon the classical Arabic literary tradition and also breaks from it. Like Scheherazade in the “One Thousand and One Nights,” Yalo tells a different story each day to stay alive. (The character of Khaleel Ayoub, a doctor, in “Gate of the Sun” does the same to keep a patient alive.)
And yet, Khoury’s writing style departs from the typically realist modes of his peers and more closely resembles the stream of consciousness of a writer like William Faulkner. He favors repetition as a stylistic device, and the endings of his stories often circle back to their beginnings. Point of view in his novels doesn’t so much change as dart from one character to another. His experimentation with narrative style can be a bit challenging, but it certainly makes for a unique perspective in Arab letters.
Khoury’s 10th novel, “Yalo,” is only his sixth to be published in the United States and is rendered in English by Peter Theroux, who has previously applied his prodigious skills to the novels of Alia Mamdouh, Naguib Mahfouz and Abdelrahman Munif, among others. Theroux gives us another wonderful translation, one that preserves the idiosyncrasies of Beiruti speech.
“Yalo” establishes Khoury as the sort of novelist whose name is inseparable from a city. Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury.
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5a51a48f7879cd22b56945809843c341 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-ca-abigail13-story.html | A natural for the part | A natural for the part
Abigail Breslin explored her inner Robinson Crusoe in making the family film “Nim’s Island” in Australia.
“I got to wear all of these really cool clothes and have a telescope by my side,” says the 11-year-old, who earned an Oscar nomination for her role as a wannabe child beauty queen in 2006’s “Little Miss Sunshine.”
“I got to wear a lizard on my shoulder and walk around with a sea lion on a beach and cut down coconuts.”
Speaking of animals, Breslin worked with five lizards, two pelicans and two sea lions. “It was so much fun,” she said by phone from her New York City home. “I love working with animals, and I don’t get to do it that often on a movie. The sea lions were so friendly. They will come up to you and give you kisses and follow you around.”
She even gets to conga with her wet-nosed costars. “That’s cool.”
“Nim’s Island,” which opens April 25, revolves around the imaginative Nim, who lives with her scientist father (Gerard Butler) and a coterie of animals on a desolate tropical island.
Nim also happens to be a big fan of a writer (Jodie Foster) who pens action novels featuring a dashing hero (also played by Butler). The novelist, though, is an agoraphobic New Yorker. But when Nim begins an e-mail correspondence with her after her father is caught in a storm at sea, the novelist has to overcome her fears to help.
“They were just a lot of fun,” Breslin says of her veteran costars. “Gerard is so funny.”
She also enjoyed the chance to do stunts. “I did a ton. . .,” she says. “I climb, run, swim, and I did sword fighting. . . . All the stunt guys called me ‘Nimdiana Jones.’ ”
Breslin has two more movies coming out in 2008: “Definitely, Maybe” and “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl.”
And after that?
“We are taking a little break for a while and will just hang out and do all of that stuff,” she says. “I am in sixth grade. It’s hard. I can’t even really talk about math!”
-- Susan King
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6137fde5ca56d02af989758508c7199d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-me-homeowner13-story.html | Owner locked out of historic home | Owner locked out of historic home
A woman whose historic Ontario home faces foreclosure was evicted after city officials said they caught her selling its period flooring, baseboards and other fixtures on the Internet.
A Superior Court judge granted the city a warrant last week to vacate and secure the classic Mediterranean Revival home, locking out owner Kim Shewalter.
“They changed the locks,” said Shewalter, 46, who let her home go into foreclosure after her mortgage payments adjusted to $6,500 a month. City officials said they were spurred into action by the for-sale postings by Shewalter, who had paid reduced property taxes on the 73-year-old Swenson House in exchange for the property’s preservation and rehabilitation.
“A number of the features were advertised for sale online -- fixtures, baseboards, tile, grates, a sink, almost the whole house,” said Cathy Walstrom, the city’s planning chief. Shewalter said she was removing and selling only items she had installed in the home.
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6baeb3dc60d2b101b08169bfd8659c1a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-13-op-queenan13-story.html | Front man or side man? | Front man or side man?
Nothing better captures the oddball quality of Mike Huckabee’s campaign than the fact that he plays the bass guitar. When the folksy Arkansan first took the stage with his classic-rock band, Capitol Offense, the public and the press corps were amused by this refreshing zaniness. But now that his quest for the highest office in the land seems less quixotic, the time has come to examine what Huckabee’s choice of musical instrument says about the man.
History abounds with political figures given to public displays of their musical gifts, but none of them played the bass. The most famous is the vile Roman emperor, Nero, who supposedly played the fiddle while a huge section of ancient Rome burned to the ground. (One problem: If Nero did wax musical while the Eternal City was going up in flames, it must’ve been either on the lyre or a prototype of the lute, as the fiddle was not invented until the Renaissance. Still, it would’ve been much less colorful to say, “Nero plucked the lyre while Rome burned” or “Nero strummed a prototype of the lute -- perhaps the oud -- while Rome burned.”)
Nero was not the last potentate with top-shelf musical leanings. Henry VIII is said to have played the harp, the lute, the recorder and the harpsichord, and is thought by some to have written the lovely folk song “Greensleeves.” Frederick the Great wrote 121 flute sonatas. Thomas Jefferson did, in fact, play the fiddle, and by all accounts was fairly good at it. Harry Truman was known to pound out a thoroughly credible tune on the old eighty-eights, and Bill Clinton could blow the sax without completely embarrassing himself.
On a side note, Alan Greenspan had a short career as a jazz saxophonist before meeting Ayn Rand and turning to economics. If Charlie Parker or John Coltrane or even Kenny G had made the same choice, and then ended up chairing the Fed, it might have been a great loss for music but could have given the fusty old world of interest-rate calibration the kick in the pants it’s been needing for decades. And imagine how much fun it would have been if Rand had reversed course and taken up the baritone sax.
But here’s my point. The telling thing about Nero, Frederick the Great, Henry VIII, Jefferson, Truman and Clinton is that they all played high-profile, soloist instruments. Violins, pianos, saxes, harpsichords and even lyres are all instruments played by musicians who have the chops and the chutzpah to demand the spotlight, not to lurk in the shadows the way bass players do.
Yes, the bass is a wonderful instrument that is indispensable in supplying the “bottom” needed to give a piece of music substance. But it is not a glamorous instrument; many nonmusicians cannot even hear what the bassist is playing, confusing the general muddle of the bass with the drums.
Bassists, with few exceptions, are low-profile drones content to toil away in support mode while their more flashy colleagues wow the crowd. Even the exceptions to this rule -- Paul McCartney, Charlie Mingus, Sting -- did their composing on the piano or the guitar, most certainly not on the bass.
The plain truth is, the bass -- stand-up or electric -- is just not a sexy instrument. This is particularly true in the classic-rock genre Huckabee favors. It was never in Bill Wyman’s power, much less in his interest, to try upstaging Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. John Entwistle was an affable nonentity as opposed to Pete Townsend, Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon. Teenage boys grow up wanting to sing like Robert Plant and play guitar like Jimmy Page; nobody dreams of being the second coming of John Paul Jones.
I know all this because I too am a bassist. I took up the instrument at 17 because bassists, unlike guitarists, were always in short supply, as nobody really wanted to play the bass. Bass players were well received by other musicians because they were never a threat to get the good-looking girls. Still, the main reason I took up the bass was because I could never camouflage the fact that I was a crummy guitarist, but I could disguise the fact that I was a crummy bassist because none of my bandmates in the Phase Shift Network ever paid any attention to what I was playing.
This is what worries me about Huckabee and the bass guitar. The president of the United States is the most powerful man in the world, just as the conductor is the most important person in the orchestra, just as the lead guitarist is the most important musician in the band. The bass guitarist, I’m afraid, is more like the Commerce secretary or Uncle Fred, a solid, dependable fellow but definitely not the guy you want with his finger on the red button. Bass players are too bland and dull to run a society as classy as this one. And the ones who aren’t, the ones like Jaco Pastorius and Jack Bruce and Flea, who try to turn the bass into a solo instrument, simply make a bad situation worse.
Whatever John Q. Public may say on the record, in private everyone hates bass players who forget that they are bass players. It calls to mind the story about the anthropologist who is repeatedly roused from his slumber by tribal drums pounding in the distance. Three times he asks what the beating of the drums signifies; three times the tribe’s leader replies: “After drums stop, very, very bad.” Exasperated, he finally demands, “OK. Forget what the drums mean. What comes after the drums?” To which the chieftain mournfully replies: “Bass solo.” Yup, Mr. Huckabee, that says it all.
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d175e367558c2be5ce90ef618bbfe621 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-14-he-closer14-story.html | A B12 deficiency - in data | A B12 deficiency - in data
New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens is feeling the heat. A former trainer has said he injected the seven-time Cy Young winner with steroids and human growth hormone, but Clemens says the only injections he received were of vitamin B12 and lidocaine, an analgesic. Lidocaine is sometimes injected into joints to dull joint pain -- a potential problem for an aging athlete -- but B12 injections are more commonly used to treat pernicious anemia and address diet deficiencies in the elderly. Physicians generally believe that the well-nourished rank-and-file don’t need it, but the vitamin hasn’t lost its luster among those who say it boosts energy.
Vitamin B12 is an essential vitamin found primarily in animal foods. The body uses it in the formation of DNA and red blood cells, and it’s necessary for the healthy functioning of the nervous system. For people who are deficient or at risk of deficiency, injections can be helpful. For a well-nourished pitcher hoping to improve his fastball, not so much.
“Some athletes believe that vitamin B12 injections will increase oxygen [supply to the muscles] and that that enhances performance,” says Andrea Giancoli, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Assn. and consultant for the L.A. Unified School District on nutrition and policy. “But in the absence of a vitamin B12 deficiency, the studies don’t support that.”
Aside from a 1989 report in the International Journal for Vitamin and Nutrition Research, which found that a combination of B1 (thiamin), B6 (pyridoxine) and B12 (cyanocobalamin) improved fine motor skill in target shooting, the evidence is scant, writes Thomas Brenna, professor of human nutrition at Cornell University, in an e-mail.
And B12 injections are not going to give the average person an energy boost, says Dr. David Baron, chief of staff at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital.
“For my entire career, I have encountered patients who have requested B12 shots, and I’ve been explaining to them that they serve no useful purpose,” Baron says. “Honestly, this is an argument that’s been going on between Western scientific physicians and complementary and alternative healthcare providers for many, many years.”
Some weight-loss programs even recommend B12 injections, says James Hill, director of the human nutrition center at the University of Colorado. “But there’s no indication that they’re doing any good,” he says.
In fact, when the body is drenched with B12, the kidneys will filter out whatever isn’t needed, says Dr. Michael Karp, an internist and assistant professor of clinical medicine at USC School of Medicine. The upside is that too much B12 probably won’t hurt you, he says.
The basis for the belief that vitamin B12 shots can provide energy goes back decades, Baron says. “Before we knew how to manufacture B12 in an injectable form, people who were deficient for various reasons were quite ill,” he says. Once physicians began giving B12 shots to this population, “people who were horribly chronically anemic from B12 deficiency just basically came to life,” he says. “It was a miracle.”
The average person needs 2.4 micrograms of B12 per day, and most people get sufficient amounts in their food, particularly given how many foods -- such as cereals, nondairy milk, meat substitutes and protein bars -- are now fortified with B12, Giancoli says.
Vitamin B12 has a somewhat tangled path to absorption. The vitamin needs an acidic environment in the stomach in order to be released from food. It then binds with a glyco-protein compound called intrinsic factor, which allows it to be absorbed through the small intestine. If the stomach doesn’t have a sufficient hydrochloric acid or lacks intrinsic factor, absorption will be limited.
To be sure, a deficiency of B12 can have serious consequences -- including pernicious anemia and nerve damage. “The nerve damage can start with memory problems, declined cognitive function, tingling in the extremities and can progress,” Giancoli says. “And the neurological changes may not be apparent in everyone. There may be very general symptoms, like fatigue, weakness, weight loss, constipation, loss of appetite.”
People most at risk for B12 deficiency are patients with certain types of gastrointestinal disorders (such as Crohn’s disease), vegans and the elderly. The elderly are at risk for a number of reasons, says Dr. Marie Bernard, a spokeswoman for the American Geriatrics Society.
“As you get older, you’re more likely to have accumulated medical problems that might prevent you from absorbing B12 optimally,” Bernard says. Those events would include surgery to remove part of the intestine, and use of certain medications, such as acid-suppressing drugs.
As for that other segment clamoring for injections -- the worried well who believe the shots boost energy -- B12 may also have a benefit of sorts: a nice little placebo effect.
“Quite frankly,” Karp says, “I’ll sometimes get a new patient who says that they’re getting a monthly vitamin B12 injection and that it makes them feel better, so I’ll continue to give it to them. If it makes them feel better, that’s still something.”
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janet.cromley@latimes.com
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bc122482573b52adccc1d3227a79d068 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-15-fi-netflix15-story.html | Netflix lifts limits on seeing online movies | Netflix lifts limits on seeing online movies
Netflix, seeking not to be bypassed in the transition to digital distribution of movies, removed limits on how many films and TV shows subscribers can watch over the Internet. The move comes as Apple Inc. is set to unveil plans for users to rent major Hollywood movies online through its iTunes Store.
Netflix, which pioneered the online movie rental business in 1997, had capped the number of hours available to its 7 million subscribers based on the price of their monthly plan. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company faces stiff competition from Apple, Amazon.com Inc. and others working on digital distribution of movies in the hope that video-on-demand can eventually supplant DVDs.
Now, Netflix customers on subscription plans costing $9 and up can spend unlimited hours streaming movies and TV shows at no extra cost instead of waiting for them to be shipped in the mail. Those on the cheapest plan -- costing $5 -- will get up to two hours of free monthly streaming.
Most movies just released on DVD and current TV shows are unavailable in the company’s “watch instantly” service, however. Netflix, the largest mail-order movie company, offers a library of more than 90,000 DVD titles via postal delivery, but it has only 6,000 movies and TV shows for instant viewing.
Though that may sound like a huge choice, many of the available titles are movies that would be relegated to the marked-down bin at the video store.
For the most part, the studios are reluctant to make the newest DVD releases available for streaming and downloading because of fear that it would hamper disc sales.
“There is a lot of stuff like ‘Revenge of the Nerds 4' -- the kind of movies you can already see on TBS,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles. Even so, he said, the expanded service could help Netflix build loyalty in video-on-demand.
“They aren’t doing this to make money today, but to have the technology in place to be able to participate when the Hollywood studios go to a downloading model,” noted Pachter, who rates the stock a “buy.”
The six most-viewed offerings as of Monday afternoon on Netflix’s service were episodes of “Heroes,” “The Office” and “30 Rock.” No. 7 was the movie “Secret Things,” an “erotic French thriller” about a stripper and a bartender who decide to “use their sexual powers to invade the corporate world,” and No. 8 was “Breasts: A Documentary.”
Since the streaming feature was introduced a year ago, Netflix said, its most popular movie titles have included such mainstream fare as “The Sum of All Fears,” “The Italian Job” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
A company spokesman declined to say how many subscribers used the service. Pachter estimated that only about 10% of Netflix customers downloaded movies -- many of them rarely.
Most consumers are reluctant to watch movies on their computers when they can view high-definition DVDs and other programming on their large-screen TVs.
Netflix spent $40 million to develop its streaming service, including technology and content. Analysts say the cost of adding unlimited streaming would be negligible.
In Monday’s trading after the announcement, Netflix stock fell 64 cents to $22.77.
As early as today, Apple is expected to unveil a movie rental service through its iTunes marketplace.
Major studios including Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. have reportedly signed up for the digital video-on-demand service, which could offer 30-day rentals at prices from as low as $3 for older films to $5 for high-definition movies.
Viewers would have 24 hours to watch a film after it began playing.
Apple hopes the move will boost sales of the Apple TV set-top box, one of several technologies designed to serve as a bridge between the PC -- where movies, photos and television shows are stored -- and the living room TV.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
Netflix already competes with downloading services Blockbuster Inc.'s Movielink and Amazon’s Unbox. And cable and satellite TV providers such as Comcast Corp. offer movies and special events via on-demand services of their own.
Netflix is developing a set-top box with LG Electronics that will allow movies to be viewed on a TV screen. That device is likely to hit the market later this year.
“We’re in the early part of a hybrid phase in which consumers can choose to receive DVDs by mail or watch movies instantly,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said.
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josh.friedman@latimes.com
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10a518c38deb5552060ec6989373e3bb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-15-fi-strike15-story.html | Studios cancel TV writer contracts | Studios cancel TV writer contracts
Conceding that the current television season cannot be salvaged, four major studios canceled dozens of writer contracts Monday.
The move signals that development of next season’s crop of new shows also could be in jeopardy because of the 2-month-old writers strike. Typically, January marks the start of pilot season when networks order new comedies and dramas. But with writers not working, networks do not have a pool of scripts from which to choose.
20th Century Fox Television, CBS Paramount Network Television, NBC Universal and Warner Bros. Television each confirmed that they terminated development and production agreements. Such arrangements typically cost the studios $500,000 to $2 million a year per writer in order to pay them and their staffs and overhead while they develop ideas for new TV shows.
“I didn’t see it coming,” said Barbara Hall, a writer and producer whose credits include former CBS series “Joan of Arcadia” and “Judging Amy.” ABC executives gave her the news Friday. “I am not entirely sure what their strategy is, all I know was that I was a casualty of it,” she said.
It’s unclear how many people will be affected by the so-called force majeure actions, which allow a studio unilaterally to cancel a writer’s contract in the event of a crisis such as a strike. A production deal can involve a solo writer or a team of several people.
“The duration of the WGA strike has significantly affected our ongoing business. Regretfully, due to these changed business circumstances, we’ve had to end some writer/producer deals,” NBC Universal said in its statement.
Overall, more than 65 deals with writers have been eliminated since Friday. ABC Studios late last week cut about 25 deals. On Monday, CBS Paramount cut 15, Fox jettisoned about 14, NBC Universal rid nearly 10, and Warner Bros. trimmed three, said people familiar with the situation.
One top studio executive said if the strike continues into February there would probably be another round of force majeure eliminations. “There are likely to be deeper cuts,” said the executive, who asked not to be identified given the sensitivity of the issue.
For the studios, the terminations were in some part strategic. Payments had not been made on the contracts since November, when the Writers Guild of America went on strike. The canceled contracts mostly affected writers who may have achieved some success but were not behind the bigger hits.
By eliminating the deals now, the studios will no longer be obligated to pay the writers even if the strike ends in the next month or two. The action saves the media companies tens of millions of dollars in payments, and is the first real sign of belt-tightening caused by the strike.
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meg.james@latimes.com
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cf48a29d83d9b9e223da15183b6a64fe | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-16-et-beaufort16-story.html | An antiwar Oscar hopeful embattled | An antiwar Oscar hopeful embattled
A pained expression crosses director Joseph Cedar’s face when he is asked about the controversy that led to his wartime drama, “Beaufort,” being selected as Israel’s official entry in the Academy Awards’ best foreign language film category this year.
Rumors had swirled from Hollywood to the Middle East last fall that people behind “Beaufort” had contacted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the Oscars, to complain that Israel’s first choice, the bittersweet comedy “The Band’s Visit,” had violated Oscar rules for foreign-language films because more than half of its dialogue was in English. (That film was ultimately disqualified for consideration in the category.)
The “Beaufort” filmmakers denied the rumors, but the controversy placed Cedar, 39, in an uncomfortable position. Like any director, he wants his films to be judged for what appears on the screen, not for allegations of award season politicking.
“In order to have peace of mind, you have to believe that a film speaks for itself and that people evaluate your work for what it is,” Cedar said recently as he sat down for a tofu salad lunch in the Larchmont district of Los Angeles. He compared a director’s task to a 100-yard dash, in which the filmmaker goes quickly from script to mixing room, and when the movie is finished “you hope people appreciate it.”
Cedar will find out next week if his film, which will open Friday in New York with a tentative March release here, makes the cut and is nominated by the academy -- it was one of the nine shortlisted titles in the category announced Tuesday. Oscar nominations are scheduled for Tuesday.
Based on the popular novel by author Ron Leshem, which was inspired by real events, “Beaufort” is a tense drama about a young Israeli commander and his troops guarding a mountaintop outpost in the waning days of Israel’s 18-year occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, Israel’s army invaded Lebanon, capturing the mountain and routing its Palestine Liberation Organization defenders; the mountain contains a magnificent 12th century Crusader fortress.
On May 24, 2000, Israeli troops withdrew from Lebanon, destroying their heavily fortified outpost with 6 tons of explosives, though the castle ruins were not harmed.
“The mountain was considered the most strategic spot in southern Lebanon and the first place that any military has to take over if they want to control the region,” Cedar explained.
When “Beaufort” opened in Israel last March, its antiwar tone generated widespread debate inside his homeland. “The first Lebanon war was the first war that wasn’t in consensus in Israel,” Cedar explained. “The battle of Beaufort triggered the first crack in the consensus.”
The fact that the film’s release followed Israel’s 2006 reentry into Lebanon in the wake of cross-border attacks from Hezbollah guerrillas no doubt played a role in that heated response. The resulting 34-day invasion again left many Israelis disillusioned with their leaders because the conflict had no decisive resolution, Cedar said.
“We finished filming in June of 2006, which was a month before the war broke out,” he recalled. “So we were editing while the war was happening. It was very sad to see Israel go back into Lebanon. I thought that after 18 years there and the collective memory, Israel would have been so traumatized it would be harder for any government to bring its troops back there. But I was wrong.” Only a month before the invasion, Cedar and his crew had been filming on another mountaintop with an ancient Crusader fortress called Kalat Namrud in northern Israel. The site is near the Lebanese border and within view of the actual Beaufort. The filmmakers used 50 trucks to haul in 1,000 tons of concrete, creating a replica of the Beaufort outpost. “Every time the enemy improved its weapons, Israel had to improve its fortifications,” Cedar said. “So, over 18 years, it turned into this massive, underground city of concrete. We asked the army to assist us in building the [replica] outpost, but they said no.”
The army, however, did allow the filmmakers to rent military equipment. “It wasn’t an easy decision for them,” Cedar said of the army’s cooperation. But he noted that the fact that the Beaufort story was so widely known and that Leshem had co-written the screenplay with Cedar ultimately helped his cause. “The army decided, if that’s the case, let’s help to make the film accurate and not try to fight it.”
Still, criticism erupted when families of soldiers who had been killed in Lebanon learned that some of the actors had not served in the Israeli army, usually a requirement for Israeli citizens.
“We were getting a lot of emotional criticism that we were being disrespectful to the actual people who had been killed there,” recalled Cedar, himself a paratrooper who had served in the first Lebanon war. “Israel may be the only place where actors are expected to have actual combat experience when playing soldiers in a movie.”
As it was, he said, the actors spent a month at an Israeli army outpost rehearsing their roles.
Controversy aside, the film went on to win four awards from the Israeli Film Academy for best cinematography, editing, art direction and sound, and Cedar also took home the best director’s prize for “Beaufort” at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
Cedar was born in New York, and his family moved to Jerusalem when he was about 5. As a youth, he was recruited into the Beni Akiva youth movement, which supported the idea that Jews should settle every part of biblical Israel, and he was personally involved in a number of settlement initiatives in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem as a young boy and into his early 20s.
His first two films, 2002’s “Time of Favor” and 2005’s “Campfire,” each of which were selected as Israel’s official entries to the Oscars, dealt with the complexities and mixed emotions he had toward this movement. “I never saw it as something political,” he recalled of his participation. “It was a great, social, exciting, romantic time for us.”
Cedar, who lives with his wife and two children in Tel Aviv, studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is a graduate of New York University’s film school.
Growing up, Cedar said, he appreciated mainstream American cinema, “the kind of films where you don’t know who directed this. The films I enjoyed as a kid, I found out who directed them 20 years later. So, when I found out that James L. Brooks directed three of my favorite films, it was a revelation because I didn’t know they had the same director.”
In making “Beaufort,” Cedar noted, he was influenced heavily by Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 antiwar film “Paths of Glory.” When filming a scene in which an Israeli demolition expert seeks to defuse a roadside bomb, Cedar explained that he used the ritualized execution ceremony in Kubrick’s film as a template.
“It’s all ceremony,” Cedar said of the routine the demolition expert goes through before disarming a bomb. “And it’s a ceremony that is supposed to give him a sense of safety, but it’s clear that there is no way to really protect yourself. In effect, it’s just a way for him not to think that he is going to die.”
Asked if he is a peace activist, Cedar replies: “I hope so.” Then he quickly adds, “I know some real activists, and I’m nowhere near that. I’m not that good a man.”
robert.welkos@latimes.com
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67c641a121f2af1f5b482a83a00f1cc7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-16-oe-handel16-story.html | DGA as peacemaker | DGA as peacemaker
The studios and the Directors Guild started talking Saturday -- the day before the Golden Globes’ televised implosion into a hurried news conference -- and some people think an agreement is imminent, if for no other reason than the hope that the Oscars can be saved from a similar fate. But a quick deal for directors may not signal progress on Hollywood’s larger labor issue, the Writer’s Guild strike that is dragging down the industry and local economy.
All three guilds -- the writers, actors and directors -- are focused on new-media residuals, which are reuse fees paid when a movie or TV episode is streamed or downloaded from the Internet. The studios have so far offered writers peanuts -- for instance, just $139 for a year of streaming a half-hour TV program, no matter how much ad revenue it generates. The Writers Guild is demanding about eight to 10 times that amount. Will the Directors Guild take a similarly tough stance? Probably not. But it should.
The Directors Guild cares about new-media residuals -- it reportedly spent almost $2 million researching the issues -- just not as deeply as writers or actors do. The top echelon of movie directors are paid millions and promised a cut of the gross, so new-media residuals don’t amount to much mad money for them. Meanwhile, 40% of DGA members are assistant directors and unit production managers who receive practically no residuals now.
As a result, the Directors Guild likely is more willing to trade off new-media residuals against other issues, such as larger base payments up front. Indeed, the studios would prefer to hike those minimums rather than increase residuals. That’s because the first residuals deal negotiated often becomes a blueprint for the others -- it’s called “pattern bargaining” -- but upfront minimums don’t work that way. If the directors’ deal were to become the contract template, each dollar of residuals the studios grant multiplies into more than $12 across all the unions’ contracts.
What about the actors? So far, the Screen Actors Guild has stood firm with the writers. Normally, though, SAG conducts its studio negotiations in tandem with a less-assertive actors union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. But this time around may be different: SAG will vote next month on severing that joint-bargaining relationship. That’s an ominous sign; it means SAG wants the freedom to take as hard a line as possible this year.
So the stage is set for a disaster. If the directors accept a lowball new-media deal, the Writers Guild and SAG may well reject it as a template, and pattern bargaining would break down. SAG’s position would embolden the Writers Guild leadership to maintain the strike, despite pressure from some writers to end the walkout. Come June 30, when the actors deal expires, SAG would go on strike too.
At that point, the industry would be in all-out civil war, with battle lines drawn: the writers and SAG on one side, and studios, networks, directors, crew and AFTRA on the other. Feature film production would cease, just as scripted TV production already has, but studios and networks would limp along for a while on a diet of reality TV and movies already in the can. The two strikes could stretch on for months longer.
In this scenario, everyone suffers, including the directors. If there are no scripts and no actors, there’s nothing to direct. More people would lose their jobs, and bitterness would increase dramatically, making it ever harder to hammer out new contracts.
There’s an obvious way to avert this scorched-earth scenario: The directors have to insist on a deal that the writers and actors can live with, even to the point of threatening a strike of their own. That’s a tough script to follow: It’s hard to negotiate on someone else’s behalf, and strikes are alien to the directors (they’ve only walked out once in seven decades, and that was for just five minutes).
But if the DGA negotiators pull it off, pieces start to fall into place. A good directors deal gives the writers and studios incentive to restart their own talks, which ended five weeks ago when the studios walked out. They could then close a deal on new media on the same terms as the directors, ending the strike. SAG would presumably do a similar deal, without ever striking.
A movie set is a tough place; a cast and crew of hundreds depend on the director to keep the show moving. This time, though, the “cast and crew” number in the tens of thousands, and millions more people are watching. The stakes are high. Let’s hope the directors don’t yell “Cut!” too quickly.
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6eb4d6154a9356300bd8eeb3d4c965ca | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-17-me-broad17-story.html | Charter schools get boost | Charter schools get boost
Arts and education philanthropist Eli Broad today will announce his largest investment to date in Los Angeles charter schools, $23.3 million to jump-start at least 17 new campuses run by two major charter-school organizations.
Broad’s gift is believed to be the largest by any private donor to local charter schools and underscores his goal of creating effective schools outside the direct jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
L.A. Unified already has 128 charter schools, more than any school system in the nation, enrolling about 7% of the district’s 700,000 students.
KIPP schools, which will receive $12 million, are noted nationally for their regimented, character-building approach and extra-long school days and school years. The other charter group is Aspire Public Schools, which will receive $5 million; it requires every graduate to earn college course credits and $3,000 from a paid internship.
Charters are free, independently run, publicly funded schools that are not bound by either the state Education Code or many school district dictates.
Broad, 74, said Wednesday that creating more charters became an essential fallback when L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa retreated from pursuing outright control of the nation’s second-largest school system.
“In other cities, those with mayoral control -- Chicago, New York City, Boston -- things are happening from the top down,” Broad said in an interview. “And they’ve made great progress in all those cities. Here, we’ve got a different situation. If we want to see improvement here, charters are a route to get there. We think doing things from the bottom up, with charters, will help all public schoolchildren.”
Broad’s history with L.A. Unified spans several reform eras over the last decade. His support of local charter-school organizations has now grown to $56 million, reaching an estimated 25,000 students, arguably far surpassing the number affected by Villaraigosa’s higher-profile effort to oversee reforms at six schools through a community partnership.
The gift also builds on research suggesting that charter schools are especially effective in raising test scores at urban middle schools, a sore spot for L.A. Unified.
Broad’s donation, hailed in many quarters, was not greeted with enthusiasm by the leader of the teachers union. Most KIPP schools are non-union, as are all Aspire schools.
“Eli’s so enamored with charter schools, he’s willing to put millions and millions of dollars into them simply because they’re charter schools,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.
Duffy questioned both the staying power of higher test scores at some charter schools as well as what he called their focus on “teaching to the test,” which he characterized as simplistic and counterproductive.
Broad emerged as a force in the local school reform wars in 1999, when he helped bankroll then-Mayor Richard Riordan’s effort to elect school board allies. He also was the person most responsible for recruiting former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer to head L.A. Unified, which Romer did from 2000 to 2006. In addition, Broad has funded a training academy for school district leaders and awards the national Broad Prize to one well-regarded school district each year.
Broad has rarely donated directly to L.A. Unified, although he has supported the new arts high school under construction on Grand Avenue downtown. He has continued to make sizable campaign donations in school board elections -- preferring candidates who say they won’t micromanage, especially if he believes they will oppose the teachers union when he thinks it necessary.
Broad declined to comment on the district’s recent reform record, or on the mayor’s specific efforts. But he said progress in New York City shows that large school districts can make huge strides and that cooperative unions, such as the one in New York, can play an immensely helpful role.
“We’ve been trying to induce KIPP to come down here because, from what we’ve seen across America, it’s the gold or platinum standard of charter schools,” added Broad, who also praised Aspire highly.
Both KIPP and Aspire operate schools in traditionally underserved, poor and working-class urban communities with low-achieving Latino or African American students.
On test scores, the L.A.-area KIPP and Aspire schools slipped last year, but both still scored well ahead of schools serving similar students. And the KIPP schools scored better than average among all schools.
Researchers for the Mountain View, Calif.-based nonprofit EdSource concluded last year that, on balance, charter middle schools are clearly outperforming regular public middle schools. EdSource also asserted that schools run by charter-management organizations, such as KIPP and Aspire, are consistently doing better than other charter schools.
“Charter middle schools really have the secret sauce for educating middle school kids,” said Caprice Young, head of the California Charter Schools Assn. “And there’s no reason why L.A. Unified shouldn’t take advantage of it.”
Founded in Houston and based in San Francisco, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) has two schools in Los Angeles -- one in South Los Angeles and another in Lincoln Heights. The Broad money will fund four new schools organized under a single Los Angeles-area board of directors. Most of the 57 KIPP schools nationwide are middle schools.
Operating a KIPP school costs more than some charters, in part, because KIPP typically pays teachers more and puts school leaders through intensive, lengthy training. California, in particular, requires a philanthropic subsidy because the state provides far less for schools than some other states where KIPP operates, said spokesman Steve Mancini.
Aspire began with $400,000 left over from the successful political campaign to remove a 100-school limit on the number of California charter schools. Veteran educator Don Shalvey, part of that campaign, also had overseen the 1992 opening of the state’s first charter school, in the Silicon Valley-area district where he served as superintendent.
With the Broad money, the Oakland-based organization runs a total of 21 schools in three regions: Oakland, the Stockton area and L.A. County. It intends to open 13 schools in Carson and Huntington Park, where it now operates four.
Aspire is one of two charter groups with permission from the state to bypass local school districts when seeking approval to open schools. The California School Boards Assn., among others, objects to the loss of local control. But supporters see it as a way to offer educational alternatives even where local school boards are hostile.
L.A. Unified has not been antagonistic, but Shalvey said he chose state authorization to allow for better data collection and consistent, comprehensive program evaluation by one entity -- the state.
To create a high school campus in Huntington Park, Aspire joined with Pacific Charter School Development, the third group funded by Broad today. The Huntington Park-based company finds space for schools and converts buildings into campuses, then leases them to charters on affordable terms until the school can purchase the property outright.
Broad’s foundation will give Pacific a no-interest $6-million loan, which it hopes to leverage into financing worth $30 million; plus $300,000 for operating expenses.
In the collaboration with Aspire, Pacific gutted and then refurbished a 77,000-square-foot warehouse that now contains two charters, the Aspire school and one run by the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, another group that has received significant Broad dollars.
Among the officials expected on hand for today’s Broad announcement is state Board of Education President Ted Mitchell, a charter supporter.
The movement, he said, “has really only begun to take hold in L.A. Unified.”
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howard.blume@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Charter groups
KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program)
Founded: 1994, in Houston (now based in San Francisco), by teachers Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin
Schools: 57, mostly fifth- through-eighth grades; 10 in California; two in L.A. Unified
Amount from Broad: $12 million now; $6.3 million previously
Goal: Four new schools in the L.A. area, serving a total of 2,300 students by 2013
Some other funders: $50 million over seven years from Gap co-founders Doris and Donald Fisher; $18 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Philosophy: Longer school days, longer school years, character building, school climate focusing on skills such as how to pay attention.
Aspire Public Schools
Founded: 1998, by Don Shalvey, a Silicon Valley-area superintendent, and Netflix founder Reed Hastings
Schools: 21, various grade levels in three regions: Oakland, Stockton and Los Angeles County -- with four schools in Huntington Park
Amount from Broad: $5 million now; $3.5 million previously
Goal: 13 new schools in the Carson and Huntington Park areas of L.A. Unified
Some other funders: $8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; about that same amount from the Walton Family Foundation
Philosophy: Focus on areas with large, underperforming schools. Graduates leave with college credits, job experience and money in the pocket.
Pacific Charter School Development
Founded: 2003, by Glenn Pierce, former bagel chain and pizza chain executive who attended the Broad Superintendents Academy
Amount from Broad: $6-million no-interest loan and $300,000 for operating expenses; at least that much in past funding
Goal: Leverage $30 million in a revolving fund to pay for thousands of charter seats
Some other funders: $6.9 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; $6.7 million from the Walton Family Foundation
Philosophy: Help charters find and pay for facilities.
Sources: Broad Foundation and
the three organizations
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6fc251cc4045ddcfe18632d214646c4b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-18-fg-tijuana18-story.html | Huge shootout rattles Tijuana neighborhood | Huge shootout rattles Tijuana neighborhood
Hundreds of police officers and soldiers waged a three-hour gun battle against heavily armed men here Thursday, as residents of a normally quiet neighborhood ran for their lives. One suspect was killed and six kidnapping victims were found dead after the shootout.
Four police officers were injured as a monthlong crackdown on Tijuana’s crime cartels escalated.
The working-class neighborhood of La Mesa resembled a war zone. Crying children streamed from an elementary school, escorted by terrified parents. People lay on sidewalks and streets as bullets flew overhead. Some huddled inside their homes.
The six abducted men were found handcuffed, blindfolded and shot execution style, federal authorities said.
Four suspects were arrested, including two police officers -- one state and one city. All were being taken to Mexico City, a common procedure for organized crime suspects.
Federal authorities said the suspects were part of the Arellano Felix cartel, which has controlled crime in the city for years.
“We’ve entered a new era,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights and a lifelong Tijuana resident.
This week, gunmen killed three police officers, the wife and two daughters of one of them, and a young couple and their 3-year-old son.
The confrontation Thursday began in the morning as the three slain police officers were being buried across town. Police quickly scrambled to La Mesa, where officers had surrounded a house. Gunfire erupted as officers approached and they peppered the house with automatic weapons fire.
Later, bomb threats forced the evacuation of City Hall and police headquarters, but no explosives were found.
Police officials have said criminals are waging a campaign of terror in response to a crackdown launched in December by the city’s new administration.
To support the effort, the government sent 1,000 federal police officers to the state of Baja California last week, half of them to Tijuana. Hundreds of soldiers are also participating in the crackdown.
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richard.marosi@latimes.com
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4603696ee6a655e7d57c83a5515c884a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-20-bk-kirsch20-story.html | America’s core value | America’s core value
THE 14 most important words in American democracy, according to Anthony Lewis, are found in the 1st Amendment: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . .” Yet it was not until 1931, he points out in “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” that those words were invoked and enforced by the Supreme Court. Even so, the courts have continued to engage in a long and sometimes rancorous debate over what they actually mean. In that debate, Lewis finds the real meaning of our democracy.
Lewis, one of the great explicators and advocates of civil liberty in the media, makes a stirring argument for what conservatives dismiss as “judicial activism.” He cites Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes, who in 1907, even before his appointment to the high court, declared that “the Constitution is what the judges say it is,” and he defends the willingness of the courts to flesh out the skeletal words of the 1st Amendment. “Timid, unimaginative judges,” Lewis argues, “could not have made America as extraordinarily free as it is.”
As a corrective to complacency, Lewis reminds us that our freedoms are not only precious but hard-won. English law permitted the king and Parliament to decide what was fit to print and punish defiant authors and publishers under the law of “seditious libel.” As drafted in 1787, our Constitution was silent on the rights of free speech and freedom of the press; the 1st Amendment was added four years later. When Congress passed its own Sedition Act, in 1798, criminalizing “false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States,” the rationale was that the law was needed, as Lewis explains, “to defend the country against terrorism: French terrorism.”
Thus does Lewis anticipate the danger of “the political use of fear to justify repression,” and he shows how the debate over the Sedition Act prefigures more recent controversies: “It tells us why Americans should scent danger when a government tries to stop a newspaper from disclosing the origins of an unsuccessful war, as the Nixon administration did when the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War in 1971, or accuses a newspaper of endangering national security by disclosing secret and illegal wiretapping without warrants, as the administration of George W. Bush did during the Iraq War in 2006.”
Lewis is the author of three previous books on law and politics, including the celebrated “Gideon’s Trumpet,” and he knows how to parse a Supreme Court decision. At the same time, he looks behind the printed page to scrutinize the experiences and values of the men and women whose utterances are given the force of law. The result is a short history of the 1st Amendment that is always illuminating and sometimes rollicking -- as when he pauses to report that Justice John Harlan, whose eyesight was failing but who wished to determine whether a particular movie was obscene, “brought a law clerk with him to tell him what was going on.”
The single most surprising fact in Lewis’ book, however, is that the court did not refer to the amendment in considering a free-speech case until 1919 -- for the simple reason that after the Sedition Act expired in 1801, the federal government did not try to limit those freedoms again until the outbreak of World War I, when U.S. citizens were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for criticizing the draft. In the first three of those cases, the high court upheld convictions obtained under the act; it was only in a dissent by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a fourth case, Abrams vs. United States, that the 1st Amendment was invoked in defense of leafleting that had resulted in conviction.
Not until 1931 did the court’s majority finally apply the 1st Amendment, in this instance to strike down a California law that criminalized the display of a red flag “as a sign, symbol or emblem of opposition to organized government.” But Lewis notes that the ever-shifting boundaries of the amendment are drawn anew in each case. Justice Hugo Black, for example, was a self-declared free-speech absolutist, but he dissented from a 1971 decision reversing the conviction of a young war protester for wearing a jacket inscribed with a bleepable anti-draft slogan, arguing that it was an “absurd and immature antic” rather than an act of free speech.
Lewis concedes that freedom of the press sometimes takes a bad bounce, as when, for example, reporters assert the right to withhold identity of confidential sources. He cites the case of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was arrested in 1999 on suspicion of spying after government sources leaked allegations to the press. After Lee was exonerated, he sued the government and subpoenaed the reporters to discover who had fingered him. The case was settled without a clear resolution of the conflict between competing values -- Lee’s right to repair his damaged reputation versus the media’s right to protect sources -- but Lewis asks the tough questions. “Suppose that a federal shield law had existed when Wen Ho Lee sued to seek some compensation for his nightmare ordeal,” he muses. “The journalists who wrote the damaging stories would have had their subpoenas dismissed, and without the names of the leakers Lee would probably have had to give up his lawsuit. Is that what a decent society should want?”
As Lewis admits, no absolute defense of free speech and freedom of the press is possible -- if only because the 1st Amendment is hedged on all sides by the laws of copyright, defamation, privacy and obscenity. At the same time, he reminds us of the values the Founders sought to protect when they enacted the Bill of Rights. For Lewis, the 1st Amendment is the touchstone of democracy, but words scratched on a sheet of parchment are not enough to fulfill its promise. “Even in a country with constitutional guarantees of freedom, something more is needed to resist fear and its manipulators,” he insists. “That is courage.”
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630f1b22f96ce765b26ec006f7cf2fa3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-20-bk-weingarten20-story.html | On the beaten track | On the beaten track
As one of our more intrepid cultural interpreters, William T. Vollmann has traveled with the mujahedin in Afghanistan, smoked crack with hookers and camped out at the North Pole. So it’s not surprising to find him riding the rails. In “Riding Toward Everywhere,” an account of his adventures as a slumming hobo -- expanded from a January 2007 essay he wrote for Harper’s -- Vollmann improvises his way across the United States with a series of clandestine hitches courtesy of the transcontinental train system.
Nothing new, you say? As a vehicle for probing the dark underbelly of America, examining the virtuous souls of the underclass and any number of other hoary literary conceits, riding the rails is so 19th century. But Vollmann still finds some juice in the conceit, so much so that his literary gift propels this slender, elegantly written book along like a third rail. Only at the end, when the book turns as monotonous as the train rides themselves, does “Riding Toward Everywhere” peter out.
Vollmann thinks a lot about savagery and the human capacity for suffering. It’s a major preoccupation of his numerous novels and volumes of reportage, and this book carries the themes forward. The author, as he explains near the beginning, is a man given to frequent reflection -- even self-recrimination at times -- about his place in the world.
“All I know is that although I live a freer life than many people, I want to be freer still,” he writes. “I’m sometimes positively dazzled with longing for a better way of being.” I’m not sure what “dazzled with longing” feels like, but it sends him off to find satori hopping trains in rail yards in Sacramento, Seattle, Spokane, Wash., Cheyenne, Wyo., and elsewhere.
The book begins with some autobiographical musing, as Vollmann talks about his otherwise conservative father’s anti-authoritarian streak, which apparently has leaked into his own DNA. “As I get older, I find myself getting angrier and angrier” at his “increasingly un-American America,” he rages. What really upsets him is having to take his shoes off at the airport gate. But is that really evidence of rampant un-Americanism? As a polemic, “Riding Toward Everywhere” is shrill and unconvincing.
Fortunately, Vollmann’s rage only flits around the narrative’s margins. He’s much better when he sticks to the particulars of railroad life. Riding with his sturdy companion, Steve, the author searches for the scuzzy empyrean, the “somewhere” that lurks just around the next bend in the tracks. Here’s where Vollmann demonstrates his gift for writing about deprivation in lyrical prose. Waiting in the cold night for a train to hop, he revels in “a glimpse of an ancient Pullman car, as fabulous to us as a woolly mammoth, the sudden sweetness of breathing night air after a rest . . . every grainer car silhouetted itself in succession, stencil cuts of perfect beauty.”
The train tracks crisscross the country, delivering crucial goods and human cargo alike to most every state in the nation, yet they also support an underground world. Through his encounters with veteran train hoppers, Vollmann discovers a rich mythology, an oral history passed down through the years. In Spokane, he learns of the Freight Train Riders of America, a notorious gang that allegedly has terrorized train hoppers in heinous fashion. Everyone has a story about them, but they never materialize. It’s another “shadow show,” that strange, vestigial dimension of the hobo life that never quite reveals itself to Vollmann.
The author encounters his share of down-and-outers on the road. Badger, a wizened and self-possessed traveler whose beard makes him look as “lordly” as a “Biblical patriarch,” is seeking the woman who stole his dog -- she’s another in a long line of “Diesel Venus” sirens who leave broken hearts in their boot dust. Then there’s Pittsburgh Ed, who has been “catching out” trains since 1980, but the day-job market has dried up for him. Now he sells his blood for cash: “Cheap high, too. Straight out of the stab lab, suck down a mug of beer, and it goes right to your head!” Vollmann captures street cadence with perfect pitch.
As the author moves from west to east and back again, wandering the rails with no discernible destination, that old mystic’s saw about the journey becoming the destination comes to mind. This may well be the road to enlightenment, but as the train trips blend into one another they get a bit tedious in the retelling. One wonders whether Vollmann would have been better off sticking with the shorter essay.
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8ae0e4002e4b71c9cc6be3ed0dc2c083 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-20-me-downtown20-story.html | Plan seeks to make Santa Ana the heart of Orange County | Plan seeks to make Santa Ana the heart of Orange County
For years, Orange County civic boosters have argued over where its “downtown” might be: Santa Ana’s historic urban core? Costa Mesa’s leafy arts complex? Anaheim’s bustling Resort District?
Now Santa Ana city officials are promoting a massive redevelopment plan they say should end the debate once and for all.
The Renaissance Plan envisions instant gentrification along a 421-acre corridor stretching from the county’s civic center to the city’s train station -- a neighborhood of graceful pre-World War II architecture, ethnic shopping districts and historic neighborhoods. But there are also swaths of industry and blight, tiny homes and aging apartments, poverty and crime.
Although the plan seems dreamy to some property owners in the area, city politicians and business leaders believe it could cement Santa Ana as a regional destination bustling with trolleys and alive at night with an energetic street scene.
“Anything that revitalizes downtown is great,” said Mike Harrah, a developer who owns more than 3.8 million square feet of office and retail space in downtown Santa Ana.
Harrah, who owns restaurants and a concert hall, is building the city’s tallest building nearby -- 37 stories of glass and steel.
The Renaissance Plan calls for residential high-rises near the train station, thousands of new homes in nearby neighborhoods, cafes, parks and reduced industrial uses.
The plan would alter zoning, though existing businesses would be allowed to continue operating.
The city has purchased some land in the area with redevelopment funds but vows it will not use its powers of eminent domain to condemn any property.
Councilman David Benavides said the plan was needed “so we are not always reacting” to developers and, instead, creating a wish list for them.
“We want to transfer to the next generation a strong, vibrant downtown,” he said.
City Manager Dave Ream said that if the plan is approved by the City Council, it would probably unfold over decades.
City officials hope to bring a draft plan to the Planning Commission and City Council this spring.
If approved, it would create new zoning that could lead to the construction of upscale housing through the city’s redevelopment agency. Private developers would be needed to complete the plan.
But despite all the civic enthusiasm, some business owners complain that if the plan is adopted, their operations would no longer conform with the area’s zoning.
Although they could continue to operate, the businesses would be prohibited from expanding. Some fear the city might use eminent domain to someday buy them out.
Those who have industrial businesses say that having a business in the planning area hurts them.
“My business and my property are in jeopardy because of this plan,” said Tardif Sheet Metal owner Mike Tardif, whose father opened the company 50 years ago. “I would like to plan for family succession of my business, and this puts that into question.”
John Moore, who owns American Demolition, said he had been planning to rent out a 9,700-square-foot building he owns for seven years at $8,000 a month with annual 4% rent increases.
But when the prospective tenant learned the building was on the plan’s map, he canceled the lease.
The plan “has created a tremendous amount of uncertainty for properties in the plan,” Moore said. “If you aren’t in the plan, you don’t have the same worries.”
Harrah is more optimistic.
“Santa Ana is the capital city of Orange County,” he said, “and it has to have that same shiny effect as its name.”
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jennifer.delson@latimes.com
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2251a88bf44dd5566b304256b427adb4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-20-me-lopez20-story.html | Good cop makes a bad decision | Good cop makes a bad decision
Remember the televised chase that ended with a Los Angeles police officer beating a suspected car thief with a flashlight?
John Hatfield, who was fired by LAPD Chief Bill Bratton for using unnecessary force in that Compton beating, is on a sofa next to me and we’re watching a video of the incident in the Monrovia home of a friend of his.
I’ve got to admit, I’m a little uncomfortable, given that I’m one of the people who said back in June of 2004 that Hatfield should lose his job.
To be precise, what I said was: “Any cop who’d whack a captured suspect 11 times, on live TV no less, is too dumb to keep past lunch.”
In the next few months, the 38-year-old Hatfield will be going to court in an attempt to get his job back. Although he’s studying to be a nurse, he aches to wear a badge again. And he wanted me to hear why he did what he did that morning 3 1/2 years ago.
“Chasing car thieves was one of the things I really enjoyed doing,” Hatfield says as we watch suspect Stanley Miller speed through South L.A. in a stolen Camry, with Hatfield leading a caravan of cops in hot pursuit. He liked the feeling of catching someone in the act and returning stolen property to the poor soul who got ripped off.
Hatfield is using a red laser on the TV screen, pointing out little details while rewinding and replaying the video. He says that during the chase, Miller dipped down more than once, perhaps reaching for a gun. Hatfield opened his own car door while driving, anticipating that Miller might at any time leap out of the car and start shooting.
