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d350e21bc0216a46d026f82d7e42119a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-29-na-briefs29.s4-story.html | Gun advocate sues again | Gun advocate sues again
The plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down the city’s handgun ban filed a federal lawsuit alleging that its new regulations still violate an individual’s right to own a gun for self-defense.
Dick Heller and two other plaintiffs contend that the city continues to violate the intent of the Supreme Court’s June 26 decision by prohibiting the ownership of most semiautomatic weapons, requiring an “arbitrary” fee to register a firearm and establishing rules that make it all but impossible to keep a gun in the home for immediate self-defense.
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5e0cb6cb5e78574082faee2b83a90a0a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-29-na-justice29-story.html | Sex bias seen at Justice Dept. | Sex bias seen at Justice Dept.
When Bush administration officials at the Justice Department dismissed nine U.S. attorneys in 2006, there were various theories as to why the prosecutors were being let go.
They were too soft on the death penalty. They did not prosecute enough illegal immigrants. They did not go after enough Democrats.
On Monday, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog hinted at perhaps the most sensational justification yet -- perceived homosexuality.
In the second of a series of reports on the politically charged tenure of former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, the department’s inspector general found that two former Justice aides used sexual orientation as a litmus test in deciding whom they would hire or fire.
The report describes an alleged “sexual relationship” between a career prosecutor and a U.S. attorney, who were not named. Margaret M. Chiara, the former U.S. attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich., said in an interview with The Times that she now believed she was fired because of the erroneous belief that she was having a relationship with career prosecutor Leslie Hagen.
“I could not begin to understand how I found myself sharing the misfortune of my former colleagues,” Chiara said of the eight other U.S. attorneys who were fired. “Now I understand.”
Justice officials said after her firing that Chiara was let go because of mismanagement and because she had caused morale in her office to sink. Chiara said Monday she believed those concerns were raised by the same people who spread rumors about her and Hagen.
“I guess now I am persuaded with deep regret that this is what was the basis,” she added. “There is nothing else.”
The investigators found that Hagen lost a coveted assignment in Washington after rumors of the supposed relationship reached Gonzales aide Monica M. Goodling.
Chiara and Hagen told investigators that they did not have a sexual relationship, according to the report. Lawyers for Goodling declined to comment.
The report released Monday provides a more detailed examination of questionable moves made by Goodling and others -- including Gonzales’ former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson -- that were revealed during congressional hearings last year.
A former public affairs officer who became the Justice Department’s liaison with the White House, Goodling testified under a grant of immunity before the House Judiciary Committee that she had “crossed a line” and allowed political and other impermissible factors to affect her hiring decisions.
The latest disclosures include a finding that Goodling rejected the application of a career terrorism prosecutor for a job at Justice Department headquarters because his wife was active in local Democratic politics. The report said a less-qualified candidate was hired.
Goodling also sought out the advice of the White House and other Republicans in filling vacant immigration judge positions. Goodling -- who declined to be interviewed by the authors of the report -- previously testified that, based on advice from Sampson, she incorrectly had believed that it was legal to consider political factors in selecting judges.
The report found that Gonzales was unaware of many of the hiring decisions, and took action when he realized there were problems.
Gonzales’ lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, said Monday that the report was a measure of vindication for the former attorney general.
Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey said in a statement that he was “of course disturbed” by the findings, and noted that the department had taken action to head off future abuses.
A spokeswoman for Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department inspector general, declined to comment when asked why the report did not address whether Goodling had retaliated against Chiara as well as Hagen.
The office is preparing a separate report on the firings of the nine U.S. attorneys, and some observers speculated that the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Chiara may be addressed there.
Hagen was hired by Chiara in Grand Rapids about a year after Chiara was appointed by President Bush to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in western Michigan. The women had known each other since they were county prosecutors together in the 1990s. After Hagen joined the U.S. attorney’s office, the women would often commute together to work.
Hagen was hired to focus on crimes affecting Native Americans -- a priority of Chiara’s -- and she was successful, winning an award from the director of the administrative office in Washington overseeing U.S. attorneys.
The report does not address how the rumors about sexual orientation began. The report also says there were rumors that the women “took government trips together” and that Hagen “received large bonuses.” But it found that allegations about the supposed financial benefits were never investigated or referred for investigation, and thus remained unsubstantiated.
Lisa Banks, Hagen’s attorney, said Monday that all of the allegations were untrue.
“This rumor of a relationship between [Hagen and Chiara] is absolutely false. There was no such relationship, no improper trips or bonuses. It was completely fabricated, based on nothing but malicious rumor,” Banks told The Times.
Banks said she believed the rumors were started by other attorneys in the Grand Rapids office who eventually landed jobs at the Justice Department in Washington. She declined to identify them.
“Leslie was a stellar performer. She earned a coveted award. It engineered some jealously. Because she was doing well, and because she was a colleague and friend of the U.S. attorney, I think that is probably where these rumors started,” Banks said. “Once they were heard by Monica Goodling . . . that was the end of Ms. Hagen and her career.”
After working in Grand Rapids, Hagen was reassigned in 2005 to the Justice Department in Washington to work on Native American issues and was offered a customary extension by her supervisors after a year on the job.
Goodling intervened and blocked the extension. The report said that several witnesses told investigators that her opposition was based on the “alleged sexual orientation.”
One official told investigators about a conversation in which he told Goodling that he had heard the rumors that the women were lesbians. He said Goodling responded to that news “by putting her head in her hands and asking why no one had told her about this information before.”
Monday’s report also said that Goodling used an Internet search that included the words “gay” and “homosexual” to screen candidates and their backgrounds.
Investigators found that Goodling used the same search parameters as Jan Williams, who served as White House liaison before Goodling. The report said that Williams had used the string in late 2005 and early 2006 to research candidates for positions on a national advisory commission on violence against women.
Since being dismissed, Chiara, 64, has been serving on a national commission investigating sexual violence in prisons. Hagen, 44, has been working in a Justice Department office that oversees grant programs regarding sex offender registration and notification.
Lawyers for Goodling released a statement saying that her testimony before Congress had brought to light many of the abuses included in Monday’s report. They described the testimony as “among the most candid and meticulous that has been seen on Capitol Hill in decades.”
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rick.schmitt@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
In the spotlight
A look at the aides to former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales targeted in a Justice Department investigation. The inquiry said they violated Justice Department policies and civil service laws:
Monica M. Goodling
Graduated from Messiah College in Pennsylvania and earned a law degree at Regent University in Virginia, a school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. After doing opposition research for the GOP during the 2000 presidential election, she won a job in the public affairs office at the Justice Department. In 2005, at age 31, she became deputy director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. She resigned from the department last year.
D. Kyle Sampson
Graduated from Brigham Young
University in Utah and the University
of Chicago Law School. After working
for the Senate Judiciary Committee, he went to the White House as associate counsel to President Bush. In 2003, he moved to the Justice Department, where
he was chief of staff from 2005 until he resigned last year.
Source: Los Angeles Times
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224a5a3164d6af77e845537dada4240a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-29-oe-rubenstein29-story.html | Pickens’ ‘clean’ secret | Pickens’ ‘clean’ secret
Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is pushing a national campaign to make the U.S. “energy independent” through wind power and vehicles that run on natural gas. His blitz of TV ads featuring his own down-home voice has picked up a lot of admiring news coverage. To date, Pickens has yet to explain whose dime will pay for this.
Well, Californians can clarify exactly whose dime it will be: Ours. Along with being the country’s biggest wind power developer, Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels Corp., a natural gas fueling station company that is the sole backer of the stealthy Proposition 10 on California’s November ballot. This measure would authorize the sale of $5 billion in general fund bonds to provide alternative energy rebates and incentives -- but by the time the principal and the interest is paid off, it would squander at least $9.8 billion in taxpayer money on Pickens’ self-serving natural gas agenda.
The initiative deceptively reads like it’s supporting all alternative-fuel vehicles and renewable energy sources. But a closer read finds a laundry list of cash grabs -- from $200 million for a liquefied natural gas terminal to $2.5 billion for rebates of up to $50,000 for each natural gas vehicle.
Much of the measure’s billions could benefit Pickens’ company to the exclusion of almost all other clean-vehicle fuels and technology. Engines that run on compressed natural gas have a place in pollution reduction, especially for heavy trucks and public buses. But natural gas is a nonrenewable fossil fuel that we import from foreign sources, and it is no better (and in some cases worse) when it comes to emissions and fuel efficiency compared with the best hybrid cars or the new ultra-clean diesel engines. Most insidiously, Proposition 10’s lavish rebates for natural gas-powered cars and trucks could crowd out superior technologies from taking root in California, the largest transportation market in the United States.
Even worse, private trucking and delivery companies could buy 5,000 natural gas trucks, collect California taxpayer-funded rebates of $200 million or more and immediately send those fleets out of state. There’s nothing in Proposition 10 to prevent that. It’s like asking California voters to finance a new bridge with taxpayer dollars, without mentioning that the bridge could be in Ohio.
Pickens is selling Proposition 10 to green-minded, high-gas-price-paying Californians under the official name of “The California Renewable Energy and Clean Alternative Fuel Act.” If the name rings a bell, that’s because it’s intentionally similar to the “California Clean Alternative Energy Act” of 2006, also known as Proposition 87. Proposition 87’s rebates and incentives would have been funded by fees on the oil industry for petroleum extracted in California, not by taxpayers.
Proposition 87 lost after the oil industry spent more than $100 million campaigning against it. I was the founder and chairman of Californians for Clean Energy, the force behind Proposition 87, and am disgusted that Pickens’ lawyers and natural gas sales team have lifted Proposition 87’s language and twisted it into such a deceptive, counterproductive initiative.
Pickens’ raid on California’s general fund comes while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature are racking their brains trying to make state ends meet. The payments over the 30-year life of the Pickens bonds would deprive Californians of at least $325 million a year to fund schools, fight wildfires and keep emergency rooms open.
Yet in the paragraph of Proposition 10 titled “Accountability,” there isn’t a word about requiring proof that the billions of dollars spent would result in one less ounce of petroleum used or one fewer wisp of greenhouse gases emitted in California.
I’ve met Pickens, and I’ll vouch for his patriotic intentions to get the U.S. off of foreign oil -- but not for funding his interests on the sly with billions of dollars from California’s taxpayers. In fact, I’d prefer to believe that he’s being ill-served by his lawyers and political consultants, because it’s clear that the shortcomings of Proposition 10 could ultimately hurt his energy independence message.
Given that Pickens can also play rough -- he was a funder of the nasty “Swift boat” campaign in the 2004 presidential election -- it’ll take guts to challenge him. California’s governor, attorney general and treasurer should be the first to say no, because there’s certainly a case against a $5-billion bond that results in almost no lasting infrastructure, could siphon taxpayer money out of state and would distort the clean-vehicle market. The makers of hybrid and biofuel vehicles, and California teachers, hospitals and firefighters, who would be on the losing end of Proposition 10, should also think hard about what Pickens’ plan would do to them.
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58d83249c8fc0af408235ed5836f2528 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-30-et-pagan30-story.html | Pride of the pagans | Pride of the pagans
This is the first in a series of occasional articles exploring alternative cultural life around Southern California.
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If YOU think the meager little baton that Harry Potter has been waving around for going on six movies now is something special, you’ve never seen a real wand. The genuine article -- adorned with feathers, stones and a message in the runic alphabet -- was on display at a “Healing Faire” in, of all places, Studio City, this month. It was the creation of Jude Bradley, an actual witch. Or Wiccan, to use the appropriate term.
She was not wearing a pointed hat, and there was no black in her wardrobe (she was wearing jeans, in fact). She did say that she grew up in the Boston area and had spent a decent amount of time around Salem, Mass., a town that of course has some history with witches. Maybe too much, in fact.
“It’s become very commercial,” said Bradley, who in addition to custom wands also makes meditation sachets and can do tarot-type readings with a regular deck of playing cards.
At the Unitarian Universalist Church on Moorpark Street she was in the company of various other New Age spiritualists, technologically savvy psychics, massage therapists and purveyors of therapeutic oils at this low-key event held as a fundraiser by the Los Angeles chapter of Pagan Pride, an organization that is striving to legitimize the practice of pagan religions and defend them against detractors.
They are completely serious, well-coordinated, and yes, they have some foes, including at one time current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr. In 1999, Barr, then a Georgia congressman, sought to prevent pagans and Wiccans in the armed forces from engaging in religious practices on military bases (he’s since backed down from that position, perhaps fearing he’d lose the pagan/Libertarian vote).
Last year, the loose-knit movement won a decade-long struggle when the Veterans Administration approved the pentangle, a key symbol of Wiccans, for use on headstones. There are many forms of pagan practice, however, so the campaign has now shifted to allowing symbols associated with other unrecognized faiths. On Oct. 5, the local pagan community will gather in El Monte for its annual Pagan Pride Day celebration. Last year, 1,500 people attended the event in Los Angeles, and an estimated 40,000 turned out worldwide.
Contemporary paganism doesn’t draw its inspiration from the multiple-gods worship of ancient Greece and Rome so much as from less classical, earthier antecedents (although pagans can and do worship different gods and goddesses). Think Druids, or the shamanistic traditions of Native Americans. Satanism, being associated with the post-Christian world, is not usually considered part of the neo-pagan movement although neo-pagans, being exceedingly tolerant, would probably not object to Satanists being allowed to do their thing, as well.
If all this puts images of Stevie Nicks, gauzy clothing, crystals and amulets in your mind, well, those are all present. But Pagan Pride L.A. also has a public affairs officer, Brian Ewing, who holds down a day job as an employment lawyer. They’re not living in pre-Christian times, either: Their Web presence is extensive, and they don’t shy away from modern technology.
The psychic at the Healing Faire, Debbie Reasbeck, had brought with her several thousand dollars’ worth of computers and software specifically designed for the analysis of auras. Place your hand on a sensor and a PC with a camera mount extrapolates your life force, displaying it as a penumbra of colors surrounding your body. (It can also scrutinize your chakras.) Reasbeck pointed out that her focus is as a healer. She practices the art of reiki, which is based on unblocking congested life-force energy. Obviously, you don’t need to be a pagan to have a life force, so her work can appeal to just about everybody.
“If you let your chakras shut down, it can affect your body,” said Reasbeck, who maintained that she has been psychic for most of her life (she first realized that she had the ability in second grade).
Not surprisingly, the path to paganism isn’t always clear, and it can be lonely.
“I’m a solitary witch and always have been,” Bradley said, when asked if she practices as part of a group. “This has always been a bit of closeted community, but it’s getting better. A lot of people are involved with Earth religions.”
A fellow Wiccan, Glenda Tamblyn, who had brought bath salt “enchantments” to the event, seconded Bradley’s impressions. “It’s not like you wake up one day and decide you have a different path to follow,” she said.
Tamblyn’s craft can be tricky. “Different oils and plants have different energies,” she explained. She used lavender as an example, saying that a little can be relaxing. “But a lot of lavender is a stimulant,” she added. “You gotta find a balance with the lavender.” If the correct proportions are achieved, “the essence of the plant will have the power to stimulate you spiritually and physically.”
People who are curious about pagan theories of wellness, along with assorted other paraphernalia of alternative health culture, can engage in one-stop shopping at DragonMarsh, a shop in Riverside that has been dealing in everything from costumes for theme weddings to a vast repository of teas, herbs, and spices for 20 years. Events manager Eric Du’Marn and spiritual oils specialist Amy Rose Blackstone held down the store’s booth at the Healing Faire.
“We encourage a lot of different paths in the neo-pagan life,” Du’Marn said, when asked about the spiritual predilections of his staff of six. He added that DragonMarsh has been participating in Pagan Pride events for the last “seven or eight years.”
He’s not above using a bit of spiritual assistance for personal gain, especially since Blackstone can create a “money blend” oil.
“I use a bit on the back of my hand,” he said, “when I go to Vegas.”
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d44c061c56aa6b38cb212509b1587c4a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-30-fg-iraq30-story.html | Iraqi military launches crackdown | Iraqi military launches crackdown
The Iraqi government’s most ambitious effort yet to assert its authority over long-troubled parts of the country began Tuesday with polite requests to search homes in and near this capital of Diyala province.
It was a modest and carefully prepared launch of a campaign that Iraqi commanders say will make use of nearly 30,000 Iraqi troops and eventually stretch across a region east of Baghdad that is roughly the size of Maryland. The government’s previous crackdowns focused on individual cities.
“The mission is to clear the whole province . . . of terrorists and outlaws and to bring back security and stability,” Lt. Gen. Ali Gaidan Najid, commander of the Iraqi ground forces, said at a meeting to coordinate operations with U.S. forces.
Iraqi soldiers and national police encountered no resistance as they knocked on doors in Baqubah and the town of Khan Bani Saad, about 15 miles south. But this is well-trod ground for the Iraqi forces and their U.S. counterparts, who have conducted repeated operations in the area since last year.
The troops will face a more serious test when they push into the province’s hinterlands, where Sunni Arab militants loyal to insurgent groups including Al Qaeda in Iraq have found sanctuary since they were pushed out of the city of Fallouja, west of Baghdad in Anbar province, in 2004.
The U.S. military believes many insurgent leaders have already fled their hide-outs since Prime Minister Nouri Maliki announced at the end of June that he was sending reinforcements to Diyala. But they typically leave behind roads riddled with mines, houses rigged to explode and suicide bombers armed with explosives vests.
Diyala, an ethnically and religiously mixed region stretching from the eastern outskirts of Baghdad to the Iranian border, has long been a hotbed of violence. Al Qaeda in Iraq declared Baqubah the capital of its self-styled Islamic caliphate, and the group’s founding leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, died in a U.S. airstrike near the city in June 2006.
A series of U.S.-led campaigns, which began last year, restored a measure of calm to the main cities and towns along the central portion of the Diyala River, a region of rich farmland laced with canals that was long the breadbasket of Iraq.
But even with the extra forces deployed under the Bush administration’s troop buildup last year, the American military did not have sufficient numbers to push into more remote parts of the province, where fighters hide among thick palm groves, and in isolated hamlets, vast desert expanses and rugged mountains. Most of the additional forces have returned home this year, and the U.S. presence in Diyala has dropped to less than half the level at its peak last summer.
U.S. commanders, who have also been ramping up operations in recent weeks, welcomed the deployment of additional Iraqi troops, who now outnumber them in the province about 5 to 1.
“I can’t get out into the periphery without the additional Iraqi troops,” said Lt. Col. Bryan Denny, acting commander of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which assumed responsibility for security in the province in June. “I don’t have the combat power to do that.”
U.S. commanders, who had been expecting the Iraqi crackdown to begin later in the week, were caught off guard when hundreds of Iraqi troops cordoned off parts of the city before dawn Tuesday and began searching for weapons and fighters. But they quickly mobilized troops, which fell in behind the Iraqis in case they needed backup.
The U.S. officers’ main concern was that the arrival of large numbers of predominantly Shiite Muslim troops to arrest Sunni Arab insurgents could trigger new clashes in a region scarred by years of sectarian bloodshed.
Residents too were apprehensive about the treatment they would receive, particularly members of the 10,000-strong local Sunni and Shiite guard force hired by the U.S. military to help ensure that insurgents do not return to their communities after major clearing operations are completed. Many members of the force are former insurgents now being paid by the Americans to keep order. Some worry they will be targeted by the Iraqi military for their past crimes.
In the days leading up to the crackdown, Denny urged Iraqi leaders to take into account the efforts of the so-called Sons of Iraq guards, who provide key information about insurgent networks and weapons caches.
“This could be the seminal event that fractures the province and pulls us back, or it could be the event that unites us,” he said at a meeting at the provincial police chief’s office. “What will make the difference is how they are treated, whether they all get their day in court.”
Every detail of the Iraqi operation appeared to be aimed at allaying residents’ fears -- down to its name, “Glad Tidings of Benevolence.”
Najid and other Iraqi authorities underscored that they were not targeting communities, but would be executing warrants against individuals of all faiths who had violated the law. A team of investigative judges has been brought in to speed up the processing of detainees and release those without sufficient evidence.
Shortly after 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, the national police turned up at a home in Tahrir, a former Sunni militant stronghold in Baqubah.
“They politely asked me to accompany them around the house, and before that they excused themselves before going in, in case our women were unveiled,” said Abu Ibrahim, an unemployed father who asked to be identified by a traditional nickname. “They didn’t slam doors. They didn’t harm anyone. Money wasn’t stolen.”
It was not the kind of behavior he had expected.
“Six to eight months ago, when searches happened, they used to come slamming doors, blindfolded our eyes and dropped us on the floor with our hands tied until they finished,” he said.
Other residents questioned why the government had announced its intentions ahead of time, giving militants time to slip away. It is a frustration shared by U.S. commanders.
“You could argue which is success, the killing or capturing of terrorists, or forcing them to flee the province,” Denny said. “I would rather detain those that are guilty and let them have their day in court.”
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alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
Times staff writer Saif Hameed and a special correspondent in Baqubah contributed to this report.
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909d22d3ae94c600eb4400c961cfe03f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-30-fg-olyspy30-story.html | China has spy gear in hotels, senator says | China has spy gear in hotels, senator says
China has installed Internet-spying equipment in all the major hotel chains serving the 2008 Summer Olympics, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) charged Tuesday.
Brownback, citing hotel documents he received, said journalists, athletes’ families and others attending the Olympics next month “will be subjected to invasive intelligence-gathering” by China’s Public Security Bureau.
One document said, “In order to ensure the smooth opening of Olympic in Beijing and the Expo in Shanghai in 2010, safeguard the security of Internet network and the information thereon in the hotels . . . it is required that your company install and run the Security Management System.”
The Chinese government has put great emphasis on security around the Games, citing what it calls an unprecedented threat of terrorism in mobilizing a security force larger than many standing armies.
But critics say the security is mostly directed at potential protesters who might air grievances about Tibet or other human rights issues.
In addition to the 110,000 security professionals, 500,000 volunteers with red and yellow armbands have become ubiquitous in Beijing. Ordinary citizens, especially taxi drivers, have been advised to be vigilant for threats.
The Public Security Bureau’s order to the hotels says that failure to comply could result in financial penalties, suspension of access to the Internet or the loss of a license to operate a hotel in China.
“These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government,” Brownback said at a news conference.
Spokesmen at the Chinese Embassy in Washington were not available for comment.
In Beijing, meanwhile, some Internet sites remain blocked at the main Olympic press center and some venues where reporters will work.
Websites such as Amnesty International or any with Tibet in the address could not be opened Tuesday at the main press center, which will house about 5,000 print journalists.
The government routinely blocks Internet access for the Chinese public.
In bidding for the Games seven years ago, China said the news media would have “complete freedom to report.”
And in April, Hein Verbruggen and Kevan Gosper, senior International Olympic Committee members overseeing the Games, said they’d received assurances from Chinese officials that Internet censorship would be lifted for journalists during the Games.
Gosper, however, issued a clarification Tuesday. He said the open Internet extended only to sites related to “Olympic competitions.” He said the freedom to report “didn’t necessarily extend to free access and reporting on everything that relates to China.”
The U.S. State Department issued a fact sheet this year warning travelers attending the Games that “they have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public or private locations” in China.
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8a0261b73c370bca3405a0aeb9362c10 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-30-fg-usisrael30-story.html | Strike on Iran is not off the table, U.S. tells Israeli | Strike on Iran is not off the table, U.S. tells Israeli
Bush administration officials reassured Israel’s defense minister this week that the United States has not abandoned all possibility of a military attack on Iran, despite widespread Israeli concern that Washington has begun softening its position toward Tehran.
In meetings Monday and Tuesday, administration officials told Defense Minister Ehud Barak that the option of attacking Iran over its nuclear program remains on the table, though U.S. officials are primarily seeking a diplomatic solution.
At the same time, U.S. officials acknowledged that there is a rare divergence in the U.S. and Israeli approaches, with Israelis emphasizing the possibility of a military response out of concern that Tehran may soon have the know-how for building a nuclear bomb.
“Is there a difference of emphasis? It certainly looks as though there is,” said a senior American Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the sensitive talks.
U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of building nuclear weapons.
Tehran says that it is engaged in a peaceful enrichment program for civilian energy purposes.
Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said in an interview that U.S. officials have often made it clear to Israeli officials that Washington prefers to try to mitigate the threat from Tehran by applying economic pressure.
“The military option, although always available, is not our preferred route,” Morrell said.
“We have made that point clear to them and the world in our public statements and private meetings.”
Barak left Israel for Washington amid reports in the Israeli press that he would try to talk the Bush administration out of what many Israelis perceive as a more conciliatory policy toward Iran.
On Tuesday, the Israeli Defense Ministry released a statement saying that Barak had told Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that “a policy that consists of keeping all options on the table must be maintained.”
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Barak said that there remains time for “accelerated sanctions” to try to persuade Iran to abandon the nuclear program.
Israeli officials were concerned in December when a key U.S. intelligence report concluded that Iran had abandoned an effort to build a nuclear bomb. They also have noted with concern comments this month by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that an Israeli airstrike on Iran would further destabilize the Middle East and compound the strain on overworked U.S. forces.
Also this month, in a rare move toward engagement with Tehran, a senior U.S. diplomat took part in international talks in Geneva about the nuclear program.
And U.S. officials have floated a proposal for opening a low-level diplomatic office in Tehran.
These gestures have taken place at a time of intensifying discussion in Israel about the wisdom of an Israeli military attack on Iran before the Bush administration leaves office.
A senior State Department official said Tuesday that Israel “is a sovereign state and we understand that they view this as an existential threat. And we take the threat that’s posed by Iran seriously as well.”
But the official, who asked to remain unidentified in keeping with diplomatic rules, said the administration is “pursuing the strategy we believe is the right one.”
Gates, in an hourlong meeting with Barak, told the minister that the United States intends to consider providing radar to Israel that can detect ballistic missiles launched from Iran and supplying weapons to counter rocket attacks from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, according to a senior Defense official.
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paul.richter@latimes.com
julian.barnes@latimes.com
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e0cb6e9a3c933e88ae1fbf4e6abc6fd1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-30-me-fastfood30-story.html | Council bans new fast-food outlets | Council bans new fast-food outlets
A law that would bar fast-food restaurants from opening in South Los Angeles for at least a year sailed through the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday.
The council approved the fast-food moratorium unanimously, despite complaints from representatives of McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr. and other companies, who said they were being unfairly targeted.
Councilwoman Jan Perry, who has pushed for a moratorium for six years, said the initiative would give the city time to craft measures to lure sit-down restaurants serving healthier food to a part of the city that desperately wants more of them.
“I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options,” she said.
The ban covers a 32-square-mile area for one year, with two possible six-month extensions.
The area contains about 500,000 residents, including those who live in West Adams, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park.
The law defines fast-food restaurants as “any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers.”
A report released last year by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health found 30% of children in South L.A. were obese, compared with 25% of all children in the city.
Still, several fast-food workers told the council that the panel was ignoring the good things their franchises accomplish. The workers argued that fast-food establishments provide residents with job opportunities and, in recent years, nutritious menu options.
“McDonald’s believes in healthy choices,” said Don Bailey, who has owned and operated the company’s restaurants in South Los Angeles for 22 years.
Another foe of the measure was Madelyn Alfano, whose company, Maria’s Italian Kitchen, has restaurants in Sherman Oaks, Brentwood and other parts of the city. Alfano said the law would create new red tape and force restaurateurs to spend thousands more to start businesses.
“The intent of this bill, and this proposal, is a very good one. There is an obesity problem,” said Alfano, whose company recently opened an express version of the restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. But “I don’t think the restaurant industry is to blame.”
Moratoriums frequently last as long as two years at City Hall, to give planning officials enough time to craft new zoning rules. Perry said businesses can apply for a “hardship exemption” if they are intent on opening a fast-food restaurant.
The councilwoman also said she expected city officials to come up with financial assistance for some restaurants.
“This will buy us time to aggressively market the district and show potential developers that we are not only open for business, but have some substantive incentives to make it worth their while to develop in South L.A.,” she said.
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molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com
david.zahniser@latimes.com
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RELATED STORY
Fee: Tentative trash fee hike approved. Page B4
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c47fe90442d63691c4edea7e5b9b6333 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-30-me-la-quake30-story.html | Why we rolled with the punch | Why we rolled with the punch
The earthquake that rattled Southern California on Tuesday might have caused devastation if it had taken place in some parts of the world, but relatively strict building codes ensured that most of the region’s infrastructure -- homes, schools, freeways and rail systems -- rolled with the magnitude 5.4 punch, which was centered near Chino Hills and felt as far away as Las Vegas.
As aftershocks continued to reverberate, officials inspected airports, freeways and buildings and reported little damage from the quake, which occurred at 11:42 a.m. and was the first significant temblor in more than a decade to be centered in an urban area of California. The biggest strains were felt in phone and Internet systems, which buckled because of overwhelming demand in the minutes after the jolt.
The quake struck hardest in an area of San Bernardino County that has seen massive growth in population and housing in the last decade. That meant that the buildings shaken the hardest were mostly built under California’s strictest building codes, updated in 1997 in response to the 6.7 Northridge quake of 1994. That kept damage to a minimum.
Only minor injuries were reported, three at an outpatient medical clinic in Brea and five at a building in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles.
“The most interesting thing to us is that this is the first one we’ve had in a populated area for a long time,” seismologist Kate Hutton of Caltech said. “People have forgotten what an earthquake feels like. We should look at this as an earthquake drill for the Big One that will come one day.”
Although moderate in intensity, the quake rumbled up from a relatively shallow depth, making it feel sharper, stronger and scarier than its magnitude suggested, especially in areas close to the epicenter.
“It’s the first time in my life I actually got under my desk,” said Anaheim Police Sgt. Ken Seymour, a native Southern Californian.
Robert Heded, 32, a Time Warner technician who lives in Culver City, was about 30 feet up a telephone pole at La Cienega and Pico boulevards in Los Angeles when the quake hit.
“I just sat there and waited, kinda rode it out,” he said a while later as he bought an energy drink at a 7-Eleven, still dressed in his reflective safety vest.
The lines were “swaying a lot more than usual, about four feet from side to side,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what was happening, if it was an earthquake or if it was me.” Heded said he finished up his work, still strapped to the pole in his safety gear. Then made his way down.
“It was bad,” said Nirmala Dawson, the director of the Montessori School of Chino. She said the school performs frequent earthquake drills. “But at that moment, to be honest, we forgot them. We just evacuated.”
No one was injured, she said, but a few children were frightened by the shaking. Then, after the quake, phones began ringing off the hook with calls from parents.
That nearly universal instinct to call loved ones -- or someone -- strained the capacity of the regional phone network, perhaps instructive for officials planning emergency responses to the next massive earthquake.
Verizon lost some phone service Tuesday in several quake-affected areas. “We have some outages on our land-line side,” said Jonathan Davies, Verizon spokesman. “We’re not sure yet if it’s physical damage or just due to high call volumes.”
AT&T;'s cellphone service was spotty in some areas. Sitting in a Starbucks in Pasadena, Paul Roberts was able to get calls on his cellphone. “But I am sitting here with my buddy, who has AT&T;, too, and he can’t make outgoing calls,” said Roberts, a student at Art Center College of Design.
The Los Angeles Times’ website, latimes.com, was briefly unavailable to many users when heavy traffic swamped its servers immediately after the earthquake. Full access returned in about 10 minutes, according to Meredith Artley, the executive editor of the site. It had about 630,000 page views in the hour after the temblor, roughly double the usual amount.
The earthquake slowed, but for the most part didn’t stop, the region’s transportation network.
A section of the southbound Interstate 5 near Bake Parkway in Irvine was briefly closed to traffic so that Caltrans workers could inspect it, according to Tom Marshall, spokesman for the California Highway Patrol. No problems were found.
No disruptions were reported on Los Angeles County highways. Raja Mitwasi, chief deputy director of the Caltrans office in Los Angeles, said Caltrans was inspecting highway bridges and pavement, but had not found any signs of damage.
The biggest delays were on passenger trains, which were slowed to allow inspectors access to tracks.
Denise Tyrrell, a Metrolink representative, said there were delays of about an hour on Metrolink trains serving Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties. Metrolink use is at an all-time high because of rising gas prices. Similar delays were reported on Amtrak’s Surfliner trains, with shorter ones on Los Angeles County’s Metro Rail lines.
On Tuesday afternoon at Union Station in Los Angeles, some passengers affected by the delays said they understood the need to check tracks for damage.
“They had to do what they had to do to make sure it was safe,” said Pete Paladino, 64, a special needs teacher who was delayed about 30 minutes on the Red Line to downtown and was headed home to Upland.
The quake briefly knocked out the ground radar system at Los Angeles International Airport but did not affect any flights, LAX officials said. The radar is linked to a safety system that warns air traffic controllers of potential collisions. Nancy Castles, a representative for the airport, said no damage has been found at LAX except for a broken water heater that caused some flooding in the checked baggage area of Terminal 7.
One terminal at Ontario International Airport sustained cosmetic damage, but flights were not affected, according to spokesman Harold Johnson. Staffers at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana closed one runway for five minutes after the quake to inspect it, airport spokeswoman Jenny Wedge said. They found no damage.
The quake did cause its share of damage, mostly in the form of shattered glass and dislodged bricks. In Los Angeles, problems included flooding at a Macy’s in Woodland Hills; some people stuck in an elevator at Pershing Square; some cracking and other minor damage to some downtown buildings; and five minor injuries to people in the 3600 block of Wilshire Boulevard “who were rushing and trampling each other out the building,” according to City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who was serving as acting mayor in the absence of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was on vacation in London.
The quake gives new urgency to a drill, the Great Southern California Shakeout, being planned for November by a consortium of public and private organizations. It will simulate the response to a magnitude 7.8 quake on the San Andreas fault.
Seismologists consider such a quake to be inevitable, although they cannot predict when it might hit. To put the latest temblor in perspective: A 7.8 quake would be 3,981 times more powerful than one of magnitude 5.4, according to Anthony Guarino, a seismic analyst at Caltech.
The recent devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province was calibrated at magnitude 7.9. As powerful as that quake was, it also demonstrated what can happen when buildings are not built to the highest earthquake standards. Hutton, the Caltech seismologist, said even a 5.4 quake could cause widespread damage “anyplace where there’s no earthquake regulation, where no reinforcement is required.”
The Chino Hills quake hit hardest in an area of relatively new development. Valerie McClung, community relations manager for the city of Chino Hills, said almost all of the residential and commercial development in the city began no earlier than 1991, the year the city was incorporated.
Most development, she said, occurred after the Northridge quake.
“It’s the best possible location,” said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards Initiative of the U.S. Geological Survey. “If this had happened in San Bernardino, where there are over 200 unreinforced masonry buildings, we would have had a lot of downed buildings.”
Jones said big earthquakes often lead to an upgrade in building codes.
For instance, she said, unreinforced masonry was outlawed in California in a 1935 code, adopted in the aftermath of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.
The 1997 code, adopted after Northridge, banned brittle steel and mandated that builders use a stronger welding material to join steel parts.
“Each time there’s a big earthquake, we say ‘Oops, we hadn’t thought about that one before,’ ” Jones said.
It helps when the quake occurs in an urban area. When that happens, said Thomas Heaton, a professor of engineering and seismology at Caltech, “It means 10 million people feel it. If it happened in the Mojave Desert it sure wouldn’t have been as big a deal at all.”
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joel.rubin@latimes.com
david.pierson@latimes.com
mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Web features
More on the Chino Hills earthquake is available on latimes.com:
* Reporters’ dispatches, on the L.A. Now blog.
* How local schools and transportation handled the quake.
* Why cellphone service failed, on the Technology blog.
* Voices of people who live near the epicenter.
* Maps, earthquake resources, photos, video, graphics and historical data.