“I’m going to use the car door as my shield,” Hatfield says.
That never happens.
But when Miller finally stops after a 30-minute chase and begins running, Hatfield still suspects he might have a gun. The fact that Miller is holding his left arm close to his chest reinforces the idea.
In the foot chase, Hatfield is the third cop to reach Miller, who has run out of gas and is raising his hands.
Another cop aims his gun at the suspect, re-holsters it, then tackles him.
That was a critical blunder, according to the internal review that followed. The officer should have kept his gun pointed at the suspect until the other cops cuffed him.
Instead, a melee breaks out, with Hatfield joining the brawl. His first move is a wild, vicious-looking kick that misses Miller, and then he drops to the ground and begins swinging the flashlight and driving his knees into him.
“Whomp, whomp, whomp,” I wrote in my 2004 column, repeating the word 11 times, once for each blow Hatfield landed.
None of it is pretty. Hatfield is going like a windmill, and though he says even the knee-drilling of Miller was tactical, it looks gratuitous to me. Hatfield argues that he did not believe Miller was completely subdued, and he heard one of the other officers say the suspect had a gun.
“His left arm is under his chest,” Hatfield says as we play back the video. “That’s the one I was concerned with.”
Hatfield says his flashlight blows were aimed at weakening the left arm. As we watch the video, he convinces me I was probably wrong when I wrote that he was waling on a man “who was already restrained.”
Miller was down, yes, and certainly wasn’t going anywhere at that point, with three cops on him and more arriving. But it appears that he might still be resisting by not surrendering his left arm.
Unfortunately for Hatfield, that argument didn’t hold much water at his Board of Rights hearing, where a panel that included two Los Angeles Police Department commanders ruled that Hatfield was out of control and should be fired. The panel specifically noted that the kneeing looked “malicious.”
I don’t think Hatfield’s cause was helped by the actions of another officer at the scene who appeared to be gesturing for the pack of light-skinned cops to ease up on the African American Miller. This officer appears to then point a thumb over his shoulder, as if warning officers that an African American sergeant is about to arrive.
And let’s not forget that the initial police report erroneously said a pair of wire cutters were found in Miller’s pocket. That seemed like a convenient explanation for why the officers feared a gun and acted as they did, except that it wasn’t true. Police later corrected the report, saying the wire cutters were found in Miller’s car, not his pocket. Makes you wonder whether Hatfield was the one who deserved the harshest punishment.
In the end, there was no gun at all. When police finally opened Miller’s hand, they found $8.
Bratton called the whole thing a mess. Hatfield doesn’t deny there were problems start to finish, and concedes he could have acted differently. But as he notes, county prosecutors said they could not prove that Hatfield acted without “lawful necessity.”
All this time later, Hatfield can’t let go of it.
Miller, sentenced to three years in prison for evading arrest, got a $450,000 settlement from the city despite having only minor abrasions. And Hatfield, who had no other substantial complaints against him in eight years of mostly commendable service, lost everything for 30 seconds worth of decision-making.
“What hurts the most is the suggestion that I was a racist,” says Hatfield, whose wife is Iranian, whose mother is of Mexican descent and whose best man at his first wedding was African American.
He thanks me for having said in my column that his actions didn’t strike me as racially motivated, just overzealous. The former officer says he loved working South L.A. because so many good citizens badly need protec- tion from gangsters and thieves.
Bratton would not talk about the Hatfield case because of pending litigation, but a senior cop who asked not to be named said that Hatfield should not have jumped into a pile and used his flashlight on a man he thought was armed. A smarter move would have been to stand back, reassess and perhaps train his gun on Miller until he was brought under control.
For another opinion, I asked civil rights attorney and police reform activist Connie Rice if she’d watch the video with me. Come on over, she said.
Rice has critics on both sides -- those who think she’s too tough on the police, and those who think she’s too inclined to rationalize some of their controversial behavior. To my knowledge, she had taken no position on the Miller case, other than to initially urge no rush to judgment.
“I sat through Hatfield’s Board of Rights hearing,” she said when we met. “I said to Chief Bratton at the time that I would not have fired Hatfield.”
Why not?
“He was one of the good ones,” she said.
Rice said she checked with sources in the LAPD and in South L.A. right after the incident. Among other things, she learned that Hatfield occasionally shot baskets with neighborhood kids. He also helped raise money for a scholarship program for low-income kids.
That’s not to say she excused his actions in the Miller arrest, or those of other officers. As we watched the video in her office, she cringed more than once, attributing the tactical blunders to training lapses.
“This is a melee,” she said as we watched the pileup, with Hatfield slugging away.
There is no question he used bad judgment and excessive force and appeared to be on an adrenaline high, Rice said. But given the mistakes that had already set things in motion, and given his reputation and record, she thought Hatfield should have been suspended without pay and then assigned to teach other officers how to avoid the mistakes made in the Miller arrest.
So why was he fired?
“The rules are different” in a high-profile incident, Rice said, especially one involving a black suspect and an African American community that sees the LAPD through an 80-year prism. There were protests at the time, comparisons to the Rodney King case and a call for heads to roll.
“I think the pressure to respond to the community was huge.”
Rice said there’s been “a sea change” under Bratton in terms of the LAPD’s understanding of the need to earn the trust and cooperation of minority communities. The chief might have fired Hatfield, she said, to send a message to both cops and the community, and that’s not a bad thing.
Hatfield doesn’t buy the notion that sacrificing him was good for the community. Officers are no longer policing as aggressively as they need to, he said, because they fear the kind of second-guessing that cost him his job.
So should Hatfield have been fired?
Probably. Two years into the job, Bratton had to prove that he was running a different kind of department. But the case is more nuanced than I acknowledged at the time, and for that, I apologize to Hatfield.
When I left him after our first meeting, I asked if I could borrow the DVD of the chase to study it more.
Sure, he said, but only if I promised to give it back.
“I might want to show it to my kids one day,” he said. “I’m proud of what I did as a cop.”
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steve.lopez@latimes.com
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998342827ec8c1ababfcdb20867e1c67 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-21-ed-prop93-21-story.html | Change term limits | Change term limits
Like many political reform initiatives, Proposition 93 presents voters with a quandary. It would improve California’s political system by rationally reforming the legislative term-limits law. But it also would confer a temporary, unearned and undeserved benefit on a handful of elected officials who broke faith with Californians. Now the question before voters is whether it’s better to punish those politicians, and in so doing punish ourselves, by squandering a rare chance to improve the system, or to begin repairing the broken process without worrying that a few elected officials may, for a short time, enjoy an unexpected political afterlife.
The Times urges voters to reject the childish world of politics and to engage instead in the grown-up business of governing. Vote yes on Proposition 93.
Under the term-limits law voters adopted 18 years ago, legislators can serve a maximum of three two-year terms in the Assembly and two four-year terms in the Senate, for a total of 14 years. Under Proposition 93, they would be able to serve 12 years, in either or both houses, in any combination of terms they could work out. If the measure passes, it’s widely expected that most would serve the full 12 in a single house.
Term limits would remain intact, and in fact legislators would be restricted to two fewer years than currently allowed. But by serving all those years in one house, they would be able to build up the expertise that currently is so sorely lacking in Sacramento. As things stand, most lawmakers serve for too short a period to gain expertise, so they never master the issues on which they vote. They are dependent on the experts who are never termed out: lobbyists for special interests and lawyers for the Democratic and Republican parties. Those lobbyists are the same people who contribute the most campaign money, and right now, it’s that money doing the talking and walking in Sacramento.
More time in one house means lawmakers wouldn’t be so dependent on lobbyists for their supposed expertise. Lawmakers also would have more clout to say no to lobbyist money -- in part because they wouldn’t have to plan a run for another office quite so soon.
The rub? There are two. First, we were hoping for something better. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland) at least implied that they would join term-limits reform with a measure they don’t like, but that is even more crucial to correcting the state’s broken politics: redistricting reform. They reneged. Second, the term-limits reform includes a transition provision that likely will keep Nunez and Perata in power for a few more years, in effect rewarding them for their treachery.
We don’t want to reward Nunez, Perata or the rest of them for being babies about redistricting. They should have put it on the ballot. But what encourages them to be such big babies? In part it’s their limited tenure, which empowers the political party lawyers to press for the status quo on districting, and encourages the legislative leaders to hang on to whatever power they do have. Californians have a chance to change the rules of the game.
Sure, it stinks that Nunez and Perata would get a special benefit, but voters should not spike the chance at term-limits reform just because a few leaders would get a few years extra in power. That negative consequence would be short-lived. Then it would be gone forever, and we would have a new term-limits structure we could live with forever. The Times has long been skeptical of term limits of any kind, but Proposition 93 provides a positive and creative compromise.
Redistricting, meanwhile, is out of the Legislature’s hands and will be before voters in November, when they can finish the job that the Assembly and Senate couldn’t handle.
Besides, no lawmaker gets more time in office without approval of the voters in his or her home district. That’s democracy, and it should be protected, not limited.
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a4ebf663aada634e5cb5ff71e0d7cbd8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-21-et-idealist21-story.html | A breed of politician that is facing extinction | A breed of politician that is facing extinction
“American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver” is not a title that prepares you for an hour and a half of heartbreak and indignation. But watching this Chicago Video Project biopic about the man who launched the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty, it is difficult not to feel both these things. Along with pride, regret, rage and hope. But mostly heartbreak. Because so many of the things Sargent Shriver stood for, fought for, are now simply absent from our national conversation. Indeed, even the term American idealist seems nostalgic at best; at worst, it’s an oxymoron.
“Idealist,” which airs tonight on PBS, reminds us of a powerful man too often eclipsed in public memory by the family he joined when he married Eunice Kennedy and now known more widely as the father of Maria, first lady of California. Which says as much about the vagaries of politics as anything else because “Sarge” Shriver was as powerful a politician as any of the Kennedys. Good looking, funny, well-spoken and incredibly driven, he both touted and lived “the politics of service,” unapologetically and seemingly without guile.
Shriver played social conscience to two presidential administrations while creating programs that continue to serve millions of people. He convinced his brother-in-law to step up his support of civil rights and then to start the Peace Corps. After Kennedy’s assassination, Shriver headed Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, keeping the president focused on the progressive social programs even as racist Southern politicians attempted to derail them and everyone’s attention strayed increasingly, and fatally, to Vietnam.
Written and directed by Bruce Orenstein, “Idealist” is clearly a labor of love. Why, the effective use of the French horn and lone trumpet in the score is enough to evoke the word “haunting.” Indeed, as portrayed in “Idealist,” Shriver seems almost too good to be true. The son of Catholic activists -- his mother and father founded Commonweal -- the young Shriver watched as the stock-market crash ruined his well-to-do family. On the charity of friends and family, he went to Yale; he was briefly an editor at Newsweek before becoming a lawyer. Then he met, and wed, Eunice Kennedy, became part of the dynasty and the rest is baby boomer history.
Seemingly always on the side of the oppressed and disenfranchised, Shriver believed that the only way to break down barriers of class and race was to do just that -- by sending young educated Americans into the slums and ghettos and struggling neighborhoods abroad and at home. And he often went with them. The only criticism Shriver receives from the folks interviewed in “Idealist” is that he was too demanding, too hard-working.
Even those who may not agree with his politics or pedigree cannot deny the work he did or the effect it continues to have on this country -- we did not win the War on Poverty, but at least poverty was acknowledged as an enemy; Head Start alone has improved the lives of millions. And if the Peace Corps is not the post-college draw it once was, it remains vital and has spawned other groups with similar goals.
Oh, and if that’s not enough of a legacy, the Shrivers created the Special Olympics. In their backyard.
There is, mercifully, no airing of Kennedy laundry in “Idealist,” save the complicated effect the family had on Shriver’s career. Yes, he was part of the inner circle, but when it seemed as though Hubert Humphrey was going to put him on the ticket as a vice presidential nominee, it was the Kennedys who apparently intervened. The line of succession did not apply to brothers-in-law, though Shriver later joined George McGovern on his unsuccessful presidential bid.
For all we may praise less famous men, the power of “Idealist” stems as much from its portrayal of this nation as it does from this one man’s attempt to improve it. The issues that Shriver tried to address -- poverty, education, healthcare, public participation in the democratic process and the domestic cost of pursuing an aggressive foreign policy -- are precisely the issues this country faces today. Imagine a politician who could rally today’s privileged youth into signing up for programs like the Peace Corps or VISTA. Imagine a man or woman who would sincerely pledge to end severe poverty in this country, soon and permanently. A politician who made controversial decisions simply because they were the right thing to do.
Watching “Idealist,” it is almost impossible not to wonder just what has happened to this country. How did we lose all that energy, that hope and dedication, that call for personal duty as members of a democracy, that belief not only that we the people could make a difference, but also that we had a responsibility to make a difference? Now 92 and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Sargent Shriver has slipped beyond the demands of his nation. We can only hope that someone at some point will try to take his place.
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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com
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‘American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver’
Where: KCET
When: 9 tonight
Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)
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7a83efeed4b8001c0a96388ee2d6a764 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-21-he-eye21-story.html | Keep your eyes on those leafy greens | Keep your eyes on those leafy greens
Dismiss it as boring if you’d like, but “rabbit food” could be just what the doctor orders at your next ophthalmologist’s visit.
Eating the right vegetables, it now appears, may help to ward off some life-changing diseases such as cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, conditions you might otherwise come eye to eye with as you get older.
Surprisingly, despite their reputation, carrots are probably not near the top of the list. Certainly, the vitamin A they’re full of is necessary for eye health, says Dr. Michael Marmor, an ophthalmology professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. “But people are generally not vitamin A deficient in our society, and a high dose doesn’t do any more good.”
The most useful vegetables, according to new research, seem to be the leafy green ones -- such as spinach, kale and collard greens -- which are rich in the antioxidant carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin.
These are also the only carotenoids found in measurable amounts in the eye, says Bill Christen, a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School. “That adds credence to the idea that they could be of benefit,” he says.
Christen is lead author of a new study published this month showing that people who eat diets high in lutein and zeaxanthin are less likely to develop cataracts than others whose diets included less of those nutrients. A second new study by Australian scientists that is to be published next month, found similar results for age-related macular degeneration.
But while these studies show a diet-eye health relationship, they do not directly demonstrate cause and effect. Only one study to date has shown specific nutrients can cause reductions in risk for eye disease.
In that 2001 study, a high-dose combination of zinc and several antioxidants (not including lutein and zeaxanthin) lowered the risk of advanced macular degeneration and the vision loss that goes along with it.
Supplements based on that formula are now on the market. Designed for people who already have macular degeneration and are at high risk for having the disease progress to an advanced stage, these products contain zinc and antioxidants in amounts far exceeding their recommended dietary allowances. “They should be taken only on the recommendation of an ophthalmologist,” Marmor says.
But many experts recommend that people whose eyes are healthy should take supplements with ingredients that stick closer to recommended amounts such as a multivitamin that also contains lutein, zeaxanthin and zinc.
“It makes perfectly good sense to be taking a prudent amount of nutrient supplements, along with eating a healthy diet, in order not to have problems when you’re older,” says Dr. Roger Steinert, professor and vice chair of ophthalmology at UC Irvine.
“There’s no downside, and there’s good evidence it can help,” says alternative health guru and author Dr. Andrew Weil, founder and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Center in Tucson. “I would recommend that people start from an early age . . . certainly in their teens.”
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A look at vision loss
Cataracts cloud the eye’s lens and interfere with vision by blocking light from reaching the retina. “The lens is a bag of proteins,” Steinert says. “Cataracts develop when the proteins become disorganized,” similar to what happens when you fry an egg and the clear part becomes opaque white. Cataracts can be treated with surgery to replace affected lenses. The procedure is highly successful.
Age-related macular degeneration affects the retina. In advanced stages, it destroys sharp, straight-ahead vision, leaving people unable to read, drive or even recognize a friend’s face. In one form known as “dry” macular degeneration, vision loss sometimes occurs because light-sensitive cells break down in the macula, a yellow spot near the center of the retina.
Alternatively, in the much less common “wet” form, leaky blood vessels grow under the retina where they don’t belong. In either case, little can be done to repair the disease’s damage over the long term.
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Similar traits, therapy
Different as they are, cataracts and macular degeneration share similarities. Both are age-related, have genetic components and are thought to result, in part, from oxidative damage caused by light.
Lutein and zeaxanthin might help prevent both.
In one new study, published in this month’s issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, Christen of Brigham and Women’s hospital led a team that analyzed the diets of more than 35,000 female health professionals who in 1993 had enrolled in an earlier research program, the Women’s Health Study, and were then tracked for an average of 10 years.
During that time, 2,031 of the women, who were all 45 or older when they enrolled, developed cataracts. When Christen’s team divided the women into five groups based on their estimated lutein and zeaxanthin consumption, they found that those in the top group (who consumed about 6.7 milligrams of the antioxidants a day in food and vitamins) were 18% less likely to develop cataracts than those in the lowest (who got about 1.2 milligrams).
The other new study, which is to be published next month in the journal Ophthalmology, analyzed data from 2,454 Australians who were 49 or older when they enrolled (from 1992 to 1994) and were re-examined after five or 10 years, or both.
Led by Dr. Jennifer Tan, a professor at the University of Sydney and Westmead Hospital in Sydney, researchers divided the participants into three groups according to how much lutein and zeaxanthin they consumed in their diets. Those in the top group were only about one-third as likely to develop wet macular degeneration as the rest of the participants.
Those above the median in consumption were only about two-thirds as likely as those below the median to develop certain forms of drusen, yellow deposits under the retina that are found in beginning and intermediate stages of macular degeneration that can increase the likelihood of developing an advanced form.
The Australian study also found that zinc was associated with a lower risk of developing macular degeneration. When researchers divided the participants into 10 groups according to how much zinc they consumed in their diets and in supplements, those in the top group were about half as likely as the others to develop any form of the disease.
This finding supported one from an earlier investigation, the 2001 Age-Related Eye Disease Study, a seven-year clinical trial sponsored by the National Eye Institute. In that randomized controlled study, people at high risk of developing advanced macular degeneration lowered their risk by about 25% when they took a high-dose combination of zinc and the antioxidants vitamin C, vitamin E and beta carotene. Those people also lowered their vision loss risk by 19%.
Participants who took either zinc alone or antioxidants alone also lowered their risk of developing advanced macular degeneration, but not as much.
The nutrients, alone or in combination, did no apparent good for people who showed signs of, at most, early stages of the disease. But because progression of the disease is slow, the seven-year trial may not have been long enough to reveal helpful effects, says Dr. Abdhish Bhavsar, director of clinical research at the Retina Center and attending surgeon at Phillips Eye Institute, both in Minneapolis. “If patients could be followed for a very long time, it’s possible that effects would be found,” he says.
The nutrients also had no effect on the development of cataracts.
The study did not include lutein and zeaxanthin among its antioxidants because they weren’t commercially available then, says Dr. Emily Chew, deputy director of the Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the National Eye Institute. Chew is now leading Age-Related Eye Disease Study 2, a clinical trial that is adding lutein and zeaxanthin as well as omega-3 fatty acids to the nutrient combination used in the first study. Again, the objective is to see if the nutrients can lower risk of advanced macular degeneration.
Though both new studies help to paint a picture of nutrients as beneficial for eye health, they also blur things a bit.
In the cataract study, participants who consumed the most vitamin E were less likely to develop cataracts than those who ate the least. But in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study, antioxidants -- including vitamin E -- had no effect on cataracts.
In the macular degeneration study, both beta carotene and vitamin E were associated with an increased risk of late-stage disease. But in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study, both were included in the antioxidant combination that lowered the risk.
Even if vitamin E proves to be useful in preventing or mitigating eye disease, there are reasons to be cautious about taking it in high doses, Steinert says. For example, the prime ages for worrying about eye disease are also prime ages for worrying about cholesterol. And vitamin E has been shown to interfere with the effects of cholesterol-lowering statins.
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Preventive measures
Some factors that lead to eye disease can’t be avoided. People can’t help but get older, and they can’t change their genes. Still, there are steps that improve the odds of keeping eyes healthy.
People do themselves one big favor by not smoking. Smoking can lead to cardiovascular disease, which can have drastic effects on the retina’s delicate blood supply.
They can do themselves another good turn by minimizing exposure to light. “Sunglasses are the sunscreen for the eyes,” Steinert says.
And more and more, it seems that people can delay or prevent eye disease by eating the right nutrients in the right amounts, although scientists still have a ways to go before they know just what those are. It can’t hurt, they say, to eat more leafy green vegetables. Taking a multivitamin is another no-risk strategy with possible eye-health returns. And if taking a vitamin, it might as well be one with lutein, zeaxanthin and zinc.
It’s not clear whether supplements can help ward off eye disease or merely slow progression after it starts, and partly for that reason experts don’t all agree when it’s best to start with a supplement regimen. Some, such as Chew, hesitate to recommend starting before developing early stages of disease because there are no clear data suggesting it will help before then. Others, such as Weil, think there’s no time like now, whether you’re 15 or 50.
Weil has been taking a blend of antioxidants for two decades. At 65, he says his eyes are exceptionally healthy.
“It’s true that I don’t wear reading glasses,” he says. “And that’s unusual. But I don’t know that I can attribute that to taking antioxidants.”
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fc17928253538afbe8d98f8bc2593a59 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-22-et-coachella22-story.html | Coachella has a ‘Dark Side’ | Coachella has a ‘Dark Side’
The indie-rock kids of Coachella are in store for a classic-rock moment this April: Roger Waters of Pink Floyd will re-create the band’s trippy 1973 masterpiece “Dark Side of the Moon” on the festival’s main stage, which also will feature the Raconteurs, the Verve, Jack Johnson, Kraftwerk and a reunion of Portishead.
The ninth edition of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival will take over the Empire Polo Field outside the dusty town of Indio from April 25 through 27. The 125-act lineup was announced Monday afternoon at a press conference in Mexico City with Death Cab for Cutie, My Morning Jacket, Love and Rockets, and Justice among the names on the bill along with M.I.A., the Breeders, Rilo Kiley, Sasha & Digweed, Cafe Tacuba and Fatboy Slim. Tickets will go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday.
The festival has become a touchstone event in California and fan speculation has pinged across the Internet for months, along with a flurry of hoax lineups and posters; one apparently was convincing enough to fool the staff at (KYSR-FM) 98.7, which on Monday breathlessly reported that Radiohead and Muse would top the bill. Prince, David Bowie, the Smiths and No Doubt were the most commonly rumored Coachella acts; the booking of Waters, however, was a left-field choice and a generational mystery to many young loyalists of the Coachella brand.
One comment posted by a reader at www.latimes.com was a clear indication that the 63-year-old Waters is on the other side of the wall when it comes to today’s generation of fans: “Is Roger Waters the one with the pig or was that Peter Frampton?”
Promoter Paul Tollett, the architect of the show, has shown a puckish streak in the past with genre surprises, such as booking Madonna for an elaborate dance-tent set or having Willie Nelson serenade fans waiting for Rage Against the Machine.
This year, however, the top of the lineup is already being criticized by many in the cruel ether of the Internet. Some of that criticism is because Coachella is competing against its own stellar history of magic moments (such as the Pixies or Rage reunions) as well as an increasing number of regional festivals fishing from the same talent pool.
Tollett, a partner in the show with the concert promotion company AEG Live, pointed out Monday that there’s always debate about the top of the bill, but for the focused music fan, this year’s Coachella looks to be one of the strongest for up-and-coming acts and the middle tier of the bill. He declined to cite some of his favorites: “You just get in trouble with managers when you do that because you can’t mention every one.”
The press conference Monday was staged in Mexico as an acknowledgment of the country’s strong fan, artist and press support for Coachella, which was staged for the first time in 1999. This year Austin and Porter TV will be among the Mexican acts playing the festival.
geoff.boucher@latimes.com
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085b0a6b35564f2f1357ced83943eea7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-22-fg-liberia22-story.html | Rebel returns to Liberia to confess to 20,000 deaths | Rebel returns to Liberia to confess to 20,000 deaths
One of this country’s most notorious rebel commanders, known as Gen. Butt Naked for charging into battle wearing only boots, has returned to confess his responsibility for 20,000 deaths.
Joshua Milton Blahyi, who now lives in Ghana, returned last week to face his homeland’s truth and reconciliation commission, this time wearing a suit and tie. His platoon’s practice of charging naked into battle was a technique meant to terrify the enemy.
Blahyi is urging other former killers to come forward as the country founded by freed American slaves in 1847 struggles to recover from past horrors.
“I could be electrocuted. I could be hanged. I could be given any other punishment,” the 37-year-old Blahyi said in a weekend interview after his truth commission appearance last week. “But I think forgiveness and reconciliation is the right way to go.”
The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls.
Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women’s wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.
“More than 20,000 people fell victim” to Blahyi and his men, he said, beginning in 1982, when he became responsible for making human sacrifices before battle.
The commission, modeled on the one in post-apartheid South Africa, has been taking testimony from victims and former rebels for two years, urging a full accounting of wartime atrocities. While the commission cannot charge killers with a crime, it can recommend charges be brought.
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f88f29df0fa9ded7ccafd6769f713518 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-22-fi-yahoo22-story.html | Yahoo may lay off hundreds | Yahoo may lay off hundreds
Yahoo Inc. plans to lay off hundreds of employees in business areas not central to its new priorities as it faces rising competitive pressures, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, which has seen its share of online advertising decline despite its sites being among the Internet’s most visited, is still deciding where to cut.
Yahoo has experienced dramatic turnover in its executive ranks and might hire workers to pursue key areas of focus, so it probably will maintain the same number of workers -- about 14,000 -- as it had at the end of 2007, the person said.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang, who was appointed to replace former CEO Terry Semel last summer amid growing investor unhappiness, has been spearheading an effort to lure more advertising and eyeballs and to prop up its slumping stock price.
Yahoo is expected to detail the cutbacks about the time it releases fourth-quarter results Jan. 29.
The company said in a statement, “Yahoo has embarked on a multiyear transformation that includes making tough decisions about the business to help the company grow.”
The cuts were first reported this weekend in blogs that speculated Yahoo might trim 10% to 20% of its workforce.
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jessica.guynn@latimes.com
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8952215c404add2cd46263d0c4c9f120 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-22-me-calarts22-story.html | CalArts forges partnership in Africa | CalArts forges partnership in Africa
Kathy Carbone remembers the twinge of trepidation she felt when she was asked to help create a library in the tiny, east-central African nation of Rwanda.
“Oh my God, what have I just signed up for?” she recently said, recalling her initial reaction. “I felt overwhelmed. I had never created a library.”
Carbone, the performing arts librarian at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, realized she faced an enormous task. She would need books, a computerized system to catalog the publications, and a way to get the hard copies to the proposed facility half a world away.
But to her relief, and to the delight of others who initiated the relationship between CalArts and the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center in Kigali, Rwanda, the effort immediately generated an outpouring of goodwill.
Colleagues, friends and family responded to Carbone’s e-mail appeal for books by donating about 150 volumes on genocide, human rights, reconciliation and similar topics. A Texas-based company called Biblionix agreed to provide an online cataloging system -- absolutely free. And when the time came to transport the books, Carbone, her colleagues and students stuffed most of the texts into suitcases and boxes, and headed to Rwanda.
“I was surprised at how many people responded and how quickly,” Carbone said of the enthusiasm for the library project, which began about a year ago. “It was beautiful.”
The center, which currently operates online, plans to open an office and library in Kigali in July. It would be dedicated to providing information about an ugly subject: The 1994 Rwanda genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were killed. The library would be a key component of the studies center.
The idea for the center was hatched by Jean-Pierre Karegeye, a Rwandan doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, and Erik Ehn, dean of the School of Theater at CalArts.
The scholars met while Ehn, a playwright, was visiting Rwanda in 2004. Karegeye said he was excited by Ehn’s enthusiasm to explore Rwanda’s tragedy and examine ways to promote peace-building through the arts. Karegeye suggested others could also benefit from this experience.
The men resolved to create a center to study the Rwandan genocide, and a special relationship was forged between Rwanda and CalArts.
The center and library are to be housed in the Kigali offices of Ibuka, a genocide survivors organization that has donated the space. Survivors would be able to use the venue to testify about their experiences. Writers and artists would have a place to share and store their work, while scholars could discuss and exchange ideas. The general public would also be welcome, Karegeye said.
“It’s open to anyone who wants to know what happened,” he added. “The genocide is not something that should just concern Rwandans, but every human being.”
For now, the books that Carbone brought to Kigali last year have been cataloged online but are temporarily stored in an office closet. She estimated it would cost at least $150,000 to pay for new books, office equipment, staff salaries and other resources for the center and library project, which relies entirely on donations.
The librarian spends several hours each week scouring the Internet for free databases on Africa and human rights. She combs journals on genocide and conflict resolution; and posts wish lists for relevant publications with online booksellers.
The information is gradually being loaded onto the website www.igscrwanda.org
Since 2006, CalArts has hosted conferences where scholars, actors, filmmakers and human rights activists were among those who gathered to brainstorm about how to make peace through art, and to watch plays and films.
“The key that opens the door to every conference is Rwanda,” Ehn said.
The next four-day conference is scheduled to begin Thursday.
For the last three summers, CalArts students and faculty have traveled to Rwanda. They have heard testimonies from genocide survivors, visited memorial sites and interacted with academics, politicians and other artists.
Students don’t get credit for going on the trip and must cover the $3,500 to $4,000 cost themselves, unless they qualify for financial assistance from the school.
Virginia Grise raised money to pay for last year’s trip in various ways including waiting tables and performing readings from plays she had written.
The second-year master of fine arts candidate had never traveled to Africa and said she had no idea what to expect. But she returned bursting “with a deeper sense of urgency” to her work -- “The urgency to write and tell the stories of our dead,” said Grise, 31. “The urgency not to forget.”
Catherine Strecker, 27, who is in her final year of the institute’s bachelor of fine arts program, was so “blown away” by the experience of visiting Rwanda in 2006 that she went back last year. The resolve of one female survivor had a particular impact on Strecker.
“She asked us to tell people about Rwanda and what happened there in 1994,” Strecker recalled. “I realize that I carry her and all of the others with me. In all the work I do, in every breath, they are there.”
To Deborah Asiimwe, who came from Uganda to study at CalArts last year, the opportunity for American students to learn about genocide in Rwanda seemed exceptional.
“Being on the ground [in Rwanda] is much more important than just reading about it, or what you see on TV,” said Asiimwe, 34, who is currently producing “Cooking Oil,” a play she wrote about the controversy surrounding humanitarian aid distribution in Africa. “It’s a place of bearing true witness.”
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ann.simmons@latimes.com
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59a72ebaec39be84213537482507940f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-23-fi-merck23-story.html | Schering, Merck halt TV ads for two drugs | Schering, Merck halt TV ads for two drugs
Merck & Co. and Schering-Plough Corp. suspended television ads Tuesday for the cholesterol pills Vytorin and Zetia after a study questioned the benefit of the medicines.
The Vytorin commercials were among the most widely aired drug ads, featuring people dressed as food items to show the pill lowers cholesterol from food as well as from genetics. The ads were voluntarily and temporarily halted, Schering-Plough spokesman Lee Davies said.
The firms released data last week showing that Vytorin, a combination of Merck’s Zocor and Schering’s Zetia, worked no better at reducing the buildup of plaque in the artery leading to the brain than just Zocor, available as a generic. Vytorin and Zetia were prescribed 100,000 times a day on average, with more than $200 million spent last year to reach consumers. Doctors say the drugs were over prescribed because of the heavy marketing.
“The direct-to-patient advertising has fostered the acceptance of this combination therapy without truly a lot of medical backing that would support these drugs,” said Mark Turco, director of the center for cardiovascular research at Washington Adventist Hospital in Maryland. “Marketing is key, and the company has done a great job at marketing.”
Prescriptions for Vytorin have fallen 12% and for Zetia have declined 15% since the results of the study, called Enhance, were released Jan. 14, according to a research report Tuesday by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
New ads for the drugs began running over the weekend in newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, Davies said. The two-page ad is in the form of a letter from Schering’s chief medical officer and Merck’s vice president of external medical and scientific affairs and says the companies stand by the drugs’ health benefit.
There have been no changes to the companies’ magazine ad campaign since the release of the study, Davies said. He declined to say when the television ads would resume.
Lawmakers are probing whether Schering and Merck acted improperly in their marketing for Vytorin and Zetia.
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5844ca95c919f348c5c0b9ce9e3e57e9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-24-ed-feebate24-story.html | A healthy discount | A healthy discount
If California lawmakers could dramatically cut greenhouse gases without costing taxpayers a cent or hurting consumers or businesses, and also reduce reliance on imported oil, wouldn’t they be crazy not to? The obvious answer to that question eludes the Assembly, where a cowardly performance by a group of Southern California members has stalled a common-sense bill.
AB 493 from Assemblyman Ira Ruskin (D-Redwood City) would create a “feebate” program for new-car purchases. Feebates are an old idea but one seldom given a chance to work because of opposition from business interests, in this case car dealers. They nudge consumers into making socially responsible choices -- like buying cars that get better mileage and pollute less -- by giving them rebates, which are funded by charging a fee to consumers who buy harmful products -- like low-mileage, highly polluting vehicles.
The bill wouldn’t harm people who need light-duty trucks -- pickups, SUVs and minivans -- as its critics claim, because it specifies that some of those vehicles must be available without fees. It doesn’t hurt small businesses, because those with fewer than 25 employees are exempted. The bill, which calls for fees and rebates of up to $2,500 a vehicle, is carefully constructed to ensure that it doesn’t cost any taxpayer money. It’s even unlikely that it would cost car dealers, because while the fee would doubtless discourage purchases of Hummers, the rebate would entice customers to buy efficient cars they might not otherwise be able to afford.
California has mandated a 25% cut in greenhouse gases by 2020. With vehicles accounting for up to 40% of the state’s global warming emissions, a big part of the cut must come from cars and trucks. Yet the state’s ambitious effort to reduce tailpipe emissions by ordering manufacturers to produce cleaner cars has been blocked by the Environmental Protection Agency. That makes bills such as AB 493 all the more crucial; even if the EPA reverses its position, the feebate would complement the emissions program. The University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute estimates that the bill would cut greenhouse gases from automobiles up to 27% by 2016.
AB 493 is expected to return to the Assembly before Jan. 31 for a last-chance vote. It needed 41 votes to pass last summer but was stalled by a 35-35 tie. All the chamber’s Republicans opposed it, along with three Democrats. It still might have passed in the Assembly, which has a 48-to-32 Democratic majority, if 10 local Democrats hadn’t abstained. One, Nell Soto (D-Pomona), gets a pass because of illness; the rest may have caved in to pressure from car dealers in their districts. They are Assemblymen Mike Davis (D-Los Angeles), Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate), Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton), Felipe Fuentes (D-Arleta), Edward Hernandez (D-West Covina), Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia), Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge) and Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana), as well as former Assemblywoman Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach), who has since been elected to Congress. Calls from their constituents might help them grow a backbone the second time around.
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b1b6d095fbc5be488a609218b4919ad3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-24-fg-febres24-story.html | Secrets died with slain Argentine | Secrets died with slain Argentine
Hector Febres was the man who knew too much.
And, like a character in a spy novel damned with an excess of secrets, Febres met an untimely and grisly end: He was poisoned last month in his cell.
That is the conclusion of Argentine officials investigating the death of the former coast guard officer, who was awaiting a verdict on charges of torture. The case arose from Febres’ service under a military dictatorship decades earlier at the country’s most notorious clandestine detention center.
In the early hours of Dec. 10, authorities say, someone slipped Febres, 66, a lethal dose of cyanide, possibly in a glass of water. He had lived a comfortable, if confined, existence in an ample suite at a coast guard base for much of the last nine years as the case against him proceeded, glacier-like.
Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, who is overseeing the investigation, rejected speculation about suicide and ruled this month that Febres probably was slain to keep him silent. Who killed him remains a mystery.
As his long-delayed trial on charges of torturing four prisoners neared a verdict, authorities say, Febres felt betrayed by his former military colleagues. He may have been on the verge of coughing up some sensational secrets from the regime’s “dirty war” against what it called communist sympathizers.
Among the most anticipated potential revelations: the fate of newborn babies stolen from prisoners. The mothers were killed in one of the more macabre legacies of the 1976-83 military rule.
“Febres took all those cases to the tomb with him,” lamented Liliana Mazea, a human rights attorney.
The episode has again raised the specter of a shadowy network of assassins loyal to the former dictatorship. A witness in a separate case has been missing for more than a year.
Judge Arroyo Salgado this month ordered the arrest of two of Febres’ jailers, who were accused of providing access to the killer, or killers. One, Angel Volpi, was a close confidant of Febres.
And, in a bizarre twist, prosecutors charged Febres’ widow and his two children with helping to cover up the crime. The three deny any wrongdoing and were released after three weeks in custody.
The role that the family is suspected of playing remains unclear. The three still stand accused of tampering with items at the crime scene, including Febres’ computer, which was removed from his cell. Authorities suspect that data was erased or stolen.
Febres’ family dined with him at his cell the night before his death, according to reports here, sharing salads and grilled meat ordered from his favorite restaurant. Febres had even decorated a Christmas tree.
The prisoner was poisoned soon after, Arroyo Salgado wrote, to “prevent Febres from betraying his pact of silence for the crimes committed in the ESMA.”
That is the Spanish acronym for the Navy Mechanics School, the stately, white-colonnaded building on a main drag here that served as a concentration camp where thousands of prisoners were tortured and “disappeared.” Some were drugged and dumped into the ocean from aircraft; others were executed and buried anonymously. The former detention center is now a memorial museum.
Febres was not one of the dirty war big names in the gray rogues’ gallery of aging former generals, colonels and police chiefs awaiting trial. He was a military cop who became a key administrator, a brutal paper pusher who, literally, knew where all the bodies were. One of his nicknames: “Savage,” for his vicious comportment.
Accounts from survivors of the naval lockup indicate that Febres may have overseen the meticulous records that documented prisoners’ comings and goings. One former detainee, Carlos Lordkipanidse, testified that he saw rows of microfilms with “faces of boys and girls, older people, kids, older women, one after another.”
Those records, which could provide clues to the fates of legions of disappeared, have not been found.
Moreover, Febres is said to have overseen a particular subset of prisoners: pregnant women, methodically killed once they gave birth. Human rights activists say that as many as 500 babies may have been stolen at clandestine sites nationwide and placed in “good” families, many with ties to the military and police.
Testimony indicated that Febres would even buy clothing for the newborns, assuring the distraught mothers that the babies would be turned over to relatives. It was all a lie.
Was Febres, facing life behind bars far from the cushy digs at the coast guard base, poised to reveal details of the baby-snatching and other crimes? Did he have crucial details and records on his computer? Those are major unanswered questions.
“I think he did mean to use it [his information] as a form of negotiating something,” Victoria Donda, an Argentine lawmaker, told the daily Clarin newspaper.
Donda was among those born at the infamous naval facility, in 1977. Her parents were disappeared. She discovered her true identity years later. It was Febres, she says, who probably made the arrangements.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever know the name of the person who pushed my mother out of a plane,” Donda said, “but at least I’d like to see justice for the one who took me from her arms.”
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patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com
Andres D’Alessandro of The Times’ Buenos Aires Bureau contributed to this report.
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a8d791a3cfd45d303f0956bd6d408fa1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-24-fg-generals24-story.html | Ex-officers ask Musharraf to resign | Ex-officers ask Musharraf to resign
President Pervez Musharraf should immediately step down as a way to promote democracy, combat religious militancy and restore the reputation of Pakistan’s military, according to an influential group of retired officers.
The Pakistan Ex-Servicemen’s Society made its demands late Tuesday, two days after Musharraf left on an eight-day European swing to assure world leaders that Pakistan -- and its nuclear arsenal -- is in safe hands.
“This is in the supreme national interest and it makes it incumbent on him to step down,” said a statement released after a meeting in Rawalpindi of the retired officers, including two dozen army generals, three air marshals and eight admirals.
The call for Musharraf’s resignation was quickly dismissed Wednesday by the government.
“What these people say amounts to nothing,” said retired army Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, now a spokesman for Musharraf.
“They call themselves retired military personnel. But they’re just self-appointed people who have been fluctuating between political parties. It’s clearly a political move.”
Western diplomats also reacted Wednesday, noting that the meeting of the retired military group was one of the largest assembled to speak out against Musharraf.
“I can’t say it’s significant but it’s certainly unusual,” said one diplomat who requested anonymity. “It certainly shows the great concern the military in Pakistan has over its reputation.”
Musharraf took office in 1999 in a bloodless military coup. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he became a top ally in the Bush administration’s campaign against terrorism. He was commander of the army until stepping down in late November.
Pakistan has experienced widespread civil unrest since Musharraf suspended the nation’s top Supreme Court judge in March, and has seen protracted battles with religious insurgents and Taliban guerrillas along the country’s mountainous border with Afghanistan.
Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Dec. 27 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s military garrison town, after a campaign rally for parliamentary elections that had been scheduled for early this month. Many blame Musharraf’s administration for the killing, saying that at the very least, it failed to provide her with adequate security. The elections have been rescheduled for Feb. 18.
The letter released by the ex-military members was the Pakistani leader’s latest embarrassment. Though the group does not officially speak for serving officers, several of those who attended the recent meeting said many current officers privately support them.
“The message is that Musharraf is the problem,” said Talat Masood, a prominent political analyst and retired general who attended the gathering. “The sooner he realizes it, the better it will be for the country and the armed forces.
“The army is getting a bad name because of his performance and the way he has involved the military in politics. He’s doing irreparable damage.”
Gen. Ashfaq Kiani, who replaced Musharraf as chief of the military, has disengaged the army from politics but remains loyal to the president, analysts say. Recently, Kiani has banned officers from maintaining contacts with politicians, ordering that officers serving in civil posts and government-run enterprises return to their military duties.
On Tuesday, the day the ex-servicemen signed their letter calling for Musharraf’s resignation, Kiani held security talks with Adm. William J. Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command and the top commander of American forces in the Middle East.
Demands for change by retired military personnel are not unique to Pakistan. Former generals and enlisted men in the U.S. have criticized the armed forces’ involvement in the war in Iraq, experts say.
Musharraf met Wednesday with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. She pressed him to hold free and fair elections, the Associated Press reported. He has assured leaders that Pakistan is not a “banana republic” and has pledged that the country’s nuclear arsenal will not fall into the hands of terrorists.
Meanwhile, he has said Western powers should not hold Pakistan to unrealistic standards regarding issues such as human rights.
At home, there are shortages of wheat and flour and officials have recently considered issuing rationing cards.
Masood, the analyst, said the ex-military men had called for the meeting after watching events with great concern.
“We are with the rest of the nation in its opposition to President Musharraf,” he said. “We are no way a party to what he is doing.”
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john.glionna@latimes.com
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10048a9caa7a2192588d879a9d8f481e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-24-fi-smallbiz24-story.html | SBA makes more, smaller loans | SBA makes more, smaller loans
As a credit crunch squeezed borrowers during the last three months of 2007, Los Angeles bucked the national downward slide in loans backed by the Small Business Administration. Driven by a higher number of smaller deals, loan volume here increased 3.5% to 1,319 from 1,275 in the year-earlier period, according to agency figures.
But the amount lent fell $15.3 million, or 5.5%, to $265.2 million. That drop reflected a decline in the number of SBA commercial real estate loans, which are typically larger than the average SBA loan, according to the head of the L.A. district office.
“We believe more [SBA] loans are being made for things like debt consolidation and working capital,” said Alberto Alvarado, administrator for the Glendale-based office, which serves Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
The mixed performance punctuated record numbers for the district’s 2007 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The number of loans jumped 21% from the previous year to 6,194. The amount of money lent climbed 13% to $1.3 billion.
The slowdown in commercial real estate lending is due in part to a cooling economy and the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which has depressed the value of SBA loans on the secondary market.
“All of a sudden this is not as exciting as it used to be” for some lenders, said Steven Stultz, a 35-year veteran in SBA lending and principal of Stultz Financial Inc., an SBA consulting company based in Irvine.
At the same time, some SBA lenders around the country are complaining about a new oversight fee the agency started charging last fall. In addition, profit from their SBA lending has declined.
“When the sub-prime problem is hitting and bankers are looking to rein in expenses, the SBA is hitting us with a new lender oversight cost,” said Tony Wilkinson, executive director of the National Assn. of Government Guaranteed Lenders, based in Stillwater, Okla. “It’s the wrong time. Our volume is down.”
The number of loans nationwide shrank by 2,849, or 11%, to 23,111 in the last three months of 2007, the first quarter of the government’s 2008 fiscal year.
The decline came despite an increase in the popularity of its commercial real estate loan. Those loans increased by 3.8% to 2,393 while the amount lent climbed 9.3% to $1.446 billion, according to the SBA.
The national performance was surprising to some observers because SBA lending is often considered to be countercyclical. That means when the economy is doing poorly, and conventional business loans are harder to get, more small-business owners typically turn to SBA lenders.
The bump in loan volume for the Los Angeles district came in part from a single lender: Innovative Bank, a unit of Innovative Bancorp of Oakland.
The small lender, which had assets of $279 million as of Sept. 30, more than tripled the number of loans it made in the Los Angeles district to 305 in the final three months of 2007, compared with 95 in the year-earlier period.
That put it at the top of the lender rankings for the Los Angeles district for the quarter, replacing Bank of America, which made the most loans -- 196 -- the year before.
The amount Innovative Bank lent in the Los Angeles area also soared, to $6.9 million from $1.9 million.
“We are taking a little bit more of an aggressive approach to brand ourselves as an SBA lender,” said Richard Choo, executive vice president of marketing at the bank, which was bought in 2005 by a Korean American investment group. “Our SBA is our core.”
The bank has beefed up the number of SBA lending officers in its Los Angeles branch to seven from two a year ago, he said. Increased marketing efforts, particularly in Koreatown and among the Armenian community, have helped push the expansion, he said.
The bank has focused on making some of the smallest SBA loans. That is a critically underserved market, the SBA’s Alvarado said.
The popularity of the bank’s Small Office, Home Office loan has helped push it to the top of SBA lender rankings in other key markets, such as New York.
Innovative Bank has changed the compensation for its top SBA lending officers, Choo said, in response to a cease-and-desist order issued by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in April.
The order was based on an October 2006 examination of the fast-growing bank that found the need for it to boost its management strength, improve loan procedures and strengthen compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires institutions to report cash transactions of more than $10,000 as a tool against money laundering.
The bank has put in policies and procedures to do so, hired executives, appointed new directors, instituted more frequent board meetings and submitted a three-year operating plan to the FDIC as required.
“We are probably 99% there on clearing up most of the order issues that the FDIC had cited,” Choo said.
Wells Fargo is also moving ahead despite industry concerns about the effect of the oversight fee, although some of its growth is coming from larger real estate loans.
“It isn’t in any way inhibiting us from doing business,” said Thomas Burke, head of small-business lending at the bank.
The number of SBA loans the bank did in the last quarter of fiscal 2007 dropped by 10%, or 36 loans, he said. But the amount lent grew 13% or $5.5 million. That means more high-dollar loans were made to fewer borrowers.
“The larger borrowers are doing just fine, but the smaller borrowers -- under $75,000, $50,000 -- they are struggling,” Burke said.
SBA lenders are approved by the federal agency to make loans, which it backs with guarantees ranging from 50% to 85%. There were 98 banks and finance companies lending in the Los Angeles market.
Many specialize in one of the agency’s two major loan-guarantee programs, such as the 504 real estate loan, which is a long-term loan
The other is the agency’s workhorse, the 7(a) program. The programs get their catchy names from the numbered sections in the federal regulations that authorize their existence.
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cyndia.zwahlen@latimes.com
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3a35024edffb2f811fc95071ab1bbc72 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-24-fi-tofu24-story.html | Korean immigrant reigns over an empire of tofu stew | Korean immigrant reigns over an empire of tofu stew
When Hee-sook Lee opened a restaurant at the edge of Los Angeles’ Koreatown more than a decade ago, there seemed to be nothing remarkable about the tofu stew she served.
But with a “secret recipe” for the common Korean dish and an entrepreneurial side that family and friends had never before seen in her, Lee within a few short years was exporting her brand of tofu stew to South Korea, building a small empire that has spawned numerous imitators.
Today, tourists from South Korea arrive by the busload at BCD Tofu House and snap photos. Visiting dignitaries, sports stars and actors frequently dine at the restaurant. Even though the restaurant is open around the clock, there is almost always a wait.
Since the Vermont Avenue restaurant opened in 1996, Lee has expanded it into a transpacific chain with more than a dozen branches in Southern California, Seattle, Tokyo and South Korea. And she is far from being done.
“It’s not important whether there are 10 or 100 branches,” Lee said, speaking in Korean. “I consider myself a diplomat of sorts, making Korean food known to the world.”
The success of Lee’s restaurants has catapulted the 48-year-old chief executive into minor celebrity status in South Korea. People recognize her from numerous media reports and approach her on the streets of Seoul. The South Korean government invited her to speak at a convention for overseas Korean business owners. In 2006, the tale of her success was reenacted in a 12-part radio miniseries broadcast in South Korea.
Fellow immigrants look to Lee for a clue as to how she built up a business that brings in $19 million annually and employs more than 300 people. Many wonder how a common dish brimming with very Korean flavors -- spicy and salty, and served scalding hot -- succeeded in Los Angeles.
To those asking for the secret to her success, Lee smiles sheepishly and says there really isn’t much to it.
“To succeed in anything, you just have to be fanatically devoted to it,” Lee told a hall full of dark-suited businesspeople at the government-sponsored convention in 2006. “No matter what other people tell you, you shouldn’t look back.”
When she first arrived in Los Angeles with two of her three sons in 1989, Lee barely spoke English. She left behind her husband and 18-month-old son so that she and the other two sons, 5 and 7 at the time, could get an education.
Initially, the plan was to return to South Korea after a few years. She studied design at Santa Monica College and then moved on to the Gemology Institute of America. But when Lee finished her studies, the children had grown attached to life in the U.S. and didn’t want to move back.
Lee toyed with the idea of permanently settling here and wondered what she could do to earn a living. Having married young, she had limited work experience -- a brief stint as an accountant and helping operate a restaurant owned by her husband, Tae Lee. But Lee was convinced that she could thrive as a businesswoman, she said.
She decided to take a gamble and open a restaurant. And entering the restaurant business was no small gamble. A quarter of all new restaurants close by the first year, and by the third year nearly half shut down, according to the California Restaurant Assn.
To differentiate her eatery from the seemingly endless array of restaurants lining the streets of Koreatown, Lee decided she would serve just one simple tofu dish, soon-dubu -- a common, cheap lunch dish with chunks of white tofu submerged in a bubbling bright-red soup saturated with spices.
Lee took to the kitchen, spending long nights experimenting with different spices and condiments. From the commonplace stew, she conjured up 12 varieties with different types of meat and flavors. She brainstormed ways to customize the dish like a cup of coffee, offering four degrees of spiciness, with or without monosodium glutamate. Her final recipe is a secret that she won’t share with anyone, not even her husband, she said.
After about a year of preparation and some advertising, Lee opened her first BCD Tofu House on Vermont Avenue in April 1996. The name is short for Buk Chang Dong, a neighborhood in Seoul where her in-laws once ran a restaurant.
Lee spent much of her time tending to the restaurant’s operation. Each day at 2 a.m. she went to the downtown wholesale market to handpick produce. Three months after her restaurant opened, Lee and her family, reunited, moved to Las Vegas, where her husband owned property and the residency application process was shorter. She commuted to L.A. by plane each day to oversee her restaurant’s operations.
“I wanted to be home by the time the children got home from school and cook them dinner, so I would take the 6:30, 7:30 flight back. . . . The children would get tired of waiting and fall asleep, and that was painful for me to see,” Lee recalled.
Ten months after the first restaurant opened, Lee opened a second BCD Tofu House in Koreatown. Ten months after that, she opened a third in Garden Grove.
“I could have just operated one restaurant to perfection, but anyone could do that,” Lee said.
Just two years into the business, Lee began to export her soon-dubu to South Korea. Now she operates 13 tofu houses on either side of the Pacific and plans to open two more in Irvine and Fullerton in the coming months. Lee, who became a naturalized citizen in 2000, says she wants to eventually open branches on the East Coast and in China and to franchise the chain in the U.S.
Even at this rate, Lee hasn’t been able to open branches fast enough to keep up with the demand, and numerous imitators are taking advantage of the opportunity. One chain calls itself BSD and has nearly 50 franchises throughout South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China.
In July 2006, Lee faced a restaurateur’s worst fear -- a food poisoning report to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. When the restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard was closed for nine days as a result of an inspection, the Korean media in Los Angeles reported on the story daily, treating it as front-page news because of the restaurant’s popularity.
Rumors that the restaurant was unsanitary circulated in the Korean community, and the flow of customers ebbed for a while, Lee said.
The experience was especially painful for Lee because she tries to keep a tight rein on the restaurants’ operations. Each day she makes about 40 gallons of her secret seasoning herself, which is shipped out to all her U.S. restaurants. When she visits one of her restaurants, she listens for the clatter that dishes make when carelessly placed on the table and looks for the one customer in the corner who has been waiting a minute too long to be served. For first-time diners who look a little lost, she will even demonstrate how her food is to be eaten.
“She stops by every day to look around. Mostly she’ll encourage people, but she’ll criticize sharply when something’s wrong, especially when she finds things aren’t clean,” said Eun-jae Kim, 43, a head waitress who has worked for Lee for eight years.
Lee’s husband Tae, 70, complains that she doesn’t know how to take a break. When they chat over coffee every morning in their Malibu home, he mentions going on cruises or other vacations; instead, Lee takes him on business trips. This month she took him to Shanghai to scout potential restaurant sites.
“She works a little too hard,” he said.
But relaxing isn’t on the menu. Lee recently purchased a 15,000-square-foot factory in Gardena that produces a milder version of the signature Korean cabbage dish kimchi for non-Korean palates. In December, she opened a restaurant on Alvarado Street near MacArthur Park that serves Korean chicken stew to a largely Latino clientele. The restaurant is called BCD Pollo Pillo.
“Your heart flutters when you start up something new like this,” Lee said, watching her newly hired staff test the deep-frying equipment at the chicken restaurant. “It’s like when a mother bears a child. Giving birth is so painful, but she soon forgets and bears a child yet again.”
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victoria.kim@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
BCD Tofu House
Business: A Koreatown restaurant that has grown into a mini-empire based on a simple tofu stew. The company operates more than a dozen restaurants in Southern California, Seattle, Tokyo and South Korea.
Founder: Hee-sook Lee
Revenue: $19 million
Employees: More than 300
Latest venture: In December, Lee opened BCD Pollo Pillo, a Los Angeles restaurant that serves Korean chicken stew and fried chicken to a largely Latino clientele.
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255f9548cac25f4b0b82ca3662215b53 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-24-na-rudynineelev24-story.html | The chinks in his 9/11 armor | The chinks in his 9/11 armor
On Sept. 11, 2001, Rudolph W. Giuliani emerged from the ash plumes of the ruined World Trade Center as much an icon as the fallen towers. His drawn face was coated in concrete dust. His painstaking words were freighted with the unimaginable.
“There were so many people around, so many problems,” Giuliani recalled in his autobiography. The counting of the dead had not begun, and he had to publicly reckon with the disaster’s human toll. “The number of casualties,” he told the world, “will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”
Giuliani’s composed performance on Sept. 11 is the foundation of his quest for the presidency. But some of the chaos that hobbled rescuers that morning was rooted in his blind spots as New York’s mayor. The man who titled his autobiography “Leadership” proved to be masterfully reactive to crisis but sketchier in preparing for the unknown.
“He did great things and some stupid things,” said former New York Deputy Fire Chief Charles R. Blaich, who was a ground zero commander on Sept. 11 and later highlighted the handicaps that fire officials faced. “There’s a lot there to admire. The problem is that when it came to a serious discussion about lessons learned, he didn’t want any part of it.”
The long day was Giuliani’s crucible -- a moment that showed his mettle and humanity under extreme pressure. Despite the heroic actions of hundreds of firefighters and police, it was also a public-safety meltdown caused not only by the streaking suicide planes, but in part because of lapses that occurred on Giuliani’s watch.
He had outfitted his firefighters with flame-retardant gear, but their patchwork radio system sent many urgent evacuation calls vanishing into the ether. His trek through the rain of rubble to secure a temporary command center showed poise. But coordination between his field commanders was sporadic, and there was no backup for the shattered nerve center he had built in the tower complex.
Giuliani had responded quickly to terrorist threats over his eight-year mayoralty. But his administration failed to comprehensively cure organization and equipment flaws exposed during the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
Even afterward, the temperamental Giuliani had little use for public displays of self-doubt. He did not press for internal inquiries into what went wrong that day, leaving the soul-searching to the incoming administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the federal 9/11 Commission. Both documented shortcomings.
Amid falling poll numbers that have bumped him from front-runner status among the Republican contenders for the presidency, Giuliani alluded late last month to the possibility that he had not covered every base before the attacks.
“I did everything I could think of doing in that situation to help,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I think I made mostly the right decisions. Probably didn’t make all the right decisions, but I tried very hard to alleviate the problem as much as I could.”
It was a rare, if terse, admission for a decisive, high-strung public figure who had been lionized since the attacks. Glorified as “America’s mayor,” Giuliani built a career out of his association with Sept. 11, going on the inspirational lecture circuit and launching a private consulting firm that made him a multimillionaire.
In the presidential race, as he has tried to capitalize on his stature, Giuliani has found himself targeted by critics who blame him for some of the Sept. 11 disarray among rescuers. When the towers crumbled, 343 New York firefighters and 23 police officers died.
“TV made him a hero, but there’s more to leadership than standing calmly before the cameras,” said Jim Riches, a New York deputy fire chief whose firefighter son, Jimmy, died in the collapse of the north tower.
Riches heads a group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims who question Giuliani’s leadership. They are gathering in Florida for a publicity campaign against him ahead of Tuesday’s state primary, which is widely viewed as crucial to Giuliani’s bid for the GOP nomination.
Giuliani dominated the cameras from the moment he took office in January 1994. New York was crime-ridden, its tax base dwindling. When three firefighters died two months later in an inferno in Greenwich Village, a stunned Giuliani showed himself on and off camera as a restless agent for change.
His new fire commissioner, Howard Safir, asked for $12 million in flame-resistant “bunker gear.” Giuliani summoned his budget chief at 2 a.m. to approve the outlay. Cynics noted that the protective outfits were already on order by his predecessor, David N. Dinkins. But the incident showed a classic Giuliani trait -- swift reaction to a crisis on his watch.
“He built his government to be responsive,” said Randy M. Mastro, who was Giuliani’s deputy mayor in the mid-1990s.
There was less urgency when it came to leftover business from his predecessors.
Nearly a year before Giuliani took office, Islamic terrorists exploded a 1,500-pound bomb in the World Trade Center’s underground garage. The prelude to the Sept. 11 attacks killed six people, injured 1,042 and forced thousands to make harrowing descents through palls of smoke. Fire and police rescuers who climbed into the towers were hampered by poorly lit stairwells, radio failures and command chaos on the ground.
Dinkins launched a postmortem that continued under Giuliani. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the skyscrapers, improved stairwell safety. The city’s reaction was more piecemeal.
During his eight years in office, Giuliani repeatedly ratcheted up the police presence in response to terrorist threats -- including a shooting at the Empire State Building in 1997, Al Qaeda bombings abroad and the millennium celebration in 2000.
“His interest was very deep, continuous and detailed,” said former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, a close friend and endorser who recalled briefing Giuliani at least half a dozen times on terrorist threats.
Other former law enforcement figures said Giuliani’s terrorism concerns spiked with each new threat, only to subside.
“He was obsessed with crime reduction. Terrorism was secondary,” said Louis R. Anemone, the former chief of department in the NYPD, the highest-ranking uniformed officer.
Among scores of city news releases that highlighted Giuliani’s accomplishments between 1994 and 2001, only two made reference to terrorism before Sept. 11.
In response to the 1993 failures, the Giuliani administration provided the Fire Department with a new communications truck and a supply of “repeaters” -- power boosters that allowed firefighters’ radios to work better in tall buildings. But the city was slower to act on fire experts’ advice to replace the department’s “Handi-Talkie” radios, which faded out in high-rises.
Blaich, then a battalion chief, heard from senior fire officials that Giuliani and his top aides “were concerned about communications, but there was always a money problem. As far as 1993 was concerned, the prevailing attitude was it was a one-time event that wouldn’t happen again. From where we sat, Giuliani wasn’t focused on it at all.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Blaich highlighted the city’s command failures at a conference on the event.
It was not until March 2001, under a new fire commissioner, Thomas von Essen, that the Giuliani administration unveiled a $14-million digital radio system for firefighters. The units were not thoroughly field-tested, and they quickly proved to have flaws. They were shelved -- and the old radios that had performed poorly in 1993 were returned to firefighters, who would carry them up into the disintegrating twin towers on Sept. 11.
Former Giuliani aides point to his creation of New York’s Office of Emergency Management in 1996 as his most telling response to the 1993 bombing.
“The possibility of terror on a mass scale concerned him,” Mastro said.
Giuliani hired Jerome M. Hauer, an expert in biological and chemical terrorism, to run the new office. Hauer said he was assigned to develop a new command center and unify police and fire officials who had long vied for control at disaster scenes. He also led “tabletop” drills in which senior city officials practiced responses to imagined crises. Giuliani often attended.
But larger mass drills for rank-and-file responders did not alter the city’s command stalemate. During one mock nerve-gas drill at Yankee Stadium, “it was cops on one side, firefighters on the other,” Riches recalled. “No coordination.”
Mass drills occurred more rarely than the tabletops, Hauer said, and dropped off sharply after he resigned from the Office of Emergency Management in 2000.
The push for a new command center made more headway. In 1998, Giuliani announced a new $15-million state-of-the-art nerve center, equipped with wide-screen TVs and digital communications. It was on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center.
Hauer says now that he opposed the site and preferred a Brooklyn location, worried about its proximity to the vulnerable towers. “Rudy’s people kept going back to the trade center,” said Hauer, now a Giuliani foe.
“Revisionist history,” Safir scoffed.
But Hauer and Giuliani’s loyalists concede that the city failed to set up a backup command center in case the main nerve center came under attack.
Joseph J. Lhota, a former deputy mayor, was working at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 11 when he heard the roar of a jet engine. From the front steps of the limestone building, he saw smoke pouring from the point of impact above the 94th floor of the north tower. Racing to his city car, Lhota phoned Giuliani at a breakfast meeting. He reached a police aide, telling her: “We have a problem. The World Trade Center’s been hit by a jet.”
Moments after the second plane slammed into the south tower, Lhota met with Giuliani and a group of aides. “People are jumping out of the building,” he told Giuliani.
“No, they’re not,” Giuliani insisted.
“Look up,” Lhota said. Giuliani put his hand to his mouth.
Aware that their state-of-the-art command center was too near the burning buildings, Giuliani led his aides north, searching for a backup site. Behind them, rescuers were hamstrung by many of the same operational failures that had dogged them in 1993. While top city fire officials hunkered down just outside the burning towers, police set up a separate command center blocks away. Their radios were not “interoperable,” slowing spur-of-the-moment coordination.
Giuliani and his aides later insisted that top fire officials on the scene were the “incident commanders.” But the federal 9/11 Commission concluded that the city’s failure to develop an integrated command hampered rescuers.
“It’s clear there was poor coordination,” said Samuel M.W. Caspersen, a commission counsel who investigated New York’s Sept. 11 preparations.
The old radios again performed fitfully. The higher that rescuers ascended into the towers, the harder they were to contact. Many evacuation calls into the north tower after the south tower fell did not reach firefighters on the upper floors.
The 9/11 Commission and reviews launched by Bloomberg, Giuliani’s successor, concluded that the faulty radios were part of a broad tableau of breakdowns that included repeater failures, command errors, and stubborn and weary firefighters who hesitated even after they heard calls to evacuate. None of the experts would hazard guesses about how many rescuers might have been saved if the city’s preparations had been faultless.
Moments after the towers fell, Giuliani and his aides emerged into a wasteland of ash and pulverized concrete. They pressed north to find a secure site where they could fashion a command site. Along the way, Giuliani stopped for an impromptu news conference to assure New Yorkers that their government still functioned.
The haggard group finally camped at the city’s Police Academy, where aides rounded up desks, laptops and phones to re-create a semblance of Giuliani’s obliterated command bunker.
“We didn’t want to leave Manhattan,” he later told the 9/11 Commission. “We thought it would be a terrible statement if city government left the island.”
Giuliani’s long day stretched into long weeks before his administration ended four months later. The decisions he had made and deferred over the first 7 1/2 years of his tenure were dwarfed by those he made in his last months as mayor.
“I was making hundreds of decisions,” he remembered in his biography, “one after another.”
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steve.braun@latimes.com
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4d9f4763bd33c1a0f2c90c3c32b617b4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-25-et-book25-story.html | The economics of man’s nature | The economics of man’s nature
Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers typically began political treatises with an exploration into the “state of nature,” the premise being that the ideal form of governance should follow logically from mankind’s true condition. But what is mankind’s true nature? Good or bad? Thomas Hobbes took a famously dour view: Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” at least without the rule of a Leviathan. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, justified direct democracy by claiming that man is naturally compassionate, “born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Oh, pity these thinkers! For they were writing before armies of social scientists learned to coax subjects into rooms with half-silvered mirrors and into high-tech brain-scanning machines, generating reams of data on what people are “really” like.
But would any of this have changed our dead philosophers’ minds about human nature? After all, the evidence remains decidedly mixed -- at best, we are a wondrously complicated mess of contradictions and stunningly silly tendencies. And one of those silly tendencies is the “confirmation bias” -- that is, people tend to believe only the evidence that confirms what they already think.
Such is the pleasure and frustration of the new book “The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales From Evolutionary Economics.” On one hand, we have author Michael Shermer, founder and director of the Skeptics Society, captivating raconteur of all the greatest hits of behavioral, evolutionary and neuropsychology, provider of wonderful cocktail party material, like the one about 50% of an audience challenged to count the number of completed basketball passes failing to notice the gorilla walking across the crowded court. But we also have Shermer, the tendentious libertarian, doing logical back-flips unbecoming a self-proclaimed skeptic to marshal human nature’s unruly contradictions into a political program of minimal government and extreme market capitalism.
Interestingly, Shermer’s first target is the very neoclassical economics on which so much free market fundamentalism has been built. He has a legitimate beef with the discipline’s fundamental assumption that people can be reduced to nothing more than rational, self-interested utility maximizers. Rather, he contends, whether we are selfish or altruistic depends on the context: “We evolved to display within-group amity and between-group enmity.”
But it’s more than just a matter of intention, he says: It’s in our genes. Or, more colorfully: “We cooperate for the same reason we copulate -- because it feels good.” Even trust is a chemical reaction brought on by close contact, which triggers the release of the hormone oxytocin in all but the 2% of us who are classified as sociopaths. And “mirror neurons” in our brain help us feel empathy. This makes sense evolutionarily too, Shermer argues, because “more often than not the most adaptable thing you can do to survive and reproduce is to be cooperative and altruistic.”
So what about the bad traits? Fear and anger, Shermer asserts, evolved to help us to avoid and defend against danger. Only in the wrong environment, like, say, the corporate culture of Enron, does evil actually proliferate. But, he insists, Enron is the exception, not the rule, and that if most people behaved this way, market capitalism “would have collapsed centuries ago.” (In fact, the modern invention of market capitalism has almost collapsed multiple times and would have but for repeated interventions by governments.) Citing research showing that autonomy and self-reliance make people happiest, clearly, he concludes, “if you want happiness and freedom, you have to minimize government interference.” (Conveniently, since people are naturally altruistic, there’s no need for government interference anyway!)
So why doesn’t everyone see this as clearly? Well, that’s easy, Shermer says: It’s because “our brains evolved to deal with a world that bears only slight resemblance to the vast, messy crowds of information in the modern marketplace.” As he entertainingly recounts, experiments show that humans are irrationally risk-averse, terrible at making guesses and remembering things properly, highly susceptible to group-think and so on, until it’s clear: Yup, we’re really dumb. And, wouldn’t you know it? We also have this vestigial “folk economic propensity” to think anything as complex as capitalism must be run by a government acting as God. And so any trade protectionism we feel is just a lingering byproduct of “our evolved social psychology of group loyalty.”
Wait a second! Isn’t this the same psychology of group loyalty on which Shermer has built his whole people-are-basically-good foundation that justifies minimal government? This group loyalty is now bad because it undermines trade and support for a market economy? Which is it?
Call it Shermer’s paradox -- a helpful reminder of just how challenging and quixotic it remains to build a coherent political philosophy upon the sands of our conflicted and chimerical natures, even with all the great advances we have made in fascinating cocktail party tidbits.
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Lee Drutman is co-author of “The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.”
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a337e1b8e49c5dd982dadbaa844edcf7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-25-me-museums25-story.html | Raids suggest a deeper network of looted art | Raids suggest a deeper network of looted art
Coordinated raids on four Southern California museums early Thursday suggest that the involvement of art institutions in the purchase of looted objects is far more extensive than recent high-profile scandals have indicated.
Even as the country’s most prominent museums were embarrassed by revelations of stolen artifacts in their collections, several local museums continued to pursue objects they had reason to believe were taken illegally from Thailand, Myanmar, China and Native American sites within the United States, according to search warrants served Thursday.
Dozens of federal agents descended on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena’s Pacific Asia Museum, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and Mingei International Museum in San Diego.
The raids marked the first public move in a five-year undercover investigation of the alleged smuggling pipeline.
Museum officials defended their practices and pledged to cooperate fully in the investigations.
The detailed warrants gave the agents broad authority to search the museums’ galleries, offices, storage areas and computer archives. They were looking for objects and records related to the primary targets of the investigation: an alleged art smuggler, Robert Olson, and the owner of a Los Angeles Asian art gallery, Jonathan Markell. Markell’s Silk Roads Gallery on La Brea Avenue was also raided.
No arrests were made, but legal experts say the surprise search warrants suggest prosecutors are collecting the final elements to seek criminal indictments against Markell and Olson.
The action comes after several years in which the art world has been hammered by claims from Italy and Greece that major American museums -- most prominently the J. Paul Getty Museum -- purchased art that had been stolen from and smuggled out of those countries.
The Getty agreed last year to return 40 of its most prized objects, following similar deals by museums in Boston and New York. The Getty’s former antiquities curator is on trial in Rome, accused of knowingly buying looted art, a charge she denies.
This case could go further. The warrants served Thursday show prosectors have carefully laid a foundation for the possible indictment of museum staffers allegedly complicit in the looting schemes -- which would be a first under American law, experts say.
The warrants are based on a five-year undercover investigation by an unnamed agent with the National Park Service, who presented himself to Olson and Markell as an eager collector.
Olson and Markell told the undercover investigator they regularly bought Thai antiquities from looters and smugglers, sometimes smuggling them personally, the warrants state. They then allegedly sold them to clients in Los Angeles. They also admitted running an elaborate donation scheme, selling their clients looted artifacts with forged appraisals that inflated the value of the objects by as much as 400%, the warrants state. They then allegedly helped these clients donate the objects to local museums, which provided a tax write off at the inflated value.
The scheme appears to have spanned the last decade and generally involved repeated donations of objects with values of just under $5,000, the value at which the IRS required additional documentation.
In the case of the Bowers and the Pacific Asia Museum, the warrants clearly suggest that officials were aware that the objects were looted and overvalued but accepted them anyway.
A senior curator at the Bowers Museum, now deceased, regularly accepted donations of Thai and Native American antiquities from Olson that he knew were removed illegally, the warrants say. The documents describe the longtime curator, Armand Labbe, smiling and chuckling as he told the agent he could accept the donations because “he could not determine” what rules the museum was supposed to follow.
The Bowers’ current director, Peter Keller, told the undercover agent he knew Olson and had visited his warehouse. An appraiser, described as Labbe’s girlfriend, told the agent that she regularly prepared appraisals of objects for Keller to donate to his own museum. Keller denied wrongdoing Thursday.
In the case of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the agent met with two museum officials in in November 2005 and offered to donate Thai material he had purchased from Markell.
Marcia Page, the museum’s deputy director of collections, told the agent that given her position, she was “expected to at least put up token resistance to accepting antiquities without proper paperwork,” the warrant states. She noted that Markell had donated Thai material, and that she didn’t think it was legal. She said more senior people in the museum would have to sign the paperwork.
About two weeks later, Page told the agent that the bulk of his donation had been accepted.
LACMA, the Mingei and the UC Berkeley Art Museum all received similar donations from Markell or Olson over several years, the warrants say, but the documents are unclear about the extent to which museum officials knew of alleged theft or tax evasion.
According to the warrants, Markell at one point told the agent that LACMA was “a stickler” for checking the background of pieces. But the dealer also suggested the museum had pursued objects it knew were looted in the past.
“They knew,” Markell said of one artifact LACMA wanted that was taken out of Thailand after a law prohibiting exporting such items was passed there, according to the warrants. “Markell said that LACMA had found a loophole, but he was not clear on what that loophole was.”
The 150 pages of warrants filed Thursday paint a picture of rampant fraud and theft.
The charges that follow could include receiving stolen property, import violations and tax fraud. In particular, the warrants show that authorities are building a case that the looted antiquities should be considered stolen property under American law. Thailand has claimed state ownership of all artifacts since 1961, and American law would recognize that claim if certain conditions are met, said Marcia Isaacson, a former New York federal prosecutor who won a pivotal antiquities conviction several years ago.
The investigation targets art allegedly stolen from Thailand, China, Myanmar and Native American archeological sites that ended up in museums across the Southland.
The contested objects are far less valuable than those returned by the Getty but they are far more numerous, and some of the alleged conduct by museum officials, contained in hours of tape-recorded meetings, appears equally troubling.
Many come from the ancient civilization of the Ban Chiang, which occupied northeastern Thailand from 1000 BC to AD 200. “The original location where Ban Chiang culture was discovered was named a World Heritage Site in 1992 and is considered the most important prehistoric settlement yet discovered in Southeast Asia,” the warrants say.
The warrants allege that the Ban Chiang objects are probably looted because they were first excavated by archeologists in 1967, six years after Thailand banned the export of antiquities.
The Thai government never gave permission for the contested antiquities to leave the country. Moreover, importing such objects into the United States after 1979 was a violation of the U.S. National Stolen Property Act and the Archeological Resource Protection Act, the warrants state.
Other objects named in the warrants came from Burma (also known as Myanmar), from which the U.S. has banned imports since 2003, and China, which has strict export laws governing its antiquities. There are also objects allegedly stolen from Native American sites in the U.S., the sale of which are controlled by federal laws.
The investigation began in 2003, when the undercover agent with the National Park Service posed as a buyer and began purchasing looted art from Olson, according to the warrants. Olson, the warrants say, specializes in Native American and Thai anti- quities.
Olson allegedly told the agent he had been importing objects from Ban Chiang since the 1980s and had never received a permit from the Thai government. He said he got objects “as they were being dug up” and knew it was illegal to ship them out of the country, the warrants say.
The smuggled antiquities were affixed with “Made in Thailand” labels, and sometimes painted over, to make them look to U.S. customs officials like modern replicas, Olson allegedly told the agent.
Olson also claimed to have the largest collection of Native American ladles anywhere in the world and admitted that he had dug for artifacts on public land in New Mexico without authorization, the warrants state.
In September 2003, federal agents intercepted a shipment from Thailand destined for Olson and Markell. Markell and his wife own Silk Roads Gallery, which sells Asian and Buddhist art. Their website shows the couple in a photo with the Dalai Lama.
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jason.felch@latimes.com
Times staff writers Ari Bloomekatz, Paloma Esquivel, Robert Lopez, David Reyes and Richard Marosi contributed to this report.
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da1c51e76f4b3a8a962b7f1e4ff3fd13 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-25-sci-synthetic25-story.html | Moving a step closer to creating life | Moving a step closer to creating life
Using off-the-shelf chemical compounds, scientists for the first time have constructed the entire genome of a bacterium, a key step toward their ultimate goal of creating synthetic life forms, researchers reported today.
The man-made DNA was nearly identical to the natural version on which it was based -- with minor modifications to identify it and render it harmless to people, according to the study in the journal Science.
The research team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., is now trying to insert the artificial DNA inside a living cell with the hope that it will take over its host and become the first synthetically created, self-replicating organism.
“This entire process started with four bottles of chemicals,” said J. Craig Venter, who has been spearheading the overall project.
Scientists have previously pieced together individual genes and even whole viruses in the lab, but those were not independent life forms. The genome in this study -- from the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium -- is more than 10 times larger than any previously synthesized.
Researchers in the nascent field of synthetic biology hope to use the method as a blueprint for designing microscopic creatures that can produce renewable fuels, medicines and industrial products.
“It’s a cookbook for how to make big things,” said Andrew Ellington, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not connected with the study.
Venter, the maverick scientist best known for challenging the federal government’s effort to decode the human genome, has been studying M. genitalium for more than a decade.
With only 485 protein-coding genes and very little extraneous DNA, its genome is smaller than that of any other free-living organism.
Venter wants to make it even smaller and find out just how many genes are required to create “a minimal operating system for life.”
About 100 of the genes can be removed individually without affecting the bacteria’s ability to survive. But that doesn’t mean all 100 genes can be deleted simultaneously. To determine how many are superfluous, he plans to make thousands of versions of the bacterium and see which ones can survive.
An organism’s genome is made up of varying pairs of four chemicals -- adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. These base pairs form the rungs in the spiraling double helix of DNA.
Replicating M. genitalium’s entire string of A’s, Ts, Cs and Gs in the lab was the first step in Venter’s plan.
Nature’s version of the bacterium, which causes nongonococcal urethritis and other genital diseases, contains a single circular chromosome that is 580,076 base pairs long.
The research team started out with 101 small fragments of the genome, which were made by three commercial firms that specialize in synthesizing genes and other short DNA sequences.
Each fragment overlapped slightly with the ones on either side.
Then they assembled them into progressively larger chunks.
Four adjoining fragments were combined with an enzyme, which chewed off one strand of DNA at each end. DNA strands naturally pair up, and the overlapping fragments came together spontaneously, said Dr. Hamilton O. Smith, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist who led the team.
The resulting 25 larger pieces were injected into the bacterium Escherichia coli, which made thousands of copies as it divided. The copies were harvested and used in the next stage of the experiment.
The researchers used the same method to combine the 25 pieces into eight larger sections and then paired those up into four bigger segments before they maxed out the capacity of E. coli.
That prompted a switch to a yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which has a natural tendency to repair broken chromosomes. With the yeast, they were able to combine the four segments into two half-genomes. They made copies and then spliced together the two halves into a complete genome, Smith said.
Along the way, they added five short watermarks to differentiate between the original genome and the copy.
They also modified one of the genes to disable the bacteria’s ability to stick to mammalian cells and cause diseases. The final version of the synthetic genome was 582,970 base pairs long. If printed out on paper in 10-point font, the genome would fill 147 pages.
“Reconstructing a natural bacterial genome from scratch is a great technical feat,” said Drew Endy, a biological engineer at MIT, who wasn’t involved in the study.
The next step for the researchers is to transplant the artificial DNA into a host bacterium and see if it will take over the cell.
Another team at the Venter Institute demonstrated last year that it could convert one species of Mycoplasma into another by replacing all of its DNA. But the species that served as a host in that experiment may not be the best for the synthetic genome, Smith said.
“It’s not just a slam-dunk, or we would be announcing it today,” Venter said. “But we’re confident that they can be overcome, and it’s a matter of time before we have it booted up in a cell.”
With DNA synthesis technology doubling in power every 12 to 18 months, scientists should be able to create customized bacteria by 2012, Endy said.
“Getting better at building DNA . . . is incredibly important,” he said.
The study was funded by Synthetic Genomics Inc. of Rockville, a privately held sister company to the Venter Institute that is designing cells that can produce clean energy.
A green jet fuel is currently being tested, and hundreds of other products could follow, Venter said.
But M. genitalium probably won’t serve as the foundation for those future designer organisms because it is too difficult to grow in the lab, Smith said.
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karen.kaplan@latimes.com
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592e8b29bd8f921755d1f29d8c4645ef | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-26-fi-briefs26.s3-story.html | KB Home awards bonuses to execs | KB Home awards bonuses to execs
KB Home Chief Executive Jeffrey T. Mezger has been awarded a $6-million bonus for his job performance in fiscal 2007, the company said in a filing at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Los Angeles home builder also designated bonuses ranging from $350,000 to $450,000 for three other senior executives.
KB Home has been battered by the U.S. housing slump. It lost $929.4 million for its fiscal year ended Nov. 30, and sales fell 32% to $6.4 billion.
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4599a6269df43129358c1e9db84ab7b9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-26-fi-detective26-story.html | Keeping girls safe by pretending to be one | Keeping girls safe by pretending to be one
No one will ever confuse Jim Murray with a teenager. His tall frame, broad shoulders and clipped, gray hair give him away for the grandfather he is.
But the 69-year-old retired police chief of this small Missouri farm town cuts a credible figure as a 13-year-old girl surfing the Web, looking for friends. He knows all the instant-messaging shorthand, the emoticons.
Murray’s retirement job from a rural home office has netted 20 arrests since he started in 2002. His latest catch was the biggest: four felony enticement charges against a town mayor, who after his arrest called Murray up and begged him to make the case go away.
The 19 other defendants have included a Missouri furniture company executive, an Arkansas professor and an Oklahoma school security guard. Ten of those men have been convicted and sent to prison. One was deported. The other cases are still pending.
The defendants ranged in age from 24 to 62, with an average of 39, and mainly come from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, Diamond police said.
Internet child safety experts say police officers like Murray are heroes who do good work at the cost of wading through the muck of online pedophile fantasies.
“He’s a trailblazer -- 2002 was very early for smaller police departments to start doing this,” said Parry Aftab, executive director of Wiredsafety.org, a children’s Internet safety group.
Murray, who taught elementary school for 27 years before switching to police work, is more humble. “This is really about the kids,” he said.
The first thing he handed a reporter at the start of an interview was a packet of newspaper stories about Kacie Woody, a 13-year-old girl in neighboring Arkansas who was abducted, raped and killed by a man she met online. It’s not a case Murray worked on. Instead, he said, it’s “a motivator.”
Murray says he manages to shake the online conversations out of his head after a while, but they can still make him angry. “There’ll be times when you just want to reach through the screen and choke them or slap them,” he said. “To think they could talk that way to a girl.”
The latest defendant is Allen Kauffman, 63, who resigned as mayor of Collins, Mo., and pastor of Temple Lot Church after he was arrested Jan. 11 at home in his small town about 110 miles southeast of Kansas City.
Prosecutors say Murray was logged in to a Yahoo chat room as a 13-year-old girl named cindyndiamond using the screen name Cin when he was contacted Nov. 15 by “duke dukeadk,” who prosecutors allege was Kauffman.
Duke contacted Cindy again the next day and said he was 55 years old. The exchange included:
Cin: i like to french kiss . . . senior boy taught me.
duke dukeadk: but it depends on where you want to be kissed at.
In at least five instant-message sessions through mid-December, Duke allegedly went on to tell Cindy he wanted to have sex with her, asked for nude photos of her and suggested Cindy have sex with another girl in front of a webcam so that Duke could watch.
Murray has arrested other men arriving for trysts they had set up with the detective’s teenage persona.
Murray was chief of police in Diamond from 1995 to 2000. He got a personal computer after retiring and discovered chat rooms. Being offered pictures of young girls angered him, he said. He contacted experts in Internet sting operations and received training from the National White Collar Crime Center on data recovery.
Now, Murray patrols the Web from a cramped home office divided between his police computer and a personal computer ringed with photos of his six grandchildren and three adult kids.
Murray remains a detective on reserve status with the Diamond police, but he donates his investigation time. He says he spends about 30 minutes a week on average in chats but several hours more going through the hard drives of arrested suspects looking for contacts with other potential victims.
“Several people have stopped me at Wal-Mart and the filling station and said they appreciate what we’re doing on the Internet stuff,” he said. “And that’s a good feeling.”
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5f500609ef85919c1c1a6878d783a54b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-26-me-haidl26-story.html | Gregory Haidl is released from prison | Gregory Haidl is released from prison
Gregory Haidl, whose arrest and conviction in a high-profile sexual assault case has proved pivotal in the undoing of former Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona and the unraveling of his inner circle, will be set free from prison today.
His homecoming will be bittersweet, tempered by the fact that he will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. And he returns with his father emerging as a chief witness in the federal corruption case against Carona, who is accused of peddling access to his office for tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts.
Don Haidl, through his attorney Mark Byrne, released a statement on behalf of his family, saying his son “was a model prisoner” who took advantage of educational and vocational programs at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga.
“Now he wants to lead a productive and quiet life as a law-abiding citizen,” Byrne said on behalf of the elder Haidl.
The victim of the July 2002 sexual assault, identified in court proceedings only as Jane Doe, had no comment on Haidl’s release, said her attorney, Sheldon Lodmer. The woman has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit against Haidl and his co-defendants, and is “coming along fine” while working and going to school, Lodmer said.
Haidl, 22, was being released early from his six-year term because of credit for good behavior and for time served in an Orange County jail before he was convicted, state corrections spokesman Bill Sessa said.
Because of the nature of his conviction and his criminal history, Haidl is considered a high-control parolee, a category that warrants the highest level of supervision, Sessa said. Haidl is scheduled to serve three years of parole but could be released from supervision earlier if he stays out of trouble, Sessa said.
Haidl and two friends were convicted in 2005, after two sensational trials, of sexually assaulting Doe, who was 19 at the time of the attack.
The case gained notoriety because of a lurid videotape that captured the attack at the Newport Beach home of Don Haidl, and aggressive efforts by defense attorneys to paint the accuser as a would-be porn star.
The son’s prosecution fractured what were once tight bonds between Carona, Don Haidl and his other handpicked assistant, George Jaramillo, marking the beginning of the end of the sheriff’s reign.
Jaramillo, once seen as Carona’s likely successor, was accused of intervening in the Newport Beach police investigation of the assault and of trying get the younger Haidl preferential treatment in a marijuana case. He was fired by Carona in early 2004 and was later sentenced to a year in jail for misusing department resources.
The elder Haidl, who helped bankroll Carona’s first campaign, gave up the assistant sheriff’s post in 2004 to concentrate on his son’s legal troubles. He was convinced that his position had subjected his son to tougher treatment by publicity-minded prosecutors and the media.
While his son was in prison, Don Haidl was accused by federal prosecutors of filing a false income tax return in a scheme that tapped several of his corporate entities to pay the legal bills racked up by his son and his son’s co-defendants.
Faced with those charges, he agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of Carona. Don Haidl faces up to three years in prison, but prosecutors have said they would recommend leniency if he continues to help in the investigation and testifies truthfully.
Jaramillo, released late last year from his jail sentence, has also pleaded guilty to tax charges and is cooperating with authorities in the case against Carona.
christine.hanley@latimes.com
gil.reza@latimes.com
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51932528d481c12a606ceb1d9226e042 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-26-oe-chait26-story.html | Is the right right on the Clintons? | Is the right right on the Clintons?
Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read -- kept saying the same thing: They’ve suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we’ve reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.
The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not be a good Democratic nominee. But now that loathing seems a lot less irrational. We’re not frothing Clinton haters like ... well, name pretty much any conservative. We just really wish they’d go away.
The big turning point seems to be this week, when the Clintons slammed Obama for acknowledging that Ronald Reagan changed the country. Everyone knows Reagan changed the country. Bill and Hillary have said he changed the country. But they falsely claimed that Obama praised Reagan’s ideas, saying he was a better president than Clinton -- something he didn’t say and surely does not believe.
This might have been the most egregious case, but it wasn’t the first. Before the New Hampshire primaries, Clinton supporters e-mailed pro-choice voters claiming that Obama was suspect on abortion rights because he had voted “present” instead of “no” on some votes. (In fact, the president of the Illinois chapter of Planned Parenthood said she had coordinated strategy with Obama and wanted him to vote “present.”) Recently, there have been waves of robocalls in South Carolina repeatedly attacking “Barack Hussein Obama.”
I crossed the Clinton Rubicon a couple of weeks ago when, in the course of introducing Hillary, Clinton supporter and Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson invoked Obama’s youthful drug use. This was disgusting on its own terms, but worse still if you know anything about Johnson. I do -- I once wrote a long profile of him. He has a sleazy habit of appropriating the logic of civil rights for his own financial gain. He also has a habit of aiding conservative crusades to eliminate the estate tax and privatize Social Security by falsely claiming they redistribute wealth from African Americans to whites. The episode reminded me of the Clintons’ habit of surrounding themselves with the most egregious characters: Dick Morris, Marc Rich and so on.
The Clinton campaign is trying to make it seem as if the complaint is about negativity, and it is pointing out that Obama has criticized Hillary as well. That’s what politicians are supposed to do when they compete for votes. But criticism isn’t the same thing as lying and sleaze-mongering.
Am I starting to sound like a Clinton hater? It’s a scary thought. Of course, to conservatives, it’s a delicious thought. The Wall Street Journal published a gloating editorial noting that liberals had suddenly learned “what everyone else already knows about the Clintons.” (By “everyone,” it means Republicans.)
It made me wonder: Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along? Maybe not right to set up a perjury trap so they could impeach him, but right about the Clintons’ essential nature? Fortunately, the Journal’s attempt to convince us that the Clintons have always been unscrupulous liars seemed to prove the opposite. Its examples of Clintonian lies were their claims that Bob Dole wanted to cut Medicare, that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy, that Paula Jones was “trailer trash” and that Kenneth Starr was a partisan.
Except Dole did vote to cut Medicare, there was a vast right-wing conspiracy and Starr was and is a rabid partisan. (“Trailer trash” is, of course, a matter of opinion, and it’s a cruel thing to say, but as far as whether it’s a lie -- well, it’s not like they called William F. Buckley “trailer trash.”)
So maybe the answer is that the Clintons would have smeared their opponents in the 1990s, but lying is unnecessary when the other party is doing things such as voting to slash Medicare to pay for a big tax cut for the rich.
But the conservatives might have had a point about the Clintons’ character. Bill’s affair with Monica Lewinsky jeopardized the whole progressive project for momentary pleasure. The Clintons gleefully triangulated the Democrats in Congress to boost his approval rating. They do seem to have a feeling of entitlement to power.
If Hillary wins the nomination, most of us will probably vote for her because the alternative is likely to be worse. But what happens if she’s embroiled in another scandal? Will liberals rally behind her, or will they remember the Democratic primary?
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7254bab865c63e2809af986b3de39c05 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-27-ca-knize27-story.html | The piano keys a mature devotion | The piano keys a mature devotion
The moment Perri Knize first played her piano, she knew it had to be named Marlene.
Hearing the piano’s uniquely tuned sound, Knize, whose book “Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey” has just been published, remembered the star of “The Blue Angel” and her throaty rendition of “Falling in Love Again.”
“It was like Marlene Dietrich’s soul in this piano. The 1930s Hollywood glamour was there,” Knize said, taking a lunch break from talking up her book at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, an annual trade event for music products retailers and manufacturers.
Knize’s book shows strangers to the piano that each instrument has a personality, and devoted buyers such as Knize will search for the right one with an Ahab-like zeal. “Grand Obsession” traces her long quest for the right instrument, her restoration of its voice, and her discovery of its origins in a European forest.
Her search would have been impossible without the help of an online tribe of piano aficionados who became her social network and her book’s supporting characters.
Many of them, like Knize, took up piano later in life -- becoming part of the fastest-growing demographic of new piano students, according to the Music Teachers National Assn. That piano lessons are increasingly the purview of adults means that the recital has receded in importance, often replaced by the piano party -- which has all the piano performance, none of the judgment, and much more alcohol.
Frank Baxter, founder of PianoWorld.com, the chat forum that plays a big part in “Grand Obsession,” explained social piano playing.
“The expectation people have of piano is of a concert pianist with the tailcoat and everyone shushing everyone else,” he said. “We’re not that type of group. There are no snobs among us, and if there are, we knock them off their pedestal. We’re here to have fun.”
Baxter launched his current site in 2001. Since then, membership has gone from about 100 to well over 28,000. About 150 new members receive their member numbers each week (Baxter claims No. 1). They organize monthly parties in cities around the country, from a two-day affair at four homes each autumn in Cape Cod, Mass., to smaller gatherings with a Southern California-based group that takes credit for launching the trend six years ago in Long Beach. Baxter hopes to organize a piano cruise, with members providing the entertainment.
Brenda Dillon, a piano teacher and project director of the National Piano Foundation, said the demand for fun, adult piano classes “is like a tsunami.” She added, “We’re encouraging piano parties. If we create a nonstressful environment, they keep enrolling.”
Knize, who attended her first piano party at a teacher’s behest, became Piano World member No. 138, attending parties and organizing some too. She devotes a chapter of “Grand Obsession” to a “piano crawl” she planned -- a chance for members from as far as Bucharest, Romania, to sample pianos at various Manhattan dealers.
So it was only appropriate that Knize’s tour for her book, which has been getting strong reviews, began with a “pianothon” in New York -- including demonstrations of several pianos and a roaming party along that city’s “Piano Row” -- followed by a piano party in Southern California last weekend.
About two dozen guests gathered around a gleaming black grand piano in the living room of Steve Miller (member No. 14) in Yorba Linda, sharing wine and food while good-naturedly interrupting Knize’s reading. One guest asked another, “Are you going to cry now?” after one poignant line. And when Knize described PianoWorld.com members’ “combativeness,” another interrupted with, “How can you say that?”
Conversation sounded as if this might have been a wine tasting, only the tourist anecdotes of Europe involved piano factories instead of vineyards and dropped foreign names were those of famous piano makers, not vintners.
Penny Arevalo, an Orange County resident who boasts member No. 13, described a Mason & Hamlin piano she once played as “sweet and soft and fuzzy.” She came to the party to meet Knize, who included Arevalo as a character in her book but had never met her in person. Still, they greeted each other as old friends, with a simultaneous “Hiiii” and a hug.
Knize also met Arevalo’s family -- her husband and 13-year-old son had just performed “Wipe Out” on piano and guitar for the crowd, and her 9-year-old daughter was busily reading Knize’s book.
“A piano is just like wine or chocolate; it’s a quality, luxury thing that people are passionate about,” said Arevalo. “It’s so fun to try them all since you can’t buy them all.”
Arevalo also praised piano parties for piquing her son’s musical interest at age 6, when he watched a PianoWorld member’s performance.
“He was enraptured,” she said. “You can’t do that anywhere else. You can’t walk right up next to a pianist in a concert hall.”
‘The folk aspect of the piano’
Each guest had ready reasons for coming to piano parties too. Del Fandrich, who builds pianos and whose brother worked on Knize’s piano, doesn’t play but loves simply “the sound of the instrument and the musician’s soul in the air.”
Len Poche, a first-time piano party attendee from Fullerton, remembered that pianos were once in every bar, “even less reputable places.”
Frank Baxter, who also attended, thinks it’s the simplicity of the instrument compared to the guitar or the saxophone. “You can sit down and play one note at a time,” he said. “You don’t need to know the notes, or even the alphabet. You just need A through G and one finger.”
Baxter also pointed out that it’s easier to enjoy the piano now. Those who don’t want to invest in private lessons can hook up keyboards to computer programs. And for those whose pianos are more furniture than music makers, companies such as PianoDisc turn the instruments into high-tech player pianos, connected to iPods or DVDs of concert pianists.
But for Steve Miller, the party’s host, the piano is already quite high-tech in itself while still having a low-tech appeal. “They’re beautiful mechanically, they have 10,000 parts,” he said. “But it’s wood, leather, felt. It’s an organic object.”
On-and-off lessons
Knize’s love for the piano began in a moment of solitude, as she drove the Montana countryside listening to Arthur Rubinstein play Chopin waltzes and entering what she calls in her book “a piano-induced rapture.” After years of on-and-off lessons, she realized that learning music as an adult meant having the physical, emotional and mental maturity the piano demands.
Born into a musical family -- with a professional musician father who asked not whether she would like to play an instrument but which instrument -- Knize asked for piano lessons at age 8. By then, her father had already helped develop her ear, teaching her to identify repeated themes, to describe music as “juicy.” (That synesthetic ability served her well in appreciating and writing about her piano: “I am swept away by powerful waves of sound -- rich, dark, and warm, with singing overtones. The middle section is smoky and mysterious. . . . The treble is bell-like and sparkling; it hangs in the air, full of color, a shimmering northern lights.”)
But since the family couldn’t afford piano lessons, Knize took up the flute instead, only to quit when she realized she didn’t have the skill to be a professional flutist. Knize studied philosophy in school and briefly pursued graphic design. Still, she said, “I was miserable , and I had to think back to the last time I had a dream.”
Her ideal job in high school had been to be a fire lookout -- but technology made most of those jobs obsolete. Knize found work with the U.S. Forest Service, driving to Montana with her dog at age 27. With no one to talk to, Knize said, “I got the writing bug.” She became an environmental policy reporter, shifting gears to write a book about piano after again following a calling, this time at an age when many think their inner voices are telling them to procure sports cars.
“When you get to your 40s you start being cognizant of the fact that you’re halfway through your life,” she said. “You start taking inventory of your dreams, and if you haven’t already done so, it’s time to make your dreams happen.”
She began piano lessons with the ambition of eventually playing Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations.” And though she has begun learning its opening aria, she is less goal-oriented now, appreciating piano for the meditative quality she describes in her book.
“Footfalls the whole of a journey. Notes the whole of a work of music. Breaths, the whole of our lives. All can be a direct experience of reality -- the wholeness in the implicate order,” Knize writes. “This seems to me a recipe for sanity in this delusional world.”
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swati.pandey@latimes.com
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48f4d34a0d486c5392aeb94c5ebfa3cf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-27-ed-literacy27-story.html | How to spell ‘solvency’ | How to spell ‘solvency’
In the not-so-distant past, redlining -- the practice of denying financial services to people based solely on their race, sex, surname or address -- deprived many Americans of the opportunity to build a prosperous life. Today many of us still suffer financially. But this time around, we’re limited by too many choices rather than too few.
Financial illiteracy has become the new redlining. Vast numbers of us go to college and own homes and cars. Our kids tote the latest cellphones, and our living room television sets have been replaced by lavish home entertainment centers. But we don’t know how to budget for our households or how to balance our checkbooks. Homeowners who misunderstood or ignored the inherent risks of adjustable-rate mortgages are losing houses to foreclosure in record numbers. (In California, 31,676 households foreclosed in the last quarter of 2007, more than twice as many as the previous record in 1996.) Shoppers who ignored the fine print on credit card agreements helped push consumer bankruptcies up 40%, to 801,840, in 2007. The average college student graduates with $2,200 in credit card debt and is more likely to drop out of school because of financial hardship than because of academic failure.
In part, the problem stems from complexities in today’s credit markets. Forty years ago, a bank making a loan cared whether a borrower could pay it back because the bank held on to the loan in its portfolio. But over the last decade, lenders have been just as likely to package loans, sell them off to faceless investors and wash their hands of further responsibility. With little at stake, lenders have the incentive to loan out more and more money. In the process, they often saddle borrowers with loans they can’t afford or understand.
Policymakers are addressing the most flagrant abuses, such as deceptive marketing of onerous sub-prime mortgages, by clamping down on fraud, simplifying financial disclosures and removing the obstacles that have made it hard for lenders and borrowers to renegotiate loan terms, even when it benefits all the parties involved. But the government shouldn’t act like a nanny -- which means that all of these efforts will be for naught if Americans don’t master basic financial skills.
We must learn to save and budget if we want to keep buying more stuff, not to mention if we want to retire with security and comfort. We must understand the concept of compound interest -- how it works in our favor when we put money each month into our 401(k)s, and hurts us when we pay only the minimum on our credit card bills. We must learn that low monthly payments don’t equal affordability. We must read fine print. We must be aware of the seductive power of marketing and separate our wants from our needs. We must recognize that brokers, bankers and salespeople are trying to make a buck and aren’t necessarily our friends. At the same time, the 10% or so of us who are “unbanked” or “underbanked” -- off the financial grid -- must develop basic trust in financial institutions and must understand that opening bank accounts and establishing credit are prerequisites to success in the 21st century.