* Comments from more than 1,000 readers speaking out on the quake.
latimes.com/chinoquake
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The following Times staff writers contributed to the earthquake coverage:
Tami Abdollah, Tony Barboza, Esmeralda Bermudez, Andrew Blankstein, Howard Blume,
Jia-Rui Chong, David Colker, Cara Mia DiMassa, Paloma Esquivel, Jessica Garrison, Anna Gorman, Jeff Gottlieb, Martha Groves, Carla Hall, Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Jill Leovy, David Kelly, Rong-Gong Lin II, Jean Merl, Robert J. Lopez, Seema Mehta, Joe Mozingo, Charles Ornstein, Stuart Pfeifer, Bob Pool, Tony Perry, Paul Pringle, Jean-Paul Renaud, Susannah Rosenblatt, Michael Rothfeld, Ann M. Simmons, Garrett Therolf, My-Thuan Tran, Ruben Vives, Dan Weikel, Phil Willon, Richard Winton, Kimi Yoshino and David Zahniser.
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cc398fa1225c141c13b969fee0188d10 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-30-sci-vangogh30-story.html | High-tech study reveals work beneath Van Gogh landscape | High-tech study reveals work beneath Van Gogh landscape
Using a thin beam of synchrotron X-rays generated by a particle accelerator, European scientists have reconstructed a portrait of a peasant woman painted by Vincent van Gogh that had been concealed beneath another painting for 121 years.
The image, unveiled in a scientific journal published today, bears a striking resemblance to a series of somber portraits the artist produced in the Dutch town of Nuenen, where he composed “The Potato Eaters,” completed in 1885 and regarded as his first major work.
Conventional X-rays had revealed the rough outlines of the portrait, which Van Gogh covered 2 1/2 years later with a vibrant landscape of a flowering meadow after he moved to Paris and was influenced by Impressionism. But those X-rays weren’t good at distinguishing between the many layers of paint on the single canvas, and pigments made from heavy metals obscured colors derived from other elements.
“We get a very partial, fragmentary, color-blind view,” said Joris Dik, a materials scientist and art historian at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands.
So Dik and his colleagues took the painting, “Patch of Grass,” which was completed in 1887, to a particle accelerator in Hamburg, Germany. The intense X-ray beam excited the atoms on the canvas, causing them to emit X-rays of their own that were captured by a florescence detector. It took two days to scan the roughly 7-by-7-inch portion of the meadow that masked the portrait.
Since each element in the painting had its own X-ray signature, the scientists were able to identify the distribution of metals in the various layers of paint and construct a three-dimensional model of the work. Then the team peeled off the layers one by one.
The top layer consisted of paints made with zinc, barium, sulfur and other elements. Behind that they found a uniform distribution of lead, which was used as a primer to hide the portrait and prepare the canvas for a new painting. Once that was removed, they combined the distributions of two more elements -- mercury and antimony -- to produce the outlines of the hidden portrait.
Then, with the help of computer software, the team embarked on an elaborate version of painting by numbers.
“We colorized those two distributions according to the color that the pigment would have had,” Dik said.
Chemical analysis revealed that the mercury was an ingredient of vermilion, the red pigment used to color the woman’s lips, cheeks and forehead. Antimony was a component of Naples yellow, which was mixed with zinc white paint to highlight certain areas of the woman’s face, according to the report in the August issue of Analytical Chemistry.
Van Gogh often recycled his canvases. Art experts estimate that one-third of his early paintings hide others, which may be ripe for new analysis.
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karen.kaplan@latimes.com
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854250e7f853c2d4752f563f42f9a1ce | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-31-fg-nokorea31-story.html | North Korean families suffering as food grows scarce, U.N. says | North Korean families suffering as food grows scarce, U.N. says
North Korea is heading toward its worst food crisis since the 1990s because of flooding, successive crop failures and worldwide inflation for staples such as rice and corn, the United Nations World Food Program said Wednesday.
The agency shied away from predicting another famine like the one that killed as many as 2 million people in the 1990s, but said its field staff was observing some of the same warning signs.
People are again foraging for wild plants, grass and seaweed to supplement their meager diets. Hospitals are reporting an increase in chronic diarrhea and illness that are often linked to malnutrition. Many families have cut back from three meals a day to two.
“We did go into the kitchens of some of these families and, believe me, there was nothing,” said Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the World Food Program’s director for North Korea, who supervised a recent study of 250 households.
When questioned about where they would get their next meal, many of the people interviewed offered vague answers, such as, “Well, I’m hoping my relatives who live on a cooperative farm will deliver some potatoes tonight.”
“One of my team members came to me and said these households were in tears. They simply didn’t have any options,” De Margerie said at a news conference in Beijing.
Under North Korea’s communist system, people living in the cities rely on a public distribution system for their staples, but the rations have been cut to one-third of their original levels. At the same time, their purchasing power has been eroded by inflation.
“We’ve noticed that market prices for staple foods in Pyongyang -- rice, maize, potatoes, eggs -- were all going through the roof, sometimes quadrupling,” De Margerie said.
To a large extent, the North Koreans are suffering as a result of the same increase in food prices that has afflicted all of Asia this year. But because their economy is so stagnant, they have no way of compensating. Making matters worse, the Chinese, who supply North Korea with much of its food, have cut back and imposed new export taxes because of concerns about their own domestic food supply. Severe floods there also affected harvests.
North Korea kicked out many aid agencies in 2005, insisting that its food crisis was over. But in May of this year, the government acknowledged that the food situation was approaching “emergency” levels and asked the World Food Program to step up its relief efforts.
The United States has also increased assistance. In late June, just days after North Korea blew up a cooling tower at its main nuclear compound, a U.S. freighter delivered 37,000 tons of wheat to be distributed through the World Food Program.
The agency is now bringing food in for an estimated 1.2 million North Koreans and it hopes in the next few months to reach as many as 6 million people, roughly a quarter of the estimated population.
De Margerie said the agency was not experiencing the same problems with access and information that complicated some of its relief efforts in North Korea in the 1990s.
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barbara.demick@latimes.com
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5f461bdbed766fddb080f4f3365e4e1b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-31-me-hall31-story.html | General Electric chemist invented process for making diamonds in lab | General Electric chemist invented process for making diamonds in lab
H. Tracy Hall, the physical chemist who invented the first reproducible process for making diamonds in the laboratory, kicking off a multibillion-dollar industry, died Friday at his home in Provo, Utah. He was 88 and had Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes.
The feat, considered on a par with converting lead into gold, had been a goal of chemists, alchemists, physicists and scam artists for more than two centuries when Hall -- ostensibly part of a team at General Electric but working primarily on his own -- pulled it off.
Those first diamonds were small to the point of near invisibility and nowhere near the quality that might be required for jewelry. But they were perfect for a variety of industrial applications that involved cutting, grinding and polishing a range of once-intractable materials.
The material is also finding growing use in the electronics industry and, as new techniques have allowed the production of stones as large as 12 carats, in the jewelry business as well.
Hall should have received a Nobel Prize for his work, said earth scientist Robert M. Hazen of George Mason University, author of a book about the creation of the man-made diamond industry.
The search for artificial diamonds was triggered by the 1797 discovery that a diamond is a form of pure carbon, converted into crystalline form by high temperatures and pressures.
Over the centuries, researchers tried various clever ways of producing the desired conditions, occasionally claiming the production of one or more stones. But their work was never reproducible, and most observers argued that the stones had been secretly added to the experiments by sympathetic colleagues or by the researchers themselves.
When Hall joined GE’s Project Superpressure at Schenectady, N.Y., in 1953, the company was in the process of purchasing a massive, $125,000 press that could generate a pressure of 1.6 million pounds per square inch in a small, confined space.
Hall had built a pressure chamber that he called the “half-belt” that had been used to create high pressures in a 35-year-old Watson-Stillman press that leaked so much water from its hydraulics that he had to wear rubber boots while working with it.
When he envisioned a better pressure chamber, the company refused to come up with the $1,000 it would require and refused him official time in the GE machine shop to build it. He persuaded a friend in the shop to do the work during off hours, and a former supervisor persuaded the company to purchase the expensive carboloy (tungsten carbide dispersed in cobalt) that he needed to produce it.
After several false starts, Hall ran a final test in the new device on Dec. 16, 1954, when other researchers in the lab had already left for Christmas vacation.
When he unsealed the apparatus after the experiment, he later said, “My hands began to tremble; my heart beat rapidly; my knees weakened and no longer gave support. My eyes had caught the flashing light from dozens of tiny . . . crystals.”
Hall repeated the experiment several times, achieving the same results. On New Year’s Eve, GE chemist Hugh H. Woodbury used Hall’s equipment to perform the experiment, becoming the second person to make artificial diamonds. A week later, Hall reported his results to GE officials, who suspected that he was exaggerating his findings.
But when the experiment was repeated in front of them -- with Hall safely out of the building -- the results were the same. On Feb. 14, 1955, the company breathlessly announced that it had created the first synthetic diamonds, and the results were trumpeted in newspapers across the country.
The news release, however, implied that the diamonds had been made in the company’s expensive new press.
Hall’s reward? A $10 savings bond. “Big deal,” he said later.
Disheartened by the lack of credit, he began looking for another job, landing at Brigham Young University in Provo, where he planned to do high-pressure research. But the federal government had slapped a secret label on the apparatus, which effectively prevented Hall from using it.
His solution was to invent another apparatus, called the tetrahedral press, that was even better and that circumvented all the patents held by GE. He published his research in a widely read journal, but shortly thereafter, the government slapped a secret label on that device as well. A few months later, however, the military lifted the veil of secrecy, and he was finally able to use the fruits of his labor.
Hall and two colleagues later started a new company called MegaDiamond in Provo, and the area still remains a nexus of synthetic diamond production.
Howard Tracy Hall was born Oct. 20, 1919, in Ogden, Utah. His childhood hero was Thomas Edison and, by the fourth grade, Hall’s goal in life was to work for General Electric, which was closely associated with the inventor.
He enrolled at the University of Utah, receiving his master’s degree in 1943 before spending the rest of the war years as a Navy ensign. After the war, he returned to Utah for his doctorate and ultimately persuaded GE to hire him.
He was active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he and his wife, the former Ida Rose Langford, served a mission in Zimbabwe and South Africa in 1982-83. After his formal retirement from BYU, he became a tree farmer in Payson, Utah.
Ida Rose Hall died in 2005. Hall is survived by six daughters, a son, four brothers, 35 grandchildren and 53 great-grandchildren.
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thomas.maugh@latimes.com
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3fb6adb2c8748b45a30216c69e8de927 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-31-me-power31-story.html | Power plans in disarray | Power plans in disarray
Does Southern California need a dozen or so new gas-fired power plants -- and if it does, can it build them? No one seems to know for sure.
The region’s long-term plans to generate electricity to serve a growing population and to replace decades-old dirty plants were thrown into disarray this week, when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday that local authorities had failed to do the necessary environmental and health analyses.
Officials from the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which encompasses Orange County and large swaths of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, warned of likely “blackouts and brownouts” if the plants are not built.
Many of the plants, such as a 914-megawatt generator sponsored by the small industrial city of Vernon, would be in low-income, crowded areas that have high rates of asthma and other pollution-related diseases. Though they would be outfitted with the latest in pollution-control technology, the gas-fired generators would emit thousands of tons of fine soot particles, which are linked to cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.
The court decision is “a victory for the health of our children,” said Lucy Ramos, a Boyle Heights middle-school aide and president of Mothers of East L.A., a group that has been fighting the Vernon plant. “Our community is not a dumping ground.”
The proposed plants, which include 11 in the Los Angeles Basin and two in the outlying areas of Desert Hot Springs and Victorville, would be built by private companies, which would sell the power to Southern California Edison and other utilities. But under the federal Clean Air Act, no polluting facilities can be built unless soot and chemicals are reduced elsewhere in the region through a complex system of pollution credits, also known as offsets.
Years ago, the air district set aside what it called Priority Reserve credits so that projects such as hospitals and police stations could be built even if they added to the region’s pollution. Last year, the district, lobbied by a host of former politicians, decided to sell the credits to energy companies for $420 million: about half the market value, according to environmentalists’ calculations.
Environmental and community groups said Wednesday that they would sue in federal court to nullify such credits.
The decision, meanwhile, left air regulators perplexed at their next move.
“What’s the responsible action?” asked Barry Wallerstein, the air district’s executive officer. “Should we wait until we have brownouts and blackouts to build new power plants? We need lights in our schools and power for our factories and electricity in our homes.”
Wallerstein said the region needs about 2,000 megawatts of new capacity, and that sufficient offsets are unavailable on the open market.
The 32-page decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Communities for a Better Environment and other groups. In it, Judge Ann I. Jones told the air district it could not sell offsets to the plants without a fuller analysis under California’s Environmental Quality Act. In particular, the judge said, the district needed to analyze exactly how many tons of pollutants, including health-damaging soot and planet-heating greenhouse gases, each proposed plant would emit.
Wallerstein said the district is unlikely to appeal the ruling. “It will be a question of whether we proceed with a new rule, or whether we throw up our hands and say, someone else should figure this out because it is beyond our control.”
If the judge’s concerns “are beyond our ability to address, then there will be a permanent moratorium on power plant construction in Southern California.”
Environmentalists and many industry experts say that much of the region’s demand can be met through conservation and renewable energy.
But no one knows how much could be supplied by wind farms, geothermal energy, solar rooftop facilities or large solar plants, many of which are proposed in fragile desert areas.
Until the 1998 electricity deregulation, the state’s Energy Commission was responsible for determining needs. But later, the commission’s role was largely reduced to permitting the siting of plants, leaving the market to decide how much and what kind of generation is needed.
Southern California Edison has signed long-term power purchase agreements for 2,556 megawatts of power from new gas-fired generators, including proposed plants in Walnut Creek, Calif., and El Segundo. Spokesman Gil Alexander said Wednesday that the company had not assessed the effect of the judge’s decision.
“Obviously we believe new capacity is a critical energy planning issue for the region,” he said.
Under California law, private utilities, which produce 11% of their power from renewable sources, must boost their so-called “green” portfolio to 20% by 2010. But a recent plan released by the state Air Resources Board said the amount must increase to a third by 2020 for all utilities, if the state is to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gases that are causing global warming.
Aides to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are negotiating with legislators to put the 33% requirement into law this year, a measure that could alter plans for many of the new gas-fired plants.
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margot.roosevelt@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Power plants
Proposed power plants in the Los Angeles region that may be affected by a judge’s ruling against pollution credits:
* Vernon, 943 megawatts
* Rancho Cucamonga, 721 megawatts
* El Segundo, 573 megawatts
* Palmdale, 563 megawatts
* Industry, 500 megawatts
* Romoland, 500 megawatts
* Anaheim, 200 megawatts
* Rancho Cucamonga, 45 megawatts
* Ontario, 45 megawatts
* Norwalk, 45 megawatts
* Riverside, 98.6 megawatts
Mojave plants
* Desert Hot Springs, 850 megawatts
* Victorville, 563 megawatts
Source: South Coast Air Quality Management District
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2180b6f766d7f7501f166d06729dd895 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-31-sci-dino31-story.html | Ancient T. rex tissue, or just old slime? | Ancient T. rex tissue, or just old slime?
Soft, organic material discovered inside a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that scientists believed was 70-million-year-old dinosaur tissue may have been nothing more than ordinary slime, scientists said in a study published Wednesday.
Researchers reported in the online journal PLoS ONE that bacterial colonies infiltrating tiny cavities in the bones long after the dinosaurs died may have naturally molded into shapes resembling the tissues they replaced.
Carbon dating performed on one sample showed that the tissue-like material was modern, circa 1960.
After further examination with light and electron microscopy, researchers concluded that the substances were most likely remnants of biofilms, or layers of bacterial cells and the sticky molecules they secrete.
The finding sparked a strong response from the researchers who originally said they had found ancient dinosaur tissue.
Mary H. Schweitzer, the biologist from North Carolina State University who found the original material, said in a statement that errors in the current study “seem to underlie a fundamental misunderstanding of our work, our data and our interpretations.”
The dinosaur tissue was reported in 2005 after Schweitzer’s team, working at a remote dig site in Montana, was forced to break a T. rex femur into chunks small enough to be transported by helicopter. Inside were pieces of rubbery material that looked like blood vessels and bone marrow.
Subsequent analysis showed that proteins in the material resembled those found in birds, long thought to be close relatives of dinosaurs.
The find was received as one of the year’s most stunning scientific discoveries, although many scientists were skeptical that dinosaur tissue could survive tens of millions of years.
Hoping to find more samples of dinosaur tissues, a team of scientists at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington decided to examine a fossilized turtle toe.
They cracked open the bone, put it under an electron microscope, and within minutes saw spheres reminiscent of blood cells, like those reported by Schweitzer’s group.
“We did the happy dance,” said Thomas Kaye, an associate researcher at the museum and the leader of the group.
The researchers then dissolved the bone in mild acid, exposing hidden tissue that resembled vessels and bone-forming cells. The findings were similar to those of Schweitzer’s group.
But as Kaye examined more fossils, he was puzzled that he found similar materials in nearly every bone. It didn’t make sense to him that so much tissue could have survived for millions of years.
The solution came from Zbigniew Sawlowicz of Jagiellonian University in Poland, who identified the small spheres resembling blood cells as framboids, iron-containing structures known to form in the presence of bacteria.
Further examination revealed pockets of microbe-like shapes and tiny furrows that may have been trails that bacteria blazed though the muck, the researchers said.
Kaye said the evidence -- and common sense -- clearly pointed to bacterial leftovers. “Believe me, I didn’t want it to be this explanation,” he said. “I would much rather have it be dinosaurian tissue.”
But Schweitzer argued that there are significant holes in Kaye’s study, namely an explanation for why the protein in the tissue looks like that expected for a dinosaur. She added that her group has considered biofilms but has found no evidence for their presence.
Some scientists were hesitant to take sides.
“It’s actually quite common to find biofilms in areas where fossils would be formed,” said Frank Corsetti, an earth scientist at USC who was not involved in the research. “It’s an interesting idea, but the jury is still out.”
Jennifer Macalady, a geo-microbiologist from Pennsylvania State University who also was not involved in the research, said: “To tell you the truth, I don’t find either side of the story very convincing.”