Fortunately, efforts to improve financial literacy in the United States are gaining momentum. President Bush created the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Education in 2002. On Tuesday, he unveiled the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy, which will be co-chaired by investment guru Charles Schwab and Los Angeles-based financial literacy advocate John Hope Bryant, and which will make recommendations for new education strategies and programs in the public and private sectors. The idea isn’t to remove all risk, or to crimp consumer choices. It’s to create a market that empowers citizens, as participants, to build and share in the national wealth -- to live the American dream.
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aaf52b58cf5c35a30413183def27c439 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-27-re-hotprop27-story.html | Unlimited court time: $25 million | Unlimited court time: $25 million
Pete Sampras and his wife, actress Bridgette Wilson, have put their Beverly Hills home on the market for $25 million.
Before the 36-year-old tennis ace retired in 2003, he won a record 14 Grand Slam men’s singles titles.
Sampras’ 11,000-square-foot, English Tudor-style house, built in 1933, has been recently remodeled and expanded.
The walled and gated private estate has five bedrooms, including a master suite with his-and-her bathrooms. The home has a total of 12 bathrooms.
Other features are a detached guesthouse, a gym, a theater, a children’s play yard, a pool, a putting green and -- of course -- a tennis court with a north-south orientation. The home is located on more than an acre of mature, landscaped grounds and has a circular driveway.
Wilson, 34, played the bride-to-be in “The Wedding Planner” (2001) and appeared in “CSI: Miami” (2003) and, more recently, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (the 2007 pilot and one episode).
Jordan Cohen, estates director at Re/Max-Olson & Associates Inc. in Westlake Village, has the listing.
Plenty of room to play ball on the beach now
L.A. Dodgers owners Frank and Jamie McCourt can’t seem to get enough of the beach.
The couple bought a Malibu house in August, and they now have purchased the home next door as well.
The McCourts paid close to $19 million for the second house, which has three bedrooms and two bathrooms in less than 2,000 square feet. (They purchased their first home in Malibu for close to its $33.5-million asking price. The sellers of that home were actors Courteney Cox and David Arquette.)
Both of the McCourts’ Malibu homes have beach frontage -- the first has 80 feet; the second, 66 feet. Their latest is a California bungalow built in 1949; their first, built in 1983, was designed by John Lautner, who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. The four-bedroom, 5,500-square-foot house sits on a double lot and has exposed concrete, natural wood, skylights, a curved roof line and a pool.
The bungalow is already being renovated, with completion scheduled in July.
The McCourts have been active in the Los Angeles real estate scene. They bought a house in Holmby Hills for about $25 million in 2004, soon after they came to L.A. from Boston.
She was ‘Torn’ but sold anyway
London-based Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia has sold her Hollywood Hills home for close to its asking price of $3.9 million.
The buyer is Jeanette Longoria, an heiress from Mexico.
The house, built in the 1950s, has five bedrooms and six bathrooms in 5,400 square feet.
As a youth, the singer appeared in the U.K. TV series “Neighbours.” Imbruglia, now in her early 30s, is known for singing the hit 1997 single “Torn.”
Trista Rullan with Hilton & Hyland Real Estate, Christie’s Great Estates, Beverly Hills, represented Longoria in the purchase.
Apple doesn’t fall far from the cave
A former home of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, is on the market for $6.9 million.
Wozniak bought the Los Gatos home while it was under construction and completed it, adding his own inventive touches in the late 1980s, when he took occupancy.
Among Wozniak’s additions were re-created prehistoric caves with dinosaur footprints, mineral shells and fossils.
The caves were crafted to blend in with the landscaping. From the caves, there is an underwater view through a window into a koi pond. Another cave comes equipped with an audio-video entertainment center -- no doubt the envy of many a caveman.
Wozniak lived in the 7,100-square-foot home until 2004, when the current owners -- Larry and Karin Willard -- purchased it and reconfigured its interiors.
The one-story home has five bedroom suites, a hole in a wall that leads to an indoor play area, an espresso lounge with views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a 20-foot-high foyer, a home theater, a 400-bottle wine room and a pet suite with a private yard for resident pooch and canine visitors.
Bruce Nelson of John Bruce Nelson & Associates in Bel-Air has the listing.
ruth.ryon@latimes.com
To see previous columns on celebrity realty transactions, go to latimes.com/hotproperty.
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108475d2e1f5b535fb82823ad1e387f2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-28-et-filmtobooks28-story.html | Cut to writers and . . . fade to book | Cut to writers and . . . fade to book
As the writers strike drags on, there’s at least one small corner of the industry that hasn’t been grinding to a halt over the last months: literary departments at the major talent agencies, which are getting inundated with book proposals and story ideas for novels from out-of-work screenwriters.
“Some of our writers who have ideas but never had the time are turning to their book projects,” said Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, an executive vice president of the William Morris Agency’s literary department.
Lydia Wills at Paradigm agreed that “back-burner projects” are now getting more attention, noting a surge in “book pitches and novel writing” among her agency’s Hollywood clientele.
But although the strike has given screenwriters who’ve long had novels percolating in their heads the impetus to finally get the darn things written, there’s also a cruel reality: Because book fees are small change compared with the big payoff of a Hollywood script, it’s a treacherous hedge, a gamble on something that might not even cover one month’s rent, let alone a house note.
Most are undeterred. Screenwriter Mark Haskell Smith (“Playing God,” “The Inheritance”) is using the downtime as an excuse to get his fourth novel finished. There may not be a big check waiting for him, but he’s content that the tome will at least find its way to bookstores. He turned to fiction, after all, because he didn’t want to see another good spec script languish.
“I had an idea for a movie,” he said. “I thought rather than hear an executive tell me that the writing was good but the story was too dark, I would just write a book instead. I didn’t want another rejected script.”
Besides, Smith said, it’s not like there are any guarantees for screenwriters, strike or no strike. “The job market for screenwriters has shrunk dramatically over the last few years,” he said. “I’ve been hot, then not, then hot again.”
A fan of the novelists Donald Westlake and Ross Thomas, Smith writes in the “comic noir” genre. “Moist,” the story of an employee in a pathology lab who falls in love with a woman on the tattoo of a severed arm, was published by Grove Press in 2001, and he’s had two subsequent novels, also published by Grove.
“The Writers Guild is gonna kill me for saying this, but a script is nothing more than a blueprint for a film,” he said. “It’s a road map and can’t stand on its own; it needs others to make it a movie. Books are more holistic. They’re less about plot and more about character, emotions, nuance. It’s refreshing to just write about people for a change.”
Screenwriter Wesley Strick (“Doom,” “Arachnophobia”) is using the strike to work on his second novel. “I write in the morning and picket in the afternoon,” he said. Although his scripts pay the bills, he enjoys the process of writing fiction, the discursive nature of the storytelling.
“As a screenwriter, you’re always looking for things to cut,” Strick said. “Scripts are all about economy and forward momentum, whereas novels can be big, baggy receptacles for a story. When I go back to screenwriting, I feel like I’ve been put back in my cage.”
A former advertising copy writer, Jim Jennewein has written the films “Richie Rich,” “The Flintstones” and “Getting Even With Dad” with his partner Tom S. Parker. But even for a successful writer like Jennewein, the “spin cycle” of endless story meetings, dumb notes and production green lights that turn to red has taken its toll on his muse.
“The process is less than satisfying,” said Jennewein, who grew up loving the adventure stories of Jack London. “You get tired and burned out, and I always wanted to write novels anyway.” So Jennewein and Parker are focusing on a trilogy of books for the young-adult market. Tentatively titled “Rune Warriors,” the series, which will be published by HarperCollins, is a Viking saga that Jennewein describes as a mix of Harry Potter and “The Princess Bride,” “with a little ‘Python’ thrown in.”
Like Smith’s “Moist,” “Rune Warriors” was plucked from an old script idea that Jennewein and Parker had. Since the strike started, they’ve hunkered down to finish the second and possibly third volumes.
“Authorial ownership of the words just doesn’t happen with screenwriters,” Jennewein said. “Everyone treats it [the script] as a suggestion, while writing fiction is a pure form of expression. There’s no one to interpret the words from the writer to the reader.”
Still, the transition from writing action slug lines to smooth literary prose can be bumpier than a jump-cut in a Tarantino film. According to book agent Mary Evans, the fact that a screenwriter has written a manuscript has no bearing on whether his or her book will have even a modicum of writerly competence.
“Oftentimes, you shudder when a screenwriter sends you a novel, because they tend to be strong with dialogue but crappy with context, and novels are all about creating the proper context for the story,” said Evans, whose clients include Smith and Michael Chabon. “Screenwriters are attracted to novel writing because they can let their freak flag fly and just write what they want, but the truly talented novelist-slash-screenwriter is very rare.”
Then there’s the money, which is generally lousy, with a few exceptions (such as Tom Wolfe’s recently announced $7-million advance). Smith was paid what can be charitably called a low five-figure advance for his first novel, and his payout has hovered around that level since. “If your previous novel didn’t sell, the publisher isn’t inclined to give you a bigger advance.”
To pay the bills, he’s been teaching and helping edit a custom-published magazine. There are also occasional copy-writing gigs.
“I feel really lucky that I have a book agent and a publisher who believe in me and I can still keep writing the stories I want to tell, even if it means I have to pick up other jobs to supplement my income,” Smith said. “But it’s not easy. That’s the truth.”
There’s also the small matter of time. Scripts can gestate quickly, sometimes within weeks. A novel can take years to write, and even then it may only be a first draft. “It takes me two years just to get the manuscript into good enough shape for my agent and editor to look at,” Smith said.
The hope is the books will eventually find a large audience, and Smith, Jennewein, Strick and their like will make a decent living from that sweat equity. “My editor tells me that it took Carl Hiaasen six books before he hit, and Elmore Leonard waited 30 books into his career,” Smith said.
In the end it may be Hollywood that helps him sell books -- a couple of producers have optioned “Moist” for Barry Sonnenfeld to direct. “You don’t make a lot of money in publishing unless you’re wildly successful,” Jennewein said. “But it’s freed us of the shackles of one medium and opened up another.”
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73ff526352c3d8ba6e0665cab0524ec7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-28-et-treatment28-story.html | ‘Treatment’ cures the rerun blues | ‘Treatment’ cures the rerun blues
In these strike-plagued days of endless reruns and empty, aching TiVo queues, just about anything new from HBO would be cause for rejoicing. But “In Treatment,” a half-hour drama that debuts tonight, is the proverbial manna in the desert. And not just because it’s based on a popular Israeli television show. Cleverly conceived, it boasts a star-studded cast (Gabriel Byrne, Dianne Wiest, Blair Underwood) who achieve, at times, theatrical transcendence. And perhaps most important considering these troubled times, it airs five days a week! Yes, that’s right, every weeknight for nine weeks.
As God is my witness, your TiVo will never go hungry again. No, nor any of its kin.
Here’s the setup: Paul (Byrne) is a therapist who sees patients in his home. Each episode is devoted to one patient’s session: Monday, it’s Laura (Melissa George), a young doctor with the hots for Paul and some fairly obvious father issues. Tuesday, it’s Alex (Underwood), a cocky fighter pilot who completed a mission that left 16 Iraqi boys dead, not that this is a problem for him or anything. Wednesday brings Sophie (Mia Wasikowska), a troubled teenage gymnast who may or may not have attempted suicide. On Thursday, it’s Jake and Amy (Josh Charles and Embeth Davidtz), a couple fighting over what to do now that their five-year attempt to get pregnant has worked (she wants to abort, he doesn’t). Friday is the best, because that’s when Paul takes himself, his fraying marriage and various midlife anxieties to the home of his former mentor, retired therapist Gina (Wiest).
If you’ve ever been in therapy, thought about going into therapy, known anyone in therapy or just really like Gabriel Byrne and/or Dianne Wiest (and I think I have covered the vast majority of Americans here), “In Treatment” is television as controlled substance -- highly addictive. The therapist’s office may be in danger of being worn ragged as a dramatic construct -- indeed, between “The Sopranos” and “Tell Me You Love Me,” it is tempting to wonder if HBO executives are making some kind subconscious plea for help. But “In Treatment” writer-director Rodrigo Garcia refuses to apologize or equivocate. He just puts troubled people in a (very lovely, evocatively lighted) room and writes the hell out of it.
Which doesn’t mean “In Treatment” is perfect. At times the construct of two or three people sitting in a room talking for half an hour becomes stagey, and the level of antagonism each patient aims at Paul in almost every episode strains not only believability (surely grown-ups would not waste their money talking about their therapist’s failings when they could be talking about themselves) but also the dramatic pitch. Nor are all of the characters or storylines as compelling as the others -- I found Laura grating rather than seductive, and the Alex storyline failed to capture me.
That said, I watched all seven weeks that HBO sent me (that’s 35 episodes, people), one after the other, as fast as I could clear the room of my young children. I stayed up past midnight, grew hollow-eyed and pale, missed meals and refused to answer my cellphone or check my e-mail just so I could squeeze in another episode. It wasn’t pretty, but it sure was fun.
Part of this you can chalk up to a lifelong pash for Byrne, who is at the top of his fretful haunted game, portraying a man truly devoted to his clients and his science and yet depressed, repressed, narcissistic and occasionally downright whiny. Having now officially turned the noncommittal murmur into an art form, Byrne uses his craggy brow and tragic Irish eyes to their best advantage, making Paul, at the base of it, noble enough, a man seeking to correct his failings even if he can’t quite bring himself to admit them.
When he first turns to Gina, the mentor he broke with years ago, he tells her it is because he has become so impatient with his patients. That isn’t what the real problem is, of course, and his and Gina’s attempt to get at the root of his irritation forms the spine of the narrative.
Now I could devote a whole paragraph to the wonder that is Dianne Wiest and, in fact, I think I will. Long one of the most versatile American actors around, her Friday appearances lift “In Treatment” into dramatic realms that defy mediums. Watching her and Byrne circle each other and the truth, it’s easy simply to forget where you are -- you could just as easily be at the Mark Taper Forum or the ArcLight as in your own living room. With relatively few lines, Wiest radiates the wisdom, curiosity and bewilderment of a woman in that stage of life when the paths before her grow more numerous and less distinct. She has lost her husband and retired -- she’s trying to write a novel -- and although she is still angry at Paul for past behavior, she is clearly grateful for the opportunity to sit in the therapist’s chair again. With her easy laugh and mercilessly direct questions, she is therapist as Mother Earth, and is there any chance she has an opening on Thursday afternoons?
You could watch “In Treatment” for the level of acting alone. As the truly troubled Sophie, Wasikowska is a luminous prickly wonder. Davidtz (so marvelous in films as diverse as “Matilda” and “Junebug”) and Charles (“Sports Night” and “Six Degrees”) perfectly embody one of those crazy couples whom you can’t imagine ever getting married in the first place and, yet, here they are. As Laura, George has the difficult task of parading her character’s sexual exploits in an queasy sort of psycho-seduction, while Underwood must create a man so buried under denial that he really believes his heart attack had nothing to do with his killing of 16 children. If they don’t always reach the same level of resonance some of the other story lines do, it is not for want of effort or talent.
And the best part of “In Treatment” is that if, for some reason, you really can’t stand one of the patients or the stories, you can just skip that night. Though I wouldn’t recommend it. Even without a strike, television like this doesn’t come along every day.
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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com
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‘In Treatment’
Where: HBO
When: 9:30 to 10 tonight; Monday through Friday
Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17)
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f2c3b7c2a3d4c3e864ef75800599a33d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-28-fi-virtualdisney28-story.html | Disney adds fantasy lands | Disney adds fantasy lands
Walt Disney Co. is no stranger to fantasy worlds, transporting audiences -- whether to a cottage in the woods with a young princess in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” or to the Great Barrier Reef aboard the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage ride at Disneyland.
Now, Disney is spinning its tales in the newest mass medium -- online virtual worlds, where children adopt cartoonish avatars and play games.
Disney and other entertainment companies are rushing to capitalize on the latest Internet phenomenon: the rise of virtual worlds for kids. Online haunts for grown-ups, such as Second Life, grab the attention of corporate marketers. But digital playgrounds for the juice-box set -- such as Disney’s Club Penguin and Ganz Inc.'s Webkinz -- are drawing bigger crowds.
As many as 20 million children and teens will visit virtual worlds by 2011, up from 8.2 million in 2007, according to research firm EMarketer Inc.
“You’re seeing a more than doubling in projected growth, between 2007 and 2011, in the number of kids and teens visiting these worlds,” EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said. “That’s why you’re seeing Disney making so many investments. . . . All the major media companies are making virtual worlds a big focus of their activities going forward.”
Some parents and advocates worry about the commercial aspects of these sites, which either charge a monthly subscription fee, serve up advertising or both. Several sites, including “Pirates of the Caribbean Online,” offer a basic game for free but require payment for more advanced play.
“It’s sweet-tasting candy that kids are going to want to have,” said Warren Buckleitner, editor of the Children’s Technology Review. “Give a free sample. Once you get started, it’s hard to stop.”
Online games that invite multiple players into virtual worlds have been around for more than a decade. What’s new is the increasingly younger audience. Disney’s Toontown Online was among the first to target tots, but since then, Mattel Inc.'s BarbieGirls.com, Nickelodeon’s Nicktropolis and others have popped up, attracting children as young as 3.
Disney plans to spend $5 million to $10 million apiece to develop as many as 10 virtual worlds built around familiar Disney characters and franchises.
“We’re creating virtual theme parks, but much more accessible,” said Steve Wadsworth, president of Walt Disney Internet Group. “You don’t have to get in a car or a plane.”
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Worlds of revenue
Disney’s acquisition of Club Penguin in August for as much as $700 million accelerated the online strategy. Club Penguin attracted nearly 7.9 million visitors in December, according to ComScore Media Metrix, ranking it second in popularity among children’s virtual world sites only to Webkinz.
And unlike social networks for grown-ups, such as Facebook.com, Club Penguin has no trouble finding a business model. For a monthly fee of $5.95, kids can waddle to their hearts delight in the snowy world, play games and earn coins that enable them to buy clothes or furnishings for their igloo. At the time of the acquisition, Disney said Club Penguin had about 700,000 subscribers. That would represent about $50 million in annual revenue.
It is just this kind of lucrative subscription-based revenue stream that is luring investors and developers, said analyst Billy Pidgeon of technology research firm IDC. But what they often underestimate are the costs of keeping these virtual worlds running smoothly. “World of Warcraft,” for example, requires more than 1,700 full-time customer service employees to maintain the site.
“People just have unrealistically high expectations for these models and don’t consider the expenses of maintaining these games,” Pidgeon said.
Paul Yanover, executive vice president of Walt Disney Internet Group, acknowledged that “virtual worlds are more elaborate than running a traditional website.” But Disney, he said, because of five years of experience from Disney Toontown Online, also understands “the costs of operation and maintenance” and is assured there are “really healthy businesses in online entertainment for kids and families.”
Kids at least appear to have a healthy appetite to play online. Eight-year-old Madison Magursky of Irvine said she plays Club Penguin for 10 minutes every day after school, once she’s done her homework. She even asked her mother to subscribe for her.
“I told her I wanted to be a member, because you get to buy fantastic gifts and decorations for your house and stuff,” Madison said. “And you can do certain things . . . that other people who aren’t a member can’t.”
“But she said ‘no.’ ”
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Setting a hook
Disney is counting on parents being more pliant than Madison’s mom.
In October, it launched “Pirates of the Caribbean Online,” a game that lets players live out their swashbuckling fantasies. Players take on the identity of a pirate and interact with characters from the film, including Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones.
Pint-size pirates are enticed to pay a $9.95 subscription fee to get access to more weapons, better ships or special islands.
Buckleitner of Children’s Technology Review extols “Pirates” as an engaging, mainstream game. His daughters “can’t wait to get their homework done and start playing.” However, he was concerned when his 12-year-old daughter ambushed him for his credit card to subscribe.
“Either I pay and keep my child happy, or I deal with a meltdown,” Buckleitner said. “I’m stuck in the same loop that millions of other parents have been in.”
Disney says it opted for subscriptions to defray the costs of monitoring and providing a safe environment for kids to play online. It chose not to permit advertising. Webkinz drew criticism from a parent group last month for displaying ads for the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” film and encouraging young users to buy chipmunk costumes and food for their virtual pets.
For Disney, a virtual world such as “Pirates” pays dividends beyond the potential subscription revenue. It keeps fans of the movie franchise interacting with the characters and primed for the next chapter in the “Pirates” epic, be it a film, a game or merchandise.
Drafting in the game’s wake is the “Disney Fairies,” set in Tinker Bell’s virtual world of Pixie Hollow. For now, players can go online to create their own fairy. Later this year, their fairy will be able to take wing in the virtual neighborhood of Neverland, which builds anticipation for the direct-to-DVD film, “Tinker Bell,” due out this fall.
Also in development is a virtual world inspired by Pixar’s “Cars,” in which players create and customize cars and follow in the tire tracks of Lightning McQueen, who races in pursuit of the fictional Piston Cup.
Other companies are also rushing to stake their claims online. This month, Time Warner Inc. invested in the teen site Gaia Online. And Viacom Inc., which owns Neopets, plans to spend $100 million over the next two years developing games and online platforms for kids ages eight to 14.
“The media companies are starting to realize that virtual worlds represent a very easy, very controllable, very compelling and very sticky media channel,” said Stephen Prentice, analyst for technology research firm Gartner Inc.
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Tough to keep players
The challenge, of course, is getting players to renew their subscriptions.
Prentice said virtual worlds such as Second Life have a high initial rate of downloads but suffer sharp declines, either because of a steep learning curve, loss of interest or boredom. As many as 12 million people registered as residents -- but fewer than 900,000 logged on in the last month. Even Philip Rosedale, the chief executive of Linden Lab, which developed Second Life, has acknowledged a churn rate as high as 90%.
The high cost of replacing customers is not deterring deep-pocketed new entrants, however.
Sony Corp., one of the earliest companies in the virtual worlds market and publisher of the classic online game, “EverQuest,” is developing a game for teenagers and their families called “Free Realms.” Instead of quests that can take hours to complete, “Free Realms” offers quick activities and mini-games -- raising a pet, tending a garden, playing a quick soccer game.
“Instead of kill creature, repeat, we wanted to give kids a virtual amusement park,” said John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, which is developing the game.
Games that are free are often supported by advertising, raising other concerns among parent advocates.
“None of the environments we looked at gave you something for nothing,” said Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports WebWatch, which is set to release a survey of 10 virtual world and game sites for children. “They either want information for marketing purposes or money to subscribe.”
Although the Child Online Protection Act prevents sites from collecting information from children under 13 years old without their parents’ consent, sites can collect aggregated data on where its visitors roam and what they click on to determine what ads to display.
With Disney, the idea is to impress its brands and products on young consumers, Brendler said.
“Disney tends to see its products as marketing channels for its other products,” he said. “Parents just need to be aware that Disney is a very smart marketer.”
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dawn.chmielewski@latimes.com
alex.pham@latimes.com
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102f0b41ef1b4f7e88a209319a824d5e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-28-he-errors28-story.html | ‘It’s never just one thing’ that leads to serious harm | ‘It’s never just one thing’ that leads to serious harm
A technician mistakes an “a” for an “o” in a drug name. A doctor misplaces a decimal point in a prescription order. A nurse reaches for a vial in a cabinet as she’s done hundreds of times before, only this time the light is dim and she fails to notice that the powder-blue label is more of a sky blue. The slip-ups are often simple, and always human, and all have happened in U.S. hospitals.
Each simple mistake is supposed to be countered by a recommended backup, a second or third set of eyes -- in other words, guidelines to reduce human error. A lot has to be overlooked in the cascade of errors that result in serious patient harm.
“It’s never just one thing that goes wrong when a serious event happens,” says Michael Cohen, president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, an organization that tracks prescribing errors and is sometimes called in to examine a hospital’s mistake. “We’ve detailed a situation where we found over 50 mistakes in the system before an infant was killed.” The incident, he said, was a 1,000-fold overdose of the blood thinner heparin in an Indianapolis neonatal intensive care unit that resulted in the deaths of three infants in 2006.
Late last year, the infant twins of actor Dennis Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, were the victims of a nearly identical mistake, an overdose of heparin at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “It was the exact same situation in a hospital in Indianapolis that we investigated a year earlier,” Cohen says. “The pharmacy dispensed the wrong dose to the nursing station.”
The Quaids’ newborns, who were being treated for a staph infection, have since been released, and the hospital has been cited by state regulators for its handling of drugs. Its practice, regulators say, had placed pediatric patients in jeopardy.
The mistake calls attention to how far hospitals have to go in preventing medical errors and in learning from the mistakes of others, even though many have made progress in protecting patients within their own institutions. Despite a decade of rising public awareness of such mistakes and research into how to prevent them, even one of the country’s premier institutions and a celebrity couple were not immune. Hospitals still have a long way to go to avoid mistakenly hurting their charges.
“People used to say that hospital mistakes are kind of like the poor -- they’re always with you,” says Dr. Lucien Leape, one of the authors of a 1999 Institute of Medicine report that estimated 100,000 people died each year in the U.S. from preventable hospital errors. “Well, no, they don’t have to be.”
Hospitals are trying. In a program called the 100,000 Lives Campaign, some 3,000 of the nation’s 5,000 acute care hospitals, including Cedars-Sinai, have voluntarily instituted up to six changes in practices aimed at reducing errors. The Joint Commission, a national organization that accredits hospitals and other healthcare facilities, now requires that patients be informed of “unanticipated outcomes.”
But while accountability is improving, hospitals still face increasingly complex technology. And medical culture, built on individual excellence, not teamwork, is slow to change.
Unfortunately, Cohen says, few hospitals learn from the mistakes, or improvements, of others. His organization published the results of the Indianapolis incident in a newsletter sent to every hospital in the country. If hospitals are to improve, he says, they have to study errors that have happened elsewhere.
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First instinct: Denial
The mid-1990s saw a rash of medical errors that caught the attention of the public, and the medical profession: A Florida man had the wrong leg amputated, a New York woman had surgery on the wrong side of her brain, and Betsy Lehman, a newspaper reporter whose beat was health, died of an accidental chemotherapy overdose at one of the nation’s top cancer centers, Boston’s Dana Farber.
At first, the American Medical Assn. responded with a public relations campaign, calling the incidents “isolated” mistakes, according to an analysis of the era published in the April 27, 2002, British Medical Journal. By 1996, however, the AMA launched a National Patient Safety Foundation and changed its stance, admitting that such errors were “common.”
But it was the 1999 Institute of Medicine Report that shocked the country, and shamed the medical profession into voluntarily adopting systems changes. The report estimated that 100,000 patients died annually from preventable hospital errors -- about the same as the yearly tally of deaths from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer and AIDS combined.
Leape, a leading researcher on medical mistakes, had long said the number was a conservative estimate. Sure enough, five years later, a review of Medicare records by the Denver-based healthcare ranking group HealthGrades found nearly twice as many deaths from preventable errors -- up to 195,000 -- in the country’s healthcare facilities. The higher estimate was never published in a peer-reviewed journal and included deaths in settings other than hospitals, such as nursing homes.
But since then, hospitals have begun responding to their state’s reporting laws, and, individually and voluntarily, launching their own efforts to improve. One of the most notable is an effort sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., whose aim is to improve healthcare. In that push, called the 100,000 Lives Campaign, 3,000 of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals volunteered to concentrate on one or more of six changes statistically proven to reduce errors. Those changes included following evidence-based guidelines to reduce infections and improve care for heart attack patients and to assemble teams to respond to the earliest signs of a patient crisis.
After a year, the institute reported that the changes made within the participating hospitals probably saved more than 120,000 lives, even more that what the IOM said was its conservative estimate of accidental deaths.
A death related to a medical error can be proven, but a death avoided is more difficult to document. In the November 2006 Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, the 100,000 Lives Campaign compared the volunteer hospitals’ actual deaths in one year with statistically expected deaths, based on data from the base year 2004. Based on the analysis, 122,300 people walked out of hospitals in 2005 unscathed -- and never knew it might have been otherwise.
Now, all those hospitals and 700 others are signing up for a follow-up campaign called the 5 Million Lives Campaign, aimed to halt not just deaths, but also injuries and near misses.
Even simple changes can make a difference. One statewide hospital group in Michigan followed a plan devised by Dr. Peter Pronovost, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, that involved a simple checklist, fashioned after the kind of safety list pilots are required to check on each takeoff and landing. A landmark study in the Dec. 28, 2006, New England Journal of Medicine of 108 ICUs in Michigan hospitals found that by using the checklist unfailingly, common infections from medical tubing could be reduced by two-thirds. Wash hands with soap. Check. Clean patient’s skin with antiseptic. Check. Wear sterile mask, gown, glove. Check. Put sterile drapes over entire patient. Check.
The Michigan hospitals initiated safety programs involving education, in-hospital safety teams, and the daily check-off lists. The improvement in infection rate was sustained for 18 months, according to the study.
“Instead of business as usual, [the Michigan ICU teams] deployed a basic checklist,” says Jonah Frohlich, senior program office at the California HealthCare Foundation. He was not involved with the Michigan study. “It was simple stuff. Nurses could stop physicians from proceeding if they weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing on the checklist. That’s completely counter to medical culture.”
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A price for mistakes
A changing bottom line may spur the effort to change. After Oct. 1, 2008, Medicare rules will make it more worthwhile for hospitals to avoid mistakes. The federal insurance program will no longer pay for follow-up care for several preventable problems. For example, the government will not reimburse a hospital for retrieving scissors, scalpels or sponges left in a patient’s body cavity following surgery. Nor will the federal insurer pay if a patient is transfused with the wrong blood type, or acquires a pressure ulcer while in the hospital. And, the new rules say, the hospital cannot pass the bill for a mistake on to the patient.
Private insurers may follow suit and refuse to pay for preventable mistakes.
The first step in controlling errors is to know how many there are and where they occur. Reporting is becoming more stringent. “One of the interesting developments is that state after state has announced that hospitals have to report these serious, preventable adverse events,” says Leape. California, since 2006, has required reporting of 27 serious medical errors listed by the National Quality Forum, a group of consumers, doctors, insurers and institutions promoting improved quality in healthcare.
If mistakes must be reported, then insurers can insist that hospitals eat the cost of the error, says Leape. “The next step is to say that we won’t pay for preventable infections,” he says. “If that sort of thing happens, we’re going to move from doing the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to doing it, because if we don’t, we’ll be out of business.”
One impediment to admitting mistakes has been the fear that an apology would lead to a lawsuit. That, too, is changing. Mistakes, and their solutions, says Dr. Thomas Gallagher, professor of medical ethics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, are human. Wronged patients, and their families, want someone to sincerely say they are sorry, studies show. Gallagher, in a Feb. 26, 2003, report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., talked with 52 patients and 46 doctors in 13 focus groups. He found that patients wanted full disclosure of harmful errors; an explanation for why it happened; information on what the institution was doing to prevent the mistake from happening again; and an apology.
The apology, a response long mangled and silenced by fear of malpractice litigation, is making a legally protected comeback. Thirty-six states, including California, have passed apology laws. They take different forms, but at the very least they mean a hospital’s or a physician’s apology cannot be used against them in court.
“You can say the words, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” says Gallagher. “The hope is that if you can’t use an apology in court to prove that a doctor has been negligent, then there will be more apologies.”
So far, technology is a poorly utilized partner in helping humans reduce errors. A 2005 study by the RAND Corp. found that computerizing medical records could save the healthcare system $81 billion -- and $4 billion of that savings would come from improved safety, largely by reducing prescription errors.
But computerized records and prescriptions are notoriously slow in coming to physicians’ offices and hospitals. In the first comprehensive look at health Internet technology in the state, a Jan. 17 report by the California HealthCare Foundation found that only 13% of hospitals in the state use electronic health records, and only 11% use bar-code administration of drugs. Such bar codes, as those seen in supermarket checkout lines, would signal an alert if a healthcare worker grabbed, and scanned, the wrong drug or the wrong dose for the wrong patient.
Until more hospitals acquire the technological means to double-check providers’ actions, nurses like those at Cedars will still reach for vials as they’ve done thousands of times. They may fail to notice a decimal point or a different colored label. “I can easily see how a nurse, especially an experienced one who has always done it right, can overlook the label,” Cohen says. “Just like you and I do at the supermarket, reaching for what we’ve always known, not realizing it has changed.
“This same incident that affected the Quaids, it could happen again at another hospital in another place.”
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susan.brink@latimes.com
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b6d14d7890c34d95291faf8e8f48805d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-28-oe-rodriguez28-story.html | Clinton’s Latino spin | Clinton’s Latino spin
If a Hillary Clinton campaign official told a reporter that white voters never support black candidates, would the media have swallowed the message whole? What if a campaign pollster began whispering that Jews don’t have an “affinity” for African American politicians? Would the pundits have accepted the premise unquestioningly?
A few weeks ago, Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton pollster and Latino expert, publicly articulated what campaign officials appear to have been whispering for months. In an interview with Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, Bendixen explained that “the Hispanic voter -- and I want to say this very carefully -- has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.”
The spin worked. For the last several weeks, it’s been on the airwaves (Tucker Carlson, “Hardball,” NPR), generally tossed off as if it were conventional wisdom. And it has shown up in sources as far afield as Agence France-Presse and the London Daily Telegraph, which wrote about a “voting bloc traditionally reluctant to support black candidates.”
The spin also helped shape the analysis of the Jan. 19 Nevada caucus, in which Clinton won the support of Latino voters by a margin of better than 2 to 1. Forget the possibility that Nevada’s Latino voters may have actually preferred Clinton or, at the very least, had a fondness for her husband; pundits embraced the idea that Latino voters simply didn’t like the fact that her opponent was black.
But was Bendixen’s blanket statement true? Far from it, and the evidence is overwhelming enough to make you wonder why in the world the Clinton campaign would want to portray Latino voters as too unrelentingly racist to vote for Barack Obama.
University of Washington political scientist Matt Barreto has compiled a list of black big-city mayors who have received broad Latino support over the last several decades. In 1983, Harold Washington pulled 80% of the Latino vote in Chicago. David Dinkins won 73% in New York in 1989. And Denver’s Wellington Webb garnered more than 70% in 1991, as did Ron Kirk in Dallas in 1995 and then again in 1997 and 1999.
He could have also added that longtime Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley won a healthy chunk of the Latino vote in 1973 and then the clear majority in his mayoral reelection campaigns of 1977, 1981, 1985 and 1989.
Here in L.A., all three black members of Congress represent heavily Latino districts and ultimately couldn’t survive without significant Latino support. Five other black House members represent districts that are more than 25% Latino -- including New York’s Charles Rangel and Texan Al Green -- and are also heavily dependent on Latino voters.
So, given all this evidence, why did this notion get repeated so nonchalantly? For one, despite the focus on demographic changes in America, journalists’ ignorance of the aspirations of Latino America is pretty remarkable. They just don’t know much about the biggest minority in the nation. And two, no Latino organizations function in the way that, say, the Anti-Defamation League does for Jewish Americans. In other words, you can pretty much say whatever you want about Latinos without suffering any political repercussions.
Unlike merely “exuberant” supporters, whose mushy grasp of facts Clinton has explained by saying they can sometimes be “uncontrollable,” pollsters such as Bendixen most certainly work -- and speak -- at the whim and in the pay of the candidate.
So what would the Clinton campaign have to gain from spreading this misinformation? It helps undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types, and it jibes with the Clinton strategy of pigeon-holing Obama as the “black candidate.” (Witness Bill Clinton’s statement last week that his wife might lose South Carolina because of Obama’s growing black support.)
But the social costs of the Clintons’ strategy might end up being higher than the country is willing to pay. According to Stanford Law professor Richard Thompson Ford, who just published “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,” such political stunts can be “self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“It could make black voters more hostile to Latinos,” he said. “And Latinos who hear it might think that they somehow ought to be at odds with blacks. These kinds of statements generate interracial tensions.”
At the Democratic presidential debate in Nevada, Tim Russert asked Clinton whether the New Yorker quote represented the view of her campaign. “No, he was making a historical statement,” she said. “And, obviously, what we’re trying to do is bring America together so that everybody feels like they’re involved and they have a stake in the future.”
Really?
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f0bfc2d5007faa22e763486b56854697 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-28-sp-crowe28-story.html | It turned out to be the biggest snap of his career | It turned out to be the biggest snap of his career
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The photograph is iconic, among the most enduring images in sports history. But to see it hanging here, in the offices of Y.A. Tittle Insurance & Financial Services, is a bit of a surprise.
It depicts the company’s founder, Pro Football Hall of Famer Y.A. Tittle, at perhaps the lowest point in his career, battered, bruised and bloodied.
Moments before the indelible shot was snapped by Morris Berman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the New York Giants quarterback had been pounded to the turf by 270-pound defensive end John Baker of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Tittle’s fluttering pass had landed in the arms of a surprised Steelers tackle, Chuck Hinton, who returned the interception eight yards into the end zone for a touchdown.
Alone and helmet-less in the end zone, shoulders drooped and arms rested on his thighs, Tittle is shown seated on his haunches, a dazed look in his eyes and blood trickling from his famously bald head. Two games into the last of his 17 professional seasons, the fallen warrior had suffered a concussion and cracked sternum.
“Heck of a way to get famous,” Tittle, now 81, says of the photo.
Actually, Yelberton Abraham Tittle already was quite well known long before that September afternoon at Pitt Stadium in 1964.
In the three seasons after his trade from the San Francisco 49ers in 1961, the former Louisiana State standout was the NFL’s most celebrated quarterback. Twice the league’s most valuable player, he led the Giants to three consecutive championship-game appearances and passed for a record 36 touchdowns in 1963, a mark that stood until Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins passed for 48 in 1984.
Tittle’s star had long faded, however, before his name was thrust back into the news last April, when Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam was killed in an auto accident while en route to an interview with Tittle.
“I could have been with him,” says Tittle, seated at a tidy desk in his office across the street from Google’s sprawling headquarters. “I had offered to pick him up.”
Halberstam, Tittle notes, was researching a book about the 1958 NFL championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts, often called football’s greatest game. Tittle did not play in that game, but several of his Giants teammates did, and Halberstam wanted to ask about them.
“He wasn’t going to write about me,” Tittle notes.
Still, he probably would have asked about the photo.
Tittle, like the editors at the Post-Gazette, had failed at first to see the beauty in the image but later came to appreciate the poignancy of it.
“That was the end of the road,” says Tittle, who played in pain the rest of the season but was ineffective and unable to rally the Giants, whose string of three consecutive Eastern Conference championships ended with a 2-10-2 record and Tittle’s retirement. “It was the end of my dream. It was over.”
Surprisingly, for an image that Tittle says “made me more famous than all the footballs I threw,” Berman’s photo was not published in the Post-Gazette because editors said it lacked action. It wasn’t until after Berman entered it into contests that the now famous image took on a life of its own, winning a national award, securing a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and earning wide acclaim as one of the most recognizable sports photographs of the 20th century.
“That was my chance to win a Pulitzer,” Berman, who died in 2002, later lamented, “but the photo was ineligible because it wasn’t printed.”
Still, the image helped to change the way photographers looked at sports, leading them to focus on reactions as well as more standard game coverage.
“It said to a lot of people that sometimes the most revealing sports photograph was made after the play was done or the game was over,” Rich Clarkson, former director of photography at National Geographic, told The Times in 2002. “It led other photographers to open their eyes to things other than peak action.”
Years later, Tittle says, Baker even used the photo in his campaign to win election as the first African American sheriff in North Carolina’s Wake County, a position the late Steelers lineman held for 24 years until 2002.
Says Tittle, laughing, “He put my picture on his campaign posters and said, ‘If you don’t obey the law, this is what Big John will do to you.’ ”
Tittle, a father of four and grandfather to seven, was 34 when he was traded to the Giants. He had spent the previous 10 seasons with the 49ers, had established his Bay Area insurance business and seriously considered retiring rather than reporting to the Giants, a move that probably would have kept him out of the Hall of Fame.
In New York, he punched his Hall ticket. And though his first three seasons ended with losses in the NFL championship game, he was OK with that.
“Of course, winning is the most important thing,” he says. “But being introduced before the championship game and running out there -- ‘No. 14, Y.A. Tittle,’ and 75,000 people stand up to cheer you -- that’s championship enough. Not as good as the real McCoy, but that thrill of getting there was a tremendous satisfaction.”
In New York in the early 1960s, he was the star of stars.
Then, for better and worse, came that Sunday at Pittsburgh.
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jerome.crowe@latimes.com
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9d3ce75fe86f19b2db8a4271c1c5e437 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-29-me-homeless29-story.html | Seeking out the most vulnerable | Seeking out the most vulnerable
With its storefront tributes to Southern California’s surfing culture and L.A.'s hipster elite, the leafy dinosaur topiary and gleaming signs that promise multiple movies, Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade is a popular destination for tens of thousands each week.
In the middle of the night, it is a destination of another sort for a smattering of the city’s chronically homeless. It is those inhabitants whom social workers hoped to encounter early Monday.
One man, wrapped in an orange scarf and dingy blankets, slept near the entrance to Barney’s Beanery. A nearby walker was draped with his only personal belongings, protected from the almost constant drizzle.
“Am I in your way or something?” he asked after he was awakened at 3:15 a.m.
“No, you’re fine,” John Maceri said. “We’re with the city of Santa Monica and we want to help you.”
Maceri, the executive director of the Ocean Park Community Center, was one of 50 people helping conduct a survey of the chronically homeless in Santa Monica in the early morning.
It was the fourth of seven days during which teams of people from the city, nonprofit social service agencies, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the county’s Department of Mental Health are attempting to count the number of homeless. The goal is to find those who are at the greatest risk of dying on the streets.
Although the man in the orange scarf didn’t know it, he is part of a growing social experiment that some experts say is helping shrink the chronically homeless population in major urban centers.
Maceri and two colleagues interviewed him for about 30 minutes, asking about his vital statistics and health. He is in his late 40s, a veteran and hearing-impaired, he told the social workers. The Third Street Promenade, he said, is his home.
“I live on the Promenade!” the man in the orange scarf proclaimed as Maceri jotted down answers and Ed Parker, a street outreach coordinator for Step Up on Second, complimented him on his receptiveness to their questions.
After the interview, the social workers handed him a $5 gift certificate from a fast-food restaurant. Maceri and his teammates went through the same process with seven other people sleeping on the Promenade. Five of them agreed to take their survey.
“The people out here in the middle of the night sleeping are the most challenging to get to use social services,” said Danielle Noble, the leader of Maceri’s group and senior administrative analyst with Santa Monica’s Homeless Services office.
Noble and others say their hope is to get the most vulnerable homeless people into housing and help all the chronically homeless get in touch with agencies that can get them off the streets more quickly.
The project is the latest of Santa Monica’s efforts to end its chronic homeless problem. Every night, an estimated 600 people sleep at shelters and on the city’s sidewalks, streets and benches, city officials say.
The city formally launched its Chronic Homeless Project in 2004. As of this month, 77 people who had been chronically homeless are now housed, according to Julie Rusk, human services manager for Santa Monica.
In October, Rusk said, the city decided to collaborate with Common Ground, a New York City nonprofit group that launched a similar, successful effort to house homeless people living in Times Square.
Common Ground’s approach is a technological breakthrough, said Gary Blasi, a UCLA law professor who has studied homelessness for 25 years.
“It’s innovative because you are looking at the root of the problem and finding the homeless instead of them finding you,” said Blasi, who observed another Common Ground effort in December on Los Angeles’ skid row.
“Normally, the chronically homeless make it to agencies when in crisis, like emergency rooms,” Blasi said. The Common Ground “approach isn’t an exact science but targets the chronically homeless, the more difficult ones, that the shelter system historically leaves out.”
In December, volunteers from county agencies and social service groups canvassed about 40 blocks of skid row with Common Ground, plotting the concentration of tents and sleeping bags and identifying hubs of drug activity.
The surveyors counted 471 people regularly sleeping on the area’s streets and persuaded 350 of them to be interviewed. Recently, Los Angeles County supervisors unanimously approved a $5.6-million plan to house and provide health services for the 50 most vulnerable homeless people on skid row identified by the survey.
Each person is given a “vulnerability score” that is determined by factors such as length of homelessness and physical and mental health status, in an effort to predict an individual’s risk of dying on the streets.
Rusk said that Santa Monica’s goal is to house the 10 most vulnerable people as soon as possible. Once they are housed, efforts will be directed toward housing the next 10 most vulnerable people, going down the list as far as possible, Rusk said.
During an initial head count last Friday morning, the Santa Monica surveyors counted 277 individuals sleeping on streets in the early morning. The teams are scheduled to go out again from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. today and Wednesday.
A public briefing on the survey will be held at 3 p.m. Thursday at the Santa Monica Main Library Auditorium, 601 Santa Monica Blvd.
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francisco.varaorta@ latimes.com
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20320196476e6c15d622196dea156f98 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-30-et-quick30.s1-story.html | It’s alcohol rehab for Sean Young | It’s alcohol rehab for Sean Young
Sean Young has entered rehabilitation for alcohol abuse following a weekend outburst in which she was heckling from the audience at the Directors Guild of America awards.
The 48-year-old actress was escorted from the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency in Century City on Saturday night after sparring with Julian Schnabel, who was nominated for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
“Actress Sean Young voluntarily admitted herself yesterday to a rehabilitation center for treatment related to alcoholism,” a statement from Insignia PR said Tuesday. “It is understood that Young has struggled against the disease for many years.”
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8fede822e97a8d0f41bc40be85eed551 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-30-me-daniel30-story.html | President Truman’s only child was successful writer | President Truman’s only child was successful writer
Margaret Truman Daniel, who was the only child of President Truman and his wife, Bess, and who forged successive careers as a concert singer, an actress, a high-profile wife and mother, and a prolific biographer and mystery novelist, died Tuesday. She was 83.
Daniel, the widow of former New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel, died in Chicago after a brief illness, according to the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. A longtime resident of New York City, she recently moved to an assisted living facility in Chicago, where her eldest son, Clifton Truman Daniel, lives. A cause of death was not released.
Arguably the first first daughter to be subjected to the intrusive scrutiny of the burgeoning modern communications media, Daniel was a student at George Washington University when her father ascended to the presidency upon the death in 1945 of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lessons in the perils of unwanted political celebrity were instant.
She set off something of a public relations food fight when she quietly instructed a waiter, “No potatoes, please,” and later said she drank tomato juice while dieting. The Potato Growers Assn. quickly lodged an official complaint and peppered the White House with protest letters. The Tomato Growers Assn. countered with an onslaught of supportive letters. The groups waged a marketing war in the national media, touting the nutritional value of their products.
When Daniel was photographed wearing a scarf, Women’s Wear Daily editorialized that she had damaged the millinery industry -- a dispute quieted only after she wore a hat to another publicized event. Her hatted photo, in turn, set off protests from hairdressers.
Suddenly aware that what she said, what she did and how she looked would make her the most spotlighted White House offspring in history, she muted her comments and made sure her appearance in public was politically correct. As a young, single woman, she largely postponed dating to avoid false reports of pending engagements.
For seven years, she said later, her goal was to behave so that she wouldn’t “wind up with a bad headline.” In the process, she developed a longtime disdain for Washington and privately came to refer to the White House as “the great white jail.”
What Mary Margaret Truman, the girl born and bred in Independence, Mo., would not mute, mollify or abandon was her quest -- somewhat unusual for a well-to-do young woman of the mid-20th century -- for a career.
First came singing.
Although she majored in history, she had taken voice lessons from childhood and was determined to make it as a concert singer. From 1947 until 1954, she sang operatic and classical selections at sold-out concerts across the country, receiving a warm reception from affectionate (or politically toadying) audiences but frigid reaction from critics.
Washington Post critic Paul Hume was famously scolded by President Truman when he wrote of her 1949 concert at Washington’s Constitution Hall, “Miss Truman is still too much of a vocal beginner to appear in public.”
A 1947 concert in Pittsburgh had elicited similar criticism. “In one word, childish,” snapped the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette echoed: “It is a pleasant, sweet voice, but it lacks volume and maturity. She sings with clarity and . . . precision, but leaves a great deal to be desired in musicality.”
When she appeared the same year at the Hollywood Bowl along with legendary conductor Eugene Ormandy, 15,000 people applauded. But Albert Goldberg, then music critic of the Los Angeles Times, cautioned: “Interpretively, Miss Truman is not yet far beyond the student stage.” He added that her voice “possesses promise” but required training, and he praised her poise in front of a large audience. She later said that she “was so cold I didn’t think of being frightened.”
Long after her eight-year concert career ended, she told The Times, “I knew a lot of people came out of curiosity. But I always hoped they stayed because they liked it.”
Her friends thought the critics drove her from singing, but Daniel insisted she simply became more interested in acting.
She had appeared in high school and college stage productions and in a few radio programs for children. That limited experience, combined with encouragement from actress Helen Hayes, bankable name recognition and an able agent, won her a professional radio play debut opposite James Stewart in 1951.
She portrayed his wife in an NBC adaptation of the 1950 motion picture comedy “The Jackpot” that had starred Stewart and Barbara Hale.
Daniel was under contract to NBC and, from 1954 to 1961, was co-host of the five-minute radio spot “Authors in the News” and in 1955-56 was co-host with Mike Wallace of the radio program “Weekday.” Filling in for Edward R. Murrow on his TV show “Person to Person,” she interviewed her parents in 1955.
Her marriage at 32 to Clifton Daniel in 1956 and the birth of their four sons sharply curtailed her acting career. But she continued to appear in summer stock productions and in 1965 was host of the CBS television program “International Hour.”
She settled happily into the role of wife, mother and New York society matron -- a happiness only slightly dimmed when she moved back to Washington in the mid-1970s after her husband became Washington bureau chief for the New York Times.
But another career she had never planned or prepared for was gestating, and that was writing. Critics were kinder about the efforts of Daniel the untrained writer than they had been about her carefully tutored efforts as a singer.
Writing, she once told an interviewer, was “the hardest and most exacting career I’ve ever had.”
She wrote her first book in self-defense. Knowing that an unauthorized biography of her life was planned, she wanted to head it off by relating her own life in her own way. “Souvenir: Margaret Truman’s Own Story” was written with the help of Margaret Cousins and published in 1956.
That account of her Missouri childhood, life in the White House and concert singing career was greeted by the New York Herald Tribune book review as “a gracefully written tale of an average American girl drawn by chance into the White House.”
In 1972, she published the bestselling biography of her father, “Harry S. Truman.” Critics praised its homey personal insights into Truman as a family man and its candor in relating such incidents as Winston Churchill telling Truman in 1952 that he had considered him an inept successor to Roosevelt. The British statesman added, she wrote: “I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”
She wrote “Women of Courage” in 1976 about 12 admirable women she had selected from Revolutionary to modern times and dedicated it to her mother, who died in 1982. Four years later, she wrote a rare biography of her mother, “Bess W. Truman,” a woman so private she burned most of her personal correspondence, leaving little information for historians to explore.
In nonfiction, Daniel also edited two volumes of her father’s letters and wrote the 1995 group biography “First Ladies.”
Her affinity for mystery-novel writing perhaps afforded Daniel her greatest fame, second only to her stint as first daughter. She wrote at least 20 mysteries and came to the genre almost by accident. While working on a history of children who had lived in the White House, she lost interest. An avid reader of mystery novels, Daniel mentioned to her agent that she had an idea for a murder set in the White House.
The concept of a former resident concocting a murder story in that setting was irresistible. “Murder in the White House” was published in 1980.
Her son Clifton had his own wry explanation for his mother’s mystery-writing career, noting in his memoir: “My mother seems to have a strong opinion, often bad, of almost everyone in Washington. That’s why she writes those murder mysteries; so she can kill them all off, one at a time.”
Critical reaction to the first novel was lukewarm at best. “Margaret Truman is not a terrible writer,” commented The Times’ reviewer. “ ‘Murder in the White House’ exhibits a reasonable though hardly overwhelming command of the language, a fair-to-middling eye for character and an above-average notion of how to plot a mystery. Tolstoy is safe -- so is Agatha Christie -- but Truman has constructed a decent summer amusement.”
Readers embraced the book, making it a bestseller, and eagerly anticipated the “Capitol Crimes” series she began churning out.
Utilizing her familiarity with the lofty settings of government power and of the diplomats, politicians and pundits who peopled Washington, she offered entertaining lessons about the federal government.
Reviewing her 1992 “Murder at the Pentagon,” critic Charles Champlin wrote in The Times that “the plotting indeed is satisfyingly convoluted and the large-scale resolution worthy of [Robert] Ludlum.”
A Washington Post reviewer said that Daniel “writes a lively Washington scene with the sure hand of one who knows her way around the streets, institutions . . . people and politics.”
Born Feb. 17, 1924, Mary Margaret Truman was the doting and doted upon daughter of haberdasher Harry Truman and Elizabeth Virginia Wallace Truman. At 4, she began accompanying her father on campaign trips around the state, shaking hands and saying, “How do you do?” When at 8 she asked for an electric train for Christmas, she received a baby grand piano.
She was only 10 when she first moved to Washington, D.C., after her father was elected senator. Uncertain of reelection, the Trumans rented apartments for the six-month annual Senate session, buying a house only after he had won a second term in 1940. She attended the private girls’ school Gunston Hall and graduated in 1946 from George Washington University.
Her father died in 1972. Her husband died in 2000, the same year their second son, William, was fatally struck by a car while crossing New York’s Park Avenue. Besides son Clifton, she is survived by sons Harrison and Thomas and five grandchildren.
A memorial service is being planned at the Truman Library in Independence.
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51ac8f4b8522d89be0b3758dc19aaf5e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-30-na-briefs30.s2-story.html | Detroit mayor names new aide | Detroit mayor names new aide
Detroit Democratic Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick named a new chief of staff a day after the woman who previously held the post resigned amid allegations that she and the mayor had lied under oath about an affair.
Kandia Milton, who has served as deputy chief of staff, was appointed to Christine Beatty’s job, Kilpatrick announced in a written statement.
The mayor’s office also said he planned to address the city for the first time since the scandal broke, with an address tonight from his church.
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151eced5471a9f3a40b7759e98051309 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-31-sp-collison31-story.html | Collison is back in step again | Collison is back in step again
June Collison grabbed the arm of her husband, Dennis, early in last Thursday’s UCLA game at Oregon. She had just watched her son, Darren, the Bruins point guard, do a joyful, instinctive cross-over dribble, an insouciant moment of playing basketball by feel.
Collison’s sleight of hand earned him a small bit of space, just enough so he could back up and get an open jump shot.
“At the same time,” June Collison recalled, “I looked at Dennis, he looked at me, and we both said, ‘Darren’s back.’ ”
Collison, the Bruins’ 6-foot-1, 165-pound point guard, scored 22 and 33 points in fifth-ranked UCLA’s road wins at Oregon and Oregon State last weekend. He’ll try to keep it going as the Bruins continue Pacific 10 Conference play tonight against Arizona State and Saturday against Arizona. Both games will be at Pauley Pavilion.
Each of Collison’s scoring marks against the Oregon schools were career highs, but it wasn’t the points that brought an inerasable grin.
“That’s how you’re supposed to play basketball,” Collison said. “This game is never predetermined. You make a play based on the play before. You take advantage. You never predict.”
From the moment Collison went with his instincts in the first minute of UCLA’s first exhibition game in November, when he tried to make a cut and his left knee gave way, this basketball season has been one of frustration and determination for Collison.
What at first seemed to be just a sore knee turned out to be a severe sprain that kept him out of practice for weeks and caused him to sit out the first six games.
It also caused him angst trying to play with a big knee brace. Then, as the knee began to feel better, Collison suffered from food poisoning and sustained a hip pointer against Washington.
“I had tried to stay upbeat through everything,” Collison said. “The hip thing was hard to take.”
Collison had ambitious plans for this season. Watching film, he’d picked up bits and pieces of how opposing guards scooted in front of him, disrupting the pick-and-roll play that is critical to UCLA’s offense.
Two and sometimes three times a day, Collison worked out. He also lifted weights.
He worked on basketball moves at Los Osos High with other major college players from the Inland Empire, Sean Marshall from Boston College and Anthony Goods from Stanford. He attended Steve Nash’s guard camp in New Jersey. His former youth coach, Keith Howard, accompanied him here, there and everywhere.
“By the time the season got here,” Howard said, “Darren was just raring to go.”
Early in that first exhibition game against Azusa Pacific, Dennis Collison turned to June and said, “Darren is dragging his left leg.”
June didn’t see it and Darren kept playing, but when the game was over a message was given to the Collisons that they should come to the locker room.
“When I got downstairs I could see the frustration in Darren’s eyes,” June said. “I looked at his knee and it wasn’t swollen. That’s what I kept saying. It wasn’t swollen.”
It was, however, loose and painful, and the sprain that was at first expected to keep Collison out a couple of weeks kept him away from the game a month. And, even after he returned, away from being himself, a whirling dervish capable of playing the best on-ball defense in the country according to UCLA Coach Ben Howland.
Until last Thursday.
Which was a surprise even to Collison. For while his knee was feeling better, the hip pointer brought daily pain.
After practice on Jan. 22, Collison said he wasn’t sure if he could play against the Ducks. Knowing that teammates Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Lorenzo Mata-Real were both unlikely to play because of concussions, Collison kept quiet about his hip.
“It was really paining me and I wasn’t sure how it was going to come out,” he said. “But with Luc and Lorenzo hurting, Mike Roll out, all the factors, I just went out and played. I took control and all of a sudden, I just realized, my instincts were back.”
Said Howard: “Darren’s greatest gift is his ability to improvise. He’s not one to calculate what he’s going to do and in order for him to be a high-level athlete he can’t think about what the body is going to do. What I saw this past weekend, his lateral quickness is back, his acceleration is back. His first step was back.”
Collison said there was a purpose to his struggles. “What I learned is every game, appreciate it,” he said. “Cherish every moment. Always be positive, never be negative.”
Also one other thing: “I’m so ready to play.”
TONIGHT
vs. Arizona State, 7:30, FSN Prime Ticket
Radio -- 1150.
Site -- Pauley Pavilion.
Records -- UCLA 18-2 overall, 6-1 Pac-10; Arizona State 14-5, 4-3.
Update -- Four of the top five Sun Devils scorers are from Southern California, including freshman guard James Harden from Lakewood Artesia High, who leads the team with 18.8 points per game; junior Jeff Pendergraph, from Etiwanda High, who has 31 blocked shots and is shooting 62.2%, second best in the Pac-10; sophomore Derek Glasser, a guard from Artesia who ranks second in the nation in assist/turnover ratio; and sophomore Jerren Shipp from L.A. Fairfax High, who will be going against his brother, UCLA junior Josh Shipp.
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diane.pucin@latimes.com
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TONIGHT
No. 5 UCLA vs. Arizona State
at Pauley Pavilion, 7:30, Prime
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64458bc308aabcad8d6a3bd528f0c6f4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-01-fi-techblog1.s1-story.html | Would Bill Gates be No. 2? | Would Bill Gates be No. 2?
Now that Bill Gates no longer has to worry about running Microsoft, why not help run the country?
The Microsoft Corp. co-founder is mentioned by some in political circles as the “dream running mate” for Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, according to Politico.com.
The site asked 14 consultants, staffers, fundraisers and historians to name “their most unconventional -- but reasonably viable” vice presidential choices for McCain and Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Also making the list of eight long shots was Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of EBay Inc. and a McCain fundraiser.
Former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Carly Fiorina also has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential choice. But Gates hasn’t gotten much love as a potential veep. Talk about campaign finance reform: The world’s third-richest man could help the McCain ticket obliterate Obama’s Internet-fueled fundraising advantage.
It got us to thinking: Who else in the tech world would liven up a presidential ticket?
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: Unless Obama picks Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, this could be the only way to bring a little of that Clintonesque boom-decade swagger back to the White House.
Google co-founder and President Larry Page: If Google’s going to run the world one day, this would be a good steppingstone. His fellow co-founder, Sergey Brin, is ineligible for the presidency because he was born in Russia. Page just makes the constitutional age cutoff, having turned 35 in March (sorry, Facebook fans, Mark Zuckerberg won’t be old enough until 2019).
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de85812f5d53dd3ed7295bd1d0902fad | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-01-na-energy1-story.html | McCain energy record is on/off | McCain energy record is on/off
Crisscrossing the country over the last two weeks to promote his energy plans, Sen. John McCain promised a forceful national strategy to combat global warming and end U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
“We must steer far clear of the errors and false assumptions that have marked the energy policies of nearly 20 Congresses and seven presidents,” the presumptive Republican nominee told a crowd of oil executives in Houston.
But McCain’s record of tackling energy policy on Capitol Hill shows little of the clear direction he says would come from a McCain White House.
Instead, the Arizona senator has swerved from one position to another over the years, taking often contradictory stances on the federal government’s role in energy policy.
At times he has backed measures to ease restrictions on oil drilling off the coast and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Other times he has voted to keep them.
He has championed standards to require that automakers make vehicles more fuel-efficient, yet opposed standards to require that utilities use less fossil fuel by generating more power from renewable sources, such as wind and solar.
McCain has rejected federal tax breaks for renewable energy producers, but backs billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry.
He has criticized corn-based ethanol for doing “nothing to increase our energy independence.” Yet while campaigning in 2006 in the Midwest corn belt, McCain called ethanol a “vital, vital alternative energy source.”
Senior McCain policy advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin said McCain’s positions reflected a pragmatic approach to governing. “Sen. McCain is interested in getting results,” he said.
But many environmentalists see it as inconsistency. “There is a very sporadic pattern here,” said Tim Greef, deputy legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters.
McCain has shown more interest in confronting global warming than most of his GOP colleagues, a facet of his record that has helped shape his image as a straight-talking maverick who stands up to his party.
A self-proclaimed acolyte of former Democratic Rep. Morris K. Udall of Arizona, the legendary environmental lawmaker, McCain was among the first Republicans to call for action by the federal government.
In 2002, he collaborated with Democrats on legislation to require automakers to increase vehicle fuel efficiency. And he has broken with his party to push legislation to create a federal system for capping greenhouse gases.
At the same time, McCain became a vocal critic of government subsidies, particularly for oil and gas producers. In a debate, he derided the 2003 energy bill for “increasing our dependence on conventional fuels” and was one of six GOP senators to oppose it.
But the senator’s legislative work on energy and climate change is also full of contradictions. McCain -- who argues the federal government should not be “picking favorites” -- has routinely backed federal subsidies for some energy producers but not others.
While McCain has talked tough about giveaways for oil companies, for example, he has only occasionally challenged the industry.
In 2003 and 2005, McCain criticized his colleagues for giving tax breaks to oil producers. “It doesn’t make fiscal or common sense,” he said in one debate, “to provide billions of taxpayer subsidies to encourage the production of energy by companies that are already gaining tremendous riches at today’s sky-high oil and gas prices.”
He has also acted to protect the industry’s bottom line. In 1999, McCain backed efforts to prevent the Interior Department from collecting more royalties from oil companies drilling on public land.
The department wanted payments to reflect the market price of oil, a change that could have boosted receipts by an estimated $60 million a year or more.
Six years later, after rejecting offshore drilling, he voted for legislation that opened up large sections of the Gulf of Mexico to exploration, a major industry priority.
Holtz-Eakin said McCain believed that states should have the authority to decide whether there was drilling along their coastlines. (In contrast, McCain voted to deny governors authority to veto liquefied natural gas terminals in their states.)
McCain announced two weeks ago that he favored more oil exploration off the nation’s coasts to bring down the cost of gasoline. “We must deal with the here and now,” he said.
On his recent energy tour, McCain also called for 45 new nuclear plants by 2030, a goal he is prepared to back with billions of federal dollars.
That too is a change for the four-term senator. Earlier in his congressional career, McCain was a consistent opponent of subsidies for nuclear power, voting five times in the 1990s against taxpayer aid for research on new-generation nuclear reactors. As recently as 2003, McCain opposed federal loan guarantees to help the nuclear industry finance new plants.
Three years ago, however, McCain began pushing more taxpayer assistance to help develop nuclear power as part of his proposed legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group and Public Citizen estimated a version of McCain’s bill would authorize more than $3.7 billion in subsidies for new nuclear plants.
Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based group that has worked with McCain to fight pork-barrel spending, said that kind of aid used to trouble the senator.
“Sen. McCain was a leader in going after subsidies,” Ellis said. “Government support for an industry that can’t stand on its own two feet seems to contradict his record.”
McCain now defends the subsidies as essential to kick-start the industry. “If we’re looking for a vast supply of reliable and low-cost electricity, with zero carbon emissions and long-term price stability, that’s the working definition of nuclear energy,” he said recently.
On the campaign trail, McCain has also said the federal government should spend $30 billion over the next 15 years to help companies develop less polluting ways to burn coal.
And he has indicated support for legislation to force automakers to build more vehicles that can run on fuels other than gasoline.
“This can be done with a simple federal standard to hasten the conversion of all new vehicles in America to flex-fuel technology, allowing drivers to use alcohol fuels instead of gas in their cars,” McCain said last week, adding he is prepared to sign a bill to do that.
Yet McCain has been a consistent opponent of standards that would require utilities to derive a minimum percentage of their power from renewable sources, such as wind, solar or geothermal.
“I have heard from utilities in my own state that a federal mandate of this sort is largely a requirement to import wind,” McCain said during a 2005 Senate debate. McCain has voted against renewable standards at least four times since 2002. He has also opposed tax incentives to encourage the development of power from sources other than nuclear.
In 2002, he ridiculed a proposed federal incentive for companies trying to convert animal waste into power, asking on the Senate floor: “What’s happened to man’s best friend, the dog? Why can’t he make a deposit to help reduce our energy dependence?”
He opposed tax credits in 2001 and 2006 for companies that generate power from solar, wind, geothermal and ocean wave energy, all of which produce no greenhouse gases.
McCain derided the same tax breaks two weeks ago as a “patchwork of tax credits” that are “temporary and often the result of who had the best lobbyist.”
“We will reform this effort,” he promised, “so that it is fair, rational and permanent, letting the market decide which ideas can move us toward clean and renewable energy.”
But when McCain summed up his energy initiative last week -- recapping plans for more oil exploration, more nuclear plants, and federal support for cleaner coal plants and new car batteries -- he offered no proposal to expand the use of renewable energy.
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noam.levey@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
McCain’s changing energy agenda
Issue: Nuclear
Current position:
Last month called for 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030, and has backed billions of dollars in federal aid for development.
Prior position:
Voted against federal aid for nuclear reactor development in 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996, and against billions of dollars in loan guarantees in 2003.
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Issue: Offshore drilling
Current position:
Last month called for an end to moratorium on new oil exploration off the U.S. coast.
Prior position:
In 2003, voted to stop the creation of an inventory of offshore oil and gas resources.
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Issue: Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Current position:
Last month rejected drilling in ANWR, saying there are “some areas of our country that are best left undisturbed.”
Prior position:
In 1995 and 2000, voted against measures in the annual budget debate to protect the refuge.
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Issue: Federal energy standards
Current position:
Last week called for a “federal standard to hasten the conversion” of vehicles from gasoline to alternative fuels.
Prior position:
In 2002 and 2005, opposed standards to require utilities to get more power from renewable sources such as wind and solar.
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Issue: Ethanol
Current position:
While campaigning last year, he said: “We need to increase our use of ethanol.”
Prior position:
In 2003, he said: “There is actually a net energy loss from ethanol.”
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Source: Times reporting
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d1092d5c801c4007cb13e0a5f52f98a3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-01-na-pinball1-story.html | Keeping the ball in play | Keeping the ball in play
Tim Quintana hunches over a pinball machine and stares down Spider-Man’s archenemies: Kingpin, Lizard and Scorpion. He pulls the plunger and a silver ball shoots onto the playfield, a maze of brightly lit bumpers and targets.
The ball darts over a comic-book-style drawing of Spider-Man reaching for his lady love, Mary Jane. The machine beeps: Blip-blip-blip-blip. The ball clangs off two mushroom-shaped bumpers. It plows into three square targets. Blip-blip-blip-blip.
With each blip, Quintana’s score rises: 448,400. 448,500. The ball bumps a target decorated with a small spider web. A green dot lights up. More blips. More points. More blips.
Silence. The ball is stuck.
It shakes Quintana out of his pinball trance. A welfare caseworker, he whizzes through his lunch breaks in this dim strip mall storefront called the Pinball Hall of Fame.
“It makes you feel like a kid for an hour,” he says. “Forget work, forget everything for one hour.”
Quintana seeks out the games of his youth -- like The Amazing Spider-Man -- among the 200 machines belonging to a pinhead named Tim Arnold. People come to his arcade to relive childhood afternoons. His Hall of Fame has also become a memorial for a pastime upstaged by Xboxes, PlayStations and Wiis.
Pinball, once a pop-culture touchstone, is sputtering. Only one manufacturer remains -- Stern Pinball Inc. in Illinois. In the early ‘90s, the company made up to 40,000 machines annually. Today, it turns out just 10,000, and about 40% of them are sold directly for home use.
Roger Sharpe, co-director of the International Pinball Flipper Assn., blames the decline on the machines themselves. The newer ones have a half-mile of wiring and about 3,500 parts. It’s inevitable something will break.
Arnold’s arcade is a throwback, with Mike and Ike candy machines, mismatched carpet, change machines rescued from Dumpsters, and posters for mid-'90s games such as Congo, whose slogan is: “Hippos, Snakes and Killer Apes. (And that’s just the first ball).” The Hall of Fame is open daily for at least 12 hours, and Arnold is there much of the time. There’s no phone: He fears pinball fanatics would take up his days with stories.
The customers, about 300 daily, are mostly male and middle-aged. Some are recovering gambling addicts who find the lights and pings a substitute for slot machines. They gawk at a slick Wheel of Fortune and an eerie Pinball Circus, which has a clown with an exposed brain and a figurine twisted like a Cirque du Soleil performer. Only two circus games were made.
“This is history, though it may be more whimsical,” says Sharpe, whose group runs pinball tournaments and oversees player rankings. “But it’s got its place in our culture and shouldn’t be forgotten.”
Sharpe says Arnold, who spends afternoons poring over coffee-stained blueprints to fix his machines, is helping “to keep this game alive.”
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When Arnold was growing up in Michigan, pinball was immensely popular. But, he recalls, his parents cringed at how much he liked playing the games. Many government officials equated pinball with gambling. It was banned in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago until the ‘70s, when Arnold was a teenager.
This, of course, made the game even more appealing.
Arnold had an entrepreneurial streak and at 16, he was buying gumball machines and installing them in stores. He, his brother and a friend emptied their wallets to buy their first pinball machine, Mayfair, for $165. The game is based on the movie “My Fair Lady,” and its bygone-era artwork depicts ladies in feathers and gentlemen in top hats.
Arnold eventually owned so many pinball games that his parents bought him a Dodge van so he could transport and install them in pizza parlors and arcades.
He was so dreading college in the mid-'70s that he and his older brother indulged in what seemed a boyish fantasy: They opened an arcade. His parents weren’t thrilled, but they appreciated their sons’ money-making bent -- Dad was a salesman who peddled miniature replicas of the Statue of Liberty.
The arcade was a disaster. People swiped money from the games. The building’s electrical wiring caught fire. In about three months, the arcade closed.
A few months later, in 1976, the brothers heard about a shuttered arcade in East Lansing. They rented the space, installed 28 machines and named it Pinball Pete’s. Near Michigan State University and a bar teeming with college kids, this arcade was far more successful. Pinball was also booming. The Who’s campy rock opera “Tommy” spawned the hit song “Pinball Wizard” and a machine with back glass depicting the movie’s stars. The brothers opened another Pinball Pete’s. And another. They ran seven, all in Michigan.
Arnold eventually grew tired of juggling the businesses, and he loathed the onslaught of graphics-heavy games: He thinks they dumbed down arcade play. He retired in 1990 at age 35 with about $1 million. Arnold and his partner, Charlotte Owens, lived comfortably off his investments.
Arnold had long aspired to open a pinball repository. His rationale was similar to that of a kid with the newest video console: What’s the use of having cool games if you’re playing them alone?
His pinball palace, Arnold figured, would only work in a tourist-packed city. New York and Los Angeles: too expensive. Orlando: too humid. In 1990, he and Owens bought a house with a tennis court on 2 1/2 acres in Vegas, whose neon Strip resembles a pinball game’s playfield.
He lined his tennis court with games and covered them with tarps. He built a 10,000-square-foot windowless hangar in his backyard. To get there, you walk by other evidence of Arnold’s affinity for cast-offs: 2,000 sun-cracked bowling balls; a turnstile from the New York New York casino, and a 10- to 12-foot-long fiberglass hand that Arnold rescued from Caesars Palace.
He has packed the hangar with 800 or so of the bulky machines, some stacked 18 feet high, while they wait to be fixed. Many were rescued from drained swimming pools, swap meets, car dealerships and tobacco warehouses.
For years, Arnold lugged the machines into the backyard for parties to raise money for his repository. In 2006, 16 years after moving to Vegas, Arnold opened the nonprofit Hall of Fame in a dowdy plaza a few miles east of the Strip. A devoted volunteer known as Hippy helps care for the 4,500-square-foot space. Arnold wishes he could move to a bigger place with room for 600 to 800 games (including one each of all 384 produced by his favorite manufacturer, D. Gottlieb & Co.).
Arnold doesn’t charge admission. Each month, he takes in about $16,000 from the games played, but some months that’s barely enough to get by. Proceeds go to charities (mainly the Salvation Army), which led Las Vegas CityLife, an alternative weekly, to name Arnold one of its “local heroes.”
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On this afternoon, Mark Scheffki walks into the Hall of Fame, and nostalgia takes over.
Scheffki, 46, drove here to determine the worth of his parents’ 1970s machine, Bali-Hi. But he was drawn instead to the decade-old game Scared Stiff. Elvira -- the self-proclaimed “Mistress of the Dark” -- skulks on its back glass with a black cat, a skull, a frog and a hand waving a machete. Scheffki sprints through levels that are “Hair Raising!” and “Skin Crawling!” Elvira’s voice shouts: “Frogs everywhere!”
The ball shoots past a coffin and two Elviras with low-cut dresses and come-hither stares. The machine mimics a bubbling caldron: pop-pop-pop-pop. The ball wriggles through a ramp, skirts flippers designed to resemble bones, and disappears.
Scheffki, a plumber weaned on pinball as a kid in Chicago, fishes into his camouflage shorts for quarters. He racks up 3,042,230 points. The machine jams.
Elvira: “You just don’t listen, do you?”
Arnold, 52, hears this from across the room, “like how mothers can sense when their kids are in trouble.”
He hustles over, unlocks the machine and plucks out a stray part. Scheffki asks Arnold about the Bali-Hi machine, and Arnold says it could fetch up to $1,000 online.
“Lucky it’s not an eight-track tape player,” Arnold says wryly. “Then it would have no value.”
Fans are whirring overhead. A machine somewhere is humming the theme to “The Lone Ranger.” In the row behind Scheffki, Quintana gives up on Spider-Man. He heads to a machine immortalizing the band Kiss.
“I’m the biggest freaking Kiss fan,” Quintana says in a near-whisper. He strokes the glass. A notecard says this was the 11,381st of 17,000 Kiss machines made -- “a true classic.” Gene Simmons’ tongue unfurls in one corner; Ace Frehley glares from the other. Kiss babes preen in black bodices. Snakes spit fire. Quintana’s game is over in less time than a song. “There’s nothing worse than putting three balls right down the middle,” he says.
Quintana, 30, who has a short ponytail and a soul patch, got hooked on pinball a year ago when a friend stumbled onto the Hall of Fame. Quintana steps outside to smoke. His phone rings. It’s his wife.
“I’m playing pinball,” he says.
She understands, and tells him to call her later.
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ashley.powers@latimes.com
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0be56bd2cec29f4e0bbcd4909805d653 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-02-et-brief2-story.html | A ring of mire | A ring of mire
SO “THE LORD OF THE RINGS” made no money.
Let me amend that. The film trilogy, which grossed $2.96 billion worldwide at the box office and $3 billion or so more in DVD and ancillary markets, has not made any money for the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the famous books.
Tolkien obviously isn’t Peter Jackson, who directed the franchise, or Liv Tyler or Viggo Mortensen, who starred in it, or New Line Cinema, the studio that financed it, or Miramax, which owned the film rights for a second but couldn’t get the movie made, or producer Saul Zaentz, who bought the rights in 1976. He’s just the guy who dreamed up the cosmology, the whole shebang of hobbits and dwarfs, orcs, ents, wargs, trolls, whatnot. “Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne.” Those were old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s words.
But he’s dead, so why should Hollywood share any of the dough?
I wondered if that’s what the Time Warner empire must be thinking when I waded through the lawsuit filed against New Line in February by Tolkien’s children on behalf of two Tolkien trusts. There are only two Tolkien children still living -- Christopher, age 83, and Priscilla, age 79 -- and the case is not scheduled to be heard until October 2009. Days after the filing, New Line folded and became a division of Warner Bros. -- some might call that karma.
Maybe I’m naive, but I find it hard to believe that not a sliver of gold could be found in all of Middle-earth for not only the aged Tolkiens but also the charitable trust that gets 50% of their fortune and distributes money to such causes as Save the Children, the Darfur Appeal, the National Campaign for Homeless People and UNICEF.
According to their lawsuit and lawyer Bonnie Eskenazi, Tolkien licensed motion picture rights to United Artists back in 1969 for a low six-figure sum and 7.5% of the “gross receipts.” Gross receipts are the money the distributor actually gets from the theaters and ancillary markets. (In the case of theatrical income, it’s usually about 50% of the box-office take.) “This is a deal under which we get a percentage of the gross once an artificial break-even is reached. The artificial break-even is essentially 2.6 times the negative cost of the film,” says Eskenazi.
New Line, which eventually secured the rights, was allowed to deduct some costs from its “Lord of the Rings” income such as taxes, but not the big-ticket expenses that studios like to take -- such as distribution fees or overhead, according to Eskenazi. So even with all the loot that New Line has pocketed on the films, there is not a shekel, a ducat, a baht, a euro or a dollar for some elderly Tolkiens? Eskenazi estimates the family is owed $150 million, but even that number is a little fuzzy, because according to the lawsuit the family has never been allowed to audit the second or third films.
I guess they’re supposed to just trust the studio.
Eskenazi explained that the family tried to settle their dispute with New Line for years, to little avail. “There were meetings and discussions out the wazoo, but New Line was entrenched. . . . We literally have gotten not a single penny of participation. New Line has said to us that, based on their reading of the contract, it doesn’t matter how much money the films make, they’ll never have to pay us anything, which is impossible.”
Multiple lawsuits
The Tolkiens are hardly the only ones who’ve had to take New Line to court to get what they see as their fair share.
In 2005, writer-director Jackson sued the studio, claiming he’d been underpaid by as much as $100 million because the company sold ancillary rights to other divisions of Warner Bros. at discounted prices, meaning there was less gross for gross-profit participants like Jackson. He also claimed he hadn’t been allowed to audit the books. That suit flared into an ugly personal battle between Jackson and then New Line chieftain Bob Shaye, and at one point the judge angrily fined the New Line legal team $125,000 for failing to produce (and potentially even destroying) relevant documents and e-mails. Still, that case was ultimately settled, as everyone wanted to get back to the serious business of making the double-film “LOTR” prequel, “The Hobbit,” with Jackson on board as producer.
Producer Zaentz also sued New Line -- twice. The first time he claimed the studio cheated him out of $20 million in royalties received from foreign investors. That suit was settled, and last December he sued again, claiming New Line wouldn’t let him audit their books.
“It’s Lord of the Lawsuits,” jokes attorney Pierce O’Donnell, who famously represented humorist Art Buchwald in his victorious “Coming to America” lawsuit against Paramount. “How much have these movies grossed? Hundreds of millions of dollars? You know what they say: The most creative people in Hollywood are accountants.”
Personally, I think Jackson deserves whatever he’s owed, although my tears stopped flowing down my cheek when I read in the New York Times that he’d already received $200 million from New Line even before the lawsuit started. And Zaentz, who did produce Ralph Bakshi’s animated “LOTR,” holds the record for biggest payday earned for movies he didn’t produce -- $188 million and counting.
According to the Tolkien lawsuit, part of the reason the Tolkien family has received no kwan from the films is that New Line has had to shell out so much money to previous rights holders Zaentz and Miramax (who both had 5% of the gross). New Line is including their fees in the cost of the negative, much as “a salary paid to the film’s editor or gaffer.”
Respectful disagreement
All of New Line’s litigation has been assumed by its corporate owner, Warner Bros., which is making pains to at least sound more conciliatory. A spokesman gave us the following statement: “The Tolkien estate is currently auditing New Line’s books and records for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films and we are working closely with the estate’s accountants and lawyers to facilitate and expedite this process. While we respectfully disagree with some of the estate’s positions, we are hopeful that the dispute can be amicably resolved once the audit has been completed.”
Recently, the judge in the case made a ruling that the Tolkien plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence to warrant their fraud and fiduciary claims but has given the Tolkiens a limited time to present more facts. Both sides are spinning the decision as a victory, and New Line is still on the hook for a potential $150 million in damages.
I wonder if the studio would have dared to treat Tolkien in such a cavalier manner if the author were still living. But those wiser in the ways of Hollywood explain that it’s unusual for an author to share profits in the first place.
“Authors and estates rarely have the leverage and status to get a gross deal,” says agent Michael Siegel, who represents Elmore Leonard and the estate of author Roald Dahl (which does get profit participation on film adaptations of his books). “It takes an extraordinary property with the right representation, and it’s very rare. Even in 1969, this was the kind of property that deserved it.
“That’s where the studios have wreaked havoc on the system,” says Siegel, explaining that studios like to include non-negotiable clauses, which can make it hard for “this profit threshold to have been achieved. There’s a tendency for authors and people around authors to feel they’re especially bullied, but authors don’t have the leverage that an actor or director has in a negotiation, so actors and directors are getting better definitions of gross and arrangements than authors.”
Of course, the Tolkiens do have one giant club in their arsenal. Part of the remedy they’re seeking is to terminate New Line’s rights to Tolkien’s books, including the two “Hobbit” films, which are now in the works with “Pan’s Labyrinth” director Guillermo del Toro.
“I think they have every right to terminate, " says Eskenazi. “If New Line engaged in gross misconduct, which I believe they did in this case, are you forced to continue in business with them?”
Still, I bet you Warner Bros. isn’t treating “Harry Potter’s” J.K. Rowling this way.
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rachel.abramowitz @latimes.com
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79b2c547bad35aa769b228819d95b99b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-02-fi-projector2-story.html | ‘Hancock’ to battle weak reviews, strong competition | ‘Hancock’ to battle weak reviews, strong competition
Last weekend, one of the most popular brand names in the movie business, Pixar, helped keep summer ticket sales humming. This holiday week, Hollywood is banking on another top box-office draw, Will Smith.
Sony Pictures’ “Hancock,” an action comedy starring Smith as an alcoholic, irascible superhero called John Hancock, will probably lead this week’s charts with more than $80 million in ticket sales, including Tuesday evening shows at many theaters, based on consumer tracking surveys.
How much more is the question surrounding the picture, which was produced for about $150 million and officially opens today at some 3,900 theaters in the U.S. and Canada.
Bullish box-office analysts expect “Hancock” to haul in more than $125 million in its first five-plus days despite blistering reviews, but Projector considers $90 million to $100 million (including $60 million for the weekend) a fairer target for an original project like this that lacks a built-in audience from an earlier movie, TV show, comic book or toy line.
“You never know what to expect with something new,” said Jeff Blake, Sony’s chairman of worldwide marketing and distribution. “It’s not like you’ve got the ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Star Wars’ fans already lining up.”
“Hancock” could be hurt by two factors: weak reviews and formidable competition.
Only 32% of reviews were positive as of Tuesday, according to review compendium Rotten Tomatoes, with several critics calling the film a hodgepodge that fails to deliver on its edgy, satirical potential.
Smith’s only box-office disappointment on the Fourth of July, the 1999 sci-fi cowboy comedy “Wild Wild West,” was widely panned as a jumble of genres. Some critics are comparing “Hancock” to 1993’s “Last Action Hero,” a Hollywood sendup that opened to harsh reviews and failed to become the blockbuster many expected.
Two holdovers, Disney-Pixar’s animated, G-rated “Wall-E” and Universal Pictures’ stylized, R-rated assassin thriller “Wanted,” starring Angelina Jolie, will vie with “Hancock” for attention at the nation’s multiplexes.
“Wall-E,” which opened to $63.1 million last weekend, looks headed for $40 million or so this weekend, and “Wanted,” which opened to $50.9 million, should nab at least an additional $25 million.
“Hancock,” backed by an aggressive marketing campaign centered on a star at the height of his popularity, could prove to be review-proof, however.
Smith has a history of success on the Fourth of July with “Independence Day” and the “Men in Black” series, and he is coming off “The Pursuit of Happyness,” a tear-jerker that grossed a surprising $307 million globally during its run, and the zombie flick “I Am Legend,” which piled up $584 million.
“Hancock,” rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action, violence and language,” also stars Jason Bateman as a publicist with a heart of gold -- yep, it’s a fantasy -- and Charlize Theron as a woman whose secret becomes one of the key plot twists.
Like most of Smith’s movies, “Hancock” is tracking well with men and women alike.
Its overall awareness and wanna-see numbers are similar to those for two films that opened when Independence Day fell on a Friday: the original “Men in Black” in 1997 and the more male-skewing “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” in 2003, starring the then-soon-to-be governor of California. Those pictures opened to $84 million and $72 million, respectively, over five days.
Distributors are counterprogramming “Hancock” with several lower-profile films. Picturehouse’s critically praised, G-rated “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl,” starring Abigail Breslin in a Depression-era family drama, goes wide after two weeks in limited release, while Sony Pictures Classics’ R-rated comedy “The Wackness” -- the front-runner to win Projector’s vote for title of the year -- opens at six theaters in New York and Los Angeles.
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josh.friedman@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Weekend forecast
The Will Smith action comedy “Hancock” is expected to lead the holiday weekend box office. These figures are The Times’ predictions. Studios will issue weekend estimates Sunday and actual results Monday.
*--* -- Movie 3-day Through the Weeks prediction -- (studio) (millions) weekend 1 Hancock $59.1 $95.5 1 -- (Sony) 2 Wall-E 43.8 139.8 2 -- (Disney) 3 Wanted 28.1 103.1 2 -- (Universal) 4 Get Smart 11.6 100.1 3 -- (Warner Bros.) 5 Kung Fu Panda 7.6 194.1 5 -- (Paramount) 6 Kit Kittredge: An American 6.8 7.3 3 Girl -- (Picturehouse) 7 The Incredible Hulk 4.4 125.4 4 -- (Universal) 8 Indiana Jones and the 3.2 306.3 7 -- Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- (Paramount) 9 Sex and the City 2.7 145.7 6 -- (Warner Bros.) 10 The Love Guru 2.4 30.6 3 -- (Paramount) *--*
Source: Times research
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771edad9f4e9ff9928c1fe2c50ab30a5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-02-me-fireball2-story.html | Mystery fireball seen across the Southland | Mystery fireball seen across the Southland
From the Hollywood Hills to the Nevada state line, people reported seeing a fireball streaking across the sky and appearing to fall toward the San Bernardino Mountains on Tuesday morning. But explanations of the mysterious object were scarce.
San Bernardino County Fire Dispatch reported receiving dozens of calls related to a fireball moving at high speed in the northwest sky around 10:40 a.m.
“We got quite a few reports. It started with a gentlemen in the Lake Arrowhead area reporting a fireball in the Meadow Bay area, and then we started getting calls from all over,” said San Bernardino County dispatch supervisor Tom Barnes.
“Fire crews in Barstow and on I-15 near Stateline came up on the radio and reported an object in the sky moving very fast across the northern sky and described it as yellowish green in color with streaks of debris. It looked like it burned up before it hit the ground.”
Barnes said the department has “basically determined it was most likely not an aircraft and was probably man-made or a meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Meteors are small rocky fragments of other planetary bodies that fall toward Earth. Meteorites are what strikes the ground. Asteroids are larger meteors.
A fireball is one of a common class of meteor, denoting a bright, streaming orb. Fireballs decelerate from 60,000 mph to 200 mph during their journeys, often burning up before they fall to Earth.
Studies have indicated that about 25 meteorites weighing more than a fifth of a pound fall on an area the size of California annually. Caltech experts say about 300 to 400 larger meteorites fell on California during the last century.
“Events like this do happen around the world. But a bright meteor is not something people would usually recognize in the day,” said Lance Benner, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. “The eyewitness account suggests it was a small asteroid hitting the atmosphere.”
The fact that it was spotted in daylight suggests it could have been farther away than it appeared, Benner said. He said it could have landed several hundred miles away.
Benner said he knows of a case in which a fireball seen in Pennsylvania ended up landing in New York state in 1992.
Benner said it was unlikely any radar system picked it up.
However, it may have been caught by security cameras at gas stations or other outdoor facilities whose vantage point has the sky as backdrop, he said.
John Haire, chief of media relations for Edwards Air Force Base, said the base had no test flights at the time of the sightings.
“I think some people have been watching too much ‘X-Files,’ ” he said, referring to the popular show about FBI agents investigating phenomena with no conventional explanation.
Most of the reports came from Riverside and San Bernardino counties, but a few people said they saw the fireball as far west as the Hollywood Hills.
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said the FAA received no reports of any missing or downed aircraft and the military had not informed the agency of any problems with aircraft or missiles.
The Barstow Fire Protection District dispatched firefighters near the town of Calico, but found no evidence of a meteorite or anything else hitting the ground, officials said.
Rimoftheworld.net, which covers the San Bernardino Mountains area, reported overhearing a fire attack plane relaying that it had detected an emergency beacon near Butler Peak in the Big Bear area.
But no signs of a downed aircraft were found.
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richard.winton@latimes.com
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47a3605986b4e8d98e5916ada115063b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-03-fi-times3-story.html | Times to cut jobs, reduce pages | Times to cut jobs, reduce pages
The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday announced plans to cut 250 positions across the company, including 150 positions in editorial, in a new effort to bring expenses into line with declining revenue. In a further cost-cutting step, the newspaper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%.
“You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” Times Editor Russ Stanton said in a memo to the staff. “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
He also noted that the poor economy had struck particularly hard at the California housing market, traditionally a robust source of advertising revenue for The Times.
The cuts reflect conditions across the newspaper industry, which is confronting sharply deteriorating print advertising revenues. Although online ad revenues are rising, they have not made up for the losses. Amid the current nationwide economic slowdown, the prospects are for continued revenue shrinkage through the end of this year.
Times Publisher David Hiller said the goal of the cuts was to “get to where we need to be for the long term. We want to get ahead of the economy that’s been rolling down on us and get to a size that will be sustainable.”
Hiller said the size of the reductions was predicated on the expectation that the economy would “bottom out and reach equilibrium” early next year. The editorial staff cuts will be among 250 positions cut across all departments of The Times, including circulation, marketing and advertising, Hiller said. Companywide employment will be about 3,000 after the reductions, he said.
The editorial staff cuts, which amount to roughly 17%, will be spread between the print newsroom and The Times’ Web operations and are to be completed by Labor Day. The two operations employ about 876 people, meaning that the editorial staff will remain above 700. The paper would continue to have one of the largest corps of editors and reporters in the country. Details on the reductions, including severance terms, will be forthcoming.
Hiller said he expected that the severance terms would match those of earlier staff buyouts at The Times, including payment equivalent to two weeks’ salary for every year of service, up to a maximum of 52 weeks, to be paid into the employee’s retirement account. One issue still under study, Hiller said, is whether the reductions trigger the California Worker Adjustment and Retaining Notification Act, or WARN, which requires 60 days’ notice of impending layoffs under certain circumstances.
As part of the reduction process, Stanton said, The Times will be combining its print and Web staffs into a single operation with a unified budget.
“These moves will be difficult and painful,” Stanton said in his memo. “But it is absolutely crucial that as we move through this process, we must maintain our ambition and our determination to produce the highest-quality journalism in print and online, every day.”
The cuts are the latest, and among the most severe, in a series of reductions that have pared The Times’ editorial staff down from its 2001 level of nearly 1,200. The most recent reductions, announced in February, involved the elimination of more than 100 jobs in all Times departments, including more than 40 in the newsroom.
The reductions have come amid considerable management turmoil: In 2006, then-Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson and Editor Dean Baquet publicly refused to make cuts requested by management at Tribune Co., owner of The Times. Both eventually left the newspaper. Tribune was then a publicly traded company, but it has since been taken private in a buyout led by Chicago entrepreneur Sam Zell.
Johnson was succeeded by Hiller. Baquet was replaced by James O’Shea, then the managing editor of the Chicago Tribune; O’Shea departed in January, also after objecting to planned cuts in the newsroom budget. Stanton, a 10-year veteran of The Times, was named editor three weeks later.
Announcements of hundreds of reductions were issued only last week by dailies in Boston, San Jose, Detroit and elsewhere. Among Tribune newspapers, the Baltimore Sun said it would cut about 100 positions by early August and the Hartford Courant announced plans to cut about 50 newsroom positions. The New York Times and the Washington Post both instituted layoffs or buyouts to reduce their staffs this year.
Besides the changes in the newspaper industry, Tribune carries the burden of about $1 billion in annual payments on its debt, much of which it took on to finance the $8.2-billion buyout.
Since the buyout, which became effective at the end of December, Zell has moved to reduce the debt through asset sales. A $650-million sale of the suburban New York daily Newsday is pending, and the sale of the Chicago Cubs along with the baseball team’s iconic Wrigley Field ballpark and related properties is expected to bring in $1 billion or more when it is completed, probably this year.
Zell said last month that the Newsday sale and new credit arrangements would ensure that the company would meet its interest and principal obligations this year and would remain in compliance with its loan agreements.
“Even with the reductions, this is one amazing place with great people and great customers,” Hiller said, “and we’re going to keep doing amazing work for them.”
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michael.hiltzik@latimes.com
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834ad242ba68937c46fd5689a8dc5d88 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-03-me-abortion3-story.html | Federal court upholds abortion foes’ 1st Amendment rights | Federal court upholds abortion foes’ 1st Amendment rights
The 1st Amendment rights of two anti-abortion activists were violated when they were ordered to stop circling a Rancho Palos Verdes middle school in a truck displaying graphic photos of aborted fetuses, a federal appellate court ruled Wednesday.
Overturning an earlier district court judgment, a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously ruled that school officials and sheriff’s deputies violated the men’s free speech rights by ordering them to leave the school’s neighborhood.
The court in its ruling on a lawsuit brought by the activists cited the concept of a “heckler’s veto,” which states that free speech cannot be limited based on listeners’ reactions to the content.
The activists’ “speech was permitted until the students and drivers around the school reacted to it, at which point the speech was deemed disruptive and ordered stopped,” Judge Harry Pregerson wrote in the ruling. “This application of the statute raises serious 1st Amendment concerns.”
The 7-by-20-foot truck with photos of first-term fetuses on three sides appeared near Dodson Middle School around 7:30 a.m. March 24, 2003, as students arrived. Several stopped to stare at the photos, which showed fetuses with small hands and feet and the word “choice” in quotation marks and big block letters, according to court documents.
Assistant Principal Art Roberts told the trial court that he saw several children who appeared to be angered by the images and that he had to discourage a group of boys from throwing rocks at the truck.
Roberts called deputies, who stopped and searched the truck and another vehicle, then ordered the activists to leave the area, according to court documents.
“It’s the off-putting speech that needs protection, otherwise there is no need for the 1st Amendment,” said Robert Muise, a lawyer for the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, who filed the suit against Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and school officials.
The three-judge panel also ruled that the individual deputies and school officials could not be held liable for the 1st Amendment violations, though the panel found that the deputies wrongly detained the activists for 75 minutes.
“A reasonable officer in the deputies’ situation could believe that their actions were lawful,” said Jennifer Lehman, a lawyer in the county counsel’s office.
The suit is one of several 1st Amendment battles the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform is fighting around the country in its reproductive choice campaign, in which trucks and planes carry graphic images of aborted fetuses to expose the public to what its members call “the reality of abortion.”
Gregg Cunningham, the center’s executive director, said in a deposition that he has seen students faint, become physically ill, weep, avert their gazes and leave the room in response to photos his group uses in the campaign, according to court papers. “There are some realities which can not be adequately communicated with words alone,” he said. “Students who are old enough to have an abortion are old enough to see an abortion.”
Mary-Jane Wagle, chief executive of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, said her group was concerned that young children may be exposed to graphic and jarring images without proper discussion in school or at home.
“Certainly we know they will be horrified, but will they understand what they see? We don’t know,” Wagle said. “We really believe that what’s important is for families to talk about these issues at home, in a safe place.”
School representatives could not be reached for comment.
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victoria.kim@latimes.com
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abbc143c74300ce173d9844f5baed2cf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-03-oe-brooks3-story.html | The founders’ rights stuff | The founders’ rights stuff
‘The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” After 9/11, that old saw -- originally coined by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson -- was dusted off. Lately, it’s been getting a heavy workout.
On June 12, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court released a decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy holding, in Boumediene vs. Bush, that Guantanamo prisoners have the right to ask the federal courts to rule on the validity of their continued detention (many have been held for years, despite little evidence in some cases that they’re truly “unlawful combatants.”)
Barack Obama praised Kennedy’s majority opinion for “re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law,” but John McCain denounced it as “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorialists agreed with McCain and hauled out the usual cliches: “More Americans are likely to die as a result [of this decision],” they opined darkly. “Justice Jackson once famously observed that the Constitution is ‘not a suicide pact.’ About Anthony Kennedy’s Constitution, we’re not so sure.”
When invoked with the requisite tone of pompous finality, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” is an effective rhetorical ploy. Who could disagree? Anyway, no one wants to defend suicide pacts. The very phrase sounds like “suicide bomber,” thus managing to subtly imply that those who stand up for basic rights are not only self-destructive but share the ideology of terrorists.
But the Constitution also doesn’t contain any footnotes that say, “Note to our descendants: This Constitution is intended for easy times only. At the first sign of trouble, feed this document to your dog. We won’t mind. We only fought a war for it.”
This Fourth of July, celebrate by rereading the Declaration of Independence, created by more or less the same crowd who brought us the Constitution, 11 years and one war later. Remember it? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Wild stuff! To the founders, “all men” have “unalienable rights” -- not just U.S. citizens in the continental United States. (If the founding fathers were around today, Rush Limbaugh and Rudy Giuliani would pillory them as limp-wristed, latte-drinking, soft-on-terror liberals.)
It was treasonous stuff too. When the Declaration of Independence was drafted, there were no U.S. citizens: Instead, there were about 2.5 million scrappy Colonists who legally owed allegiance to the king of England, George III. But they went to war -- over the little matter of freedom, law and unalienable, God-given rights.
Among their grievances against King George, the rebellious Colonists complained that he ignored the will of their representative bodies, refused “his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers” and “affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.” The Colonists also objected to the denial of “the benefit of trial by jury” and the king’s practice of avoiding the inconveniences of due process by transporting prisoners “beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.” (George III would have loved Guantanamo.)
The founders had a word for governments that respected rights only arbitrarily and selectively: tyranny. The signers of the declaration took rights seriously. They wrote, “For the support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” That wasn’t mere rhetoric. Technically, the signers were all traitors, liable to be executed for treason. And they accepted that standing up for rights means taking some real risks.
Of the 56 signers of the declaration, about a third fought in the Revolutionary War, and five were captured and severely mistreated by the British. Several later died. Many lost children in the war, and about a third had their homes damaged or destroyed by the British. About 25,000 Colonists died in the war, about 8,000 in combat, the rest of disease -- including an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 who died as a result of mistreatment while prisoners of the British. Extrapolating to modern population figures, that’s like losing nearly 300,000 Americans in a war.
The Constitution is no “suicide pact,” but the people who founded this nation risked war, prison and death for the sake of unalienable human rights. Their values guided us through good times and bad, through the Civil War, two world wars and the Cold War. But today, some Americans seem happy to discard those same precious values in the name of “security.”
Sometimes I wonder: If the founders could have foreseen this, would they have bothered to fight the Revolutionary War?