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wendy.hansen@latimes.com
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3e3607b47d41c54e7f5463f51a2940ce | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-31-sp-xgames31-story.html | In the air again after an epic fall | In the air again after an epic fall
A year ago, skateboarder Jake Brown proved from which height a man must plummet, onto an unforgiving wooden platform, to have both shoes fly from his feet on impact.
Answer: 46 feet. Or about 4 1/2 stories.
That’s the vertical drop the skateboarder endured during his fifth and final run of the big-air competition on the mega-ramp at the 2007 X Games.
Brown’s flailing as he plunged, as if tossed from a burning building, is Generation Y’s version of “the agony of defeat,” a highlight reel for the ages.
The resounding thud, followed by an intense Staples Center hush, was something eyewitnesses may never forget.
“I thought he was dead,” recalled Pierre-Luc Gagnon, a competitor and Brown’s close friend. “At first I thought he was going to have compound fractures of both legs. I thought he was going to be paralyzed.
“Then I rolled up to him and he wasn’t breathing. He was completely out and I didn’t know if he was still alive.”
Miraculously, Brown, who regained consciousness minutes later, sustained a mild concussion, small fractures in his spine and wrist, and bruises to his liver and lung.
He was hospitalized for three days and began skating a few months later, on a traditional vert ramp.
Tonight, as the X Games begin their 14th season -- with a four-day competition at Staples Center and the Home Depot Center -- the diminutive Australian skateboarder will resume big-air competition on the daunting mega-ramp.
“I’ve tried to put it aside and just move forward,” Brown, 33, said this week before practice. “Obviously I still remember it, but I’ve got a lot of energy focused on what I’ve got to do now.”
What many may not recall is that Brown won the silver medal last year, based on a remarkable third run that included a 360-degree spin across the 70-foot gap and a 540 above the quarterpipe wall.
The difficulty factor is unfathomable for fans and casual skateboarders. Mega-ramp skaters drop almost straight down a 70-foot roll-in, then sail across the gap with nothing but hands or gravity pressing the boards to their feet.
They land on a downhill ramp at nearly 40 mph and must compose themselves to launch up and above a 27-foot quarterpipe, perform another trick, and get back in position to negotiate a near-sheer drop down the quarterpipe wall.
Brown, on that third run, earned a 95.33 to vault ahead of Bob Burnquist, a veteran skateboarder from Vista, Calif., who had scored a 94.33 on his second run. In third place going into the final round was Gagnon with a 93.00.
There seemed to be voltage in the air. The level of competition on this crazy contraption had been raised markedly since big-air made its debut at the 2004 X Games.
The mega-ramp’s creator, Danny Way, who won gold the first three years, and who had begun back-flipping over the gap, was sidelined because of knee surgery.
Burnquist, who in 2006 built the world’s only permanent mega-ramp in his backyard, was favored to win. He and Way had spent more time than anyone on the mega-ramp. Burnquist learned to front-flip over the gap, and to spin 180s and 360s without holding his board.
But his backyard had become a virtual circus, a gathering place for the dozen or so skateboarders qualified to ride the mega-ramp. The progression of tricks was steady and slams sporadic; it seems a minor miracle that nobody was paralyzed or killed on the mega-ramp.
Nobody has been, Burnquist said, because skateboarders have learned to fall on the down-slopes, and to abandon tricks -- and skateboards -- early if they’re not working out.
Brown held the lead going into last year’s final round, but he and Burnquist were the last performers, respectively. Brown knew he needed a bigger trick to keep the lead.
Down he rolled, and up he flew, spinning a 720 -- that’s two rotations, in mid-air. He stuck that landing but was too far left and tried to veer more toward the center as he approached the quarterpipe.
He began to wobble and compressed his body. Atop the wall he stretched out and that flung him upward and outward, over the flats.
What spared catastrophe was the way he turned at the last instant, to absorb most of the impact with his backside and feet. His shoes blasted to opposite sides of the ramp.
“The thing that made Jake’s fall different than others was the sound when he hit, followed by the silence of the entire Staples Center,” recalled Chris Stiepock, X Games general manager. “That is something I’ll remember my whole life.”
One of Brown’s first statements after regaining consciousness, before being helped to a wheelchair, was, “Do I get another run?”
Burnquist, meanwhile, waited 15 minutes before making his final run.
His legs were “cold and trembling” as he stood atop the roll-in ramp and “all I could think of was, ‘Get this done and don’t fall,’ ” Burnquist recalled.
His run was a switch roll-in to a 180 over the gap, to a front-side 540 above the quarterpipe. Technically, it was off the charts because to ride switch means to stand unnaturally, or with the wrong foot forward.
Burnquist stuck everything and judges gave him a 95.66. He stole the gold from his fallen pal, who had nonetheless stolen the show for all the wrong reasons.
The intensity of the moment was overwhelming. Burnquist caved and sobbed, and said later that big-air skateboarding had been elevated so high on that surreal night that the gold medal he earned seemed more like a team effort.
“That was for all of us,” Burnquist restated this week. “Now I’m kind of going after mine.”
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pete.thomas@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
X Games 14
Where: Staples Center (and Event Deck at LA Live) and the Home Depot Center.
When: Today-Sunday.
Tickets: $10-$20 for all-day entry. Available on site or via Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster.com.
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OU WON’T WANT TO MISS THESE
Tonight: Skateboard Big-Air -- Will Jake Brown overcome last year’s frightful slam? Will Bob Burnquist repeat for gold or will Danny Way, coming back from injury, reclaim dominance in event he created? Moto X Best Trick -- Not the same without Travis Pastrana in the lineup. He recently backflipped, on an FMX bike, an in-flight rally car driven by Ken Block, for a magazine cover shot.
Friday: BMX Big-Air and Skateboard Street men’s final -- Kevin Robinson, last year’s athlete of the Games, is fresh from setting a world record above a quarterpipe on a bicycle: 27 feet. Paul Rodriguez, from Chatsworth, is fresh from a $100,000 payday as winner of the inaugural Maloof Money Cup street competition, and a $25,000 triumph at the AST Dew Tour stop in Cleveland. An X Games victory would be worth another $50,000.
Saturday: There are nine finals, all at the Home Depot Center. Perhaps most intriguing is the inaugural Moto X Racing women’s final. A strong favorite is Ashley Fiolek, who is deaf. It’s a disadvantage, but once out front she enters a zone in which she cannot hear the others in hot pursuit, and that removes some of the pressure. The BMX Superpark course, for the inaugural competition, has been criticized by some athletes but the show should still spellbind. Daniel Dhers is coming off a second consecutive Dew Tour triumph, which he attained by pulling off four 720s -- one of them a corked-out no-hander -- on the same run. In skateboard men’s vert, Shaun White and Pierre-Luc Gagnon, who dominate this sport, will battle for gold.
Sunday: Rally Car Super Special final. Pastrana, et al, going ballistic in a caged missile on an obstacle course littered with jumps and ridiculously tight turns. It’s the perfect capper.
-- Pete Thomas
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TODAY’S MEDAL EVENT FINALS
4:30-5:15 p.m.: BMX Freestyle Street final -- Event Deck at LA Live.
5:45-7 p.m.: Skateboard Big Air final -- Staples Center.
7-8 p.m.: Moto X Best Trick final -- Staples Center.
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774b4497aa31781da428b380e64702a5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-01-ca-monitor1-story.html | ‘Real World’ actually gets real | ‘Real World’ actually gets real
Last month, when MTV announced that the 21st installment of “The Real World” would be filmed in Brooklyn, it seemed like a statement of renewed purpose. Even though Brooklyn boasts a population of more than 2 million, this would be the first time the show has been filmed in a locale known largely as a satellite to another major location, or more to the point, where people who can’t afford to live in the city (read: Manhattan, where the show has been filmed twice before) actually live.
Though it is unlikely that housemates will spend much time in Crown Heights, Canarsie, Bay Ridge or Sheepshead Bay (where, it should be said, I was born and raised), the mere imprimatur of Brooklyn is enough to connote a sort of creative and cultural authenticity that the show has assiduously avoided since maybe the Seattle season, the show’s seventh, which aired a decade ago and was the last one in which each cast member seemed motivated by something grander than the desire to wile away a few months before the cameras.
In the press release about the move to New York, Jon Murray, co-creator of “The Real World” and chairman and president of Bunim-Murray Productions, noted that “the Brooklyn season, like the Hollywood season, will focus on what people loved about ‘The Real World’ when it launched in 1992 -- genuine people, meaningful conflict and powerful stories.”
In this regard, he is not as laughably misguided as he sounds. The current season, “The Real World: Hollywood,” is the most vivid, engaging and artful in years, the first time in recent memory that the typical cast of misfits has generated something approximating genuine pathos.
Being that the show takes place in Hollywood -- conveniently, walking distance from any number of dens of night life iniquity on Hollywood Boulevard -- producers deliberately cast a set of entertainment-industry aspirants. Though they bear all the scars of great “Real World” cast mates -- family trauma, arrest histories, battles with addiction -- they also come armed with something even more exotic: goals. As a setup for a season to be filmed in a borough known for its artistic strivers, it is perfect.
This has also been one of the most manic seasons in “Real World” history -- episodes are now a full hour (as they will be next season), and they are dizzying, cramming a spectacular amount of story into each show. It’s just halfway into the season, and already Joey has been shipped off to rehab and, in this week’s episode, has returned. Brianna has faced a court date on a prior assault arrest. Kimberly has displayed what can only be described as bouts of casual racism, repeatedly calling Brianna “ghetto” and suggesting that her behavior is beyond the pale even for “Blackville,” wherever that may be. Last week, there was a near-orgy in the hot tub (though it was played less salaciously than a similar one on the most recent season of “Big Brother”). And finally, in the confessional room, Will engaged in an act that did not appear to require the presence of his shorts with non-cast mate Reva, a woman who was dating Greg.
Why did Greg deserve this treatment? Because he is one of the oddest and most compelling figures in “Real World” history. From the earliest episodes, he distanced himself from his roommates, calling them “peasants” and sitting apart from them at meals. He pranked them, putting rocks in Will’s bed and stealing Sarah’s panties after she trash-talked him to a woman he’d brought back to the house. He calls women he’s involved with “associates.” He gets pedicures. “I am Greg, and I am perfection,” he says. “I don’t need these peasants.” (He is the first “Real World” cast member to be chosen by an online vote, making him perhaps more of a wild card than producers could have anticipated.)
Though it is tempting to lump Greg in with the great “Real World” performance artists -- Puck from San Francisco, Coral from New York, Isaac from Sydney, and anyone who has appeared on more than three of the “Real World"/"Road Rules” challenges -- his naivete sadly outweighs his cynicism. He says things like “industry party” and “red carpet A-list event” with no irony whatsoever and skips out on some of the improv-comedy classes that pass for the cast’s “job” this season so he can gain a toehold in the modeling industry, which is why he came to Los Angeles. “I love runway,” he says. “It’s my passion.”
But for all his self-absorption, and even though he has often been the root cause of problems in the house, he has also notably been the mediator in several conflicts. And when his roommates get mad at him, as they do in almost every episode, his condescension acts as a buffer; he won’t let himself get frazzled. He frustrates the housemates to the point where he gains the moral high ground. Given their increasingly bizarre behavior, they have to cede it to him. Even when Will makes insinuations about his sexuality and cruelly mentions Greg’s recently deceased father, Greg is a rock. Brianna compliments him on holding his feelings back, even though in the previous episode she’d scolded him for the same, warning, “You will be alone for the rest of your life.”
At the height of house tensions, Greg addressed the camera: “Why am I happy right now? Because I am on bad terms with every single roommate. I’m not gonna crack. I am a [expletive] diamond. Diamond does not crack -- it cuts.”
In this week’s episode, Greg will suffer extreme consequences for his general indifference to the work that is expected of him with the rest of the cast. Forced to call the trickster Reva to pick him up from the house, he registers the faintest of flinches, but he’s not truly derailed. After all, here is someone intimate with the big picture, arriving with a purpose and getting scarce when it becomes clear his presence serves everyone’s interests but his own.
It’s a throwback to the show’s early days, when it seemed like “The Real World” was mere intrusion into lives already in progress.
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15042f67d421930fdb7be88838273844 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-01-me-justman1-story.html | A creative force on two ‘Star Trek’ TV series | A creative force on two ‘Star Trek’ TV series
Robert H. Justman, a producer who was one of the creative forces behind the original “Star Trek” television series of the 1960s as well as the 1980s-era “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” has died. He was 81.
Justman died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home of complications from Parkinson’s disease, his son Jonathan said.
Justman’s death came within days of those of his “Star Trek” friends and colleagues Joseph Pevney, who directed some of the original series’ most popular episodes, and Alexander “Sandy” Courage, who composed the series theme.
“There seems to be a big ‘Star Trek’ convention and everyone is going,” Jonathan Justman said. “Everyone is getting beamed up.”
As associate producer, technical consultant and eventually co-producer, Bob Justman wielded considerable influence on “Star Trek” from its beginning in 1966 until 1969, when NBC canceled the series. He was involved in all facets of production and had a hand in casting, set design and props, as well as story lines and scripts.
The late Gene Roddenberry created the science fiction TV show featuring the starship Enterprise and its multiracial crew, which explored 23rd century galaxies with a “five-year mission, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
“It wasn’t just a science fiction show; it was a morality play,” Justman told the Christian Science Monitor in 2001. “It was, ‘Do the right thing and do right by your fellow man, and all will be well, hopefully.’ ”
Although “Star Trek” struggled in the ratings in the 1960s, it found a devoted fan base in reruns and came to be seen as an iconic science fiction TV program.
Twenty years later, Roddenberry revived the franchise for Paramount and reassembled much of the earlier show’s production team for “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a syndicated series that aired from 1987 to 1994. (Roddenberry died in 1991.)
Justman was a supervising producer on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” along with Rick Berman, who later became executive producer of that program as well as subsequent spinoffs.
“I can’t tell you how nurturing this guy was to me,” Berman told The Times. “He was like a mentor and a father. He was extraordinary.”
Justman designed sets, models and visual effects and oversaw character and script development for the debut of “The Next Generation.” But Berman said his biggest contribution was championing the casting of Patrick Stewart, who became one of the most popular characters of the new series.
“Roddenberry was very against the idea of a bald British actor playing the next Capt. Kirk,” Berman said. “But Bob was very persistent, and Patrick became Capt. Picard.”
After a year of working on the new show, Justman was satisfied and decided to retire.
“I perceived a chance to prove to the world and to myself that we could make a successful ‘Star Trek’ series from the get-go, that we didn’t have to get saved by fans wanting to keep the myth alive,” he told The Times in 1996. “ ‘Star Trek’ was an important part of my life.”
Robert Harris Justman was born July 13, 1926, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Lena and Joseph Justman. His father found success in the produce business in New York and California, then decided to go into the movie business and bought a studio in Los Angeles.
The younger Justman served as a Navy radio operator in the Pacific during World War II, attended UCLA for two years and worked in his father’s produce operation. Then, in 1950, he decided to try his hand at the family’s other business, the Motion Picture Center studio. (It later became part of Desilu Studios, owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.)
At the beginning Justman made $50 a week. He worked his way up from production assistant to assistant director to associate producer on dozens of feature films, including “Red Planet Mars,” “Apache” and “Kiss Me Deadly,” and hundreds of TV episodes, including “Adventures of Superman,” “Northwest Passage,” “The Outer Limits” and the pilot for “Mission: Impossible.”
Next came his break in “Star Trek.” After its run ended, Justman went on to produce “Then Came Bronson,” “Search,” “MacGruder and Loud,” “Gideon’s Trumpet” and other TV fare in the 1970s and ‘80s.
“Star Trek” was never far away, though. He enjoyed attending conventions where fans and others associated with the show gathered, and in 1996 he co-wrote “Inside Star Trek: The Real Story” with Herbert F. Solow, the Desilu executive in charge of production of the original series.
Justman also served as a uniformed volunteer with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for more than 20 years.
In addition to his son, survivors include his wife of 51 years, Jacqueline; a daughter, Jennifer; another son, William; two sisters, Estelle Osborne and Jill Roach; a brother, Anthony; and five grandchildren.
Services are pending.
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claire.noland@latimes.com
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d57d9fee1f399adca9d7bc146595cc48 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-et-book2-story.html | Wishing for falling snow | Wishing for falling snow
Inevitably, David Guterson’s new novel, “The Other,” will be compared to “Snow Falling on Cedars,” his spare, evocative 1994 debut about vivid characters caught in the aftermath of racial injustice.
And, inevitably, those comparisons will take the form of “It’s no ‘Snow Falling on Cedars.’ ” Indeed, “The Other” is a flat-footed morass of trivia that suggests a bad rewrite of “Into the Wild.”
During a high school track meet in 1972, Neil Countryman, the son of a carpenter, meets John William Barry, the scion of several prominent and wealthy Seattle families. Neil is an unmotivated half-miler who runs “on unfocused emotion.” John William is “the brooder in the back row. The rich kid who hates and loves himself equally. The contrarian who hears his conscience calling in the same way schizophrenics hear voices, so that, for him, there’s no not listening.”
Despite those unprepossessing evaluations, the boys become fast friends, hiking, talking, smoking dope and getting into mischief.
After college, John William grows increasingly alienated, he spends more and more time alone in the woods. He digs a cave in a mountainside and gradually refuses to leave its isolation, even to buy supplies.
Neil treks in food, books, booze, dirty magazines and dope -- when what his friend obviously needs is professional help. Neil also keeps John William’s whereabouts hidden.
When John William dies of unspecified causes (malnutrition? pneumonia? boredom? flagrant plot device?), Neil wraps the body in a cedar mat and hides it in the cave.
He says nothing about the death until rangers find the body 22 years later. Then Neil discovers John William has left him $440 million.
The money has apparently been sitting for two decades, as no one’s bothered to have John William declared dead. Nor do the local law enforcement agencies care that the last person who saw John William Barry alive benefited very handsomely from his demise: “As it turned out, no prosecutor was angry with me for failing to report the death of a missing person or for interring my friend in a cave twenty-two years ago, so I was rich with no strings attached.”
Although the novel hinges on that fortune, none of the characters seems very interested in it. Suddenly rolling in dough, Neil purchases . . . a hybrid car. He and his wife quit their jobs, but they stay in their funky old bungalow, while earning more than $60,000 a day in interest and dividends.
Their older son talks “about building a house powered by a solar-cell array, Seattle neighborhoods that are still affordable -- because he’s adamant, so far, about not asking us for money -- and his fledgling interest in Buddhism.”
When Neil visits John William’s father at the posh Rainier Club, he recounts his son’s unhappy childhood with the dreary exactitude of a high school student reciting the facts of the Battle of Yorktown.
John William’s psychotic mother may have abused her son: There are no witnesses, as the Barrys apparently kept no servants, despite all their money.
And Barry pere doesn’t seem to care that a substantial chunk of the family wealth has been handed off to an outsider.
In an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the sheer improbability of the story and the underdeveloped characters who wander through it, Guterson buries the reader in meaningless facts.
Every page is littered with the names of mountain ranges, mountains, waterways and trails; streets, cross streets and street addresses; song titles, musicians; book titles and authors.
Apparently this welter of names and details is supposed to take the place of credible character development, but the net result is every bit as entertaining as reading a street guide or a mail-order catalog.
Even Mark Sides, a lawyer who appears for only a few pages, receives a complete biography: “His undergraduate degree, from Berkeley in ’68, was in the political economy of natural resources. He’d gone to law school at Stanford and had graduated in ’71, Order of the Coif. Sides had clerked for a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in San Francisco and had lectured, in ’03, at the University of Washington on the Model Toxics Control Act.”
This resume goes on for a few hundred more words, followed by an equally detailed account of Sides’ office, including the buildings in downtown Seattle.
By this point, the reader has been wading through bogs of useless information for so long that the irrelevance of Mark Sides’ life and view don’t really register.
It goes on like this until the end, when Neil visits a used-books store (on Admiral Way), and lists 11 volumes he’s bought recently, any one of which -- including “Cocktail Shakers, Lava Lamps, and Tupperware” ($6.98) -- sounds more entertaining than the novel the reader’s just finished.
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Charles Solomon is the author of many books, including “Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation” and “The Disney That Never Was.”
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56e2fa0b0d8a291d2049e2066e287ffb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-et-camp2-story.html | Campfires, tents -- and dialysis | Campfires, tents -- and dialysis
Even though Jeannette Castaneda was 22, she couldn’t wait to get back to summer camp in Mammoth last August. Although she was looking forward to her favorite hike to Rainbow Falls and just being outdoors, she was most excited about returning as a first-time counselor.
Jeannette, who at 16 received a kidney transplant five months before her first time at camp, decided to become a counselor because she wanted to help other kidney patients have as good a time as she did that year.
“I realized it was OK to be sick and be young and feeling the way I was. It was really hard,” Jeannette, now 23, remembers. As a counselor, Jeannette was determined to help other kidney patients feel less shy with dialysis and was able to share her transplant experience. " I just wanted to help out and explain it’s OK to feel shy or scared,” she said.
About 30 kidney patients, ages 14 to 21, join more than 100 North Valley YMCA campers for a week at Camp David in Mammoth each summer, sponsored by the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California in collaboration with the YMCA.
“The great thing is that our children can go to the camp and have a YMCA experience,” said Linda Small, executive director of the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California. “They do everything from the campfires, to bonding, to actually sleeping in tents.”
Kidney patients usually connect to a dialysis machine at home each night for a minimum of 10 hours, according to Barbara Gales, a camp nurse for 16 years and research clinical coordinator at UCLA.
Because campers sleep in tents with no electricity, Gales and her team set up a medical facility where the young people can get peritoneal dialysis, a manual treatment in which internal “exchanges” of fluid are done using a catheter four times per day, lasting up to 40 minutes each exchange.
“We take the place of the machine,” Gales said. “It gives them the opportunity to be a real kid. Our kids can go off and be on a hike or go boating.”
This summer, Jeannette hopes to make it back to camp again as a counselor. “It’s a good place to be, especially when it’s the first time. I just show them around and tell them, ‘Don’t be afraid to be yourself.’ ”
Thanks to the $1.7 million raised last year by the Los Angeles Times Summer Camp Campaign, about 8,000 children will go to camp in Southern California this summer.
The annual campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which matches all donations at 50 cents on the dollar.
Unless requested otherwise, the Los Angeles Times Family Fund makes every effort to acknowledge in the newspaper donations of $100 or more received by Sept. 1.
All donations will be acknowledged by mail in three to four weeks. Donations are tax deductible as permitted by law. Addresses will not be released or published.
For more information, call (800) LA TIMES, Ext. 75771, or e-mail familyfund@latimes.com.
Mail donations using the form below (do not send cash) or donate online now at latimes.com/summercamp.
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nicole.loomis@latimes.com
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ace739638e49056326274ce09c798970 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-et-channel02-story.html | The murky mystery that is ‘Mars’ | The murky mystery that is ‘Mars’
David E. Kelley, the prolific writer-producer behind such era-encapsulating hits as “Ally McBeal” and “The Practice,” wrote the script for the pilot to “Life on Mars,” a new time-traveling cop drama from ABC. It’s based on the BBC show of the same name, which already has a cult following over here due to its run on BBC America.
So, given its rarefied status plus the Kelley pedigree, “Life on Mars” instantly looked like a must-watch for any viewer’s fall TV list. And it may prove to be a great show. But with its premiere still months away, the series has already suffered an exceptionally bumpy ride into the future, even by the Alice-in-Wonderland standards of television program development.
The network and producers are talking about tossing out the pilot and starting over. Or not; maybe they’ll just tweak a few details. Some of the actors might get canned. Not necessarily, though. One thing we know for sure: Over the last few days, the decision was made to move the series out of Los Angeles -- in both its setting and its production -- to shoot on location in New York City, giving it a very different look.
Oh, and about Kelley? He almost certainly won’t have anything to do with the show from now on. Well-informed people profess not to know whether he’ll receive his customary executive producer credit or even whether his name will be on the pilot.
Really? Will Kelley talk to us about what happened?
He will? Great!
Oh, wait. He won’t be available till after deadline? Uh, sure, we’ll talk to his agent instead. Yes, we understand -- totally off the record.
Sigh.
The things we don’t know about ABC’s “Life on Mars” could fill more space, alas, than this column is allowed. And that’s even after sources were asked nicely. We must say, everyone seemed calm, considering the circumstances, but also confused. Having to tiptoe so discreetly around so many sources’ hot spots made us feel like we were investigating a ghastly sex crime instead of the origins of a TV pilot.
But in the end, we were able to cobble together a rough idea of what happened when a big-name producer in need of his next hit collided with headstrong, strike-numbed network executives riding the wave of multiple foreign TV hits crashing U.S. shores. The stakes are high, given that “Life on Mars” is ABC’s only new drama entry this fall.
“Life on Mars” is only the best-known of at least half a dozen overseas programs that are being Americanized by broadcasters for next season. Of CBS’ five new fall series, three are based on British series or miniseries: the dramas “Eleventh Hour” and “The Ex List” and the comedy “Worst Week.” NBC has “Kath & Kim,” based on the Australian comedy. And next year Fox will roll out the animated comedy “Sit Down, Shut Up,” which is based, oddly enough, on a live-action series that had a brief and fairly unremarkable run in Australia.
Unlike homegrown shows, which can fail for an infinite variety of reasons, overseas series offer an illusion of safety. Someone has already thought through the narrative arc; a template of finished episodes exists. A programming executive can see how it all turned out before greenlighting the adaptation. Fantastic!
As “Life on Mars” shows, though, importing foreign TV ain’t always that easy.
The original British series, which premiered in 2006, revolved around Sam Tyler, a Manchester detective who’s transported back to 1973 after being hit by a car. Fans were enthusiastic about the series’ wry mixture of time-travel and crime-procedural elements, as well as its blizzard of intricate references to David Bowie, “The Wizard of Oz” and other bits of pop culture.
Kelley, insiders say, was an early admirer of the show and quickly scooped up the remake rights. Another fan was ABC entertainment chief Steve McPherson, who coveted “Life on Mars” even though it didn’t quite square with his network’s female-centric program strategy, led by “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Desperate Housewives.”
ABC picked up the pilot, and Kelley set about writing the script. Jason O’Mara, an Irish actor previously seen as an investigator trying to clear the wrongly accused in ABC’s short-lived “In Justice,” was hired to play the lead.
This is where things got complicated, sources said. ABC executives felt the finished pilot departed too much from the British version and wanted reshoots. Those plans were interrupted by the strike, as well as by a skirmish among the network, Kelley and the 20th Century Fox Television studio over who would be responsible for the additional expenses.
Kelley, who had a longtime deal with Fox, recently left for Warner Bros. Television, although that move has nothing to do with the “Life on Mars” situation, several sources said. Given his track record, the “Ally McBeal” creator remains a big TV-industry name, but it’s been a while since his last big hit. Several recent outings -- including Fox’s “The Wedding Bells” and NBC’s “The Law Firm” -- have tanked.
As ABC prepared to unveil its schedule to advertisers last month, network executives found themselves jockeying with the Fox studio over two Kelley properties: “Life on Mars,” the hot newcomer, and “Boston Legal,” a fourth-season drama that was rumored to be a candidate for cancellation.
Kelley wanted a renewal for “Boston Legal” so that he could close out the drama’s storylines. It’s also probably not coincidental that another order would push the series just past the magical 100-episode mark, which makes it a more attractive prospect in the syndicated and DVD markets. ABC just wanted its way on “Life on Mars.”
So a deal was struck: Kelley would essentially give up stewardship on “Life on Mars” if ABC would agree to 13 more episodes of “Boston Legal.”
No, it wasn’t a particularly beautiful baby, but this is how deals sometimes get done in Hollywood.
ABC hired the team of producers responsible for the flop drama “October Road” to take over the mission to “Mars.” The producers and network executives are now having a series of meetings to figure out what to do next. Will the Kelley pilot stay or go? Will the show be recast? “That’s what’s being discussed now,” one source told me Thursday, referring to all of these creative issues. “I don’t think any answers have been reached.”
Representatives for ABC and the Fox studio declined any official comment. Stacey Luchs, Kelley’s spokeswoman, initially said the writer-producer would speak to me on Friday afternoon, then e-mailed back to say she’d misunderstood his schedule.
The dizzying back-and-forth left us shaken and confused. We felt a bit like poor Sam Tyler, who’s always struggling to figure out whether he’s in a coma or just completely nuts. Tyler’s condition is understandable: He was hit by a car. We’re not sure our excuse is that good.
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The Channel Island column runs every Monday in Calendar. Contact Scott Collins at scott.collins@latimes.com
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bc7377502d1735082be9e4648fb926d7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-et-memories2-story.html | Gone but preserved in memorable films | Gone but preserved in memorable films
It was where Robert Zemeckis shot the electrifying clock-tower climax with Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.” It was also the courthouse backdrop for Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
In addition to engulfing a soundstage, a video vault and part of the King Kong attraction at Universal’s theme park, the fire that broke out early Sunday on the studio’s famous back lot destroyed the iconic Courthouse Square set, used in hundreds of film and TV productions over the decades, as well as part of the studio’s New York Street area.
This isn’t the first time the backlot has caught fire. Though the courthouse was spared in a 1990 blaze that swept through the studio (and destroyed more than four acres, including a building used in “Dick Tracy” and sets for “Ben-Hur”), the New York Street set had to be rebuilt from the smoldering ashes. That set was also destroyed by a fire in 1957.
Both outdoor sets have a tremendous history at Universal.
Fans of the old television series “Leave It to Beaver” may recognize the courthouse facade as where the Beav went to school.
And before it was called Courthouse Square, thanks to its use in the “Back to the Future” movies, the area was known as Mockingbird Square because of its extensive use in the 1962 adaptation of the Harper Lee novel.
The Hill Valley clock tower was added to the courthouse for “Back to the Future,” but over the years, filmmakers have removed the clock and redressed the buildings for several films, including Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” plus “Bruce Almighty” and “The Cat in the Hat.” It was also used in the 1960s musicals “Bye Bye Birdie” (it was where pop star Conrad Birdie performed to his adoring female fans) and “The Music Man” (as the locale of the “76 Trombones” parade finale).
Courthouse Square was one of the standing sets of the current CBS paranormal drama “Ghost Whisperer.”
Universal’s New York Street area has also seen many TV shows, commercials and films. The set’s New York Street is actually much smaller than it appears on-screen; it is curved on both ends to give the illusion on camera that it is a bigger area.
Among the recent films to have shot there are Clint Eastwood’s latest, “Changeling,” and Eddie Murphy’s upcoming summer comedy, “Meet Dave.”
Clay Griffith, “Meet Dave’s” production designer, was saddened when he heard about the fire.
“It’s so unfortunate,” he said, adding that the Universal back lot, and its New York Street set specifically, helped productions save money. The studio’s streetscape allows Hollywood productions to stay local and stage difficult sequences without worrying about crowds or other issues that could interrupt filming.
“We shot three different scenes there,” Griffith says of the New York Street set. “One of them is an Italian street fair, which is pretty hard to do in New York unless you are there [during the fair]. There’s also an explosion outside a police station, and it would have cost a lot of money if we shot it in New York.”
Universal’s New York Street set has also subbed for other cities, including San Francisco in Eastwood’s 1971 classic “Dirty Harry,” Chicago for the 1973 Oscar winner “The Sting” and the 1980 comedy “The Blues Brothers,” Seattle for the 1987 comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” and even Kansas City for 1984’s “City Heat” with Eastwood and Burt Reynolds.
For the opening sequence of last Christmas’ box office hit “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” the New York Street set was dressed to look like Washington, D.C., circa 1865. And in “Spider-Man 2,” the street’s theater was the location for Mary Jane’s performance in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
Television series that have shot on the street set include “House,” “Ally McBeal,” “The X-Files,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Ironside,” “Airwolf” and “Simon & Simon.”
Both Courthouse Square and the New York Street sets are scheduled to be rebuilt.
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susan.king@latimes.com
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Begin text of infobox
Remember these?
Two of Universal Studios’ iconic backlot sets, where some of Hollywood’s memorable movie moments were filmed, were destroyed in Sunday’s fire.
Courthouse Square:
“Inherit the Wind” (1960)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962)
“Back to the Future” trilogy (1985, 1989, 1990)
“Amistad” (1997)
“Bruce Almighty” (2003)
New York Street:
“Dirty Harry” (1971)
“The Sting” (1973)
“Earthquake” (1974)
“The Blues Brothers” (1980)
“Streets of Fire” (1984)
“Austin Powers” (1997, 1999)
“Transformers” (2007)
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f085de1508c43eccf507cb60dc6dc6fb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-fi-wedding2-story.html | Same-sex weddings could be a gift to California’s economy | Same-sex weddings could be a gift to California’s economy
Forget economic stimulus checks. Same-sex marriages may give California just the financial boost it needs.
Wedding planners, bakers and hotels began booking more business almost immediately after the state Supreme Court’s May 15 decision overturning a ban on gay marriage. Citing pent-up demand, one UCLA study projects that same-sex unions could provide a $370-million shot in the arm to the state economy over the next three years.
“Being in West Hollywood, we’ve been inundated,” said Tom Rosa, owner of the Cake and Art bakery on Santa Monica Boulevard. “After the ruling, the phone really picked up.”
Rosa said couples who had waited for decades to legally marry were splurging on 5-foot-tall confections shaped like carousels and cakes featuring handcrafted birds of paradise.
Mike Standifer and Marc Hammer were already planning a commitment ceremony for October, but when the court ruling came out, they decided to throw an even bigger bash and get married.
They plan on spending about $25,000, which includes renovations on their Hollywood home so they can have the party in their backyard. The new price tag includes rings, their suits and those of their wedding party, and the cost of flying in Standifer’s priest from Tennessee -- all costs they wouldn’t have incurred if they were just having a party.
“The wedding dynamic in the last two weeks changed everything,” Standifer said. The wedding businesses he’s worked with so far seem thrilled. “I think it’s because the economy’s not so great, but the vendors have been treating us like royalty,” he said.
By some estimates, weddings and commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples generate $1 billion a year in revenue.
PlanetOut, a media and entertainment company that conducts surveys about gay and lesbian consumers, says gay consumers earn 20% more than their straight counterparts, on average, and spend about 10% more on nuptials.
The court ruling comes at a good time for many small wedding-related businesses, which are finding that their traditional customers are spending less on weddings because of the economy.
“Brides are being more frugal with things they don’t see as a priority,” said Richard Markel, president and director of the Assn. for Wedding Professionals International.
Things really slowed down in February, said Michael Willms, owner of Entertainment Design Events, an event planning company that’s done big bashes such as a wedding for actress Lindsay Price, who stars in the NBC show “Lipstick Jungle.”
But they’ve picked up now. The day after the ruling, Willms booked a $55,000 same-sex wedding.
“These weddings will be much more lavish,” he said. “Everybody’s been waiting for it to be legal to throw the big party.”
California counties can begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples beginning June 17.
M.V. Lee Badgett, research director at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law, estimates that gay weddings could provide a $370-million boost to the state economy.
That estimate presumes that about half of California’s 92,000 same-sex couples will tie the knot, multiplied by $8,040, the amount of money from savings accounts that Badgett figures same-sex couples will use on their weddings.
Event planners, restaurants, tent and chair rental companies, florists, caterers and hotels should all get a piece of that pie, she said.
“There’s an opportunity to get a big wedding windfall,” she said.
There are, of course, some caveats. No one can accurately project how many gay couples will spend thousands on weddings. And the legality of gay weddings is potentially short-lived, as officials verify petition signatures for a proposed Nov. 4 ballot initiative that would prohibit same-sex marriage.
Still, wedding-related companies that traditionally market to the gay and lesbian community are finding business is picking up.
Mitch Goldstone, president of Irvine-based photo service ScanMyPhotos.com, said he had gotten more than 300 requests for wedding invitations with photos on them since the court ruling.
“I guess people are still concerned about dealing with unsympathetic local photo labs,” he said.
Rosa, the baker, said a lesbian couple came to him for their cake after a bakery in San Bernardino said it was booked for the summer and couldn’t make their wedding cake when a clerk saw the two women together.