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rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com
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bce0f0809dc7a97d54977cf2cf86b293 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-03-oe-jillette3-story.html | ‘I don’t know’ -- and that’s no act | ‘I don’t know’ -- and that’s no act
My partner, Teller, and I are professional skeptics. We do magic tricks in our live show in Las Vegas, and we have a passion for trying to use what we’ve learned about fooling people to possibly get a little closer to the truth. Our series on Showtime tries to question everything -- even things we hold dear.
James Randi is our inspiration, our hero, our mentor and our friend. Randi taught us to use our fake magic powers for good. Psychics use tricks to lie to people; Randi uses tricks to tell the truth. Every year, in Vegas, the James Randi Educational Foundation gathers together for a conference as many like-thinking participants as you can get from people who question whenever people think alike. There are smart, famous and groovy speakers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. There’s lots of real science stuff with real scientists questioning things that a lot of people take for granted, like ESP, UFOs, faith healing and creationism. It’s a party.
Teller and I are always honored to be invited. We don’t wear our usual matching gray suits, and Teller doesn’t stay in his silent character. Teller chats up a storm. It’s not a gig; it’s hanging out with friends. During our loose Q&A; period this year, someone asked us about global warming, or climate change, or however they’re branding it now. Teller and I were both silent on stage for a bit too long, and then I said I didn’t know.
I elaborated on “I don’t know” quite a bit. I said that Al Gore was so annoying (that’s scientifically provable, right?) that I really wanted to doubt anything he was hyping, but I just didn’t know. I also emphasized that really smart friends, who knew a lot more than me, were convinced of global warming. I ended my long-winded rambling (I most often have a silent partner) very clearly with “I don’t know.” I did that because ... I don’t know. Teller chimed in with something about Gore’s selling of “indulgences” being BS, and then said he didn’t know either. Penn & Teller don’t know jack about global warming ... next question.
The next day, I heard that one of the non-famous, non-groovy, non-scientist speakers had used me as an example of someone who let his emotions make him believe things that are wrong. OK. People who aren’t used to public speaking get excited and go off half-cocked. I’m used to public speaking and I go off half-cocked. I live half-cocked. Cut her some slack.
Later, I was asked about a Newsweek blog she wrote. Reading it bugged me more than hearing about it. She ends with: “But here was Penn, a great friend to the skeptic community, basically saying, ‘Don’t bother me with scientific evidence, I’m going to make up my mind about global warming based on my disdain for Al Gore.’ ... Which just goes to show, not even the most hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics are immune from the power of emotion to make us believe stupid things.”
Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject? I took my children to see the film “Wall-E.” This wonderful family entertainment opens with the given that mankind destroyed Earth. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing someone hating ourselves for what we’ve done to the planet and preaching the end of the world. Maybe they’re right, but is there no room for “maybe”? There’s a lot of evidence, but global warming encompasses a lot of complicated points: Is it happening? Did we cause it? Is it bad? Can we fix it? Is government-forced conservation the only way to fix it?
To be fair (and it’s always important to be fair when one is being mean-spirited, sanctimonious and self-righteous), “I don’t know” can be a very bad answer when it is disingenuous. You can’t answer “I don’t know if that happened” about the Holocaust.
But the climate of the whole world is more complicated. I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t spent my life studying weather. I’m trying to learn what I can, and while I’m working on it, isn’t it OK to say “I don’t know”?
I mean, at least in front of a bunch of friendly skeptics?
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778cc4d38337a6ebdae5bf2ee4401d20 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-03-sci-george3-story.html | Washington slept here | Washington slept here
After years of searching, archaeologists have identified and excavated the boyhood home of George Washington, site of such legendary -- if perhaps apocryphal -- events as chopping down the cherry tree and throwing a coin across the Rappahannock River.
The find indicates that the Washington family lived in a spacious eight-room home -- a sign that the family was well-off for its day -- and provides new information about George’s childhood, a period that has remained largely obscured in the mists of history.
“We all know that much of our character is formed in our early years, so to be able to have access to the very specific place and the material conditions of what life was like will help us sort out who this man Washington was,” said Julia King, an anthropology professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland who was not involved in the excavation.
The house in Stafford County, Va., on a property now known as Ferry Farm, is on the banks of the Rappahannock across from Fredericksburg and is about 50 miles southwest of Washington, D.C.
Archaeologists uncovered the remains of two chimney bases, two stone-lined cellars and two root cellars, along with thousands of artifacts -- all of which convinced them they had found the Washington homestead. The size, characteristics and location of the structure were the deciding factors, the researchers said.
“This is it -- this is the site of the house where George Washington grew up,” archaeologist David Muraca of the George Washington Foundation said at a news conference Wednesday.
“If George Washington did indeed chop down a cherry tree, as generations of Americans have believed, this is where it happened,” added Philip Levy, a history professor at the University of South Florida and co-leader of the excavation.
Erased by time
George’s father, Augustine, purchased the 600-acre parcel and moved his family there in 1738 so he could be closer to the Accokeek Creek iron furnace, which he managed. George inherited the farm at age 11 when his father died in 1743, and sold it after he moved to Mount Vernon.
Originally known as the Washington Farm, it became known as the Ferry Farm because of a ferry at the site that carried travelers across the Rappahannock.
During the Civil War, Union troops camped at the site, initially using the ruined farmhouse as their headquarters, then demolishing it for firewood. The land was also plowed in the 19th century, destroying many of the artifacts.
Over the years, development has encroached; there are now only about 113 acres preserved as a National Historic Landmark.
The team had initially identified five sites on the property as possibly being the Washington house. The first two they excavated proved to be an earlier farmhouse built on the property and a 19th century house. The third one proved to be the charm.
The house was 53 feet long and 37 feet wide. It apparently had eight rooms -- five on the first floor and three in the attic. The upper rooms, which most likely served as bedrooms, were unheated.
A kitchen and slave quarters were in detached buildings at the rear.
“This was a very elaborate house for this time and place,” said architectural historian Mark Wenger of the architectural firm Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker. “You get this only at the very top echelon of Virginia society.”
Many homes in the period, even among the more well-to-do, had only one or two rooms, he said.
Even Thomas Jefferson lived in a one-room home before moving into Monticello.
Clues to lifestyle
Excavation of the cellars yielded “bushels of plaster that came off the site,” Wenger said. Most of it showed evidence of being applied to wooden lath that was nailed to walls and ceiling joists, indicating that the house was a wood-frame structure and not a brick one. Other remnants showed that it had wooden shingles on the roof.
The team found that a fire on Christmas Eve of 1740, once thought to have destroyed the house, had produced only minor damage. In a far corner of one root cellar, they found some burned plaster and evidence of new plaster, indicating that only a small area had been burned.
“We concluded that the fire was a fairly small event, localized on one side of the house,” Levy said.
The team also found fragments of 18th century pottery and other ceramics, wig curlers and bone toothbrush handles. “We could set the table for the Washingtons,” Muraca said. “There are plates, cutlery, stemware and thousands and thousands of pieces of glass.”
Among those items are the remnants of “a very nice Wedgwood tea set,” hand-painted in four colors. The set was probably produced during the last 10 years that Washington’s mother, Mary, lived at the site and suggests that good fortune returned to the family after Augustine’s death.
Also found was a “well-used pipe bowl” emblazoned with the Masonic crest. Washington joined the Fredericksburg chapter of the Masons in 1753.
“While we can’t say that this was George Washington’s pipe, we can wonder about it,” Levy said.
Reconstruction plans
Little is known about George Washington’s life at his childhood home. He was known to swim in the river and take the ferry when he grew older, and he may have been educated in Fredericksburg. He shared the home with five siblings, including a baby sister who died there. As he entered adulthood, he spent less and less time there and eventually moved to his half brother’s house, which he later renamed Mount Vernon.
The team did not find evidence of an ax or the stump of a cherry tree.
The project, led by the George Washington Foundation, was funded by National Geographic and the Dominion Foundation.
The George Washington Foundation plans to construct a historic trail linking Mount Vernon, Ferry Farm and Washington’s birthplace at Pope’s Creek. It also plans to reconstruct the buildings that were standing in the 1740s, using tools and construction techniques from the period. That work is scheduled to begin in three to four years.
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thomas.maugh@latimes.com
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6a06123eca33d0478cbc56813d3028b6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-04-fi-coke4-story.html | Coca-Cola in a race to get people to try Coke Zero | Coca-Cola in a race to get people to try Coke Zero
What do the Mir spacecraft, Axl Rose and NASCAR have in common?
They’re all part of publicity stunts that could bring you some free junk food -- and help companies develop relationships with you, Mr. or Ms. Potential Customer.
This weekend, if any of Coca-Cola Co.'s 13 sponsored drivers win in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, everyone in America can get a free 20-ounce bottle of Coke Zero by downloading a coupon from the company’s website.
A few months ago, Dr Pepper promised a free soda to everyone in America if Axl Rose puts out a new Guns N’ Roses album in 2008.
And Taco Bell has tried the stunt twice, most recently during the 2007 World Series, when it offered a free taco to -- you guessed it, everyone in America -- the first time someone stole a base. In 2001, it said everyone in the country would get a free taco if Russia’s Mir spacecraft landed on a 40-foot-square Taco Bell banner floating in the South Pacific. (It didn’t -- no tacos for us!)
This type of marketing is becoming more common as “it gets harder and harder for these companies to break through the clutter and build preferences,” said Mary Jo Sobotka, vice president of integrated media strategy at the Phelps Group, a Santa Monica marketing and communications firm.
It’s a boon for the companies because they get buzz from publicity and traffic to their websites, Sobotka said.
That’s even though the chance of any of these things happening is pretty small. After all, Rose has supposedly been working on the new Guns N’ Roses album for 14 years. And the chances of a spacecraft landing on a 40-by-40-foot logo in the middle of an ocean that measures thousands of miles across are -- well, you do the math.
Coke says its promotion is different. There are 43 cars in the Coke Zero 400 race Saturday at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Fla. Coca-Cola has 13 drivers in the race, six of whom hold spots in the top 12 of the Sprint Cup Series’ point standings.
After all, spokeswoman Susan Stribling said, Coke really wants to get Coke Zero to customers, in whatever way it can.
“When people taste it,” she said, “they actually really like the brand.”
Even if one of Coke’s drivers does win, it won’t cost the company much, Sobotka said. It’s inexpensive to make Coke Zero, and probably only a fraction of Americans will go to the website, print a coupon and redeem it.
If it wanted to prevent even that, Coke could follow in the footsteps of Taco Bell (owned by Yum Brands Inc., which was spun off from Coke’s arch-rival PepsiCo Inc.) and make sure that not many people will take it up on the offering.
After a base was stolen in the 2007 World Series, free tacos were available as promised: at participating Taco Bell locations on a Tuesday between 2 and 5 p.m. -- which is too late for lunch and too early for dinner for that target demographic: everyone in America.
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alana.semuels@latimes.co
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d962d242c4f6759370c31de6384fd776 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-04-sp-kaman4-story.html | Kaman will represent Germany | Kaman will represent Germany
Clippers center Chris Kaman could be headed to Beijing to compete in this summer’s Olympics -- as a German.
The 26-year-old Michigan native obtained German citizenship and will play for Germany’s national basketball team alongside Dallas Mavericks forward and German native Dirk Nowitzki in an Olympic qualifying tournament later this month, according to reports.
“We’ll be stronger under the baskets with Chris,” Nowitzki told the Associated Press.
Kaman, whose great-grandparents were German, first talked about playing for Germany during the winter.
Kaman, a 7-footer who played three seasons at Central Michigan, averaged 15.7 points, 12.7 rebounds, 2.8 blocked shots and 1.9 assists last season for the Clippers -- all career bests.
But in February the injury bug bit Kaman, as it did with others on the Clippers, and the center missed 26 of the team’s last 43 games because of inflammation in his lower back and a sprained ankle.
He finished the season playing in only 56 games, the fewest of his five-year NBA career.
Last season was the first of a five-year, $52-million contract with the Clippers.
Kaman will try to help Germany’s basketball team make its first Olympic appearance since the 1992 games in Barcelona, Spain. The German team will head to Athens to participate in a qualifying event July 14 to July 20, where 12 teams will compete for three Olympic berths.
Another American who plans to play this summer in the Olympics for a foreign team is WNBA guard Becky Hammon, who grew up in South Dakota but will play on the Russian team.
Hammon, 31, plays for the San Antonio Silver Stars. But when she was overlooked by the USA women’s team she signed a contract with the club team CSKA Moscow.
Although she has no Russian ancestors, under that country’s rules Hammon was allowed to become a Russian citizen so she could play for their Olympic team.
As for Kaman, when reached Thursday at his mother’s home in Michigan, he declined to comment.
The Clippers also had no comment on his Olympic plans.
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chris.hine@latimes.com
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b4bd93332eda3adcfe26603454bda609 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-05-et-doris5-story.html | Shadows of Day | Shadows of Day
HER LIFE on screen played like an American fairy tale.
Blond, bouncy and beautiful, Doris Day captivated mid-20th century moviegoers in a series of rollicking romantic comedies with her favorite leading man, Rock Hudson, including “Pillow Talk” and “Lover Come Back,” as well as the western musical “Calamity Jane,” Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” the musical drama “Love Me or Leave Me” and many more.
A former singer with Les Brown’s band in the 1940s, Day also was a bestselling recording artist whose trademark songs -- “Sentimental Journey” and the Oscar-winning “Que Sera, Sera” -- seemed to epitomize her upbeat spirit. During her years in the spotlight, Day was always portrayed as happily married -- to third husband and manager Martin Melcher -- and loving mother to son Terry.
But the real story couldn’t be further from the truth, according to David Kaufman’s expansive new biography, “Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door.” Instead it’s a sad story -- partially told in the actress’ 1975 autobiography -- of a talented woman who was unloved by her father, pushed by an ambitious stage mother, with four failed -- and mostly loveless -- marriages, who never got what she wanted: simply to have a happy home life.
“What is even sadder to me and what I have learned in the course of researching this book, interviewing people and from quotes from her own autobiography is how insecure she is about her looks and about her talents,” said Kaufman, a theater critic and author.
“This woman has lived so much of her life unhappy with herself, I think, and yet she brought so much happiness to so many people all around the world,” he added.
Now 86, Day has lived in Carmel for nearly 30 years and spends her time rescuing abandoned and wounded animals and overseeing the Doris Day Foundation for Animals. She doesn’t do interviews and wouldn’t talk with Kaufman.
“I did try to talk to her,” he says. “I went into this project expecting that even if I would get to talk to her, she would not talk to me about her past because it is my understanding that she will not talk about the past. I think one of the reasons is the only way she could put some adversity behind her was by leaving the past and walking away from it and devoting all of her energies to pets. That is the only thing she wants to talk about.”
Kaufman believes the reason the actress won’t talk about her life is, “and this was the biggest surprise to me, is because she feels so completely disassociated from who ‘Doris Day’ was.”
That’s why her friends call her “Clara” -- a nickname bestowed upon her by one of her costars, Billy DeWolfe, years ago. “She signs her notes as Clara,” Kaufman says. “She answers the phone as Clara.”
A fan of her talent
When Kaufman began the book about eight years ago, he didn’t know that much about the career or life of Doris Day, who was born Doris Kappelhoff in Cincinnati in 1922.
“There were 12 or 15 of her 30 films I never saw before I started researching the book,” he says. “But I was an enormous fan and admirer of her talent. I always felt that her acting in particular was underestimated by the world at large. One of my primary motivations for doing this book was to hopefully remedy that, to have her talent become more recognized.”
Unlike the brassy blonds of the 1930s and ‘40s, like Jean Harlow, Mae West and Betty Grable, Day was more the girl next door, both tomboyish and sexy. She fit perfectly into the zeitgeist of the 1950s -- a decade of prosperity, hope and wholesomeness. “She hoped to suggest that the world was OK,” wrote David Thomson in “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.” “She was the home fire that refused to admit the Cold War. Above all, she was optimistic.”
She turned in terrific dramatic performances in such films as “Love Me or Leave Me,” in which she played singer Ruth Etting, and “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” in which she played the mother of a kidnapped boy. And Day was also a deft romantic comedy star opposite Clark Gable in “Teacher’s Pet,” in her sex comedies with Hudson, as well as with James Garner.
“She is easy to deride,” Thomson noted. “But her fans were devoted and her energy was authentic.”
Kaufman interviewed several of Day’s closest friends, including actress Kaye Ballard and choreographer Donald Saddler. He was aided in his efforts when columnist Liz Smith devoted a column to the book three years ago. “She basically declared this is the definitive book and that led to people . . . and they led to other people and it was like the house that Jack built.”
Kaufman admits that Day’s reputation as a movie star suffered in the mid- to late 1960s because Melcher kept producing romantic comedies in which the fortysomething actress was playing the same type of bouncy -- and often virginal -- heroine she did early in her career.
“The last handful of movies were schlock,” says Kaufman. “They were atrocious. If Melcher had let her make ‘The Graduate’ -- it was a year before his death -- it could have taken her career and certainly a reputation to a certain other level.”
Trying to understand
Though he tried to avoid armchair psychology in the book, Kaufman admits Day’s choice of husbands, including her abusive first spouse -- musician Al Jorden -- and the bombastic Melcher, who was more a business partner than soul mate, are all connected to her horrible relationship with her father, William, who abandoned the family when Day was young.
“In essence what she was doing was constantly looking for people who reminded her of her father because she was hoping she would work out what she had not worked out with him. But in the process she just repeated the lousy relationship.”
Kaufman believes that Day and Hudson, who was gay, became fast friends because “they realized they were the opposite of who they really were and they could really relate to each other,” says Kaufman, adding “I don’t think she’s ever had a truly confidential, candid conversation with anybody on this earth. I don’t think she is capable of being intimate.”
Her passion for animals, Kaufman believes, is due to the fact that she unconsciously identifies with them. “Most people don’t realize all the animals she has had, she got them because they were abandoned, left by her gate or sick or wounded in some way and she basically nursed them back to health. She identifies with these animals because she feels like a wounded animal. And she was a wounded and abandoned human being.”
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susan.king@latimes.com
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14f98abd8f79752e0d5591c79ce0c9bf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-05-fg-briefs5.s3-story.html | Ex-nuclear chief alleges army role | Ex-nuclear chief alleges army role
The army under President Pervez Musharraf supervised a shipment of uranium centrifuges to North Korea in 2000, the disgraced architect of Pakistan’s atomic weapons program said.
The claim is the most controversial leveled by Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has been agitating for an end to house arrest and backing off his 2004 confession that he was solely responsible for spreading nuclear arms technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
The retired scientist’s comments could prove embarrassing for Pakistan, which has repeatedly denied that the army or government knew about Khan’s activities before 2003.
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6be3fce5097e282b7842d1cb626ccad3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-05-fi-sick5-story.html | Feeling ill over sick leave | Feeling ill over sick leave
For maybe five times in the last 15 years, Manuela Mendez has had to drag herself to work at a fast-food restaurant in La Mirada, coughing and congested.
“I go to work because we need the money,” she said in Spanish. “It’s difficult to work. I carry microbes that contaminate my work mates, and that’s a problem for the customers.”
The 40-year-old mother of two does not think it is fair that she and an estimated 6 million California workers -- about 40% of the state workforce -- do not have the right to take a day of paid sick leave to recuperate from an illness or injury, see a doctor or care for a family member who is ill.
Mendez, an activist with the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is part of a broad coalition that includes labor unions, health advocates and women’s groups backing a bill that would give all employees in the state at least five paid sick days a year.
The bill, AB 2716, has passed the Assembly on a 45-33 vote and is expected to clear the state Senate this summer.
If that happens, business lobbyists are expected to ask Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for a veto. He has a solid history of siding with the California Chamber of Commerce when it comes to vetoing bills on the chamber’s self-styled list of “job killers.”
The measure by Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D-San Francisco) is modeled on recently approved municipal laws in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and is similar to proposals being considered in a dozen other states and in Milwaukee.
“People shouldn’t have to worry that if they get sick, they’ll lose their job,” Ma said. “Paid sick days are good for a healthy economy.”
Most California business organizations disagree. Ma’s bill is near the top of the chamber’s list of alleged anti-employer legislation. Granting paid sick leave would hurt workers more than it would help, chamber lobbyist Marc Burgat contends.
“If you increase some costs to employers, they’ll have to decrease other costs by cutting hours or the number of employees,” he testified at a recent hearing on the bill.
An in-house study released last week by the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business association, said that granting paid sick leave to all workers would during the next five years destroy 370,000 jobs and cost California companies $59.3 billion in lost sales.
“When California faces an unemployment rate of 6.8%, it is absolutely outrageous to impose more mandates on small business,” said John Kabateck, the federation’s state director.
Although business lobbyists say that granting California workers paid sick leave will cause widespread economic dislocations, that hasn’t been the case in San Francisco, the only place in the state that currently mandates such a benefit.
“I can only say that the sky has not fallen in San Francisco because of the sick leave law,” said Greg Asay, a senior analyst with the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement. “San Francisco’s economy has been very strong. It’s striking how relatively unscathed we’ve been with the recession or probably recession.”
The labor standards office reported getting only about 75 sick leave complaints from workers during the first year of the new law. All the cases were resolved informally, the office said.
Small Business California, a San Francisco-based advocacy group, said it had gotten negative reactions from about 35 employers. Most of the problems involved changes in how payroll records are kept, the organization said.
But restaurateurs, probably the city’s largest class of small-business owners, support paid sick leave.
“Sick leave, especially for people who handle food for a living, is an important public policy,” said Kevin Westlye, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Assn.
“The mandate is affordable, considering the public benefit,” Westlye said.
Golden Gate’s parent group, the California Restaurant Assn., is fighting the bill in Sacramento and is a lead member of the business coalition that is relying on Schwarzenegger for a veto, if needed.
The governor so far has taken no stance, spokesman Aaron McLear said.
“Obviously, he understands the merits of the bill,” he said. “But he does have concerns about the effect it could have on business during this tough economy.”
Tough is having to go to work with a headache and fever, countered Juana Pablo, 48, who has spent the last 14 years sewing garments in South Los Angeles to support five children, ages 7 to 17.
“I have to go to work when I feel sick,” Pablo said. “If I stay home, I’d lose my job.”
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marc.lifsher@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Who gets sick leave?
According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a Washington think tank, a survey shows that 56% of medium to large private employers offer sick leave benefits to workers.
The average number of annual sick leave days ranged from 11.2 days after one year of service to 21.2 days after 25 years.
The average number of sick days used per year by a salaried exempt employee was 3.8 days; salaried nonexempt employees used 5.6; nonunion hourly employees used 4.8, and union hourly employees used 5.5 days.
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Source: Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2000 survey
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99746a72704abccf3c6fede136b0070b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-05-me-lieber5-story.html | TV producer created ‘Love Connection’ | TV producer created ‘Love Connection’
Eric Lieber, a veteran television producer who created and executive-produced TV’s long-running dating show “Love Connection,” has died. He was 71.
Lieber died of leukemia Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his wife, Peggy, who worked as co- producer with her husband for many years.
After launching his career on a TV game show in New York in the late 1950s, Lieber became a producer of the Dick Cavett, Sammy Davis Jr. and Mike Douglas talk shows and three Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Assn. telethons.
He also produced specials such as “Grammy Salutes Oscar” in 1974 and “The American Film Institute Salute to Henry Fonda” in 1978, for which he shared an Emmy nomination.
And, in 1976, he executive-produced the television coverage for the Democratic National Convention.
Lieber’s “Love Connection” was a successful syndicated show with Chuck Woolery as the host from 1983 to 1995. Lieber also executive-produced the 1998-99 version when Pat Bullard was the host.
The show featured participants who watched videos of three prospective blind dates and, after picking one, appeared on the show afterward to talk about their date. Before the date was described, the studio audience watched excerpts from the original videos and voted on the person they thought was the best date.
Shot at the KTLA-TV Channel 5 studios in Los Angeles, the show had a closely guarded video library that, according to a 1992 article in the Chicago Sun-Times, housed “some 30,000 tapes of people spilling their guts in five-minute snippets.”
Such as: “I’m Michelle. The last guy I dated had a big dog that bit me. I had to have a tetanus shot.”
If, as the Sun-Times reporter put it, it sounded “lame and desperate,” Lieber countered by saying, “You know, we’ve had 21 or 22 marriages on our show.” What about divorces? “Just one,” he said, “and I’m kind of depressed about it.”
As for the appeal of the show, Lieber said he personally enjoyed “the couples who rag on each other, but also the people who get along are fun. The show succeeds because we believe in honest emotions. And, admit it: We’re all a little voyeuristic and enjoy peeking into someone else’s life.”
Born in Vienna on April 7, 1937, he came to the United States as an infant and grew up in New Jersey. He studied art at the High School of Music & Art in New York and served a stint in the Army shortly after launching his TV career in the late 1950s.
In addition to his wife of 43 years, Lieber is survived by a daughter, Christine; and a granddaughter.
Instead of flowers, the family suggests donations to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, 1311 Mamaroneck Ave., White Plains, N.Y. 10605.
A memorial service is pending.
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dennis.mclellan @latimes.com
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88948fadc835dd5c3568abdb2adbda26 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-05-na-traildecor5-story.html | Obama says Lincoln, TV don’t mix | Obama says Lincoln, TV don’t mix
He’s not president yet, but Barack Obama has already given some thought to White House decor.
Asked at a town hall-style meeting in Fargo, N.D., about any decorating plans for the Lincoln Bedroom, Obama described a visit to the White House after he became a U.S. senator.
“You have all these mementos of Abraham Lincoln, but you have this flat-screen TV in there,” Obama told the crowd at the outdoor event.
“I thought to myself, ‘Now, who stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and watches [ESPN’s] ‘Sports Center’? You’ve got your clicker. . . . That didn’t seem to me to be appropriate. So I might take out the TV, I don’t know.
“You should read when you’re in the Lincoln Bedroom! Reread the Gettysburg Address. Don’t watch TV.”
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-- Peter Nicholas
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1293ca456a23056221f056feadcb0062 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-05-oe-fleming5-story.html | This is the U.S. on drugs | This is the U.S. on drugs
The United States’ so-called war on drugs brings to mind the old saying that if you find yourself trapped in a deep hole, stop digging. Yet, last week, the Senate approved an aid package to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, with a record $400 million going to Mexico and $65 million to Central America.
The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition -- with little to show for it. Is anyone actually benefiting from this war? Six groups come to mind.
The first group are the drug lords in nations such as Colombia, Afghanistan and Mexico, as well as those in the United States. They are making billions of dollars every year -- tax free.
The second group are the street gangs that infest many of our cities and neighborhoods, whose main source of income is the sale of illegal drugs.
Third are those people in government who are paid well to fight the first two groups. Their powers and bureaucratic fiefdoms grow larger with each tax dollar spent to fund this massive program that has been proved not to work.
Fourth are the politicians who get elected and reelected by talking tough -- not smart, just tough -- about drugs and crime. But the tougher we get in prosecuting nonviolent drug crimes, the softer we get in the prosecution of everything else because of the limited resources to fund the criminal justice system.
The fifth group are people who make money from increased crime. They include those who build prisons and those who staff them. The prison guards union is one of the strongest lobbying groups in California today, and its ranks continue to grow.
And last are the terrorist groups worldwide that are principally financed by the sale of illegal drugs.
Who are the losers in this war? Literally everyone else, especially our children.
Today, there are more drugs on our streets at cheaper prices than ever before. There are more than 1.2 million people behind bars in the U.S., and a large percentage of them for nonviolent drug usage. Under our failed drug policy, it is easier for young people to obtain illegal drugs than a six-pack of beer. Why? Because the sellers of illegal drugs don’t ask kids for IDs. As soon as we outlaw a substance, we abandon our ability to regulate and control the marketing of that substance.
After we came to our senses and repealed alcohol prohibition, homicides dropped by 60% and continued to decline until World War II. Today’s murder rates would likely again plummet if we ended drug prohibition.
So what is the answer? Start by removing criminal penalties for marijuana, just as we did for alcohol. If we were to do this, according to state budget figures, California alone would save more than $1 billion annually, which we now spend in a futile effort to eradicate marijuana use and to jail nonviolent users. Is it any wonder that marijuana has become the largest cash crop in California?
We could generate billions of dollars by taxing the stuff, just as we do with tobacco and alcohol.
We should also reclassify most Schedule I drugs (drugs that the federal government alleges have no medicinal value, including marijuana and heroin) as Schedule II drugs (which require a prescription), with the government regulating their production, overseeing their potency, controlling their distribution and allowing licensed professionals (physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, etc.) to prescribe them. This course of action would acknowledge that medical issues, such as drug addiction, are best left under the supervision of medical doctors instead of police officers.
The mission of the criminal justice system should always be to protect us from one another and not from ourselves. That means that drug users who drive a motor vehicle or commit other crimes while under the influence of these drugs would continue to be held criminally responsible for their actions, with strict penalties. But that said, the system should not be used to protect us from ourselves.
Ending drug prohibition, taxing and regulating drugs and spending tax dollars to treat addiction and dependency are the approaches that many of the world’s industrialized countries are taking. Those approaches are ones that work.
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a65f47f0de482b3d1370ec08a5de55f7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-05-sp-nascar5-story.html | Martin to drive full season for Hendrick in ’09 | Martin to drive full season for Hendrick in ’09
Veteran driver Mark Martin, taking one more stab at his first NASCAR Sprint Cup championship, said Friday he would drive a full season next year in the No. 5 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports.
Martin, who has finished second in the championship standings four times in his 26-year career, will take over for Casey Mears, who last week was given his release after this season.
Martin, 49, will join three other drivers on Hendrick’s team, the all-star lineup of Jimmie Johnson, the reigning series champion; Jeff Gordon, a four-time title winner; and Dale Earnhardt Jr., NASCAR’s most popular driver.
“It was just an opportunity that I absolutely could not -- I just couldn’t let it pass by,” Martin said at a nationally televised news conference with team owner Rick Hendrick at Daytona International Speedway, site of the next race tonight.
“This is a real special day for me,” Hendrick said. “We’re honored to have a guy of his caliber.”
Martin’s hiring was one of the worst-kept secrets in the NASCAR garage recently. But until Friday, it wasn’t clear whether he would drive all of the Cup series’ 36 races in 2009 or continue the part-time schedule he has had the last two seasons.
The Arkansas native this year is sharing driving duties in the No. 8 Chevrolet with rookie Aric Almirola, who will drive that car full-time next year for the team of Dale Earnhardt Inc.
Martin says the partial schedule has meant “two years of catching my breath” and was “very meaningful to my family and myself.”
But it also “rekindled my passion for racing . . . and also given me a taste of what it would be like to not have [racing] in my life,” he said.
A fan favorite, Martin has won 35 races in his career, spent mostly with what is now Roush Fenway Racing. He also has remained competitive despite his partial schedule and, with Hendrick’s top-notch cars, is expected to be strong next year.
Despite driving in only 12 of the series’ 17 races so far this year, Martin has finished in the top 10 five times, including two top-five finishes.
And in 2007, he missed winning his first Daytona 500, the sport’s crown jewel race, when Kevin Harvick beat him by a nose at the finish line.
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james.peltz@latimes.com
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76bf7941d1c3c393b3d09982466d5579 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-bk-namle6-story.html | Across seven seas | Across seven seas
At THE risk of being accused of judging a book by its cover, I would like to begin this review of Nam Le’s astounding collection, “The Boat,” with a simple observation. The word “stories” does not appear on the cover. Pulling the book off the shelf, you could reasonably assume you were holding a novel in your hand. The omission reflects publishing’s current wooziness toward short-story collections. The common wisdom is that they don’t sell; the word “stories” is to be avoided, and the more linked the collection, the better.
In this context, “The Boat” is a refreshingly diverse and panoramic debut. Its seven stories are set in Iowa City, the slums of Colombia, Manhattan, coastal Australia, Hiroshima, Iran and the South China Sea, with characters as varied as a Japanese third-grader, an aging painter with hemorrhoids and an American woman visiting Iran for the first time.
In “Cartagena,” a gripping tale of adolescent friendship, crime and loyalty, Juan Pablo, a 14-year-old assassin from Medellin, has been ordered to kill one of his closest friends. After he fails to eliminate his target, he is summoned by his “agent,” known as El Padre, a meeting that will most likely end in his own death. In less capable hands, this material would quickly devolve into cartoonish violence and two-dimensional stereotype, but Le’s masterful treatment results in a rich unveiling that renders the story more complex at every turn. The atmosphere is utterly authentic, the language spare and idiomatic: “Street kids scavenge for food by the roadside, some of them inhaling the pale yellow sacol from supermarket bags -- their eyes half-open and animal and unblinking.” Assuming that Le has never himself been employed by the Colombian drug cartels, the story must have required a considerable amount of research -- yet the narrative never feels weighed down. Reading these stories, you’re left feeling that Le has been all over the planet and has poked at everything with a sharp stick.
In “Meeting Elise,” Henry Luff, an aging, “well- regarded neo-figurative painter,” prepares to meet his adult daughter for the first time since she was an infant -- she’s giving a cello recital at Carnegie Hall. Luff’s narration ranges from the comic to the pa- thetic, and the world is vividly drawn, but what is most remarkable about the story is the way in which Le deftly juggles dialogue, memory and the physical sense of an aging man’s ailing body to create a continuous, seamless consciousness, wholly convincing throughout.
As with “Meeting Elise,” the stories tend to establish a future event and conclude just before that event occurs. In “Halflead Bay,” it is a big Australian football game; in “Hiroshima,” it is the dropping of the atomic bomb; in “Tehran Calling,” it is the performance of a political play. This lends them narrative propulsion -- something is coming! -- while also placing the characters in a sort of suspended animation, a space in which they interact, collide, struggle to connect, fail or succeed. Le’s characters tend to be people in transit, people who, for one reason or another, have come unmoored and find themselves among other unmoored people, all of them trying to find their way to safety and stability. He resists the urge to explain them away and instead inhabits them with the sort of visceral empathy that cannot be taught.
In the title story, the transit is also literal. A refugee named Mai forges a wary alliance with a woman and her son on a refugee boat in the South China Sea. Le keeps us keenly aware of the gulf between propinquity and genuine human connection. “She was crammed in by a boatload of human bodies, thinking of her father and becoming overwhelmed, slowly, with loneliness. . . . She stayed in that human cocoon, heaving and rolling, concentrating, until it was over.”
The finest story in the collection is “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” which is narrated by a 25-year-old lawyer-turned-writer named Nam who is attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (Le worked as a lawyer before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.) At one point, a fellow writing student lauds Nam for choosing not to exploit his ethnic background in his work: “You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans -- and New York painters with hemorrhoids.”
Lesbian vampires aside, that describes three of this collection’s stories -- clearly, there’s some gamesmanship afoot. Though Nam is obviously invented, the parallels invite us to treat the entire collection as not just a book by Nam Le, but also as the fictional product of a fictional young Vietnamese writer, also named Nam. It’s a clever, if diaphanous, frame. A teacher in the story urges Nam to write an “ethnic story,” stating that “ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.” The piece revolves around Nam’s struggle to finish this “ethnic story” while his laconic, somewhat estranged father is visiting. He writes the story of his father’s surviving the My Lai massacre. Though we never get to see the draft, the details are conveyed. The story we’re reading both contains and transforms the “ethnic story” it refers to. What eventually emerges is a deeply moving story about a son and father attempting to come to terms with themselves, with each other and with the past.
Though the other six stories in this collection are fine exemplars of literary fiction, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” in its complexity, in its range, in its depiction of a struggle to make sense of experience, achieves the realm of Literature. *
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a9dc584a2cd260955da7c90075c6835c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-ca-conversation6-story.html | Dating? Don’t ask | Dating? Don’t ask
Selma BLAIR costars in “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army,” which opens Friday. She’s also in Lori Petty’s autobiographical drama “Poker House,” which just played at the Los Angeles Film Festival. This fall, she and Molly Shannon star in NBC’s American version of “Kath and Kim.”
Do you generally enjoy being interviewed?
Sometimes I think it’s really invigorating to talk about myself for a while! But then I feel really strange because I’ve been talking about myself for an hour. You know, it doesn’t make for a good conversation.
It’s maybe not dangerous but sort of exhaustingly odd to plumb yourself all day.
My whole life I’ve been missing a filter. I don’t censor myself very well. Thank God people don’t give that much of a hoot about me.
How do people in your career find a therapist?
I dunno! All the other actors recommend a good therapist? Everybody has confidentiality issues with a therapist. That’s kind of the law they’re not supposed to break. But I’m just in therapy talking about my dog dying when I was 18.
How are you enjoying being single?
Next question!
Yay!
Yay! Therapy’s working! I’m censoring myself!
“Kath & Kim,” the U.S. version, is coming to NBC in October --
That’s what I hear, Oct. 9, NBC, at 9:30, after “The Office.” I can be a salesman! And I’m smiling while I say it! Ben Silverman would be so proud of me. I’m a good team player. See, I can work for a network. My career is still going strong, exclamation, exclamation!
Were there ever doubts that you could be, as they say, on the team?
Doubts in my head, for sure. Well, I had done a TV show years ago . . . a show on the WB called [“Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane].” It was a thrill, to me and I was giddy and new. So I was on the WB, and it was the second-to-worst-rated show in the United States. There were things you had to do -- affiliate dinners, cocktail parties, and you had to sell the show, especially because the WB was a fledgling network. . . . It was very difficult for me, and I thought, “Never again. I’m not cut out for this.” I get bored doing something more than a couple months. That’s why I like film. [But] I was away shooting “Hellboy 2" in Budapest and I thought, “I don’t know if I want to be on location so much at this point in my life. One day I’ll have a family or a child, or I could get to know my house!” So I really fought for it. It wasn’t handed to me. When I went to the up-fronts and realized I had to talk to people and smile, I was like, “Oh, no! I don’t know how to be this affable. I need to go to the dentist and put veneers on my teeth.” I’m so grateful to be here. I want to do it well! But I think I have to put a disclaimer: “This does not come naturally to me. Please don’t be angry with me.” You have to try to charm people. I’m not dripping with that said charm. That thing they call charm I do not know.
It sounds like shyness and something else -- not necessarily hatred of humanity.
No! I like humanity. I’m a little uncomfortable around humanity. But I like them there people. Those people you speak of seem kind and nice at times. But it’s a lot of work to be up and breathing, don’t you find?
Did you, uh, get fat for “Kath and Kim”?
I let myself go a little. I didn’t get fat, because that would sound wrong. I’m never going to be a big girl -- I’m just a little floppy. It’s hard going to the gym. It hurts. And it hurts when you don’t see results. There’s mirrors all over the gym!
Do you have some monster putting you through the paces?
I have two very good-looking guys putting me through the paces. That’s right, I need two: Ryan and Matt. They text me and tell me to eat every two hours, to keep my metabolism up. Little do they know I’m eating macaroni and cheese.
That is like a Demi Moore routine!
I’m trying, baby, I’m trying. I had my birthday on Monday, and I went surfing for the first time. I’m making this year about being active.
How was your birthday?
It was great. I talked to my mom on my birthday, whom I worship. I turned 36 this year. She said, “Oh, baby, when I was 36 I remember laying in bed and thinking, ‘I’m 36, it’s halfway over, it’s halfway over.’ ” That was my mom’s birthday gift.
That’s what 36 feels like.
It felt halfway over when I was 5. I’m surprised I made it this far. I never thought I’d be 16! I thought I’d die tragically young and it’d be over.
How hard did you try?
I was pretty self-destructive, I’ll leave it at that. I was a reckless person. But those days are gone!
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ac50330a62d85eff46a1cd10253c4fb4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-ca-flowers6-story.html | How their roots intertwine | How their roots intertwine
A special energy was crackling among the ladies refreshing their ikebana arrangements in the strikingly unusual exhibition “Living Flowers: Ikebana and Contemporary Art” at the Japanese American National Museum. In two days, the crown prince of Japan was expected to tour the museum. They wouldn’t be allowed here that day, but the very idea that Japanese royalty would see their work had made their day.
Leading the Sogetsu team of five, Haruko Takeichi was in charge of the large installation leading into the exhibition. The women were creating flurries of magnolia tree branches, sunflowers, and purple and white statice on and around two giant twisting tree trunks seated on the floor. Takeichi took a look over her shoulder. Something wasn’t quite right.
She picked up a pair of shears and attacked a cluster of magnolia leaves, ruthlessly trimming several to make them smaller. “They look too crowded,” she said. With confident snip-snips, she cut each leaf slightly asymmetrically, emulating the shape of their compatriots, so that from a distance they looked, yes, natural.
“That’s one of the philosophies of ikebana,” said Karin Higa, curator of the show, “to shape nature in a more perfect way, but at the same time to make it look natural.”
For some time Higa has noted how contemporary art echoes the aesthetics of ikebana -- especially in spatial concerns and the fact that ikebana, generally designed for a tokonoma, a Japanese alcove, is meant to be viewed frontally. She began to collect a list of artists for an exhibition around the idea, eventually coming up with the 20 in this show.
The still-life photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe were a natural, as was a sculpture for holding flowers by Isamu Noguchi, the late Japanese American artist who had a long affiliation with the Sogetsu school. To these she added American and international artists.
Choosing the ikebana schools was more straightforward. The museum needed schools capable of assigning members to make weekly arrangements during the show’s 12-week run, through Sept. 7. (New arrangements are made on Fridays, with “refreshing” on Tuesdays.)
Ikenobo Ikebana Society boasts the oldest history -- 600 years; Ohara School of Ikebana 110 years; and the “upstart” Sogetsu was started in 1927 by Sofu Teshigara, the father of Hiroshi Teshigara (“Woman in the Dunes”), who dutifully retired from filmmaking to run the school when called upon. Given its lineage, Sogetsu is the most free-form of the three schools, with a tendency for dramatic flair.
As Minako Hayashida of Los Angeles’ Ohara school pointed out: “These three are also the main schools in Japan.”
“This is not about flowers responding to art, but really what these two art forms can say about one another,” said Higa. “I want to look at ikebana as an art form and its internal logic and ways of being, and how that could inform and illuminate contemporary art and vice versa.”
Although she did not ask the ikebana schools to specifically create work to pair with the contemporary art she selected, some connections have nicely appeared -- some through serendipity, some through exhibition design conjuring.
In the lower gallery, Andy Ouchi’s sculpture “Monstera” is an arrangement of large monstera leaves made of green-tinted steel, seated atop a pedestal. A nearby alcove features a living arrangement of broad monstera leaves, kale and asparagus berries in a shallow bowl by Jose Salcedo of the Ohara school. Hayashida pointed out that this is in “moribana” style, which mandates the use of five elements in a triangular shape.
As part of Anna Sew Hoy’s sculpture “Why” -- a giant ball of sisal rope wound around a thick black pole, two black-painted tree branches sprouting like antlers from the top of the ball -- an ominous black shadow has been painted onto the adjoining floor and wall. Higa wanted to call attention to the natural materials being used, as well as the shadow, which she hopes will prompt viewers to note how the lighting of ikebana is also meant to cast beautiful shadows.
The natural world’s cycles
While commonalities between the art forms are evident, contrasts also emerge. Ikebana arrangements convey a sense of timelessness, but contemporary art is often concerned with issues of temporality. Included is an installation by British artist Anya Gallaccio, “In a Moment,” in which 365 gerbera daisies -- one for each day of the year -- have been woven in a daisy chain hung from overhead poles. Unlike the ikebana, these will not be refreshed, but will droop and wither till the end of the exhibition -- an artful acknowledgment of decay. “I love how you’re watching time,” Higa said of the piece.
In a similar vein are three photographs from Sharon Lockhart’s “No-no Ikebana” series. Over the space of a month, she documented how an ikebana made with a stalk of Brussels sprouts begins to sag and decay. Even more violent is the destruction recorded in “Blow Up: Untitled 5" by Ori Gersht. He has captured a freeze-frame of a flower arrangement being blown up -- literally -- with bits of petal flying out of a cloud of smoke.
The ikebana masters do find the museum project a bit unusual, but they’ve been happy to participate because they were allowed to follow their own tradition, considered an art form in Japan. “In Japan there’s not such a clear separation between art and craft,” said Higa. And, like artists, they see themselves on a continuous path of growth. As Hayashida said, “I never have 100% satisfaction.”
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‘Living Flowers’
Where: Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., Little Tokyo
When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays except until 8 p.m. Thursdays. Ikebana demonstrations (free with admission): 2-4 p.m. July 20, Sogetsu L.A. branch; 2 to 4 p.m. Aug. 24, Ohara School of Ikebana L.A. chapter
Price: $4 to $8
Contact: (213) 625-0414 or www.janm.org
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de268a48fe9a0e519fef7e618ae37400 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-ca-freedomriders6-story.html | A ride into a lasting legacy | A ride into a lasting legacy
THE STORY was already written: Vividly rendered on those young faces -- excited, angry, naive, fearful, idealistic. But it was only the first leg of their journey. That’s what first struck Eric Etheridge when he first laid eyes on a trove of old mug shots -- men and women, black and white -- who came to be known as the "” Freedom Riders.”
The images, standard head-and-shoulder shots, were stored for safekeeping by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to protect the state from “federal encroachment”; meaning to resist all change in the racial status quo after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which had desegregated public schools.
Each photograph contained just the most pertinent information: Police department. Booking number. Date of arrest. But Etheridge felt a hint of something more embedded there. “As soon as I saw them, I realized that they were something pretty exquisite.”
For Etheridge, who was, as he puts it, “a magazine editor between jobs looking to give myself an assignment,” it was an obvious, open question: “Where are they now? Where did this road eventually take them?”
His new book, “Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders,” fills in the subsequent chapters of these activists’ stories. As it happened, all these years later, these men and women would describe the same impetuses he’d glimpsed in their faces -- “naivete,” “idealism,” “anger” -- to describe what was in their head, or heart, in that earlier instant. They spoke to Etheridge candidly about the complexities that led them to board trains or buses and travel through the troubled American South during the spring and summer of 1961 -- testing the power of the Supreme Court’s ruling that decreed that interstate travel be desegregated.
Eventually, their act of persistence would alter the course of history, paving the path for the Civil Rights Act of ’64, the Voting Rights Act of ’65 and the War on Poverty -- and the stream of citizen activism that would follow.
As Etheridge would come to learn, these several hundred protesters had come to this crossroads from all points on the map -- geographically, ideologically, spiritually. Before it was all over many would be beaten; one bus was set afire; another was ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan. Mass arrests were made, and many protesters found themselves behind the bars at Parchman, Mississippi’s infamous state penitentiary. There they buoyed themselves with what become known as freedom songs.
Etheridge, a son of the South, was only 4 that summer. He grew up in Carthage, Miss., just 60 miles north of Jackson. Back then, the segregated South wasn’t something that he understood in words; rather, it was atmosphere, something that was observed in the everyday black-white divisions -- school, church, transit. Soon enough, he’d move north, first for college in Nashville, then to New York in the late ‘70s to begin a career in journalism, working as an editor at Rolling Stone and other publications.
When the Sovereignty Commission released its files to the public in 1998, that milestone revelation stuck in his head -- though it would take six more years for him to get there. The paradox wasn’t lost on him: “This was the commission whose job it was to stop progress and preserve segregation,” said Etheridge. “Here it was. . . this amazing documentation of the Mississippi portion of the Freedom Rides, and they deserved a wider audience.”
Taking a new look
He wasn’t the first to lay eyes on the mug shots or incorporate them into a larger project. But Etheridge, who had begun fiddling around more and more with photography, was interested in making new portraits. “I thought I would treat them as their own entity.” The commission had already made the first step easy -- along with the photos, the commission had collected personal information. “So I had everybody’s name, birthday, birthplace and current address as of ’61.” Plugging the information into Internet search sites, he began to make his way through the list. Some of the subjects were ready right away. Others were guarded or skeptical about his intentions. “One person said he didn’t want to be photographed. Another didn’t understand quite what I wanted to do,” said Etheridge. “They [all] were surprised to hear from some guy who was interested in this moment in their lives.” His icebreaker: “Have you seen your mug shot from 1961?” Most of them, said Etheridge, didn’t know it existed.
When writer and publisher James Atlas happened upon Etheridge’s project -- two portraits and their corresponding mug shots -- while paging through the New York Times Magazine, he was at his own crossroads. Atlas was in the process of starting his own independent press, Atlas & Co. “But my thinking had been kind of inchoate,” he said. “But when I saw those four photographs. It was somehow ordained . . . that I had a social and political mission.” Those images were still potent symbols; a reminder that each of us is capable of stepping forward, affecting change. Atlas put calls out to find him: So ultimately, “Eric’s book helped me articulate what I wanted to do.”
The portraits show the predictable transformation: gray hair, lined faces -- just one layer of the journey. But for Etheridge, there is something about what lives on in the eyes -- that anger or satisfaction, detachment or sadness. “Many of them shared their life story -- how they were raised, what kind of political understanding they had and how they got involved,” said Etheridge.
Etheridge learned that their paths varied -- they became teachers, car mechanics, graphic designers, longshoremen, pastors -- many of them lifelong activists. Some of them became famous -- Rev. James Lawson, Stokely Carmichael and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) -- and others were proud of their moment in the thick of it but happy to now be working out of the spotlight.
The legacy of the rides
LOOKING AT America’s racial landscape of today -- unemployment, murder rates of black men, statistics enumerating hate crimes-- would they say it had long-range resonance? Were the broken skulls, or the battered pride, worth it in a measurable, enduring way? “I would say that most of them feel that the Freedom Rides -- the civil rights movement of ’60 to ’65 was very successful in accomplishing these very basic things like getting people to vote, ending segregation,” said Etheridge. “I think that they all would feel in varying degrees that the movement stopped short of getting where they thought things should be.”
Etheridge is quick to add, however, that he did much of this work before there was such a thing as a Barack Obama on the horizon, so even these portraits -- these visual statements/oral interludes -- are truly snapshots of an instant, a story still in progress. Now, as Etheridge tours the country promoting the book, sometimes appearing with some of the Freedom Riders themselves, that subject often comes up: that some of the fruits, the tangible measures of success, took 40-plus years to arrive. “It’s a heroic testament,” added publisher Atlas, “to the possibilities for revisiting and advancing the cause of black equality in this country now vindicated by Obama.”