Other businesses are trying to capture the attention of gay and lesbian couples.
Susan Goldman, a wedding photographer, registered the domain name biggayweddings.com a month ago so she could market her services to same-sex couples. The Ramada hotel in West Hollywood is promoting a honeymoon special, and the West Hollywood Marketing & Visitors Bureau is launching an ad in a magazine for the gay community, selling West Hollywood as a good place for weddings and honeymoons.
The bump in advertising targeted at same-sex couples is good for publications. Bill LaPointe, publisher of the Orange County and Long Beach Blade, anticipates a 10% to 15% increase in advertising from wedding vendors. The Blade caters to gay, lesbian and transgender readers.
Macy’s published a full-page ad for its wedding and gift registry in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday, captioned “First comes love. Then comes marriage. And now it’s a milestone every couple in California can celebrate.”
Same-sex couples can obtain a marriage license in California whether or not they live in the state. That means hotels and airlines might see business from same-sex couples and their guests flying to California to marry.
“It will be the only place where couples from any state can be married legally,” said Michael C. Green, president of the Palm Springs Hospitality Assn. and owner of the Triangle Inn, a Palm Springs hotel catering to gay men. That’s a boon to places like Palm Springs, which is a popular gay resort destination.
“Our city has been barraged with phone calls from folks who want to come visit and find out how quickly we’ll be able to issue licenses,” he said.
Sue Jennings and the Rev. Cindi Love, executive director of the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches, live in Texas but will fly to Los Angeles to get married this month. They’re planning on spending about $5,000 on a dinner for their guests, flowers, a photographer and clothes for the wedding, even if it means a big credit card bill.
“We’ve been together 28 years,” Love said. “We want to have a ceremony and that acknowledgment of one another.”
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alana.semuels@latimes.com
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b2c69649e60d851969e7efec53cbdc7f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-he-regain2-story.html | Keeping it off | Keeping it off
In HER 39 years, Claudia Hallblom has, by her own estimation, lost and regained about 1,000 pounds.
Her success at losing weight was always driven by a goal, such as looking nice for her graduation or wedding. Her tactics usually included strict calorie-counting. But success on the scales was always fleeting. Sooner or later, she would revert to her old habits and no longer feel motivated to change.
“I didn’t know how to lose weight and keep it off,” the Downey woman says.
Most people can lose weight. But few can maintain their new weight for long. Researchers are now tackling that problem, and what they’re learning is disconcerting. The human body, it seems, is designed to sabotage weight loss at every turn -- once a body has been fatter, it wants to get back to the weight that it used to be. Physiology is cruelly changed in two ways: The body needs fewer calories to maintain itself, but its craving for food is more intense.
Becoming overweight, in other words, is like being issued a credit card with an uncomfortably high balance that you’ll probably end up paying off forever. Making sure the pounds stay off means pitting one’s willpower against a swarm of biological processes involving the brain, hormones, metabolism and fat storage.
“There is a big shift toward understanding long-term weight maintenance,” says Paul MacLean, associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver. “We have a huge number of diet books and diet programs, and if you do them, you can lose weight. The big problem is keeping it off. The recent estimates are that 5% to 10% of people are successful at keeping weight off on a long-term basis.”
But before you throw up your hands and reach for the Twinkies, consider this: Scientists think the truth will set us free -- that understanding the stubborn biological processes at work will lead to ways to fight back and outsmart them.
Exercise, it’s known, buffers the post-diet body against regaining weight, in ways that researchers are just starting to comprehend. Certain foods, scientists believe, may help stave off weight regain too. And medications now in development target some of the biochemistry thought to be linked to packing the pounds back on.
“There are strong physiological adaptations to weight loss that promote weight regain,” MacLean says. “The good news is we know a big part of the problem and why we haven’t been successful over the past several decades.”
The energy gap
Human biology -- for obvious adaptive reasons -- is designed to protect against weight loss and potential starvation. And after a period of obesity, the body may permanently alter the way weight is regulated by more aggressively stimulating appetite and signaling the body to protect fat stores.
Metabolism has changed: the body now needs about eight fewer calories per day for each pound of weight that was lost. That means someone who loses 40 pounds will require about 320 calories fewer each day than they did before the weight loss. This difference in energy needs before and after weight loss has been dubbed the “energy gap” by University of Colorado professor James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition in Denver.
Appetite hormones change too. The hormone leptin, for example, is a major appetite regulator -- it tells the body to stop eating and store fat after meals. Some people may be genetically prone to having lower leptin levels, making them more prone to obesity. But studies also show that, after a weight loss, leptin levels are lower than what they used to be. That means appetite is less easily quelled. It’s like a car that has suddenly lost its brakes.
Another hormone, ghrelin, stimulates food intake -- levels in the brain fall lower after a meal. However, after a weight loss, ghrelin levels in the blood generally increase, and the fall-off after mealtimes isn’t as marked.
“You lose 10% of your body weight. All of a sudden all these systems kick in to try to keep you from losing weight,” says Dr. Ken Fujioka, director of nutrition and metabolic research at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego. “People are mad at themselves or depressed after they regain the weight. But I explain: It’s not you. Biology has kicked in now. . . . You are hungry all the time. You think about food all the time.”
The brain isn’t the only thing acting to promote weight regain. MacLean’s research suggests that the central nervous system collects and interprets signals from the intestines and peripheral tissues, such as fat stores in the abdomen, to fight weight loss or regain pounds that were lost.
Through this sensing, when calories consumed surpass calories expended, the body alters how it uses and stores fuel. Glucose becomes the preferred fuel for energy, and fat is directed to fatty tissue stores in the body. Excess glucose is also converted to fat. And studies performed at the University of Toronto using continuous glucose monitoring devices show the blood sugar levels of obese people spike and plummet routinely throughout the day while normal-weight people have more stable levels.
Each drop is a cue to eat, says Dr. Michael R. Lyon, medical and research director for the Canadian Center for Functional Medicine.
The weight comes back fast. “The entire system is saying, ‘Bring the calories in, store them efficiently and do not reduce these signals until the fat is returned that was there before,’ ” MacLean says. “You may look like a lean person, but your body hasn’t changed inside.”
Moreover, animal studies show that most of the regained weight is distributed as visceral fat, the abdominal paunch that is linked to heart disease and diabetes.
Tough, but losable
So what is a dieter to do?
“There is nothing we know of that does anything to reverse this,” Fujioka says of the biological forces that defend body fat. “It’s very tough.”
But it’s not impossible. The National Weight Control Registry is an honor roll of dieters who have fought and won. Started in 1994 with modest expectations by Hill and Rena Wing, director of the weight control and diabetes research center at Brown Medical School, the registry now provides some cherished data on how regular people have managed to keep weight off. The registrants, who are surveyed regularly, have maintained a weight loss of at least 30 pounds for at least one year.
Based on data from more than 7,000 people, Wing says there are few similarities in how people lose weight. But those who succeed in maintenance sing the same song.
Instead of trying to eat less for the rest of their lives to bridge the energy gap, these people exercise more. They typically spend an hour or more each day in aerobic exercise and strictly limit time spent watching television.
Physical activity, in ways that researchers don’t really understand, influences some of the biological systems that promote weight regain, encouraging the body to become more sensitive to leptin and insulin, for example.
“Everyone thinks exercise is about burning calories,” Fujioka says. “But you are actually returning the system to more like what it should be. Things start working again.”
The successful maintainers also change what they eat: The registry found that they keep their calories in careful balance with what they expend -- religiously referring to calorie charts and writing down everything they consume. They also tend to eat low-fat foods.
But there may be more nuances to food choices than that. “We’re getting more interested in studies that look at food composition,” Fujioka says. “It could be that eating certain nutrients may also help the system work better.”
Studies suggest that calcium, for example, may help people regulate their weight, he says. No one really understands how calcium may do this -- in fact, the theory is controversial. But it could be that a diet high in calcium suppresses a form of vitamin D called calcitriol that revs up fat-burning processes.
Other research has focused on foods that balance blood-sugar levels, such as low-glycemic and fibrous foods. Studies show that eating low-glycemic foods, such as lentils and nuts and foods with high water or fiber content, helps stabilize blood sugar and curb the brain signals that urge people to eat. Fiber does this by slowing the absorption of carbohydrates from food, which helps lower their glycemic load.
“Weight loss alone is not a realistic goal,” Lyon says. “It can do more harm than good. The key is to get your brain back on your side. The starting point of that is stabilizing blood sugar.”
It’s easier after two years
Scientists don’t know how long it would take to return the physiological responses of a once-obese body to normal -- or if, indeed, that ever is quite possible.
Studies do show, however, that weight regain is most likely in the first couple of years after weight loss. And Wing says that registry data shows that people who maintain their weight loss find the first two years difficult but eventually adapt comfortably to their new habits and lifestyles.
“After that, it’s as if you master the technique,” she says.
The current research on obesity strongly points to two messages that rely heavily on human behavior: Don’t gain excess weight in the first place, and if you do, be prepared to make permanent lifestyle changes to lose it and maintain the loss.
Hallblom finally lost 63 pounds over a period of 14 months by adhering to Weight Watchers’ principles -- such as learning the nutritional content of food and keeping track of her food intake -- and taking up vigorous exercise: running 10 to 12 miles a week and working out three times weekly on an elliptical machine.
She has maintained her healthy weight for seven years and in 2001 was hired by Weight Watchers to improve its services to Spanish-speaking clients in Southern California. She says she wishes she had realized years ago that maintaining a new weight required a very different kind of lifestyle -- forever.
“This time,” she says, “I was ready to make permanent changes to improve my life.”
shari.roan@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
More diversity needed in data
Since 1994, the National Weight Control Registry has compiled information on people who have lost weight and maintained the loss. From those records, registry directors have been able to identify factors that add up to successful weight maintenance -- such as regular exercise and eating breakfast.
But many of the data have come from white women, says co-director Rena Wing of Brown Medical School. The registry needs input from all racial and ethnic groups to see whether there are differences linked to gender, race or ethnicity. Anyone who has lost 30 pounds or more and maintained the loss for one year or longer can enroll in the registry.
The minimum age for participation has been 18. But the registry has started a teen branch, for people 14 and older, to learn more about how teens may differ from adults.
Contact the registry at www.nwcr.ws or (800) 606-6927.
Shari Roan
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INOBOX)
Drug combo may keep flab off
Drug manufacturers are turning their attention to the maintenance problem. The San Diego company Amylin, for example, is testing a drug combination targeted at two of the hormonal signals driving weight regain.
In 2005, Amylin produced a drug, pramlintide, that helps lower blood sugar in diabetics who have uncontrolled blood sugar despite therapy with other drugs. It acts by mimicking a hormone that is released into the blood after feeding to help regulate glucose and slow the rate of food absorption.
In a six-month study published May 20 by Amylin Pharmaceuticals in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the combination of pramlintide with leptin reduced body weight in 177 overweight men and women by an average of 12.7%, about double the weight loss people typically experience on the medications Xenical and Meridia. Because of the systems the drug combination targets, researchers think it may be even more useful for weight maintenance.
Adding pramlintide “may sensitize the brain so it will work with leptin and do the right things,” says Dr. Ken Fujioka, director of nutrition and metabolic research at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego. Fujioka has worked on clinical trials studying pramlintide.
Drug solutions are a ways off, however, and may only lend a hand at maintaining weight. “It’s clear to us that you can’t address just a single system,” Fujioka says. “There are too many systems at work.”
Shari Roan
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79dab610754a1ce9fc01a8dee36793e7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-na-dems2-story.html | Key Clinton backers take eyes off prize | Key Clinton backers take eyes off prize
Pointing the way to a peaceful end for the tumultuous presidential primary campaign, some key supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that they accepted a new finish line in the race for delegates, a threshold Barack Obama could reach as soon as this week.
Obama aides said they expected him to surpass the 2,118 needed delegates after the final Democratic balloting finished Tuesday in South Dakota and Montana, and as more superdelegates backed the Illinois senator.
Moreover, a number of Clinton backers signaled Sunday that they were wary of the kind of protracted fight that some of her aides said they might wage in the coming months.
“It would be most beneficial if we resolved this nomination sooner rather than later,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a high-profile superdelegate who backs Clinton. “The more time we have to get through a general-election period and the more time we have to prepare in advance of the convention, the better.”
Some of Clinton’s closest advisors want the New York senator to challenge the party’s unusual decision Saturday to shift four of Clinton’s Michigan delegates to Obama in an attempt to reflect how voters might have cast ballots and to allocate Michigan’s uncommitted delegates to Obama, even though his name did not appear on the ballot in the state.
Even if Clinton won those delegates in a challenge, it would be unlikely to alter the outcome.
“She’ll do the right thing for America, and I don’t think we’re going to fight this at the convention,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a top Clinton supporter and party superdelegate, speaking on CBS. “Because even were we to win it, unless it’s going to change enough delegates for Sen. Clinton to get the nomination, then it would be a fight that would have no purpose.”
Alice Huffman, a member of the rules panel and a superdelegate committed to Clinton, said she would not support an appeal if Obama had clearly won the delegate fight.
“What’s the point for a challenge, if a challenge doesn’t change the status of anything?” asked Huffman, the president of the California branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.
Such sentiments signaled that the Democratic Party might have vaulted a major hurdle in its quest to move beyond the competitive primary season and lay the groundwork for the fall campaign against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. That achievement came Saturday when the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee agreed to seat the disqualified Florida and Michigan delegations, but to halve their votes as punishment for holding their primaries early.
Clinton and her top aides conceded nothing Sunday, and even used their own mathematical formula to declare her the winner of the popular vote. But she may begin feeling intense pressure from within her camp to stand down, should Obama cross the delegate threshold for victory.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to have much tolerance” for a convention fight, said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who is neutral in this race. “The big rationale for the Clinton campaign to continue among insiders and superdelegates was that they were going to get a big pickup of delegates from Florida and Michigan. There was no big pickup.”
The events Saturday had seemed to portend a more combative course -- with Clinton loyalists openly jeering members of the rules committee and vowing to take her cause to the floor of the party’s national nominating convention this summer in Denver.
That is exactly the nightmare scenario that party strategists believe could doom their hopes by further antagonizing key constituencies such as African Americans, women and working-class whites.
The question of Florida and Michigan has hung over the campaign for months. When Clinton fell behind Obama in the delegate count, she began to argue that the states should be fully counted. Clinton had hoped that the party would not only restore the state’s delegations but would allocate delegates based on her massive victories, perhaps even denying Obama any Michigan delegates because he had pulled his name from the ballot.
That, Clinton aides believed, would have helped pull her close enough to Obama that she could convince party superdelegates to hand her the nomination.
Saturday’s ruling dashed those hopes.
Clinton picked up just 24 more pledged delegates than Obama from the two states. Even with Clinton’s decisive win in Puerto Rico, Obama is now within 47 delegates of victory. Clinton needs 202.5.
A top Obama advisor, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), said Sunday on NBC that the campaign expected superdelegates to come forward for Obama in the coming days. Referring to the 2,118 goal, Daschle added, “you’re going to see, at the end of this week, a definitive moment . . . where he will have surpassed that number.”
Obama, addressing supporters in South Dakota, said he had called Clinton to congratulate her on her Puerto Rico win -- but he also looked ahead to her role as a surrogate for him in the fall.
“She’s going to be a great asset when we go into November,” he said.
Even as they agreed on the finish line, Clinton and her campaign showed no outward signs Sunday of acknowledging that she would not reach it. In fact, they predicted that she would get there once superdelegates weighed in.
Clinton declared in a Puerto Rico victory speech that she was winning the popular vote and “there can be no doubt” that she was favored by more Americans -- although her calculations of results are widely disputed.
“The decision will fall on the shoulders of those leaders in our party empowered by the rules to vote at the Democratic convention,” she said, then directly addressed uncommitted superdelegates: “I do not envy the decision you must make, but a decision has to be made.”
Her aides continued to criticize the party’s rules committee. One top aide, Harold M. Ickes, a member of the panel, accused his colleagues of “hijacking” Clinton’s Michigan’s votes.
Even Wasserman Schultz, despite her hope for a swift resolution, called it a “mistake” for the rules committee to slash half the votes of her state’s delegation. She said she had heard from many upset constituents and predicted the party could have trouble revving up Florida activists in the fall.
Still, some Clinton backers said Sunday that Clinton might lose some avowed supporters if Obama clinched the nomination and yet she fought on.
Garry Shay, a rules committee member and Clinton superdelegate, said he would stick with her if she finished within 100 delegates of Obama.
But within 10 to 20 days, he added, “I’m going to reassess based upon the political reality.”
Donna Brazile, an undeclared superdelegate and a rules committee member, hinted Sunday on ABC that within 72 hours she and many of her cohorts would declare loyalty to Obama “because there’s no question that the pressure is on to end this nomination fight.”
“The battle’s over,” she said. “We know the victor.”
Even Ickes, legendary in the party for relishing a junkyard-dog brawl, acknowledged in a television interview that the whole race could end this week.
“It’ll be over when one candidate secures the number for the nomination,” Ickes told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” When host Tim Russert asked if that could happen on Wednesday, Ickes said: “It could. Anything could happen.”
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peter.wallsten@latimes.com
Times staff writer Faye Fiore contributed to this report.
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d9053dfd2b0e73ce596c449a17262899 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-02-sp-briefing2-story.html | Trainer for Big Brown talks big | Trainer for Big Brown talks big
With the Belmont Stakes coming up Saturday, it should be a fun week listening to trainer Rick Dutrow Jr. He’s already talking big about Big Brown.
Dutrow didn’t hold anything back when, on a conference call with reporters last week, he was asked about his horse’s chances of winning the Belmont and becoming horse racing’s first Triple Crown winner since 1978.
“I feel like it’s actually a foregone conclusion,” he said. “To me, I just see the horses he’s in with, and I see our horse, so I expect him to win this race.”
Casino Drive, a 5 3/4 -length winner of the Peter Pan Stakes at Belmont on May 10, is considered Big Brown’s top challenger despite having raced only twice. After the Preakness, Dutrow advised putting Casino Drive in a “cold” exacta with Big Brown, meaning he thought Casino Drive would finish second.
But now he’s even hedging on that.
“This Japanese horse has got so much to prove,” he said. “I don’t know if he is on top of his game training. I’m getting different kinds of reports from people that think they know. I would not depend on that horse to be second.”
Maybe one reason Dutrow talks so boldly is because he knows the horses won’t be reading the press clippings.
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Trivia time
Kent Desormeaux rode Casino Drive to his victory in the Peter Pan, but because he will be aboard Big Brown on Saturday, Edgar Prado has picked up the mount on Casino Drive. Who was the 36-1 shot Prado rode in the 2004 Belmont that upset 3-5 favorite Smarty Jones?
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Some odd odds
Big Brown is listed as the early 1-3 favorite to win the Belmont, Casino Drive is the second choice at 7-2, and Denis of Cork is next at 10-1.
Here are a few other odds, courtesy of the online gambling site Bodoglife.com:
If Big Brown wins, it’s 1-5 that the margin will be one to five lengths, 7-2 it will be six to 10 lengths and 20-1 it will be more than 10 lengths.
As for whom Desormeaux would thank after a victory, his family or a family member is the 6-5 favorite. Big Brown is 3-1, Dutrow 9-2 and the fans or general public 5-1.
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Odd names
Pimlico track announcer David Rodman talked to the Atlanta Journal Constitution about some of the more memorable horse names he’s called. They include:
* Fast Buck Duck: “Called this one at Louisiana Downs . . . very carefully.”
* Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk: “Sounded like a Stooge calling this one.”
* Sunny Beach: “I’ve heard racing fans say this when their horse fails to win.”
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Bathroom humor
NBC is planning to charge as much as $3 million for a 30-second commercial on next year’s Super Bowl telecast.
“That translates to $100,000 per second,” wrote Barry Horn of the Dallas Morning News. “If too many people take potty breaks, that’s a lot of money down the drain.”
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Trivia answer
Prado rode Birdstone to victory in the 2004 Belmont, ending Smarty Jones’ Triple Crown bid. Two years earlier, he rode 70-1 shot Sarava to victory over 6-5 favorite War Emblem, the Bob Baffert-trained horse who was also going after the Triple Crown.
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Lakers-Celtics fix
Can’t wait to see Lakers and Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals? ESPN Classic may have the answer. Over the next three days the network will show Lakers-Celtics games from the 1984, ’85, and ’87 Finals. There will be two each day, beginning at 11 a.m. And on Tuesday at 3:30 p.m., there will be a “SportsCentury” profile of Phil Jackson.
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And finally
Maybe you can’t blame folks in Boston for being a little smug these days. Their teams are on a hot streak.
Wrote Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe: “A World Series, a Super Bowl, and now a trip back to the NBA Finals. These are golden days in our region. If you are a New England sports fan, every day is Thanksgiving.”
The Lakers are hoping that they’ll be like the crazy uncle who shows up to ruin the holiday feast. Isn’t that what the underdog New York Giants did this year?
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larry.stewart@latimes.com
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3b55b38caaea44c63f2086e680c2bc16 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-03-me-amendment3-story.html | Voters will decide on gay marriage | Voters will decide on gay marriage
Setting the stage for a political showdown, the California secretary of state today said an initiative barring gay marriage had enough signatures to qualify for the Nov. 4 ballot.
The proposal would amend the state Constitution to define marriage as a union “between a man and a woman” and undo last month’s historic California Supreme Court ruling, which found that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was unconstitutional.
A coalition of religious and conservative activists submitted 1.1 million signatures for the ballot measure. Random sampling by Secretary of State Debra Bowen found that enough legitimate signatures had been collected.
Many opponents of same-sex marriage saw the high court’s ruling as a rejection of past ballot measures against the practice, most recently Proposition 22, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. It passed in 2000 with 61% of the vote.
Supporters of the latest initiative described Monday’s certification as “great news” but acknowledged that recent surveys had shown opposition to same-sex marriage weakening in recent years.
“It will be tough,” said Ron Prentice, chairman of the Protect Marriage campaign. “However, the vast body of research . . . confirmed that there is still a majority in California that will vote to protect historic marriage.”
Prentice said his campaign had already begun drawing on the support and resources of local religious groups and other organizations for an election battle he expected to win.
He noted that a recent Los Angeles Times/KTLA poll found the proposed amendment was leading 54% to 35% among registered voters.
But opponents of the ballot initiative said they drew heart from signs that voters view gay marriage more favorably than they did nearly a decade ago.
A Field Poll published last week found that 54% of registered voters opposed the measure, while 40% supported it.
“Things have changed dramatically in California,” said David Codell, an attorney with Equality for All, a coalition of gay rights organizations that is campaigning against the amendment initiative.
Codell said the state’s domestic partnership law had helped sway many voters on the issue.
California has more than 100,000 households headed by gay couples, about a quarter with children, according to 2000 census data.
“Californians have seen for years that same-sex couples are capable of participating fully in society as families recognized by law,” he said. “Nobody is harmed when same-sex couples marry, and everyone is benefited.”
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, local officials throughout the state are expected to begin performing same-sex marriage ceremonies this month. If the ballot measure passes in November, its effect on same-sex marriages performed before the election is unclear. Prentice said he had reviewed competing legal opinions on the issue.
But he said he expected other groups that oppose same-sex marriages would consider challenging the marriages in court.
Garry South, a Democratic strategist, described the ballot measure as part of a decades-old strategy by California conservatives to use a wedge issue to mobilize support during a presidential election.
But he noted that the Supreme Court that ruled in favor of gay marriage is dominated by Republicans and said a Barack Obama victory for the Democratic Party nomination would probably bring out young voters in November more sympathetic to same-sex marriage.
“I don’t think there’s been a sea change in attitudes,” South said, “but it’s clear in the surveys that this is almost an even-steven issue in California.”
Allan Hoffenblum, a former GOP political strategist, said voters might be swayed by the high court’s ruling.
“They’re going to be seeing on TV gays getting married, then they’re going to be told, ‘No, we’re going to take that right away,’ ” said Hoffenblum, who publishes the nonpartisan California Target Book, which analyzes political races. “I think that changes the dynamics of the whole thing.”
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jack.leonard@latimes.com
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7fdc74bc5285345d04c15ce1bd79fe16 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-03-me-firouz3-story.html | Emigre helped revive Caspian horse breed found in Iran | Emigre helped revive Caspian horse breed found in Iran
Louise Firouz, an American expatriate in Iran credited with saving the pony-sized Caspian horse from extinction and championing an ancestral link to the prized Arabian breed, died of lung and liver failure May 25 at a hospital near her home in northeastern Iran. She was 74.
Firouz spent part of her childhood on her family’s farm in Great Falls, Va., where she developed an interest in animal husbandry. After her 1957 marriage to an Iranian aristocrat, she became a horsewoman in her adopted country. She was looking for a suitable horse to teach children to ride when she pursued rumors of a breed of small horses in the north near the Caspian Sea.
When she traveled to the region, she observed the horses being treated as beasts of burden and eaten in lean times. But she was amazed at its resemblance to small horses depicted on ancient Persian friezes and seals -- animals long thought extinct.
On that trip, she said, she watched the horse “trot serenely back into history.”
The Caspian horse, which averages 9 to 13 hands in height, is as short as a pony but has the stride and jumping ability of a horse. It also has an Arabian horse’s facial shape and finely proportioned legs.
Firouz’s efforts to preserve, promote and breed the horse led to genetic testing that won broad acceptance of an ancestral link to the modern Arabian horse. A definitive connection is impossible because of the limits of genetic testing, said Gus Cothran, who performed the tests for Firouz in the early 1990s and is now a clinical professor at Texas A&M; University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
Firouz was also pivotal in finding people who had the resources to establish breeding populations outside Iran, including Prince Philip of the British royal family. Her work became urgent during the Islamic revolution of the late 1970s and the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, when the Iranian government auctioned off most of the breed or used the animals to detect land mines.
Louise Elizabeth Laylin was born Dec. 24, 1933, in Washington, D.C., where her father was an international lawyer. She intended to become a veterinarian, but she failed a required physics course and instead majored in classics and English literature at Cornell University.
During her junior year, she studied abroad at the American University of Beirut and met her future husband, Yale-trained civil engineer Narcy Firouz, during a side trip to Iran. He was descended from Iran’s Qajar dynasty, which ruled before the Pahlavis overthrew it in 1921.
During the years of political strife, which included the start of the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, the Firouzes lost the bulk of their possessions and were briefly jailed. She was said to have gone on a hunger strike to win release.
Afterward, Firouz and her family retreated to a farm they had bought in Ghara Tappeh Sheikh, in the remote northeast, near Turkmenistan. She slowly began horse-breeding efforts, work that became financially difficult after her husband’s death in 1994.
Despite hardships, she said she was content in Iran. The Bloomberg news service quoted her saying: “I love the freedom of not having fences. U.S. and Europe are too conformist, too confining.”
For the last several years, she managed to keep one Caspian and 50 Akhal-Teke racehorses.
She funded her stud farm by taking Western tourists on 10-day riding treks into the mountains near her home.
In December, she told an interviewer from Reuters news agency that she had defied a doctor’s orders not to ride because of her age.
“I’m not too old to ride,” she said. “I’m too old to fall off.”
Survivors include three children, a brother, a half sister and six grandchildren.
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919fc234a62d8482f852af7f5d438e99 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-03-me-studiofire3-story.html | Studio work crew linked to fire | Studio work crew linked to fire
The dramatic Sunday blaze that destroyed portions of the Universal Studios Hollywood back lot was accidentally touched off by company employees using a blowtorch to heat asphalt roofing shingles, authorities said.
Los Angeles County fire officials said two workers and a supervisor were putting up shingles in an alley on the New York Street set. They finished at 3 a.m., spent an hour watching for any sign of fire, then took a break.
At 4:43 a.m., just as the crew was returning, a security guard saw flames and reported the fire.
The studio’s theme park and adjacent CityWalk reopened Monday as the Los Angeles County Fire Department launched what Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman promised would be a “stem to stern” examination of the water pressure problems that hampered the attack on the three-alarm blaze, which destroyed back lot sets, a video library and the “King Kong” attraction.
“The big question right now is trying to compare water available on site, off site and in the system itself with the amount of fire that the first arriving units were confronted with,” Freeman said.
When the first fire engine arrived from a station on the Universal grounds four minutes after the blaze was reported, the New York Street sets were already engulfed in flames, Freeman said.
“About the equivalent of a city block of fire” greeted the first firefighters, he said. Fire officials said Sunday that some firefighters could only get 10-foot sprays from their hoses, and county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said water was coming out of hoses anemically.
It is unclear, Freeman said Monday, whether a heavy-duty sprinkler system installed after a 1990 back lot fire in the same area affected the water pressure. But commanders told Freeman that they had to draw water from studio ponds and run hoses to hydrants off the studio lot in the early stages of fighting the fire.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power supplies Universal with water from surrounding mains. Agency Public Affairs Director Joe Ramallo said the DWP system was supplying adequate water during the fire. But Universal, like many large commercial sites, operates and maintains its own water system once lines come on to its property.
“You’re limited by the system in place on the grounds and if it’s not sufficient, you can’t do any more on our side,” Ramallo said. “We did everything we could to increase pressure on our end, but we were very limited because it’s a private system.”
Freeman said that an interdepartmental inquiry into the fire would be completed by June 13.
He said investigators will also look into whether the back lot sets, which have burned before, could be made of less combustible materials. The wood and plastic fed 100-foot flames that quickly moved into the adjacent “King Kong” building and a video library containing thousands of copies of movies and TV shows.
The fire, which turned a two-block area of the back lot into smoldering ruins, was not fully extinguished until 10 p.m. Sunday. More than 400 firefighters from the county and surrounding cities fought the blaze, which pumped out a huge column of black smoke that drifted across the San Fernando Valley.
On Monday morning, 40 to 50 firefighters were still dousing hot spots and looking for embers.
The fire affected about 3 1/2 acres of the 391-acre park, Universal said, with damage estimated in the millions of dollars.
A Universal spokesman said the studio would replace the New York Street backdrops and an animatronic King Kong destroyed by the fire. Park officials plan to reroute the studio’s popular tram ride around fire-damaged sets to areas untouched by the flames.
The park’s 30 soundstages were not damaged by the fire, Universal said, and 10 scheduled productions were still filming Monday.
Freeman said that during the 1990 back lot fire, “water supply was a challenge” as well, but not to the same degree as Sunday.
After that fire, Universal installed a heavy-duty sprinkler system designed to drench the sets in case of fire. Firefighters reported seeing water flow Sunday, Freeman said, but were uncertain whether it was coming from the sprinklers or from burst pipes.
At a Monday afternoon news conference, Freeman said it was too soon to draw conclusions about the low water pressure.
“At this point it is premature to say that there was a weak link,” he said. “It may be that the large size of the fire was the issue.”
Universal Studios Hollywood representatives declined to comment about the water-pressure issues.
Universal Music Group, an unrelated company, leased space in one of the video library vaults for master copies of reel-to-reel audiotapes of music from the 1940s and 1950s, but all of the archive had been copied, much of it digitally, as the site was being phased out, a spokesman said Monday, “so in a sense nothing was lost.”
Preliminary results of air tests at Universal Studios’ smoky back lots Sunday found levels of benzene and other toxic contaminants six times or more above normal.
At those levels, firefighters and anyone else in the immediate vicinity of the blaze could have experienced respiratory irritation, South Coast Air Quality Management District spokesman Sam Atwood said. But Atwood added that the measurements were far below the limits for serious health effects from short-term exposure.
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andrew.blankstein@latimes.com
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bettina.boxall@latimes.com
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garrett.therolf@latimes.com
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Times staff writers Janet Wilson and Robert Lopez contributed to this story.
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0417a17ef53fa3613bc267774a3f93e3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-03-na-campaign3-story.html | Fight goes on, for now | Fight goes on, for now
When Hillary Rodham Clinton dropped by Tally’s Restaurant on Monday, it seemed like a routine stop at a Great Plains landmark famous for pigs in a blanket made with buffalo sausage.
She posed for photos and talked to customers about healthcare and student loans, shaking her head at the debt that one young woman said she was wrestling with.
Clinton laughed at the suggestion that her likeness could one day join the dozens of bronze statues of former presidents scattered around downtown Rapid City. (At the front door of Tally’s, a life-size Ronald Reagan in cowboy dress stands guard.)
“Get your friends out to vote for me,” Clinton told a man wearing a “United We Stand” baseball cap emblazoned with an American flag.
A running theme of Clinton’s campaign for president in recent weeks has been her vow to keep fighting for the Democratic nomination even as the odds grew longer. On Monday, that theme dominated her travels once again -- this time on the eve of the South Dakota and Montana primaries that will close a five-month marathon of Democratic contests.
“I want you to think hard,” the senator from New York told the crowd at Tally’s. “Who would you hire to do this job?”
But the stark reality that Clinton faced was no secret: The hard math of the Democratic delegate count has put her rival Barack Obama within days, if not hours, of declaring himself the party’s White House nominee.
And while Clinton struggled to keep her voice on her final journey across South Dakota -- she lost it three times Monday -- and had to scale back her last rally when weather forced it indoors, Obama enjoyed an upbeat daylong visit to Michigan.
Obama campaigned in the Detroit suburbs as if his nomination were inevitable, offering barely a nod to the enduring, if fading, challenge that he faces from Clinton.
The Illinois senator did not bother holding a blast of closing rallies in Montana or South Dakota. Instead, he spent his day making his case against Republican John McCain in a November battleground state, handling South Dakota and Montana radio and TV interviews by phone or satellite.
At a rally in Troy, Mich., Obama mentioned Clinton in passing, offering praise.
“She and I will be working together in November,” Obama told a couple thousand supporters packed into a high school gymnasium.
Sally Foley, a lawyer and Obama supporter in the bleachers, said Clinton appeared to be “in denial.” “She’s having a hard time letting go,” Foley said. “It’s not happening.”
“Hillary Clinton, bless her heart,” added Leona McElvene of Warren, Mich., an Obama supporter who snapped photos of him from the stands. “They have to work out something where they can cooperate so we can make the country work better.”
Obama’s events were as buoyant as Clinton’s were subdued. The crowd in Troy leapt to its feet and cheered at line after line of Obama’s speech. When he pledged more money for art, music, science and literature classes in public schools, the gymnasium erupted in roars of “Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!”
Standing before a giant “Change We Can Believe In” banner, Obama urged the crowd not to fret over whether Democrats would unite once the nomination fight is settled. He reminded his supporters of widespread anxiety over the Iraq war and the economy. Michigan’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation.
President Bush and McCain, Obama said, “have been so focused on pursuing a flawed and costly war in Iraq that they’ve lost sight of the problems that have been mounting in Michigan, here at home.”
Michigan taxpayer money spent on the Iraq war, he added, could have gone to healthcare, college scholarships and salaries for new teachers.
Borrowing a laugh line from McCain’s former Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney, Obama continued, “Sen. McCain conceded not too long ago that he didn’t know much about the economy.”
The McCain campaign’s response to Obama’s event -- and what has become its daily ignoring of Clinton -- only added to the sense that the Democratic race was all but over. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said Obama appeared “desperate to divert attention from his weak judgment on foreign policy.”
In South Dakota, Clinton told supporters at a rally in rural Yankton that she was turning to “a new phase in the campaign” -- an effort to win support from superdelegates, the party leaders who are on the verge of declaring a winner.
“Their responsibility not only to the Democratic Party, but to our country, is to vote for the candidate who is best able to lead us to victory in November and best prepared to lead our country into the future,” she told the crowd at a school near the Missouri River.
Twice during the Yankton rally, Clinton handed the microphone to her daughter, Chelsea, after she lost her voice. The second time, Clinton left the stage to gargle.
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michael.finnegan@latimes.com
noam.levey@latimes.com
Finnegan reported from Troy, Mich., and Levey from Rapid City and Yankton, S.D.