Yet for many of them the vindication came long ago in the moment. “I can’t speak for nobody else,” Freedom Rider Frank Holloway recalls in his interview in “Breach of Peace.” “I didn’t feel like I was a hero or anything like that. I did it and when I stopped doing it, I didn’t feel like anybody needed to reward me or congratulate me or pat me on my back. I did what I felt like I had to do.”
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lynell.george@latimes.com
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116d5868232f9a07039c0f3c47e4f111 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-fg-summit6-story.html | Relevance of G-8 is unclear | Relevance of G-8 is unclear
As leaders of the world’s major developed nations meet this week in a tranquil mountain resort in Japan, their gathering probably will be overshadowed by the turbulent global economy and deepening unrest over soaring oil and food prices.
And the question on many minds is whether the Group of 8 leaders will be able to do anything about it.
“This is going to be one of those events that shift people’s thinking about the world,” said Tim Condon, chief Asia economist for ING Financial Markets in Singapore.
For the G-8 and other groups led by traditional Western powers, he said, “their relative position is shrinking to the rest of the world. . . . The relevance of this meeting is questionable. It’s not clear what they can do.”
Shi Yinghong, director of American Studies at People’s University in Beijing, said, “Honestly, there’s no one who can give a global solution. Many countries don’t even have a solution for their own domestic problems.”
Even G-8 members have downplayed expectations of breakthroughs or agreements on major issues.
For President Bush, this G-8 summit will be the last. In a briefing last week, administration officials indicated that the president would seek to enhance G-8 accountability and ensure that past commitments are met, including programs for fighting malaria, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. He probably also will push for policies supporting open markets and international trade.
But the American position has been weakened by its own faltering policies that many blame for the global economic malaise, particularly credit troubles after the blowup of the subprime mortgage industry.
Even as many analysts have lowered expectations for the summit, which starts Monday, protesters were mobilizing Saturday on the northern island of Hokkaido, where the leaders will meet for three days.
About 21,000 police officers have sealed off the area, and Japanese immigration officers were reported to have barred some South Korean farmers who were planning to take part in demonstrations.
Protests at such international meetings have become routine, but the tensions at this year’s summit reflect what some view as the worst economic global state since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
At the G-8 summit last year in Germany, officials declared the world economy to be in “good condition.” But since then, companies, and consumers in particular, have faced hard times amid rising inflation, triggering rioting in some countries.
In a letter last week to the G-8, World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick called on leaders to act immediately to deal with surging energy and food prices, which he said threatened to push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty and reverse gains made in previous years.
The world is “entering a danger zone,” he said.
Japan has pledged $50 million in food aid over the next three months, on top of about $200 million it had committed earlier to help developing nations with rising prices for rice and other foods.
G-8 members, which also include Germany, France, Italy, Britain, Canada and Russia, are expected to set up a new system of “food reserves,” much like strategic oil reserves.
But the World Bank estimates that short-term food needs exceed $10 billion.
The G-8 will probably have even less ability to bring about significant relief from global oil prices, which have doubled in the last year.
Part of the G-8’s weakness is that the members are themselves struggling economically. The United States is showing little or no growth, joblessness is rising and stock markets are falling. Japan and most of the other G-8 members aren’t faring much better.
The other factor: Nations such as Saudi Arabia, a key player in controlling crude supplies, and China, which is driving some of the increased demand for fuel, aren’t part of the G-8 and won’t be at the table, though Chinese officials will take part in some discussions as guests, including one-on-one sessions with Bush.
As host, Japan has made global warming a top priority, but it remains to be seen whether the gathering will be able to reach an accord on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Japanese political advisors agree that nations such as China and India, where demand for resources is increasing, and big suppliers, such as Brazil, should be included in the debate.
In discussions of energy, the U.S. and others in the G-8 have tended to cite rising demand from fast-growing countries, particularly China, whereas the Chinese and some others have blamed the weak dollar and speculation for the price increases.
“Why can’t the U.S. take responsibility to supervise those who are manipulating the global oil prices?” asked Yi Xianrong of the Research Center for International Finance at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
“And second, what about the depreciating dollar and its impact to the international market? It is the dollar’s depreciation that caused hot money fleeing . . . all over the world and led to a series of global economic problems.”
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don.lee@latimes.com
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49dc31749c4016cd28fbfa31a5e2c11b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-me-charity6-story.html | Charities find gifts aren’t a given | Charities find gifts aren’t a given
For 24 years, Citizens Against Government Waste has exposed pork-barrel spenders and rallied tax critics.
Its “Pig Book” and “porker” awards, meant to shame congressional leaders who exploit the public purse, have made the group a media darling and a political force.
But when it comes to policing its own fundraising practices, America’s self-proclaimed "#1 taxpayer watchdog” seems to have lost its bite.
Records filed with the California attorney general’s office show that over the last decade, for-profit fundraisers for the nonprofit kept more than 94 cents of every donated dollar. Yet donors could write off the full contribution on their tax returns.
“It’s a rip-off of the taxpayer,” said Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at Georgetown Public Policy Institute and a philanthropy scholar.
A Times investigation found hundreds of other examples of charities that pocketed just a sliver of what commercial fundraisers collected in their names. Some didn’t get a dime or even lost money.
According to a comprehensive review of state records filed over a decade, the problem of paltry returns extends well beyond what has been reported in recent years among benevolent societies for police, firefighters and veterans. It affects charities large and small, well-known and obscure. It spans a range of causes, including child and animal welfare, health research and opposition to drunk driving.
In more than 5,800 campaigns on behalf of charities that were registered with the state attorney general from 1997 to 2006, the fundraisers reported taking in $2.6 billion. They kept nearly $1.4 billion -- about 54 cents of every dollar raised.
These numbers reflect only part of the problem. Though commercial fundraisers are required to file detailed fundraising reports with the state, many do not, and the law is not aggressively enforced because of limited staffing.
For-profit campaigns, which often employ telemarketing, mass mailings or one-time events, account for a small fraction of $223 billion in charitable giving each year in the United States. But they collect significant sums and help shape public perceptions of charities. Pairing computer-controlled dialing systems with low-wage workers, such firms can reach a large number of people in a short time.
“If I could forget about what percentage was going where,” said Dan Halfeldt, former sales manager at one Phoenix-based telemarketer for nonprofits, “I could really say, ‘Wow, I’m raising money for something good.’ ”
The firm, Midwest Publishing Inc., consistently offered among the lowest returns by large fundraisers. It did not respond to written questions about its operations.
The fundraising business is growing. More than 300 fundraisers have registered in California. Since 2000, the number of campaigns and amounts raised by for-profit firms has risen by about two-thirds.
Among the charities that netted little from such campaigns were the Humane Society of the United States, the American Breast Cancer Foundation, the Christian social-action group Concerned Women for America, the National Right to Life Committee and Students Against Destructive Decisions.
Among The Times’ findings:
More than 100 charities raised $1 million or more from commercial appeals but netted less than 25 cents per dollar. Fundraisers got the rest.
In 430 campaigns, charities got nothing: All $44 million donated went to fundraisers. In 337 of those cases, charities actually lost money, paying fees to fundraisers that exceeded the amount raised.
In hundreds of other campaigns, charities apparently entered into contracts that limited their share of donations to 20% or less, no matter how successful the campaign.
Groups with strong emotional or patriotic appeal -- those supporting animals, children, veterans and public safety workers, for instance -- often fared worst. Missing-children charities received less than 15% of more than $28 million raised on their behalf.
Many nonprofits rely heavily on set-rate contracts and aim their campaigns toward a mass audience, which is less efficient than targeting a defined set of donors.
In general, charities argue that it takes money to make money and that the benefits of commercially run campaigns may not show in state filings.
For instance, Citizens Against Government Waste said that its telemarketing was meant to find donors who would give regularly, not necessarily to raise a large sum in a single campaign.
To critics, that argument often excuses wastefulness or profiteering -- and every charity pays for that.
Some charities “take advantage of American generosity,” said Bennett Weiner, an executive with the Better Business Bureau research program Wise Giving Alliance. They “accomplish very little, siphon off good money from the community and tarnish the well for more legitimate nonprofits.”
By donating to inefficient charities, said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, “you are taking money out of the mouth of a hungry kid.”
Urgent accounts
“Where are the children? Where did they go?” a child’s mournful voice sings on the website of Operation Lookout -- National Center for Missing Youth. “Are they held captive or do they run free? . . . Oh, where can they be?”
The group’s online, telemarketing and door-to-door outreach materials offer urgent accounts of runaways or kidnapping victims -- and equally urgent pleas for cash.
Commercial firms reported having raised more than $6 million for Operation Lookout, based in Everett, Wash., since 1999. Less than $1 million reached the charity.
A current contract between the fundraiser and the charity sets a minimum 15% return on donations. In practice, over the years, 15% has been the maximum. In each year from 2000 to 2006, it received exactly 15% -- not a penny more or less -- of funds collected in its name by commercial fundraiser Midwest Publishing.
Operation Lookout did not respond to requests for comment.
The charity has posted a defense of its fundraising on its website, blaming accounting requirements for distorting its results: “In some instances, accounting rules require that we combine volunteer recruitment, calls to action and public education making them appear as a ‘fundraising’ expense.”
Neither of the nation’s two major accounting standards bodies has ruled that such costs must be combined.
Based on tax returns and other sources, the American Institute of Philanthropy ferrets out hidden costs of fundraising by charities -- including but not limited to commercial campaigns. It estimated that Operation Lookout spent 84 cents to raise each dollar in its 2006 budget of $2.1 million, a worse record than all but 18 of more than 500 rated charities.
The philanthropy institute normally considers up to 35 cents to raise a dollar as a reasonable cost.
The Times analysis of commercial campaigns in California found inefficiency to be typical among missing-child groups: On average more than 85 cents per dollar went to the fundraiser.
However, some charities of this kind eschew commercial fundraisers, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Ernie Allen, its chief executive, said groups that rely on minuscule returns taint the entire field.
Patty Wetterling co-founded the Jacob Wetterling Foundation in 1990, after her 11-year-old son was kidnapped at gunpoint. Jacob has not been found.
“Missing children’s organizations spring up out of crisis,” she said. “Fundraisers exploit these devastating situations.”
But groups shouldn’t allow themselves to be overcharged by fundraisers over and over, she said. They “need to learn.”
6% for the charity
Vickie Bouska, a retiree in Hiawatha, Iowa, became a donor to Citizens Against Government Waste after she heard leaders’ arguments on television and received a fundraising letter. The group addressed her fears about the future.
“I’m scared to death of what we’re leaving our children,” she said. “The Chinese or the Canadians are going to own us, because no one in Washington can close the pocketbooks.”
But she was stunned to learn from a reporter how much money the group ceded to its commercial fundraisers. Of $879,000 raised in the decade examined, $49,000 -- 6% -- reached the charity.
“They aren’t really getting the money,” Bouska said, “so why am I sending it?”
Thomas Schatz, president of the Washington, D.C.-based group founded by industrialist J. Peter Grace and muckraking journalist Jack Anderson, defended its fundraising.
“The purpose of telemarketing is not always to ‘come out ahead,’ though that’s always the goal, but to reinforce [donors] for the future,” he said.
The Los Angeles-based fundraiser Facter Direct, which conducted the group’s telemarketing campaigns, declined to comment on its work for Citizens Against Government Waste. On average, state data show, it returns 39% of what it raises to its clients, slightly less than the industry norm.
“The numbers on the surface don’t always tell the whole story, said the firm’s president, Tom Siegel. “Organizations are not stupid. They recognize the cost of telemarketing and the annoyance of it. But . . . they recognize that it’s one of the most effective ways to raise money” over the long run.
Schatz noted that the telemarketing campaigns reported to the state reflect a small portion of his organization’s overall fundraising. Direct mail by commercial solicitors -- an approach used by the group for two decades -- provides most of its approximately $5.4 million in annual revenue and is more efficient, he said.
It proved impossible to verify that claim, because only one direct-mail campaign of behalf of Citizens Against Government Waste was registered with the state, as required, in the 10-year period. That one showed no revenue.
Citizens Against Government Waste suggested that its overall fundraising was highly efficient -- costing just 19 cents per dollar raised, according to its 2006 tax return.
But the group came up with that figure by designating most direct-mail and telemarketing costs as “services.” The practice is legal if information, such as criticism of pork-barrel projects, is included in fundraising pitches. The American Institute of Philanthropy estimated the actual cost of the group’s overall fundraising at 69 cents per dollar.
Some other economic-policy nonprofits steer clear of commercial fundraisers, emphasizing foundation grants and direct contact with donors.
Telemarketing and mass mailings can raise awareness, but “there’s always something about it that rubs me the wrong way,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington, D.C. “It’s important that people know that their dollars are going to the mission.”
Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago nonprofit that promotes free-market approaches to environmental and social problems and accepts corporate donations, said he didn’t trust telemarketers to safeguard his group’s image, especially when returns can be low.
“It’s not a very good risk,” he said.
Costs and credibility
American generosity has its limits. The charitable pie in the U.S. has accounted for about 2% of the gross domestic product since 1970.
Meanwhile, the number of charities has risen dramatically. More than 1.9 million nonprofits -- one for every 150 U.S. citizens -- fill gaps in government services, give voice to diverse views and compete fiercely for this limited share of donor dollars.
Tax laws, designed to encourage giving, don’t take into account how much money reaches the charitable cause. Donors to commercially run drives can write off the entire donation, even if most of it goes to the fundraiser.
Lawmakers periodically have considered reining in the fundraising industry. But the U.S. Supreme Court has limited their options by upholding the free-speech rights of fundraisers and charities.
Recently, public confidence has been shaken by news of inefficient for-profit fundraisers used by police and firefighter charities. And congressional hearings depicted some veterans’ charities as little more than shells that enrich fundraisers and executives.
In a national survey conducted in March, 70% of those polled said charities waste “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of their funds.
Charities “may be losing their most prized possession: their reputation for caring,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University who wrote the survey and has studied nonprofit governance for more than two decades.
Many charities hire for-profit fundraisers precisely because they need help selling themselves to a skeptical public. They can be “a godsend and a lifesaver,” particularly for charities without staff fundraisers, said Diana Aviv, chief executive of Independent Sector, a trade group for nonprofits.
Limited information is available about such firms; most are privately held and many shun the media.
Those that specialize in nonprofits with long-standing patron networks tend to offer better returns. New York-based telemarketer DCM Inc. works exclusively for arts groups, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, targeting ticket buyers and former donors. It enjoys one of the best records in the business, returning, on average, 72 cents per dollar raised.
“I don’t think that telemarketing is a great contribution to Western civilization, but art is,” said Phil Miller, DCM’s president. “We provide a good service for great organizations.”
Even so, many charities get stuck with unfavorable terms.
A contract between Michigan-based TeleService USA and the veterans charity VietNow makes donor lists “the exclusive property” of the fundraiser. If the charity switches fundraisers, it would lose access to past supporters -- the most likely future donors.
TeleService USA, which delivered to its clients, on average, 11 cents per dollar raised, did not respond to requests for an interview.
Hundreds of charities follow the practice used by Operation Lookout, many accepting set-rate contracts that deliver a sliver of gross donations. For small charities, the contracts seem to minimize risk: Fundraisers pay upfront costs, and charities get guaranteed -- if often small -- returns.
But major charities are the dominant users of for-profit fundraising, whether to raise money for basic costs or to expand a donor base. Among 1,614 charities with commercial campaigns registered in California, 100 accounted for 73% of gross donations. Just two, Paralyzed Veterans of America and the American Diabetes Assn., together took almost 14%.
In theory, large charities use for-profit firms more efficiently because they can tap long-standing donor networks. In practice, they do little better than small ones.
Fundraisers for these major groups, meanwhile, reaped a windfall. Those for the 100 top-grossing charities received nearly $977 million, and firms for just the top two pocketed $171 million combined.
“Often the most popular causes . . . solicit everyone under the sun to get a few dollars from almost everyone,” said Borochoff, of the American Institute of Philanthropy. “That’s a really expensive way to raise money.”
Donors often have no idea where their money goes.
Disillusioned donor
Pamela Kay Weeks lost both breasts to cancer. After she recovered, she received letters and calls from the American Breast Cancer Foundation, a Baltimore charity that listed research as a priority. Hoping to spare others what she suffered, Weeks wrote a check -- the first of many.
“I’m not a wealthy person,” said Weeks, 51, an executive secretary who lives in Sneads, Fla. “I’ve given what I can.”
Weeks thought her donations were headed for a philanthropic powerhouse. But the foundation is one of the nation’s least efficient charities, according to the American Institute of Philanthropy and Charity Navigator, another watchdog group.
In 2006 just 2.5% of the American Breast Cancer Foundation budget went to research and 10.5% to mammograms or other services unrelated to fundraising.
In reports filed with the California attorney general from 2003 through 2006, the foundation said it raised $5.8 million from fundraisers, netting just $700,000, or 12%.
The foundation had a particularly close link to one fundraiser, although there was no sign of it in state files.
Phyllis Wolf, executive director of the foundation, created the charity in 1997 with her son Joseph Wolf and two friends. The son worked for the foundation in its early years, then began a for-profit fundraising firm called Non Profit Promotions.
From 2002 through 2006, the foundation paid Non Profit Promotions an average of almost $3 million annually, according to foundation tax returns. That’s not illegal, but it violated conflict-of-interest policies used by several large charities and a model policy by the Better Business Bureau.
And despite state laws requiring fundraisers to submit results, no reports by Non Profit Promotions were on record in California or other states whose files were checked by The Times.
Neither Phyllis Wolf nor Joseph Wolf replied to written questions about their fundraising.
Weeks was surprised -- and saddened -- to hear where most of the donors’ money went.
“I figured that a lot of it goes to paying people to research cancer,” she said. “It’s unreal, hard to believe.”
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charles.piller@latimes.com
doug.smith@latimes.com
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Researchers Maloy Moore and Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
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About the data
Information analyzed for this report included all commercial fundraising campaigns reported to the state from 1997 through 2006, excluding those involving thrift store sales or vehicle donations.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
What to know before you give
Beware of a hard sell, as when callers offer to send a courier to your home to collect the donation.
Check the charity’s tax status. Donations are not deductible for all “tax-exempt” groups.
Ask about the charity’s share of what is raised. In California, fundraisers must provide it on request.
Verify that the fundraiser is legitimate. If you suspect a scam, check directly with the charity.
Avoid copycats. Bogus or inefficient charities sometimes use names similar to famous, well-run groups.
Don’t offer a credit card number over the phone or send cash.
Don’t feel obligated to pay for “gifts.” Address labels or other tokens sent by charities as incentives don’t require a donation.
Check with watchdog services and guides, such as:
Wise Giving Alliance, www.give.org, for certifications of charities.
American Institute of Philanthropy, www.charitywatch.org, or Charity Navigator, www.charitynavigator.org, for charity ratings.
GuideStar, www.guidestar.org, for access to financial and tax records and for IRS deductibility rules.
California attorney general’s office, ag.ca.gov/charities, to file complaints, or justice.doj.ca.gov/cfr/cfr.asp, to find financial records on charities or commercial fundraisers.
Federal Trade Commission, www.ftc.gov or (877) 382-4357, to report fraud.
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Sources: Federal Trade Commission, American Institute of Philanthropy, California attorney general
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Los Angeles Times
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Anatomy of a fundraising cycle
In 2006 telemarketers for Operation Lookout - National Center for Missing Youth registered four campaigns in California. Overall, the charity received about $217,000, less than 15% of gross revenues of nearly $1.5 million. Fundraisers got the rest.
Breakdown of revenue
Midwest Publishing Inc.
Total revenue: $795,507
Returned to charity: $119,326 (15%)
Total expenses: $676,181
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Contract Communications Inc.
Total revenue: $546,516
Returned to charity: $75,956 (13.9%)
Total expenses: $470,560
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TeleService USA
Total revenue: $102,205
Returned to charity: $17,375 (17%)
Total expenses: $84,830
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Kinship Communications
Total revenue: $23,706
Returned to charity: $4,267 (18%)
Total expenses: $19,439
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Note: Revenues and expenses are not equal because of rounding.
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Breakdown of expenses
Salaries: $890,212
Telephone: $53,516
Facilities: $78,253
Postage: $88,999
Other*: $140,031
* Includes office expenses, depreciation and profit
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Source: California attorney general
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Los Angeles Times
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On latimes.com
Tracking donations
For a searchable database of commercial fundraising efforts by local nonprofits, see www .latimes.com/charitydatabase
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be93ba980cd29cc8cf8278fa1d452c41 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-me-lopez6-story.html | A role model for L.A.? Chicago | A role model for L.A.? Chicago
The sun cast golden light across the metropolis, flowers overflowed baskets hanging from every post, people by the thousands strolled through massive parks or sunbathed on sandy beaches, enjoying public spaces with little or no trash, graffiti or homeless encampments.
This city’s got pride, I thought while walking along the river under swaying cranes. It also has a clear sense that someone’s in charge, ruling with an iron fist and rallying support for even greater imaginings.
Unfortunately I was not in Los Angeles or even in California.
I was vacationing in Chicago, the city that beat out L.A. last year in a bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
“I said from the beginning never count Richie out,” L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley at the time. “This is a man who has no peer. . . .”
By coincidence, Villaraigosa was in Chicago just before I was. I’d like to think he took a good look at the place and came home with a few ideas, but that was definitely not his main reason for being there.
What was? You guessed it. Money. His pal Daley co-hosted a June 3 fundraiser, where, if recent fundraising excursions are any indication, Villaraigosa may have picked up a pile from slobbering mugs who have had, or will have, business before the city.
But let’s get back to Chicago.
I can guess what some of you are thinking: “Hey, Lopez, you live in the Mediterranean clime of Southern California, which happens to sit on the Pacific Ocean, and you vacationed on the prairie, which only thaws out long enough for a brief, steamy summer that leaves everyone praying for snow?”
Here’s the deal: My wife had always wanted to take an old-fashioned Midwestern lake vacation, and we decided to squeeze in museums and other city stuff along with a trek through Michigan.
So we landed in Chicago, where folks in museums, hotels, restaurants and shops seem to have formed some kind of a pact to be helpful, polite and welcoming.
If we’d stayed more than three days, I would have had to start slapping people.
Having been to Chicago before, I know that comparisons to L.A. -- which has its own infinite charms and frankly is a far more interesting place to live -- make for an apples and oranges game. Chicago was built on a different scale and in a different era, pedestrian-friendly and transit-heavy, and it’s not chopped up into indifferent municipalities with competing interests.
And to be fair, Chicago is no Emerald City, despite the presence of the yammering munchkins who run Tribune Co. While I spent most of my time in the showcase parts of town, murder was out of control on the South Side, corruption is never far removed from the inner workings and Daley has critics on everything from taxes to tact.
But why does a city that’s under ice half the year have a better system of bike lanes, not to mention a bike-riding mayor, while Villaraigosa has a deputy mayor for transportation who dopes around L.A. in his Hummer?
Why has Chicago more aggressively improved full public access to lake and river, two of its greatest natural assets, while L.A. never gets anywhere with river development and didn’t have the sense or leadership to build a western rail line all the way to the airport, let alone the beach, despite crippling traffic?
Why was Daley able to take over all of his city’s ailing schools while a beaten-back Villaraigosa, after promising something grand, had to settle for a measly few campuses?
With a whole lot of help from his police chief, Villaraigosa has done reasonably well on cops and crime, and he’s got a decent dream of making L.A. green, particularly at the port.
But his self-induced loss of momentum, along with funding shortages and a City Council that never veers from its quest for mediocrity, have conspired to knock the shine off Antonio’s Holy Card smile.
Ron Kaye, the former L.A. Daily News editor, was born in Chicago and went to school there and, on a recent return visit, was struck by the same contrasts that were so obvious to me.
“There always has been an establishment in Chicago that had a greater sense of purpose than just getting rich or self-aggrandizing, so you have great works that came about,” Kaye said.
Chicago has smarter corruption than L.A., Kaye said, because it’s a strain of graft that gets things done rather than just lining pockets.
For better and worse, the dictatorial Daley family has been unafraid to reward friends and punish enemies and has used its power to keep the machine in line all the way down to ward heelers and block captains.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating a system of corrupt machine politics for Los Angeles. But is it too much to ask for a mayor capable of both inspiring and muscling people to create a better city?
In the absence of leadership, Kaye has embarked on the least rewarding of all L.A. challenges -- leading a public revolt. He’s promoting a July 14 rally at City Hall for something that’s being called the Saving L.A. Project.
“The slogan is to take back Los Angeles, to demand a great city,” he said. “There’s a group of community activists who want great bike paths and great schools and want to live in a great city that’s the equal of our climate.”
OK, I’m all for revolution.
But at least for a while, couldn’t we work out an exchange program in which we trade Villaraigosa for Daley and see what happens?
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steve.lopez@latimes.com
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a1997264a5f245a58aa446e91f14d5b3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-op-domanick6-story.html | Miles to go for L.A. justice | Miles to go for L.A. justice
Over the last few decades, it’s been easy to blame the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office for the catastrophic failures of L.A.'s criminal justice system. These failures, as most Angelenos know, have led to a dangerously overcrowded, racially explosive county jail system; a violent gang problem that continues unabated after 10,000 deaths over 25 years, and generation after generation of young black and brown men ceaselessly shuttled off to state prisons at a rate of more than 22,000 a year -- as many as 70% of whom, once released, will recycle back within three years.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department epitomized the problems with the criminal justice system: Leadership was calcified and visionless, disdainful of social science and innovative policing reforms, tolerant of brutal and abusive officers, unaccountable to civilian control and perennially at war with the African American community. Under LAPD chiefs Ed Davis and Daryl F. Gates and Sheriff Sherman Block, these departments generated scandal after scandal, culminating in 1992 in one of the worst riots in U.S. history.
For their part, Ira Reiner (1984-1992) and Gil Garcetti (1992-2000), as district attorneys, spent their time sniffing the political winds and playing to the worst instincts of voters. Reiner reacted to gang violence by calling for the “writing off” and imprisoning of the 70,000 young residents who had, often inaccurately, been identified as gang members. And Garcetti opportunistically prosecuted the pettiest of offenses as third-strike, 25-years-to-life crimes (even after having lobbied against the politically popular law in Sacramento).
Today, despite some notorious incidents, such as the 2007 May Day MacArthur Park police riot, and some ongoing disgraces such as the dangerous and inhuman conditions in our county jails, we’re better served by our law enforcement leaders. They’ve lowered the crime rate while largely making peace with the leaders of L.A.'s African American and Latino communities.
Chief William J. Bratton has accelerated the transformation of the LAPD into a much more accountable organization. Sheriff Lee Baca has worked to transform the paramilitary culture of his department, and he has sought a comprehensive approach to public safety that includes better schools, healthcare and social services. For his part, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley has eschewed headline-grabbing, get-tough answers to complex questions.
Unfortunately, they’ve been busy retooling the engine to run more efficiently instead of giving it the drastic overhaul it desperately needs. Even though this new generation of leaders has supported long-term crime prevention strategies, they have been unwilling to commit significant money or political capital to the process, focusing, for example, on immediate reductions in gang crime while remaining unwilling to fight for the money and make the psychological shift necessary to end the gang culture at the heart of the problem. Their primary focus has remained on crime suppression (or crisis management in the jails). Consequently, L.A.'s criminal justice system still operates as a zero-sum exercise in locking up the same people from the same neighborhoods generation after generation, without an end game in sight.
Why, if they recognize the need for the shift, have they failed to accomplish it? One reason why is that it’s extremely difficult. Baca and Cooley’s surrogates have been meeting for almost two years with the L.A. Public Defender’s Office, the Probation Department, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and with L.A. Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan to develop rehabilitative prisoner reentry strategies. Yet only a few small, experimental pilot programs have been established.
Law enforcement agencies are not used to working together for the common goal of long-term crime prevention. Common goals, a common vision and even a common language have to be developed, and everybody needs to sign off before there’s any movement. Community service organizations, drug treatment facilities and other such groups all have to be brought into the fold. A jurisdictional tangle of state, county and city laws must also be dealt with before much progress can be made.
Much of the problem lies with L.A.'s politicians. With a few exceptions (such as state Sen. Gloria Romero, City Comptroller Laura Chick and Councilwoman Janice Hahn), city leaders as well as our representatives in Sacramento have been unwilling to lead on these issues. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has coordinated all the city’s gang programs under one entity in the Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development for the first time -- in effect laying down the path and officially recognizing for the first time that the city has to have a holistic approach to eradicating gang crime and youth violence. He should be commended. But the money he’s allocated to the agency is a relative pittance. He’s putting his real political muscle behind a sales tax for mass transit, not public safety.
Organizations like the notoriously anti-reform California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. -- the prison guards union -- and the California District Attorneys Assn. are also a big part of the problem. The latter has successfully fought attempts to reform mandatory minimum-sentencing laws such as three strikes, nearly drumming Cooley out of the organization a year or so ago when he sought to soften some of the most unjust provisions of the law.
And Mike Jimenez, president of the guards union, has declared that he has “never met an inmate that could be rehabilitated.” By bullying or buying off governors and legislators with big campaign dollars, and fear-mongering with the help of victims rights groups, the union (which has donated $12 million to state campaigns over five years) has been astoundingly successful in thwarting change. They, along with the conservative legislators who demand near Old Testament punishment for drug offenses and other nonviolent crimes, have stuffed our prisons to almost 200% capacity and left us no money for alternatives to incarceration.
Meanwhile, the public remains profoundly ignorant or deeply misinformed about how the system really works. Some of the fault for this lies with the broadcast media. Talk radio drove the hysteria that led to California’s three-strikes law in 1994. Now, cable television has become part of the lynch-mob media. Led by CNN’s Nancy Grace, cable shows make it appear that criminals are constantly getting off scot-free. In fact, America’s (and L.A.'s) crime rates are at record lows -- yet the U.S. prison population has risen every year for 30 years.
Networks such as MSNBC, meanwhile, feature endless prison documentaries that give the impression that every one of the millions of Americans in prison -- half of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes -- is a psychotic ax-murderer. Local TV news, with its love of violence, cheap melodrama and good guys-versus-bad guys simplicity, also promotes a ceaseless message: Be afraid, be very afraid.
Then there are the cop melodramas that -- with the astounding exception of HBO’s “The Wire” -- almost never look at criminal justice as a system that is dramatically failing large segments of black, Latino and poor white Americans. Nor do these shows make the connections between crime and bad schools, shoddy healthcare, bad jobs and a history of racial disenfranchisement. They don’t discuss the connection between the historic racial, class and economic disenfranchisement of black Americans and the entrenched criminal culture that has emerged in many of our worst urban ghettos and barrios. Instead, they present shows like “CSI” and “Law and Order” as dramas where good police in a just system triumph over bad criminals. Everything is clear-cut good guys vs. bad guys, just like in real life -- right?
Last among the culprits are those white liberals and black leaders barring the door to open, honest public discourse about black crime in America because, as the Rev. Al Sharpton recently pointed out, they don’t want to “air their dirty laundry in public.” But everybody knows that crime and violence in our nation’s poor, black ghettos has been pandemic for decades. This must be talked about and examined.
Young black men in ghettos across America are trapped in a hedonistic, values-warped subculture of narcissistic flash, violence, gangs, immediate self-gratification and self-destruction -- unable to pass through a revolving door of gangs, drop-out education, unemployment, incarceration, release and re-imprisonment. Nor is the problem limited to black communities. Latinos now make up the largest group of inmates in state prisons.
Law-and-order conservatives, meanwhile, have offered nothing but more of the same -- more prisons and bigger platitudes.
We can’t deal with the root causes, and begin the long task of fashioning a solution, until we acknowledge the dreadful dysfunction of this criminal-prone subculture.
And we will never have a criminal justice system that works for all Americans until we start to hold accountable those who are responsible.
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2442b0d817c6939d2f76c6fc7ab2af76 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-06-op-kotkin6-story.html | Suburbia’s not dead yet | Suburbia’s not dead yet
While millions of American families struggle with falling house prices, soaring gasoline costs and tightening credit, some environmentalists, urban planners and urban real estate speculators are welcoming the bad news as signaling what they have long dreamed of -- the demise of suburbia.
In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning, contended that yesterday’s new suburbs will become “the slums” of tomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will force Americans back to the urban core. Leinberger is not alone. Other pundits, among them author James Howard Kunstler, who despises suburban aesthetics, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, see the pain in suburbia as a silver lining for urban revival.
Not so fast. The “out of the suburbs, back to the city” narrative rests more on anecdote than demographic or economic fact. Yes, high gas prices and rising sub-prime mortgage defaults are hurting some suburban communities, particularly newly built ones on the periphery. But the suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of U.S. families -- and people aren’t leaving those communities in droves to live in cities. Even with economic growth slowing, many suburbs, exurbs and smaller towns, especially those whose economies are tied to energy, are continuing to do better than most cities in terms of job creation and population growth.
The ominous predictions that the end of suburbia is at hand echo those in the 1970s, when there was also a run-up in gasoline prices. Then it was neo-Malthusians such as biologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of “The Population Bomb,” who argued that the idea of suburbia was unsustainable because it eats up so much land and energy. But suburban growth continued as people bought more fuel-efficient cars and companies moved jobs to the periphery, which cut commuting times. Contrary to pundits’ forecasts, during this decade of high energy prices, the country’s urban populations, for only the first time in recent history, actually fell, according to a census analysis by economist Jordan Rappaport at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
But today’s gas prices, at more than $4 a gallon, are the highest ever, and the prospects of them significantly dropping any time soon are slight. The conditions for an exodus from suburbia to the cities would seem ideal once again.
Nevertheless, since 2003, when gas prices began their climb, suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of the central cities, with about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurring in suburban communities, according to the 2000 to 2006 census. And the most recent statistics from the annual American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of a significant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through 2007.
The flat condominium markets in most large urban markets are another sign that people are not streaming into cities from the suburbs and buying. Many condo projects in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and San Diego have either been canceled or converted into rentals, with many units remaining vacant. As a Southern California condo developer told me recently, lower house prices are not going to make people more disposed to buying apartments.
But the biggest reason the suburb-to-city narrative is not following the script of the urban boosters and theorists has to do with employment. Living close to your workplace makes sense, not only because it cuts commuting costs and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions -- by saving time, it also gives people more time for family and leisure activities.
The problem for many cities is that they lack the jobs for people to move close to. Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22% of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. And from 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work.
A desire to live closer to their jobs doesn’t mean that people have to move to the inner core, particularly if that’s not where the jobs are. Of the 20 leading job centers in Southern California by ZIP Code, none are downtown. The central core does remain an important job center, but it accounts for barely 3% of regional employment. Among those who work downtown, some may shift from cars to public transit, although many will simply buy a more fuel-efficient car and stay put in the suburbs.
For residents who live in suburban areas with large concentrations of employment -- Burbank, Ontario and West L.A. -- commutes to work can be shorter than those experienced by their inner-city counterparts, according to Ali Modarres, a professor of geography at Cal State Los Angeles. Commutes in these communities, on average, are less than 25 minutes, while in high-density areas, such as Pico-Union, they average 35 minutes.
The relative and continuing health of these suburban employment centers would seem to preclude any large-scale flight to cities. But urban areas with limited or shrinking employment opportunities, and suburbs that bet on housing to sustain their economies, will continue to have trouble attracting residents either because of a scarcity of jobs or long commutes at a time of expensive gas.
The suburb-to-the-city narrative faces other obstacles. By the early part of the next decade, the large millennial generation born since the early 1980s will begin to form families, and they will, as have previous generations, probably seek open space and good schools for their children -- and that means they will settle in the suburbs. And there is no census evidence suggesting that immigrants have reversed their decade-old pattern of moving to the suburbs.
The growth of telecommuting, fed by technological advances, further ensures that suburbia has a future. By 2006, the expansion of home-based workers had grown twice as quickly as in the previous decade. And by 2015, according to demographer Wendell Cox, there will be more people in the country working electronically from home full time than are taking public transit.
More numerous will be those who work at home part time. Nearly 29 million Americans telecommute at least once a month, according to WorldatWork, a nonprofit consultancy. At many companies -- IBM, Sun Microsystems and AT&T; among them -- upward of 30% of their employees work from home. In some regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, almost one in 10 workers are part-time telecommuters, according to a 2004 study done by Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank.
Continuing high energy prices will likely change the nation’s geography, but not in ways some urban theorists are predicting. Rather than cramming more people and families into cities, they may instead foster a more dispersed, diverse archipelago of self-sufficient communities. From here, that looks like a far more pleasant scenario not only for suburban and exurbanites but for urban dwellers who don’t want to live under dense conditions reminiscent of 19th century industrial cities or the teeming metropolises of the contemporary Third World.
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38b3d6512f3c0ccfd5939ef7743ac820 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-07-fg-colombia7-story.html | Colombia says it paid no ransom | Colombia says it paid no ransom
Colombian authorities sought over the weekend to discredit a Swiss academic and former intermediary in talks with a left-wing rebel group who has been linked to a disputed report that officials paid $20 million for last week’s release of 15 high-profile hostages.
A Colombian government official who asked to remain unnamed said Sunday that authorities suspect Geneva-based Jean Pierre Gontard was the source for the Swiss radio report last week stating that officials paid a ransom for the release of the hostages.
Officials have denied any ransom was paid and said the rescue was based on subterfuge and infiltration of the rebel high command. The notion of paying ransom is extremely sensitive here, since U.S. and Colombian authorities have labeled the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a terrorist group and have ruled out payments to terrorists.
Meanwhile, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told the newspaper El Tiempo that captured rebel computer files name Gontard as the courier for $480,000 seized by Costa Rican police at the behest of the Colombian government this year from a FARC hide-out in San Jose, the Costa Rican capital.
With the Colombian government’s permission, Gontard has represented Switzerland in previous efforts to broker a peace agreement with FARC rebels.
On June 30, the government announced that Gontard and French diplomat Noel Saez had arrived in Colombia to resume those efforts. Two days later, onetime presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American defense contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers were rescued after more than five years in rebel captivity.
“This Mr. Gontard is going to have to explain” why his name appeared in electronic messages of FARC commander Raul Reyes, since slain, as “transporter” of the $480,000, Santos told El Tiempo.
Gontard, reached at his home early today in Geneva, declined to comment on the $480,000 allegation, and strenuously denied leaking information to Swiss public station Radio Suisse Romande. “It absolutely was not me” who spoke to the radio program, Gontard said.
According to the Colombian defense minister, the mention of Gontard was found among the thousands of electronic files recovered from the laptop computers of Raul Reyes, nom de guerre of a top FARC commander, who was killed by Colombian air and ground forces in Ecuador on March 1.
On Friday, the Swiss radio station quoted a “reliable” source as saying that $20 million was paid to the rebel commander known as Cesar, the alias of Gerardo Aguilar Ramirez. It was he who delivered the hostages to Colombian commandos posing as humanitarian aid workers. Cesar was taken into custody, along with a subordinate, after the much-celebrated operation.
The report raised doubts about the official version that the helicopter-aided release was based on a ruse fed to the rebels. The successful rescue, said to be based on tricking rebels into thinking the hostages were being moved to a different base for meetings with top commanders, was a huge public relations boost for President Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally.
The radio report suggested that Colombian authorities had managed to sway Cesar, the rebel charged with holding the hostages. That happened, the report said, through discussions with his girlfriend, a rebel who was captured this year. The money was to be paid to Cesar, not the FARC, the radio report said.
Gontard has been coming to Colombia for years as the Swiss representative of a three-nation team, including Spain and France, that has acted as facilitator for possible talks between the FARC and the government.
In the interview with El Tiempo, Colombian Defense Minister Santos called the report of a $20-million ransom “absolutely false.” The minister acknowledged that one of Cesar’s “lovers” was a government prisoner, but said “the rest is science fiction . . . and in bad taste.”
At a town hall meeting Saturday in Aguadas, a coffee growing town in western Colombia, Uribe said efforts to “discredit” the rescue operation were being made by “embittered people.”
“They believe that the Colombia geniuses are the FARC murderers,” Uribe told a cheering crowd of 800. “One day they will recognize that it was these boys from the army who thought up this operation.”
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patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com
chris.kraul@latimes.com
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6d39d14a174f85d3f525842be63f4dfc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-07-fi-boxoffice7-story.html | Another signature opening for Smith | Another signature opening for Smith
“Hancock,” a film about a petulant, perpetually drunken superhero, proved to be review-proof as well as bulletproof this weekend, overwhelming competitors and giving star Will Smith his fifth top-selling film on a Fourth of July weekend.
Audiences came in droves to see Smith play crime-fighter John Hancock in the Sony Pictures production, which pulled in an estimated $66 million over the three days beginning Independence Day, distributor Columbia Pictures said Sunday.
The strong performance of the PG-13 film extends the prospects for a healthy summer in Hollywood, which has seen ticket sales grow for six straight weekends.
“Hancock” drew $107.3 million over the 5 1/2 days since it began previewing Tuesday and officially opened Wednesday in 3,965 theaters, exceeding expectations of an $80-million haul, the studio said.
But it wasn’t as strong as last year’s holiday opening for the robot thriller “Transformers,” which picked up $155.4 million during a similar 5 1/2 -day run.
“Hancock” marked Smith’s eighth straight No. 1 opening and his eighth film to gross more than $100 million. His 2006 tear-jerker, “The Pursuit of Happyness,” grossed $307 million globally, and December’s zombie movie, “I Am Legend,” took in $584 million.
Long regarded as a box office behemoth, the actor has led ticket sales 12 times in his career, the studio said.
“The Will Smith business is a great business to be in,” said Rory Bruer, president of domestic distribution for Sony Pictures. “The film was different, fresh and unique, and it had Will Smith. We knew we were golden.”
Overseas, the film has amassed an additional $78 million, opening at No. 1 in 47 of its 50 international territories, Bruer said.
Even negative reviews lambasting the film as a confusing jumble that reneged on its promising premise could not keep “Hancock” from besting last weekend’s box office leader -- and critical darling -- “Wall-E.” The animated Disney-Pixar film about a love-struck robot slipped to second place and took in $33.4 million in its second weekend, boosting its domestic total to $128.1 million.
Smith has shrugged off critics’ sniping before. His 1999 sci-fi cowboy comedy “Wild Wild West” also was a critical bust but commercial smash on a Fourth of July weekend. “Independence Day” and the “Men in Black” series were Smith’s other major holiday successes.
“Hancock” had some aces up its sleeve, including Jason Bateman as a do-gooder publicist and a plot twist involving Charlize Theron. The surprise appearance of the Oscar-winner fanned word of mouth.
The “Hancock” audience skewed young, with 52% under age 25, but was nearly evenly split between men and women, though many of the women left less than enthralled.
After a “Hancock” screening Saturday night at ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood, Heather Flores, 33, of Sherman Oaks gave the movie a thumbs down. Despite being a Will Smith fan, Flores said she was disappointed because the film was too predictable. “I saw everything coming. All the good scenes were in the previews,” she said.
Her husband, Steven Flores, 35, a financial consultant who loved “Independence Day,” said he was shocked by the twist and pleasantly surprised to see Theron. But the clincher was the lead actor.
“I would watch Will Smith’s movies no matter what time of year they came out,” he said.
Smith’s on-screen appeal and his role in an aggressive marketing campaign should help “Hancock” easily recoup its $150-million production cost and probably surpass the $200-million mark, Bruer said.
So far this year, Paramount Pictures’ “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and “Iron Man” have busted into the $300-million range, and Marvel Entertainment Inc.'s “The Incredible Hulk” is poised to hurtle past $200 million.
Weekend sales fell sharply for several movies out for more than a week.
“Wall-E” dropped 47%, and another major “Hancock” competitor, Universal Pictures’ R-rated “Wanted,” starring Angelina Jolie as a member of an assassins guild, plunged 60% to $20.6 million from $50.9 million at its opening last weekend. Both missed expectations.
The lower-profile “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl,” a G-rated Depression-era drama from Picturehouse featuring Abigail Breslin, went to a wider market after two weeks in limited release. The film came in eighth with $3.6 million, behind Time Warner Inc.'s fourth-ranked “Get Smart” and “Kung Fu Panda,” from DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc.
Starting Friday, “Hancock” goes up against a trio of highly anticipated films. Action flicks “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” from Universal and the 3-D “Journey to the Center of the Earth” from Warner Bros. will premiere, along with the Eddie Murphy sci-fi comedy “Meet Dave.”
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tiffany.hsu@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Box office
Preliminary results (in millions) in the U.S. and Canada, based on studio projections:
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*--* -- Movie 3-day gross Total Weeks -- (studio) (millions) (millions) -- 1 Hancock $66 $107.3 1 -- (Sony) -- -- -- 2 Wall-E $33.4 $128.1 2 -- (Disney) -- -- -- 3 Wanted $20.6 $90.8 2 -- (Universal) -- -- -- 4 Get Smart $11.1 $98.1 3 -- (Warner Bros.) -- -- -- 5 Kung Fu $7.5 $193.4 5 -- Panda -- -- -- -- (Paramount) -- -- -- 6 The Incredible $5.0 $124.9 4 -- Hulk -- -- -- -- (Universal) -- -- -- 7 Indiana Jones $3.9 $306.6 7 -- and the -- -- -- -- Kingdom -- -- -- -- of the -- -- -- -- Crystal Skull -- -- -- -- (Paramount) -- -- -- 8 Kit Kittredge: $3.6 $6.1 3 -- An American -- -- -- -- Girl -- -- -- -- (Picturehouse) 9 Sex and $2.3 $144.9 6 -- the City: -- -- -- -- The Movie -- -- -- -- (Warner Bros.) -- -- -- 10 You Don’t $2.0 $94.8 5 -- Mess With -- -- -- -- the Zohan -- -- -- -- (Sony) -- -- -- *--*
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Industry totals
*--* 3-day gross Change Year-to-date gross Change (in millions) from 2007 (in billions) from 2007 $165 -4.9% $4.817 -0.57% *--*
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Note: A movie may be shown on more than one screen at each venue.
Source: Media by Numbers
Los Angeles Times
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e6383ca939d1f936d2990c99366e01a8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-07-me-backfire7-story.html | Backfire is right and wrong | Backfire is right and wrong
As flames swirled toward their family homestead, the Curtis brothers figured they’d get no help and had no choice: The only way to hold on to their 55-acre compound would be to fight fire with fire.
In the end, the controlled burn they set helped save the homes on their beloved Apple Pie Ridge -- but not without major consequences.
Outraged authorities arrested Ross Curtis, 48, on Friday on suspicion of illegally setting a backfire after disobeying official orders to stop.
His older brother, Micah, remains in Big Sur but is acting like a wanted man, dodging sheriff’s deputies when he descends from the homestead to Highway 1.
“I understand what’s going on. They don’t want a bunch of idiots setting off fires that could do more harm than good,” Micah Curtis, a 57-year-old artist, said as he walked the scene of the crime Saturday. “But we saved our homes. I’m not asking them to condone it, but they’ve got to understand it.”
As fires approach, homeowners often take up garden hoses to face down flames. But for them to light backfires is rare, authorities say -- and they’d like it to stay that way.
Cliff Williams, the law enforcement official with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection who arrested Ross Curtis, said fire crews went to the ridge several times and ordered a stop.
Instead, the brothers kept up their rebel battle.
“Mr. Curtis over a period of three days decided he wanted to fight the fire his way,” Williams said. “So he started setting backfires.”
And that tricky firefighting technique, Williams said, is best left to professionals backed up by full crews and fire engines. Such fires can blow out of control, he said, burning other houses or inadvertently trapping people.
The brothers, who live with relatives and several tenants in a terraced collection of artsy, redwood-sided homes, including one fashioned from an old water tank, say they knew there were risks but believed there was too much at stake not to take action.
They have plenty of land but are hardly wealthy. Ross Curtis is an electrical contractor. Micah Curtis sculpts steel.
Income from the rental homes pays for the care of their elderly mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. They weren’t only fighting for themselves, Micah said, they were defending Mom and Apple Pie Ridge.
The family has owned the 55 acres since the early 1960s, when patriarch Jack Curtis -- a Hollywood television writer, with “Gunsmoke” and “The Rifleman” among his credits -- traded up from a smaller place down the mountainside to this property that straddles a redwood-carpeted ridge 1,000 feet above Big Sur River.
Over the years, the Curtises have improved the various buildings. They planted a 200-tree avocado orchard, carved out the terraced gardens, laid out a funky spread of concrete ponds with lily pads, and carefully pruned rosebushes and ornamental shrubs.
The brothers took over stewardship of the property after their father died six years ago.
“Dad was the Duke of Apple Pie,” Micah said. “I guess that makes me the Earl.”
In the last 25 years, they have fought back flames twice before, he said. He learned how as a seasonal firefighter while in college.
But the Basin Complex fire, raging for the last two weeks, has been the worst test yet.
It started when a volley of crackling bolts from a lightning storm sent flames roaring.
The Curtis brothers watched with the rest of Monterey County -- and began to prepare for the worst at the first signs of nearby smoke.
With their tenants, friends and relatives stepping up to help, they used chain saws, hoes and shovels to clear fire breaks around the buildings, hauling away at least 150 pickup-truck loads of vegetation, Micah Curtis said.
On Thursday, the situation got particularly dicey as the fire picked up strength and bore down on their retreat, a five-minute drive up a twisting dirt road from Big Sur village.
Their small team of amateurs toiled into the night, trying to beat back flames by pumping water from the swimming pool with makeshift fire hoses.
As the fire closed in on three sides, Micah Curtis said, they used a flare to set controlled burns no more than a dozen feet from the blaze. That not only steered it away from their houses, he said, but also created a broader line of defense, which helped state and federal fire crews protect the village below.
Giving a tour of the property over the weekend, Micah Curtis bumped into a state fire captain doing mop-up work with an inmate crew.
The captain, who asked not to be identified because of the controversy, praised the work of the amateurs of Apple Pie Ridge.
“I’ll tell you what,” the captain told him, “you guys did a good job of holding it.”
Praise also came from other professionals.
“Awesome,” a U.S. Forest Service crew leader said, shaking his head in disbelief. “You did an awful lot of work up here.”
Walking his property Saturday, Micah Curtis, still in a silver hard hat and a yellow fire suit smudged by soot and dirt, pointed just down the ridge to a neighbor’s home, now only a smoldering pile of debris.
As flames encroached, he said, he feared that the fire would circle below his family’s homestead and “come racing up at us through a thousand feet of dry brush.”
As for the backfires, he said, “I was the one who OKd the idea. So the buck stops with me.”
His younger brother, however, took the fall.
They were at work on the backfires when fire officials spied them from the other side of the Big Sur River gorge, Micah Curtis said. When officers arrived on the scene, Ross Curtis turned himself in as the culprit so the others could keep working.
Micah Curtis still believes that he and his brother should be receiving thanks, not condemnation, from the authorities.
After all, he said, firefighters didn’t volunteer to do the job for them.
“They have some computer program that says our place is undefendable,” he said. “But their idea of defendable space is something as flat as Nebraska. This is no more dangerous than some sketchy part of L.A., and that doesn’t keep the police from going into a rough neighborhood.”
Ross Curtis, however, sounds more contrite. Maybe it’s the experience of having been behind bars, even if he was bailed out after only a few hours.
He is scheduled to be arraigned July 15 on two misdemeanor counts. In the meantime, he can’t get through the police blockade set up after evacuation orders. So he’s staying in a trailer near Monterey Bay, lent to him by his wife’s father, a Baptist preacher.
Without their two weeks of toil, Ross Curtis believes, the family’s ridge-top homes would have been destroyed. He said he doesn’t think he’s guilty of anything more than protecting land he cherishes. Still, he understands why fire officials are irate.
They explained it to him, he said, during his brief stay in jail. An unauthorized backfire, they said, can catch a team of firefighters unaware and perhaps put those crews in danger. Kill a firefighter, they told him, and you go to prison for life.
“Their concern was for their firefighters, and to them, we were a bunch of renegades or something,” Ross Curtis said. “All it takes is one gust of wind at the wrong time and it can go sideways on you.”
And that, he said, “can be the difference between a good day and a bad day.”
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eric.bailey@latimes.com
deborah.schoch@latimes.com
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4cf611f0bf38c3be0b0f5e070e36ff5a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-07-na-armyfilms7-story.html | Calling the shots on war movies | Calling the shots on war movies
There’s a war going on, and Army Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale has a mission.
But it’s far removed from the captured Iraqi palace where he was once stationed. He fights his war now from an office on Wilshire Boulevard lined with movie posters chronicling conflicts real and imagined, from “Patton” to “War of the Worlds.”
Breasseale’s desk is piled high with scripts, each marked with his name and stamped “confidential.” It’s his job to help decide which movies should get Army help.
The mission is both harder and more important than it might appear.
After the Vietnam War, movies like “Apocalypse Now” and “Born on the Fourth of July” helped cement an image of psychologically damaged Vietnam veterans.
“In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Vietnam War vet was the ‘other,’ ” Breasseale said. “Hollywood had created the crazy Nam vet.”
For the Army, it was a bitter lesson.
With the country now enmeshed in another long, unpopular war, Breasseale is hoping to influence a new generation of filmmakers in order to avoid repeating the experience.
So far, Breasseale feels, most of the movies made about Iraq have really been about Vietnam.
“It is the self-licking ice cream cone of Hollywood: They make a war movie based on another war movie,” Breasseale said. “It’s important to tell the full story, not a story based on a weird Vietnam-era idea of what the military is like.”
The Army has been helping filmmakers ever since it furnished aircraft and pilots for 1927’s “Wings” -- winner of the first best picture Academy Award.
With military assistance, moviemakers get access to bases, ships, planes, tanks and Humvees. Military leaders also offer script advice.
And unless a filmmaker agrees to address any problems, the Pentagon generally opts out.
Most movies involving the military have been summer action films, like this year’s “Iron Man,” which was made with Air Force help.
But Army officials are eager to work with filmmakers making serious movies about Iraq -- the kind of pictures that have the power to shape the public’s view of the war and its warriors.
“In the past, have there been instances of disagreements with scripts? Yes,” said Maj. Gen. Anthony A. Cucolo III, chief of Army public affairs. “The message I would send is: Give us a try.”
The problem for military officials is that some in Hollywood see their script advice as a subtle form of censorship or an attempt to spin the war.
Paul Haggis, writer and director of the Iraq war movie “In the Valley of Elah,” said he concluded that the Army was not interested in telling honest stories about the war or soldiers.
“They are trying to put the best spin on what they are doing,” Haggis said. “Of course they want to publicize what is good. But it doesn’t mean that it is true.”
Few directors focused on Iraq or Afghanistan have approached the military for help. Haggis did.
Haggis said that after he submitted his script, the producers received 21 pages of objections to parts of the film. Haggis, who did not review the notes, said his producers told him they amounted to a refusal to participate.
“We needed their help,” Haggis said. “If they had reasonable input I would have taken it. But I am not there to do publicity for the Army. I am there to do a movie that I see as true.”
Military officers say flatly that they do not censor films.
“There is no way that we are going to go in and to steamroll anyone’s vision,” said Phil Strub, the top Pentagon liaison to the film industry. “They will just tell us to drop dead and go away.”
Officials will ask for changes, or decline to participate, if they believe military policies or practices are grossly misrepresented -- especially if a movie purports to be based on real-life events, as Haggis’ film did.
Breasseale says movies about Iraq and Afghanistan have been one-dimensional.
“There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for nuance,” he said. “What sells a script to a studio is an easy concept, like ‘This guy is crazy because he has been at war.’ ‘Easy, I love it,’ the executive says.”
Breasseale is particularly critical of Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” a film released last year and based on a real-life incident in which U.S. soldiers raped an Iraqi girl, then murdered her and her family. Breasseale, who was serving in Iraq at the time of the incident, says De Palma’s movie intimates that all soldiers serving in Iraq are criminals.
“It was so wildly offensive to me that he would group all soldiers together,” Breasseale said.
De Palma did not respond to several requests for an interview.
Many Hollywood filmmakers reject the criticism of Iraq war movies. Haggis said he worked hard to shade his portrayals of soldiers, even those who commit heinous crimes.
“I did want to have a balanced and nuanced film,” Haggis said. “If anything, I tried to be empathetic. I try not to make these kids into villains.”
Iraq war movies as a group have not done well at the box office. Film critics have speculated that moviegoers see enough of war on the news or don’t care to watch films about an ongoing conflict. The Army suggests another possibility: The public is rejecting films that feel didactic or inauthentic.
“The public does not deal too well with being preached at,” Breasseale said.
The military has assisted with one Iraq war film that officials hope will be unlike “Redacted” or “In the Valley of Elah.”
“The Lucky Ones,” due out in the fall, follows three combat-scarred soldiers as they travel from New York to Las Vegas. The Army says the film -- which stars Tim Robbins, an outspoken war critic -- offers a more refined portrayal of soldiers.
During production, Robbins had a long conversation with Breasseale about what life might be like for his character, Staff Sgt. Cheever -- what would motivate an enlisted man through two combat tours in Iraq.
“It captures the nuance. It is not a broad brush stroke or just about PTSD” -- post-traumatic stress disorder -- Breasseale said. “They manage to tell a story that is familiar but different.”
Producer Rick Schwartz agrees his film is unlike other war movies. It takes place almost entirely in America, and although it deals with the aftereffects of war, the word “Iraq” is never mentioned.
Schwartz hopes audiences draw their own conclusions about whether “The Lucky Ones” is pro-war or antiwar, he said.
Though some Iraq war movies have been influenced by post-Vietnam films, he said, makers of “The Lucky Ones” avoided Vietnam references.
“You want to be able look back in 20 years from now and say, ‘That’s what was going on then,’ ” Schwartz said. “We don’t want to make a metaphor for any other war.”
The tension between Hollywood and the Army may never fully dissipate.
But Breasseale is confident that he and officers who follow him will persuade more filmmakers to view them as a resource, not a censor.
“I am the last of the eternal optimists. I believe there is always a way to make things happen,” Breasseale said. “My job is to help filmmakers tell an accurate story and help the American public understand their Army. End scene.”
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julian.barnes@latimes.com
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Begin text of infobox
Hollywood and the military
Movies made with military assistance
Recent films
“The Lucky Ones,” forthcoming
“Transformers II,” forthcoming
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (new version), forthcoming
“Major Movie Star,” forthcoming
“The Messenger,” forthcoming
“Iron Man,” 2008
“I Am Legend,” 2007
“Transformers,” 2007
“War of the Worlds,” 2005
Older films
“Patton,” 1970
“The Green Berets,” 1968
“From Here to Eternity,” 1953
“The Day the Earth Stood Still,” 1951
“Wings,” 1927
Movies made without military assistance
“In the Valley of Elah,” 2007 (military declined)
“Lions for Lambs,” 2007 (no help sought)
“Redacted,” 2007 (no help sought)
“Rendition,” 2007 (no help sought)
“Stop-Loss,” 2008 (no help sought)
Sources: Army, Times research
Los Angeles Times
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9b5d8c93ea79f5eb5709e55d54ee3bdc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-07-oe-rodriguez7-story.html | Gay marriage: the key to happiness? | Gay marriage: the key to happiness?
Who knew? The legalization of gay marriage might make Californians happier. At least that’s what a new study based on surveys of 350,000 people in nearly 100 countries suggests.
No, the authors aren’t gay activists, nor do they seem to be peddling any particular political agenda. But in their search to discover which countries are happier than others and why, these scholars -- led by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart -- have stumbled on one pretty fundamental conclusion about what people want out of life: freedom.
Yes, that’s right, more or less the same thing you were celebrating Friday by scarfing down hamburgers next to the pool in your brother-in-law’s backyard. How exactly, you ask, is gay marriage connected with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?
It’s simple. According to surveys, in developed countries discrimination against women and minorities is actually waning and gays remain the least tolerated “outgroup” in society. They are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. In most developed countries, the relative level of their acceptance or rejection is a sensitive indicator of that society’s overall tolerance toward minorities. And -- here’s the takeaway -- social tolerance “broadens the range of choices available to people,” thereby enhancing happiness for both the tolerant and the intolerant alike.
Sounds a little too touchy-feely, right? Are they saying that Armenians, who were next to last in the study’s happiness ranking, should immediately allow gays to marry in order to be happier? Not exactly.
The researchers have found that freedom of choice is not only a universal aspiration but the single most important basis of human happiness. But to get to freedom of choice for Armenians, who live in poverty, social tolerance might not beat out economic development on the national “to-do” list. That’s because first, you have to have enough food to eat. Of course, economic well-being doesn’t just buy food, it also frees people from the lack of life choices that deprivation imposes -- suddenly you’re on your way up the happiness scale.
But money can only take you so far. The transition from a subsistence economy to moderate economic security has a profound effect on a nation’s happiness. But once a nation gets past the level of, say, Portugal (No. 47), economic growth begins to produce diminishing returns. That’s when, the study’s authors theorize, humans can afford to try to maximize “free choice in all the realms of life.” Here in the U.S., we know all about post-materialist politics and the emergence of “quality of life” issues.
At this stage, what does a society have to look like in order to create more free choice and more happiness? The study indicates that you need democratization and, most important of all, social tolerance.
“Yes, I know that all this sounds like I’ve been brainwashed by my third-grade teacher,” lead researcher Inglehart told me, “but it turns out it’s true. The empirical evidence is clear: Freedom is conducive to happiness.”
For years, scholars were convinced that a nation’s level of happiness was constant. Previous research indicated that neither sudden tragedy nor rising fortunes could alter a nation’s long-term levels of satisfaction. Biological studies also have shown the degree to which happiness can be inherited. But the sheer size of the survey sample in this study, as well as the fact that it was longitudinal -- tracking results for most countries over nearly 20 years -- strongly suggest that the old studies were wrong. The happiness of a society fluctuates and usually is based on the relative freedom (including freedom from scarcity) of its population.
The researchers’ theories can account for a lot about the rankings that emerged from their work, but not everything. After all, the big picture might be development, democracy and tolerance, but individual happiness is still pretty subjective, and there are other, more minor factors that determine life satisfaction.
Where did the U.S. come in? Sixteenth. Which country was No. 1? Denmark. One impressive showing came from Latin America, where many of the nations ranked higher than the researchers had expected. Colombia, for example, came in at No. 3; Puerto Rico at No. 2. In fact, for all the study’s emphasis on development, democratization and tolerance, Latin America makes even the researchers wonder. They speculate that happiness in Latin America might have something to do with those societies’ strong belief in God. Traditional religion, according to the researchers, is also conducive to happiness.
Which brings us to a modern-day quandary. Modernity is good because it facilitates development, democracy and freedom of choice; but so is tradition because it gives us a sense of security, predictability and purpose in our lives. The study suggests that religious faith and social tolerance are a winning combination. Which leaves me wondering: Perhaps people in the U.S. would all be happier if more ministers, rabbis, imams and priests conducted more gay marriages.
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9d9713cd50bdb6605b2ee6a7504fa19d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-07-sp-sparks7-story.html | Parker’s 31 points help Sparks hold on | Parker’s 31 points help Sparks hold on
The Sparks drew a line in the sand Sunday night against the Phoenix Mercury, bending but not breaking in the final quarter.
Their 20-point lead was whittled to seven with just under four minutes remaining, causing many in the crowd of 10,004 to fidget in their seats at Staples Center.
The Sparks slammed the door, however, getting key points down the stretch from former Tennessee standouts Candace Parker, Shannon Bobbitt and Sidney Spencer, allowing them to hang on for a 91-80 victory and end a three-game losing streak.
“That’s progress, without a doubt,” said Sparks center Lisa Leslie, who finished with 25 points, 15 rebounds and eight assists. “We have to continue to find ways to win in the fourth quarter.”
The Sparks (11-6) had blown two double-digit fourth-quarter leads in the previous week and let an 18-point fourth-quarter advantage melt away in a 99-94 loss to Phoenix in their home debut May 17.
Coach Michael Cooper tweaked the starting lineup again, partly to give the team a boost and partly because starting small forward DeLisha Milton-Jones was scratched about 15 minutes before the start because of a sore Achilles’ tendon.
Marie Ferdinand-Harris returned to her starting role at shooting guard and Spencer stepped into Milton-Jones’ starting spot. Bobbitt, a rookie, also started at point guard for the second straight game. She may have secured the role for now after scoring a season-high 11 points and distributing five assists in 31 minutes of play.
“It wasn’t happening for her on the bench, so the best place for her to be is out there on the floor,” Cooper said. “Sometimes, you have to let her learn by her mistakes, but still, she makes good mistakes.”
Parker, a teammate of Bobbitt’s at Tennessee last season, also had one of her better games as a professional, totaling 31 points and 10 rebounds. Working their high-low post offense to near perfection, Parker and Leslie helped the Sparks build a 19-point lead after three quarters.
“With she and I able to pass well from the post, I just told her, ‘We’ve got to start looking for each other more,’ ” said Leslie, who turns 36 today.
Mercury forward Diana Taurasi, who came into the game leading the league in scoring at 24.9 points a game, did not score her first point until hitting a three-point shot on the team’s first possession of the fourth quarter.
That spearheaded a 15-2 run that allowed Phoenix (8-9) to cut the deficit to 79-72 with 3 minutes 50 seconds remaining. Parker hit two free throws, Bobbitt later followed with a three-point basket from the baseline, and Spencer knocked down a three-pointer from the opposite side, pushing the lead back to 11 with 1:45 remaining.
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dan.arritt@latimes.com
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6309142d10a3f5071f16961540c2f2c6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-08-fg-iraq8-story.html | Maliki advocates timetable for troop withdrawal | Maliki advocates timetable for troop withdrawal
Bolstered by recent Iraqi military successes, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki proposed Monday that negotiators include a timetable for the departure of U.S. troops in any agreement to continue the American presence in Iraq beyond the end of the year.
The suggestion, made during an official visit to the United Arab Emirates, appeared aimed at easing domestic fears that the deal would impinge on Iraqi sovereignty and clear the way for permanent American bases.
The Iraqi leader also recognizes that American opinion has turned against the war and believes his country should not wait for a decision to be made in Washington to pull out troops, according to lawmakers from his Islamic Dawa Party.
President Bush and Maliki have set a target date of July 31 to hammer out a blueprint for U.S.-Iraqi relations after the United Nations mandate for the presence of U.S.-led forces in Iraq expires at the end of the year.
The talks are focused on two accords. One would provide a framework for future diplomatic, economic and security relations. The other, known as a Status of Forces Agreement, would provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to remain in the country.
Negotiators from both sides have said that progress is being made but that outstanding differences might make it impossible to complete a comprehensive Status of Forces Agreement in time to put it into effect by the end of the year. A number of possible bridging measures are being explored.
“The current orientation [of the talks] is to reach a memorandum of understanding either to withdraw the forces, or to set a timetable for their withdrawal,” Maliki’s office quoted him as saying in response to questions from Arab ambassadors in Abu Dhabi.
Many Iraqis, including members of Maliki’s government, view a deal that allows for a long-term American military presence as a surrender of sovereignty to an occupying force. Setting a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops could ease those fears.
Followers of influential Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, who pulled his representatives out of Maliki’s Cabinet last year over the government’s refusal to set such a timetable, welcomed Monday’s statement.
“We have been demanding to set a timetable for the withdrawal of those forces . . . since the beginning,” said Felah Shanshal, one of the cleric’s loyalists in parliament. “It would be wonderful if that could be achieved.”
The security agreement is also a contentious issue in Washington, where Democrats have accused Bush of trying to commit the U.S. to a long-term presence in Iraq before he leaves office in January. White House officials have said the agreement will not set force levels or establish permanent bases in Iraq.
Points of friction between the U.S. and Iraq include the legal status of foreign personnel. American officials have dropped a demand for immunity from prosecution for private contractors working for the U.S. government, but have said that they will not allow American service personnel to be tried in Iraqi courts.
The latter is a touchy subject for Maliki, who was angered by two recent shootings by U.S. forces. In one instance, American troops searching for a suspect in Karbala province killed a security guard who was a distant relative of Maliki. In the other, a bank manager and two female employees were killed on their way to work at Baghdad’s international airport.
The U.S. military maintains that the shootings were justified.
Haider Abadi, a Dawa member and political insider, said Maliki did not believe Iraqis should be pressured into making long-term arrangements with an outgoing administration.
“No one can guess which way U.S. policy will go after the election,” he said in a telephone interview. “We cannot go on discussing an agreement that may never materialize. There is too much at stake.”
Abadi said the Iraqi military’s recent successes against militants in the cities of Basra, Amarah and Mosul and in Baghdad’s Sadr City district had inspired new confidence in the security forces.
“Are we going to be at the mercy of some sort of decision in the White House that we have no control over?” he asked.
Abadi said the government was proposing that the U.S. finish handing over responsibility for security in all 18 provinces within six months and pull out most of its troops in two to three years. Nine of the provinces are already under Iraqi control.
According to Abadi, U.S. negotiators have been receptive to the idea, but have proposed a five-year timeline.
U.S. Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen provided an upbeat assessment of security gains during a visit to Iraq on Monday, his fourth since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October. But he would not be pinned down on how long it might take to consolidate those gains, after the last of five additional U.S. brigades deployed to Iraq last year returns home this month.
“From all I see, the security conditions are holding, the level of violence is down; we’re down to a level that we haven’t seen in over four years,” Mullen was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “That, then, ties into decisions to be made later this year about the level of forces. So I hope we can continue the drawdown” after a late-summer pause.
Underscoring the remaining threat, a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a market northeast of Baghdad on Monday, killing nine people and injuring 12, police said. The attack occurred in Baqubah, capital of Diyala province.
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alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
Times staff writer Saif Hameed and a special correspondent contributed to this report.
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f20fadc95fab62f698766c048e735b5b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-08-me-disch8-story.html | Prolific sci-fi writer mixed whimsy with dark horror | Prolific sci-fi writer mixed whimsy with dark horror
Even in the genre of science fiction, writer Thomas M. Disch was considered unconventional.
The strange new worlds he created were an odd mix: dark and horror-filled, humorous and playful. His work outfoxed readers’ expectations, one critic said, and made labeling a chore for publishers.
But being outside the box was a Disch trademark.
“Tom Disch is one of the few people I have ever met who I would consider a genius,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “He was like a brilliant child in the richness of his imagination, although certainly no child had as dark and twisted an imagination as Tom did.”
Disch, 68, who has been called one of the most important science fiction writers of his generation, fatally shot himself in the head July 5, according to the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Friends said he was found dead inside his New York apartment.
Disch also wrote poetry, drama criticism, book reviews, opera librettos, plays, children’s books and an interactive computer novel.
Critic John Clute once wrote that Disch was “perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers.”
Though he never won mainstream fame, Disch was highly regarded in the world of science fiction.
Three of his novels, “Camp Concentration,” “334" and “On Wings of Song” were named in “Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels,” a survey by critic David Pringle.
Disch’s nonfiction work “The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World” received a Hugo Award in 1999.
Disch was far better known in England, where he lived for a time, than in the U.S., Gioia said. In the 1960s he was part of a New Wave movement in which writers introduced modernist and surrealist techniques into science fiction. Disch’s work was ripe with political and social satire and irony.
“334,” published in 1974, is set in a housing project in an overcrowded, controlled New York of the 2020s. One character, Birdie Ludd, must convince officials that he is fit to procreate. Another, Mrs. Hanson, must convince them that she has nothing to live for.
The book is “a cry for help, a voice from a future not so far off -- or, if you like, from a present we may never leave behind,” M. John Harrison wrote in the introduction to “334.”
“On Wings of Song,” published in 1979, tells the story of a repressive Amesville, Iowa, in the 21st century. The main character, Daniel Weinreb, tries to master the art of song and flight, “driven by the knowledge that some have attained flight, their spirits separated from their physical bodies and propelled on the waves of their own singing voices -- literally born on wings of song.”
For his efforts, Daniel is sent to a prison without bars: Each prisoner carries in his stomach an electrically controlled explosive that can be detonated from headquarters.
That Disch’s books were often described as dark did not trouble him. His work, he said, had the same proportion of tragedy and merriment as Shakespeare’s.
“In entertainment terms, evil has been good box office since the Greek theater,” Disch said in a 1999 article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “The closer you get to genuine high tragedy, the more willing to let terrible things happen to good people, the more you will grab the reader. Evil is an inexhaustible source when you want to discuss the nature of human beings.”
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, on Feb. 2, 1940, Disch spent his childhood in Minnesota towns, moving with his father, who was a salesman. He was homely, gawky and shy, and felt different because he was an intellectual.
In the years that followed high school, he worked odd jobs and attended college in New York.
But in 1962, after the magazine “Fantastic Stories” published one of his short stories, Disch left school to write.
His first novel, “The Genocides,” was published in 1965. The story told of the last days of human existence and of aliens who wipe out humans the way humans kill insects in a garden.
Prolific and diverse in his literary output, Disch also was the author of “The Brave Little Toaster,” a children’s book that was made into an animated film by Disney, and “Amnesia,” an interactive computer novel. Earlier this month his satire “The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten” was released.
As a poet, Disch wrote in standard forms: sonnets, villanelles, epigrams, “always clever and full of wordplay,” said Thomas Heacox, who teaches English at College of William and Mary, where Disch served as a writer-in-residence in the 1990s.
His volumes of poetry include “Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poetry,” published in 1989.
The home he shared for years with his partner, Charles Naylor, allowed friends to see a whimsical, humorous side. Disch was “an enormously creative, infinitely amusing and often unhappy genius,” said Gioia, who is also a poet and had known Disch for many years.
In recent years Disch suffered a series of problems: Naylor died, health and financial issues ensued, and Disch battled to remain in his apartment.
In his personal life he was as formal as his poetry, Heacox said. “And he was a huge man: big, tall and heavy. But there was something extremely delicate about his manner and his soul.”
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jocelyn.stewart@latimes.com
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ad929e8b83b0d3db8e98694178b96439 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-08-me-health8-story.html | Bridging healthcare culture gap in O.C. | Bridging healthcare culture gap in O.C.
When Planned Parenthood representatives began handing out free condoms during an initial information session with recent Vietnamese immigrants in Orange County last year, a hush fell over the room.
Those who took one quietly whispered, in Vietnamese, that they were for friends. Some called the representative the “candy lady.” And the word “condoms” itself seemed embarrassing, so they called the handouts “raincoats.”
It was a lesson in how easily the American style of teaching things like safe sex and healthful eating can run roughshod over cultural sensibilities.
From that first meeting, officials from Planned Parenthood in Orange and San Bernardino counties decided that “we don’t want to necessarily blast them with the word ‘condoms,’ ” said spokeswoman Stephanie Kight.
“In the Mission Viejo High School, we might say something like, ‘Free condoms!’ but we might want to find a more nuanced way to talk about it in the Vietnamese community.”
Social services agencies in Orange County, home to the nation’s largest Vietnamese population, have struggled to make inroads into the community since refugees started settling there in the late 1970s.
What they’ve learned is that creating effective health programs is no longer as simple as translating brochures and hiring native-speaking staff, providers say. They are now seeing a need to craft programs that reexamine the subtle parts of Vietnamese culture, including food and lifestyle habits as well as cultural taboos.
A one-size-fits-all approach can create misunderstandings or even be off-putting, leaving health providers struggling to reach people in ethnic communities, said Quyen Ngo-Metzger, an assistant professor of medicine at UC Irvine.
A few social services agencies in Orange County, including Planned Parenthood, are beginning to figure out what works -- and what doesn’t -- for Vietnamese Americans.
They are starting from the ground up, even redoing classic American mainstays such as the U.S. food pyramid. A joint diabetes program that UC Irvine conducts with Vietnamese community-based health workers found that the food pyramid, which includes bread and pasta, didn’t work for Vietnamese people, Ngo-Metzger said.
Now, the “more culturally relevant” pyramid shows pictures of rice bowls, vermicelli noodles and pho soup instead of loaves of bread.
About 40% of Vietnamese Americans say their doctors do not grasp their cultures and values, according to the National Healthcare Disparities Report from 2003. Nearly three-fourths of Vietnamese Americans report that they do not find it easy to understand information from their doctor’s office.
Orange County’s social service agencies have sought to improve their outreach efforts in recent years.
The American Red Cross of Orange County hired the first Vietnamese American coordinator in the country three years ago.
A new diabetes program from UC Irvine is partnering with community-based social services agencies to help Vietnamese patients fit their doctors’ guidelines into their daily lives.
The Maternal Outreach Management System, a nonprofit group based in Santa Ana that helps primarily Latino women in Orange County with prenatal and postpartum care, in May launched VietMOMS through a California Endowment grant. The goal is to develop a manual for delivering care to Vietnamese women, said Ailene Ly, VietMOMS coordinator.
Through focus groups, Ly discovered that Vietnamese clients, when told to follow certain guidelines, felt they were being asked to trade in traditional values passed down through many generations.
For example, many Vietnamese clients insist on consuming thuoc bac, an herbal broth made from blackened chicken and dried roots that is believed to keep the body strong during pregnancy and postpartum.
But Ly said many of the herbs are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug administration and could be harmful to the fetus or to breast milk.
Many of her clients’ mothers say in disbelief, “I did it. My parents did it. I grew up healthy and reared a healthy child, and now you’re telling me it’s not safe?”
The cultural dispute over herbal remedies and other issues takes more than language skills to solve, said Annie Nguyen, a VietMOMS counselor.
“We have to respect the traditions because those are held within our culture,” Nguyen said. “I’m not going to tell her directly that the beliefs are wrong, but I want to give the clients options.”
During one of Nguyen’s recent home visits, 3-month-old Theresa cooed at her mother, Xuan Nguyen, who was learning about the strict nutrition guideline for newborns.
Xuan, 37, came from Vietnam eight years ago, where three of her older children were born. “In Vietnam, taking care of children is more simple,” she said. “There are less rules.”
Doctors never told her what babies should eat; she simply went to the market every morning to buy porridge with meat. “In Vietnam, they just eat what we eat,” she said, “rice, noodles, soup, anything.”
Many health agencies and researchers try to swoop in to ethnic communities to implement programs designed for white communities, without a true understanding of cultural differences, Ngo-Metzger said.
One way to get over that barrier is to use “people on the ground” -- in churches, temple groups, social organizations and advocacy groups -- who understand the community and are trusted, she added.
University researchers have only begun to tap into these community-based resources, she said, part of a trend that started five years ago and was pushed forward by a federal mandate that healthcare be delivered in languages that patients understand.
The information gathered from people within the community is invaluable for health providers, Ngo-Metzger said.
Quynh Tran, Planned Parenthood’s Vietnamese community coordinator, was repeatedly turned down by many Vietnamese groups when she asked to talk about reproductive health.
Recognizing the challenges of reaching out to the community, Planned Parenthood has held off on heavily advertising in Vietnamese language newspapers, Kight said. The agency is still trying to craft messages in a way that does not offend, she said.
Kight said the information Tran is gathering from focus groups and talks with the Vietnamese community can be used across the country by other Planned Parenthood branches with large Vietnamese American populations.
“I think we’re just barely scratching the surface with research into these communities,” Ngo-Metzger said.
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my-thuan.tran@latimes.com
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4e27c1b8a7e62c3183f125c30adfb166 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-08-na-climate8-story.html | A climate threat from TVs, chips | A climate threat from TVs, chips
A synthetic chemical widely used in the manufacture of computers and flat-screen televisions is a potent greenhouse gas, with 17,000 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide, but its measure in the atmosphere has never been taken, nor is it regulated by international treaty.
The chemical, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), could be considered the “missing greenhouse gas,” atmospheric chemists Michael J. Prather and Juno Hsu of UC Irvine wrote in a paper released June 26 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “With the surge in flat-panel displays, the market for NF3 has exploded.”
The rapid growth in production alarms some climate scientists. In the atmosphere it has a life of 550 years, according to calculations by Prather and Hsu.
When the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international global warming treaty, was negotiated to control the rapid rise of planet-warming gases, NF3 was a niche product used in modest amounts in the semiconductor industry.
At the time, computer chip manufacturers used perfluorocarbons to clean the vacuum chambers where integrated circuits were made. But about two-thirds of the PFCs escaped into the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect, a warming of the Earth’s surface.
Reacting to environmental concerns, the industry sought a substitute -- and estimated that NF3, though it had greater potential for global warming, was less likely to escape into the air. “We moved into manufacturing NF3 for environmental reasons,” said Corning F. Painter, vice president of global electronics for Air Products in Allentown, Pa., the world’s leading producer. The company received a 2002 Climate Protection Award from the Environmental Protection Agency for its transition.
Last year, it announced a major production expansion at its U.S. and Korean plants. About three-quarters of the chemical is now used to manufacture computer microchips; the rest is used to make liquid crystal display panels on flat-screen televisions, Painter said.
Overall, world production of NF3 is likely to reach 8,000 tons a year by 2010, Painter said. That is the equivalent of more than 130 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. By comparison, according to the UC Irvine paper, a major coal-fired power plant producing 3,600 megawatts of electricity emits as much as 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Air Products officials say that about 2% of NF3 is emitted during manufacturing and that much of that is burned off before reaching the atmosphere.
But Prather, a leading author of the influential reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, cited a study showing that even “under ideal conditions,” more than 3% may be emitted. And, he added, “a slippery gas” such as NF3 could easily leak out undetected during manufacture, transport, application or disposal.
“We don’t know if 1% is getting out or 20% is getting out. . . . But once you let the genie out of the bottle, you can’t get it back in.”
Prather said UC Irvine researchers were working on a method to measure concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere so that industry emissions estimates would not be the only source of information.
Atmospheric scientists not connected with the paper said the authors had raised a significant issue for future climate negotiations.
“NF3 lives a very long time in the atmosphere,” said Charles E. Kolb Jr., an IPCC scientist with Massachusetts-based Aerodyne Research Inc.
“We are having a hard enough time controlling carbon dioxide and methane -- we shouldn’t be creating a new problem.”
Another climate scientist, V. (Ram) Ramanathan of UC San Diego, noted the potency and long life of NF3, adding: “This paper raises new awareness of this molecule. We need to know how much of these super-greenhouse gases are up there.”
The Kyoto Protocol covered six greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, PFCs and sulfur hexafluoride.
California, citing the danger of water shortages, wildfires and other effects of climate change, last month adopted a draft plan to control global warming emissions statewide, including several synthetic greenhouse gases but not NF3. “The larger issue is the chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons,” said state air resources board spokesman Stanley Young.
“Enough material [is] stored in old refrigerators, air conditioners and insulating foams to equal over 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in California alone.”
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margot.roosevelt@ latimes.com
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01f705117ff1de05a9b2e682ccaaade1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-09-fi-lazarus9-story.html | Don’t dismiss Pickens’ plan yet | Don’t dismiss Pickens’ plan yet
When a guy heavily invested in natural gas and wind power says the answer to our energy woes is natural gas and wind power, it’s hard not to smirk at his Texas-size gumption.
But let’s not be hasty.
Energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens unveiled a plan Tuesday to wean the United States from its dependence on foreign oil. By shifting to natural gas as a transportation fuel and increasing our reliance on wind power, he said, we could cut oil imports by as much as 38%.
“Our dependence on imported oil is killing our economy,” Pickens said in a statement. “It is the single biggest problem facing America today.”
He called the country’s oil purchases from places like Saudi Arabia “the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, sending billions of our dollars overseas to buy . . . a commodity that lasts 90 days until burned in our gas tanks.”
Pickens, a legendary oilman, said his plan could change things within five to 10 years “if we can get Congress and the administration to act quickly.”
That’s a big if. Another big if is getting the auto industry to play ball by manufacturing more vehicles that run on natural gas instead of gasoline. And yet another wild card is whether the oil industry would support new energy priorities.
“These are big question marks,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign and former head of the Sierra Club’s global warming program. “There are a lot of things out of Mr. Pickens’ control.”
The so-called Pickens Plan would first entail a hefty investment -- more than $1 trillion -- in wind farms on an unusually breezy stretch of countryside extending from Texas to North Dakota.
The wind power would replace the natural gas now used by power plants to generate electricity. The country currently gets about 22% of its juice from natural gas.
All that freed-up natural gas, in turn, would be applied to fueling millions of vehicles that now run on gasoline but would be converted -- it’s not clear how, or on whose dime -- to run instead on compressed natural gas.
I couldn’t reach Pickens to ask him these questions. But he told the Associated Press that he wasn’t guided by personal gain. “I’m doing it for America,” he said.
Well, that’s heartening. But the fact remains that he and his business partners are investing an estimated $12 billion to build the world’s largest wind farm in Texas. That facility, needless to say, would play a pivotal role in meeting the nation’s newfound demand for wind power.
Meanwhile, Pickens’ more-than-$4-billion hedge fund, BP Capital, is invested in a variety of natural gas companies. He also sits on the board of Clean Energy Fuels Corp., North America’s largest provider of vehicular natural gas.
“Mr. Pickens is a very intelligent man,” said Don Martin, vice president of Enmark Energy, a Texas oil and natural gas company. “People in the oil and natural gas business are rich for a reason. They know where the money is.”
But Becker at the Safe Climate Campaign said he didn’t begrudge Pickens’ turning a buck with the Pickens Plan.
“If he can find a way to make money and help the planet, I don’t have a problem with that,” Becker said.
However, he said, natural gas may not be an easy substitute for oil. Natural gas prices have been climbing in tandem with oil prices and are up 30% this year. Increased demand by the United States would push global natural gas prices higher, Becker said, thus mitigating any relief consumers might initially feel at the pump.
Moreover, we’d still have to import more than a third of our oil -- assuming everything went according to plan -- and would probably end up importing a greater share of natural gas as well.
Our friends in Russia are the leading natural gas purveyors, accounting for almost 15% of world exports.
“We really need to kick the tires on this and see what works,” Becker said.
For his part, Pickens said he’d be spending $58 million on a multimedia campaign designed to raise awareness of the country’s energy troubles and his plan for fixing them.
He’ll also try to prod the leading presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, to pay more attention to the issue.
“Sometimes it takes a crisis to awaken us from our slumber,” Pickens said. “But once aroused, the American people can accomplish miracles.”
That some may get even richer in the process shouldn’t necessarily deter us from trying.
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Consumer Confidential runs Wednesdays and Sundays. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.
--
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The Pickens Plan
Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens says the U.S. must reduce its dependence on foreign oil. A look at his proposed solution:
Build wind farms from Texas to North Dakota to produce at least 20% of the electricity for the United States.
Divert natural gas now being used to generate electricity for use in motor vehicles, thus cutting U.S. dependence on oil.
Costs
$1 trillion to build wind farms, plus $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.
Unspecified costs relating to converting vehicles and automakers’ plants to build cars that run on natural gas.
--
Source: www.pickensplan.com
--
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18e542bffe3c2804dc70da9d6642b4ba | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-09-me-bike9-story.html | Narrow road is a zone of conflict | Narrow road is a zone of conflict
Bicyclists who crave a steady uphill climb flock to Mandeville Canyon Road and its 5-mile, straight-shot ascent with no traffic lights.
But the route’s rising popularity has turned the narrow road into a zone of conflict for Brentwood residents and the hundreds of cyclists who, every weekend, brave its twists, turns and tree-root bumps.
The frustration boiled over on the Fourth of July. In what police describe as a “road-rage incident,” two experienced racers on a holiday outing that attracted about 300 cyclists were riding down Mandeville Canyon when a motorist in an Infiniti sedan slammed on his brakes in front of them. Police said the resulting impact propelled one rider through the car’s rear window and sent the other to the pavement.
Police arrested the driver, Christopher T. Thompson, 58, on suspicion of felony assault with a deadly weapon -- his automobile. Thompson, who lives on Mandeville Canyon Road and is an owner of a medical documentation company in Woodland Hills, was released on $30,000 bail.
Capt. Bill Eaton of the Los Angeles Police Department said the case could go to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office as early as today.
Peter Swarth, Thompson’s attorney, denied that his client had done anything wrong and said the cyclists’ account was inaccurate. “This isn’t an incident of road rage,” Swarth said. “It is a very unfortunate accident. Dr. Thompson hopes for the injured cyclists’ recovery.”
Cyclist Ron Peterson, 40, whose head crashed through the car window, suffered broken teeth and serious cuts on his face, including one that left his broken nose dangling. The other cyclist, Christian Stoehr, 29, said he suffered a shoulder separation that would require surgery. Photos showing a car’s shattered window and what appears to be a blood-covered trunk and a cut-up Peterson on a gurney and in a UCLA Medical Center bed were quickly posted on Internet blogs, prompting outraged e-mails among members of Westside riding clubs.
Peterson and Stoehr said they were starting their descent toward Sunset Boulevard when a fellow cyclist crashed into another rider’s bike and was injured. The two remained behind to help. After paramedics arrived and loaded the cyclist into an ambulance, Peterson and Stoehr said they continued to descend, riding side by side at about 30 mph.
Peterson said he pulled in front of Stoehr after a driver behind them honked. The car passed them, missing their handlebars by less than a foot, Peterson said.
The driver “yelled out some profanity and ‘Ride single file,’ ” said Peterson, who works as a cycling coach. Peterson, riding a $5,500 Specialized racing bike, screamed an expletive at the driver. At that point, the driver veered directly in front of the riders and “slammed on his brakes as hard as he could,” Peterson said.
Peterson’s head slammed through the window. Stoehr, meanwhile, said he tried to steer around the car but clipped it with his bag or a foot. “I ended up being catapulted over my own bike and landed in front of the car,” he said.
According to Peterson, the driver emerged from the car and said he was a doctor. But “from that point on, he never offered any help,” Peterson said.
Thompson’s biography on the website of his company, Touch Medix, says he spent 29 years as an emergency department doctor.
Wendy-Sue Rosen, president of the Upper Mandeville Canyon Assn., described Thompson as “a great guy who has been active in the community.” His wife, Lynne, is on the association’s board.
“People here are very, very angry at bicyclists and their disregard for the laws of the road,” Rosen said, adding that residents had reported being spat upon by cyclists.
Charles Mostov, a lawyer who lives on Mandeville Canyon Road and is an avid cyclist, said the incident had prompted some much-needed conversation.
Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who represents the area, said he had called for a meeting within the next two weeks of residents, cyclists, traffic engineers and police to discuss the issues and to reinforce the fact that “cyclists have the right to travel safely and free of fear.”
Cyclists urged members of their community not to use the incident as an excuse to act aggressively toward motorists.
“As more people take to the road because of gas prices and the economy,” Mostov said, “maybe this is an opportunity for some outreach and for dialogue so that we can get along.”
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martha.groves@latimes.com
richard.winton@latimes.com
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c7290e72f5938f839d6c4507749151a0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-09-me-newport9-story.html | Photographer faces charges | Photographer faces charges
A photographer whose clients include celebrities and fitness models was charged Tuesday with having unlawful sex with a teenage girl, authorities said.
Jason Ellis, 33, of Newport Beach lured a girl, 14, by promising to help her with a modeling career, prosecutors said.
According to a statement from the Orange County district attorney’s office, Ellis’ live-in fiancee, Michelle Hecker, 31, acted as a facilitator by picking up the victim, now 15, from her mother’s house and taking her to meet Ellis. Hecker is charged with aiding and abetting.
The alleged abuse occurred over 10 months, ending in June when the girl’s parents hired a private investigator after becoming suspicious of their daughter’s friendship with Ellis and Hecker, prosecutors said.
The district attorney requested that Ellis and Hecker be held on $100,000 bail each. If convicted, each could face a maximum sentence of seven years in state prison.
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hgreza@latimes.com
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41a10d8344d01c9254317f8cca176387 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-09-na-campaign9-story.html | McCain shifts his message toward Latino immigrants | McCain shifts his message toward Latino immigrants
John McCain, angling to win a bigger share of the fast-growing Latino vote, is taking the risky step of placing an immigration overhaul at the center of his appeal.
The presumed Republican presidential nominee, who trails Barack Obama among Latinos, had been focused on assuring conservatives that securing the U.S. border with Mexico would be his immigration priority. But McCain has adopted a message that gives equal weight to helping employers and immigrant workers and their families. That suggests that as president he would back the kind of legislation that has roiled many in his party -- most notably, a legalization plan for undocumented workers.
McCain’s approach was on display Tuesday when he told the League of United Latin American Citizens gathering here that he would deal “practically and humanely with those who came here, as my distant ancestors did, to build a better, safer life for their families.”
And in a new series of advertisements -- in Spanish and English -- and a five-minute video, McCain talks about his long ties to Latinos and says immigrants’ needs are “as important” as helping businesses and securing the border.
“We will solve it with legislation that’s practical and fair,” McCain says of immigration in the video, according to a script obtained by The Times. “We will abide by the law in every way. We will secure our borders first and ask border-state governors to certify that the border is secure.
“Then we will address the burden U.S. employers are enduring by creating a temporary-worker program, so employers can hire and people can have jobs. And as important, we will be sensitive to the immigrant workers and their families who are doing the work that must be done,” he adds.
McCain steers clear of directly calling for a pathway to citizenship. But his subtle language matches that of legalization advocates.
The video, filmed recently in New Mexico, may be shown publicly next week, when McCain is scheduled to address another large Latino group, the National Council of La Raza, which is meeting in San Diego.
His move to highlight immigrants’ needs underscores the importance of Latino voters -- particularly in the key battleground states of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Florida -- and suggests that whoever wins the presidency will be committed to giving some kind of legal status to many of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S.
Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, has promised to support an immigration overhaul that would include a legalization plan and enhanced border security.
On Tuesday, Obama, who also addressed the Latin American citizens group in Washington, accused McCain of abandoning his support for a path to citizenship.
He noted that during the GOP primary season, McCain had said he would not vote for the legalization plan he once championed because “people want the border secured first.” Obama suggested that Latino voters should not trust McCain as a loyal friend.
“Sen. McCain used to buck his party on immigration,” Obama said. “Well, for eight long years, we’ve had a president who made all kinds of promises to Latinos . . . but failed to live up to them in the White House, and we can’t afford that anymore. We need a president who isn’t going to walk away from something as important as comprehensive reform when it becomes politically unpopular.”
Obama signaled that part of his Latino outreach would be to draw links between his life and the immigrant story. He likened new immigrants’ desires to those of his father, who came to the U.S. from Kenya.
The Illinois senator also suggested he might benefit from the political fervor in the Latino community, demonstrated when hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Los Angeles and other cities to protest critics of a legalization plan. “During the immigration marches back in 2006, we had a saying: ‘Today, we march. Tomorrow, we vote,’ ” Obama said. “Well, that was the time to march. And now comes the time to vote.”
Surveys show Obama holds a strong lead among Latino voters, 59% to 29%, according to the most recent Gallup Poll. That puts McCain far below the 40% President Bush won four years ago.
Strategists in both parties believe that Republican support among Latino voters suffered when congressional conservatives blocked compromise legislation to overhaul immigration law -- forged mainly by McCain and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) -- in 2006 and 2007.
And McCain distanced himself from the compromise in the heat of a competitive GOP primary in which immigration emerged as a top concern among the party’s overwhelmingly white, conservative base. Now, however, he rarely misses an opportunity to brag about his role in the debate -- even invoking the name of Kennedy, a figure reviled by conservatives but beloved by many Latinos.
GOP strategists believe that Obama too has some vulnerabilities on the issue. They say that he played a minor role in the negotiations last year, despite efforts to describe himself as a more central player, and that he voted for amendments that sponsors believed helped stymie the compromise.
Although McCain continues to talk of securing the borders first, he does not rule out a legalization program.
On Tuesday, after pledging to work for better border enforcement, he was quick to add: “But we must not make the mistake of thinking that our responsibility to meet this challenge will end with that accomplishment. We have economic and humanitarian responsibilities as well, and they require no less dedication from us.”
McCain has sought a delicate balance in recent weeks, but his shifting rhetoric has prompted some complaints from conservatives. After a recent closed-door meeting with Latino leaders in Chicago, one anti-illegal-immigration activist in attendance accused the Arizona senator of making different promises to different groups, and argued that strict border enforcement was unworkable if existing undocumented workers were given a path to citizenship.
“He’s being two-faced,” said Rosanna Pulido, director of the Illinois Minuteman Project.
McCain’s new ad campaign not only embraces his past work on immigration, but also distances him from the conservatives who opposed him.
In the video, he refers to the harsh rhetoric that many in his party used to oppose the legislation, saying that “too often, new immigrants have been treated as objects of fear instead of symbols of hope.”
Some ads, such as a Spanish-language radio spot released last week, feature McCain’s Latino Naval Academy roommate, Frank Gamboa, who has recorded messages in both languages extolling his longtime friend’s virtues. Though he did not directly mention immigration, Gamboa noted that McCain “has stood for our community even in the most difficult of times.”
Strategists expect some ads will contain footage of McCain’s trip last week to Mexico, where he visited cultural sites with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- whose wife is Mexican American and who polls show is hugely popular among Latino voters in his home state.
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peter.wallsten@latimes.com
maeve.reston@latimes.com
Times staff writer Louise Roug contributed to this report.
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a7d18139efe134ebb411543e80de0bdb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-09-na-cheney9-story.html | Cheney accused of EPA interference | Cheney accused of EPA interference
Vice President Dick Cheney’s office worked to alter sworn congressional testimony provided by a federal official in order to play down the threat of global warming and head off regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, a former government official said in a new accusation Tuesday.
Jason K. Burnett, a former Environmental Protection Agency official, cited the behind-the-scenes efforts by unnamed officials in Cheney’s office in a letter to congressional investigators regarding testimony in January by his former boss, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson.
Burnett appeared at a news conference Tuesday with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who said his statements could boost efforts by California and other states to implement their own vehicle emission standards over White House opposition. Boxer plans to call Burnett to testify later this month before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which she chairs.
His charges are likely to give Bush administration critics new ammunition in their efforts to portray executive-branch actions on the environment as driven by politics, rather than science.
Administration pressure also was cited in changes to testimony by the head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in October and in an attempt to prevent the EPA from taking a step toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions in December.
The Supreme Court ruled last year that the EPA was required to evaluate whether greenhouse gas emissions posed a risk and, if so, implement regulations on polluters. President Bush has opposed mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, oil refineries and other polluters, contending such steps would drive up energy costs and hurt the economy.
But White House efforts to edit testimony were “clearly misconduct, in terms of interfering with scientific information,” said Bettina Poirier, staff director for the environment committee. However, she said, she was still examining whether those actions violated the law.
For Cheney, the new accusation, coming as he winds down his time in Washington, is similar to criticism he faced early in his vice presidency over private meetings he held to shape national energy policy. Then, as now, the White House refused to turn over documents sought by congressional investigators.
Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride responded: “We won’t discuss internal deliberations.”
Burnett resigned as the EPA’s associate deputy administrator last month. He also has contributed $4,600 to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign.
EPA Administrator Johnson, in testimony before Boxer’s committee in January, planned to tell senators that “greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment.”
However, Burnett said in a letter to Boxer, “an official in the office of the vice president called to tell me that his office wanted the language changed.” He said he didn’t make the change. Johnson delivered the testimony as planned.
In one of the previous instances, administration officials extensively edited testimony in October by Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, removing six pages she planned to deliver.
Administration efforts to alter her testimony have been previously reported. But, in a new allegation, Burnett charged Tuesday that Cheney’s office had been involved in efforts to delete portions of her testimony on the health risks of climate change. He declined to identify who in the vice president’s office had sought the changes.
In December, Burnett said, he sent the White House an e-mail finding, in response to the Supreme Court ruling, that greenhouse gas emissions pose a risk, a step toward regulation. But shortly after, Burnett said, “I was asked to send a follow-up note saying that the e-mail had been sent in error.”
“I explained that I could not do this because it was not true,” he said.
The new charges of political interference come as California works to overturn a federal decision in December denying California and other states permission to impose stricter emission standards than the federal government.
Congressional Democrats have tried to get records of White House communications with the EPA on the issue, but the White House recently invoked executive privilege in refusing to turn over documents to a congressional committee investigating the EPA’s decision to deny California’s request.
But with Burnett, a Stanford-trained environmental economist, Democrats have a star witness who may be able to offer new insight into the White House’s role in a number of EPA decisions at the planned July 22 Senate hearing.
Boxer said the White House was trying to prevent the government from acting on a threat to human health and the environment. She said: “History will judge this Bush administration harshly for recklessly covering up a real threat to the people they’re supposed to protect.”
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richard.simon@latimes.com
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