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0a0fdbdc4ace17eccc6db2c1be0dfab7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-04-ed-cars4-story.html | New rules of the road | New rules of the road
In some of L.A.'s wealthier neighborhoods, the homeowners seem to have swapped cars with the hired help. While just last year the well-off were commuting to work in SUVs even as domestic workers pulled into their neighborhoods in cheap subcompacts, today you’re likelier to see the moneyed set behind the wheels of Toyota Priuses, while their maids shuttle about in behemoth Lincoln Navigators.
Until recently, nobody knew when the gas-price tipping point -- the level of pain at the pump that would prompt car buyers to change their behavior -- would arrive. With gas now above $4 a gallon in most of California, we are clearly there. SUV sales have fallen off a cliff; even the resale market is so bad that about 36% of people trading in SUVs in May owed more on the vehicle than it was worth, according to the Wall Street Journal, which is why these automotive brontosauruses are suddenly becoming affordable for low-income motorists.
All this is proving very painful for U.S. automakers, which are deeply reliant on SUV sales. On Tuesday, General Motors Corp. announced that it would close four North American truck plants and might sell its gas-guzzling Hummer brand (if it can find anyone willing to buy it). Ford and Chrysler are suffering as badly or worse. The only silver lining is that sales of small cars and smaller SUVs are taking off.
The Big Three can’t say they weren’t warned. Experts have long insisted that automakers would benefit financially by accepting government efforts to improve gas mileage rather than fighting them. Congress finally passed new fuel economy standards last year; meanwhile, California’s attempts to impose even tougher fuel requirements have been blocked by the Bush administration, no doubt at the behest of automakers. That’s a shame, because if they had adapted years ago to a new environmental and economic imperative, they’d now be fully geared up to produce the gas-sipping models consumers crave. Other industries that are resisting change as fiercely as the automakers once did should take note.
The country will not, and cannot, continue to give corporations a free pass to emit greenhouse gases and pollute the air. With some kind of carbon-pricing scheme all but inevitable (even if it takes a few years), the companies that invest a little in reducing their carbon footprints now will save a lot down the road. Those that refuse probably will be road kill.
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4745e4464f70180cd41660c3c74e7fe1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-04-fi-mcmahon4-story.html | Mortgage turmoil snares Ed McMahon | Mortgage turmoil snares Ed McMahon
Ed McMahon, the longtime sidekick to Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” is fighting to avoid foreclosure on his multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills estate.
McMahon defaulted on $4.8 million in mortgage loans with a unit of Countrywide Financial Corp., which filed a notice of default in March, according to ForeclosureRadar, a company that sells default data pulled from public records.
The 85-year-old pitchman for various products, including American Family Publishers, is the highest-profile person to be caught up in the nationwide real estate downturn and mortgage crunch.
“He’s not alone. There are plenty of people affected by the weak economy, bad housing market or bad health,” McMahon’s spokesman, Howard Bragman, said late Tuesday.
Bragman said McMahon fell and broke his neck about 18 months ago and has been unable to work since.
“The ideal situation would be that he would be healthy and able to earn a living to pay for his house,” Bragman said.
The six-bedroom, five-bath home on Crest Court is listed for sale at $6.25 million, said real estate agent Alex Davis of Alex Davis Estates, who has the listing. It’s been on the market for two years, he said.
It would seem to be an ideal home. The Hilton & Hyland luxury real estate website described the home as a celebrity Mediterranean estate in the prestigious Beverly Hills gated community of The Summit, which overlooks Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland Drive.
“This once-in-a-lifetime offering is full of charm and character. The foreign imported doors and meticulously chosen fireplaces are unlike any other,” the website boasts. It also has a master suite with his-and-hers baths and closets overlooking the yard and a sweeping canyon.
But Davis said The Summit has been a difficult area to sell.
“In the midst of trying to sell this property, there were a lot of distractions,” Davis said, citing paparazzi who have converged around the nearby home of Britney Spears.
“When we were trying to sell the house one time, there were about 100 paparazzi there,” he said.
Another difficulty for the area has been a mold contamination that has plagued a number of homes, including McMahon’s and one purchased for the director of the Getty Museum.
McMahon won a $7.2-million insurance settlement after claiming that mold in his house killed his dog Muffin and sickened him and his wife.
According to a lawsuit he filed, the trouble began when a pipe broke and water flooded a den. Mold was later discovered throughout the house. McMahon and his wife, Pamela, blamed faulty cleanup.
“When your family loses its health and your home is a wasteland, that’s a colossal disaster,” McMahon said at the time.
Both the Hyland website and ChristiesGreatestEstates.com list the property, built in 1989, at $5.75 million. Davis said it was still priced at $6.25 million.
McMahon took out two loans on the property totaling $4.5 million and later borrowed an additional $300,000 against the house, according to ForeclosureRadar. The loans were obtained through Countrywide Home Loans Inc.
A Countrywide spokesman declined to comment, citing privacy concerns.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the story. Though McMahon was in negotiations with Countrywide, the paper said it wasn’t clear whether McMahon and his wife would be able to remain in the home.
McMahon was about $644,000 in arrears on the loan when the notice of default was filed, the paper said.
Federal regulators have been urging lenders to ease loan terms, but it wasn’t clear if that would happen in McMahon’s case.
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peter.hong@latimes.com
Times staff writer E. Scott Reckard contributed to this report.
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8ff7700e78875560034a494ebfe74a65 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-04-na-obamawins4-story.html | From underdog to alpha | From underdog to alpha
Barack Obama was composing his speech the night Hillary Rodham Clinton won New Hampshire, saving her presidential campaign. He glanced up to see Jim Margolis, his media strategist.
“Well?” Obama asked.
“Well,” Margolis recalls replying. “I guess we’re going to have to do it the hard way.”
It was never going to be easy. Whatever happens in the general election, Obama’s victory over Clinton after an epic 16-month battle for the Democratic nomination will go down as one of the great political upsets of all time.
Just three years out of the Illinois Legislature, saddled with an odd-sounding name and bearing the added burden of race, Obama beat a candidate boasting the party’s most vaunted political operation, its premier fundraising machine and its most popular brand name.
It was a triumph of charisma and soaring oratory -- two of the oldest commodities in politics -- fused with a thoroughly modern campaign that harnessed the Internet like never before.
Obama could not compete with Clinton for the support of the political establishment, so he attracted hundreds of thousands of new voters. He could never out-raise Clinton among big donors, so he created an online network of small donors, stunning even his own advisors by raising more than $265 million. He couldn’t overcome Clinton’s name recognition in big states -- at least starting out -- so he focused on small ones, a strategy that proved decisive when the nominating contest became an incremental fight for delegates.
He started as an underdog, but that worked to Obama’s advantage. His strategists felt free to challenge conventional thinking, like the notion that targeting young people and Republican-leaning states would be a waste of time and resources. Both proved crucial to Obama’s success.
The freedom to fail buoyed the Illinois senator and his team when national polls last fall showed Obama trailing by as much as 30 points, leading many political pundits to write him off. “We didn’t have the burden of expectations and a lifelong career path,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s preternaturally calm campaign manager. “We were very much, ‘If it works out, it works out.’ ”
Obama also benefited from blunders committed by the Clinton camp, among them the failure to appreciate the importance of the Iowa caucuses; an expectation that the race would end quickly -- which meant the candidate was left flat-footed and broke when it didn’t; and, perhaps above all, Clinton’s decision to run as the candidate of experience at a time when Democratic voters were ravenous for change.
Sitting in his Chicago office, Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, pointed to his bookshelf and a copy of “Microtrends,” a slice-and-dice examination of America by Mark Penn, his onetime counterpart in the Clinton campaign. “There’s also such a thing as macro-trends, and they are often what define elections,” Axelrod said, as elevated commuter trains rumbled below his window.
“Elections are generally defined by the incumbent . . . and rarely do people look for a replica. They almost always look for a remedy and, in [President] Bush’s case, that was particularly so,” Axelrod went on. “The question was, was Hillary Clinton really the remedy? It was our supposition, based on everything we could see, and intuition, that Barack represented the starkest departure from Bush and from the kind of politics that people were really recoiling from in Washington.”
All winning campaigns seem brilliant in retrospect. The reverse is true for a losing effort: The mistakes are obvious with the clarity of hindsight. But in Clinton’s case, many of them are still startling.
Despite its fearsome reputation, many of the Clinton campaign’s decision-makers had never worked in a presidential primary. It showed not just in their underestimation of Iowa and other caucus states, but the attempt to run a general election campaign, aimed at the political center, in a contest dominated early on by liberal voters.
Penn’s experience helping guide President Clinton to reelection in 1996 -- with the aid of a strong economy and weak GOP opponent -- was not like the tough 1992 campaign.
“You had some tremendously talented people, but not a lot who were seriously tested in battle,” said one Clinton loyalist familiar with the inner workings of her campaign.
By contrast, key members of the Obama team -- Margolis, Axelrod, national field director Steve Hildebrand, communication strategists Larry Grisolano and Robert Gibbs -- had all worked in at least one presidential campaign. Plouffe knew the national landscape at a granular level from stints with the Democratic House and Senate campaign committees.
The Clinton operation, which prided itself on pugnacity, was rife with backbiting and turf battles: between the field staff and headquarters, among Penn and his fellow strategists. The tensions slowed decision-making and produced a constant struggle over the candidate’s message, which shifted throughout the race. Clinton, the voice of Washington wisdom, gave way to Clinton the insurgent. Clinton’s softer side was highlighted for a time, then Clinton became a fist-shaking populist.
The Obama campaign operated on a more even keel, like the candidate himself. His message -- boiled down to two words, hope and change -- never wavered. There were differences among advisors, mainly over how hard to hit back when their candidate was attacked. But disagreements rarely surfaced in public; there was a cohesion and mutual regard among Obama strategists that was sorely lacking in the Clinton campaign -- and, for that matter, those of the last two Democratic nominees, Al Gore and John F. Kerry.
“When we had low points, there wasn’t someone who came in screaming, pointing fingers in 12 different directions,” Margolis said.
Obama insisted that his campaign work that way. “We’re all in this together,” Axelrod recalled the candidate telling his top strategists at an early organizational meeting in January 2007. “We’re going to rise or fall together. No sharp elbows. No big egos. I want us all to be a team.”
If there was a crucial point in the race, it was the Iowa caucuses. Obama’s victory didn’t win him the nomination. But it can be strongly argued that Clinton’s third-place finish marked the beginning of the end of her candidacy, which had always been predicated on a string of early wins. That was how Gore captured the nomination in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, starting with victories in Iowa.
Obama’s win in the overwhelmingly white state was crucial in sending a message to black voters, particularly in South Carolina, another early-voting state, who were initially skeptical of his candidacy.
“Iowa helped reinforce the notion that Obama was a real candidate who had a chance of victory,” said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist and South Carolina native, who stayed neutral in the nominating fight. “That took what everyone presumed would have been a Clinton asset -- the support of the African American community -- and turned it into an Obama asset.”
From the beginning, it was Obama’s goal to finish ahead of Clinton in Iowa; anything less, Obama strategists believed, would have likely ended his candidacy. “It was a very sketchy deal going forward,” Axelrod said. “We thought we could navigate that, but we weren’t confident.”
Initially, the campaign set its sights on second place. The presumption was that former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who never stopped running after his 2004 try for president, would win Iowa. But Edwards, overshadowed by the Obama-Clinton duel, began to fade, and by late fall Obama was narrowly leading in some state surveys. (Edwards would come in second, just ahead of Clinton, and quit the race by the end of January.)
While the Obama campaign was single-minded about Iowa -- investing so much time and effort in the state that he began slipping in national polls -- Clinton strategists were much more ambivalent. Some suggested she skip Iowa, given its left-leaning electorate and the face time voters demand; former deputy campaign manager Mike Henry was among those strategists. He wrote a memo arguing that Clinton’s efforts would be better spent elsewhere. Iowa, after all, was one of the few places where Clinton’s husband had never seriously campaigned, denying her the built-in advantage she enjoyed in other states. (In 1992, when Bill Clinton made his first presidential bid, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin was running, so the rest of the Democrats ceded the state.)
But after Henry’s memo became public in May 2007, Clinton rejected his advice. “I’m unequivocally committed to competing in Iowa,” she told Radio Iowa.
Despite that, however, insiders describe a constant fight over resources and the time Clinton would spend in the state. “They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and they didn’t come to understand that until very late,” said one of her key Iowa supporters, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
The New York senator spent more than $20 million in Iowa and devoted more than 60 days of campaigning. But Clinton, 60, could not top Obama’s organizational effort -- and not just because he outspent her or visited more often. Obama, 46, was a political phenom, a captivating speaker who drew tens of thousands of Iowans to his events, starting with his February 2007 announcement swing. To attend, participants were asked to provide their phone numbers and e-mail addresses; within days the campaign followed up by asking them to volunteer.
It was a strategy replicated across the country, providing the “human capital,” as Axelrod put it, to build a national grass-roots network at a relatively low cost. Even better, many of the same supporters went online to contribute to Obama’s campaign, paying for the professional organizers the campaign dispatched to lead its volunteer army.
Obama “overwhelmed her from the bottom up,” said Joe Trippi, an Edwards advisor who made pioneering use of the Internet as manager of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run.
Most critical was the campaign’s focus on small states, particularly those holding caucuses. Clinton strategists believed that caucuses, which require a commitment of several hours and tend to draw the party’s most liberal activists, were unlikely to attract voters taken with Clinton’s more centrist message. Instead, they expected to steamroll through the big states, where the former first lady’s establishment support and household name offered a huge advantage -- and they spent accordingly.
But that overlooked a crucial thing about the way Democrats choose their nominee.
The Republican Party awards its delegates on a winner-take-all basis. The system is designed to quickly winnow the field and swiftly settle on a nominee. Under those rules, Clinton almost surely would have beaten Obama.
But the Democrats allocate their delegates on a proportional basis, meaning even a losing candidate is guaranteed a share. Although Obama lost most of the bigger states to Clinton, he often walked away with a healthy chunk of delegates by keeping competitive; under party rules, his big wins in small places paid off much more than Clinton’s smaller victories in big states.
Take hard-fought Pennsylvania. Clinton won 55% to 45%, netting 12 delegates. Obama, by contrast, netted that many breezing through Idaho, which he carried, 79% to 17%. With scant effort he won Kansas, 74% to 26%, netting an additional 14 delegates.
Overall, Obama’s caucus wins in 17 states and territories accounted for most of his lead over Clinton in pledged delegates, or those awarded on the basis of election results. That, in turn, helped Obama win over a majority of what the Democrats call superdelegates, the 800 members of Congress and party insiders who enjoy automatic votes at the nominating convention in Denver.
After winning Iowa on Jan. 3, Obama strategists were counting on a victory five days later in New Hampshire to propel him into Feb. 5, the biggest day of primary balloting in history. Voters in 22 states and American Samoa were heading to the polls, and Clinton looked to be a strong favorite.
Obama lost New Hampshire -- and perhaps deserved to, Axelrod now says, after taking what amounted to a victory lap around the state. But he bounced back Jan. 26 with a big win in South Carolina.
Luck helps in politics, and one of Obama’s biggest breaks came from an unlikely source: former President Clinton. The results of the South Carolina primary were magnified, Obama strategists believe, by Bill Clinton’s headline-grabbing performance in the state.
He chewed out a reporter and also suggested Obama’s growing black support could cost his wife victory, a not-so-subtle way, some thought, of injecting race into the campaign. Afterward, the former president outraged many African Americans -- his loyal supporters as president -- by comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson, who won South Carolina during his quixotic 1988 campaign. The publicity drew heightened attention to Obama’s 28-point margin, Plouffe said, and soured many voters on the Clintons and their combative style of politics. That underlined Obama’s promise to bring a fresh approach to Washington and “gave us added velocity heading into Feb. 5,” Plouffe said.
In their private calculations, the Obama camp strategists expected their candidate to end that day trailing Clinton by about 100 elected delegates. Instead, he won 13 of the 23 contests -- six of them caucuses -- and finished with a lead of 30 elected delegates.
Clinton’s quick-kill strategy had failed, and proved to be one of her costliest mistakes. Worse, she was experiencing money problems. On Feb. 6, it was announced that Clinton had lent her campaign $5 million and that some staffers were working without pay. (Despite raising more than $215 million, she would eventually lend her campaign more than $11 million to keep the lights on.)
“I think the Clinton camp’s basic attitude was that the whole calendar was set up to deliver the knockout blow on Feb. 5,” Obama told reporters the day after. “We’ve got many more rounds to fight.”
Obama, with his national grass-roots network and Internet-fueled fundraising, was ready in a way Clinton was not. Over the next month, between Feb. 5 and March 4, he won 11 consecutive contests and expanded his lead among elected delegates to more than 150. Although it was not clear at the time, the race was essentially decided.
The two fought to a draw in March in Texas, Clinton winning the primary and Obama winning its caucuses. Clinton took Rhode Island, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico and South Dakota. Obama won Vermont, Wyoming, Mississippi, Guam, North Carolina and Montana, and barely lost Indiana.
A flap over Obama’s incendiary ex-minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., scared away some voters in the last few states, but not superdelegates.
Undeterred, they steadily streamed toward the presumptive nominee. The only thing left was for Obama to run out the calendar and for the party to resolve a dispute over Florida and Michigan, two states that broke the rules by voting early. Clinton’s fight to recognize their delegates was her last stand; she suffered a final setback Saturday with an agreement to seat them with half a vote each, dashing her last chance of significantly cutting Obama’s delegate lead.
The delegates he added Tuesday in South Dakota and Montana, along with an outpouring of superdelegate support, finally allowed Obama to claim the nomination and become the first African American to win a major-party presidential nomination.
Speaking to supporters Tuesday night in New York City, Clinton praised Obama and his campaign, but stopped short of conceding. She said she would spend the next few days deciding “how to move forward, with the best interests of our country and our party guiding my way.”
Axelrod remains a Clinton fan. In the office at his consulting firm, about a mile from Obama headquarters, he keeps a framed picture of the senator, an old acquaintance, taken a few years ago with his wife and daughter. She was a good candidate, he said, a strong debater and a compelling personality. But her strategy was flawed.
She campaigned too long as a lofty front-runner, following the old rules of politics, emphasizing the past, downplaying her own attempt to make history as the nation’s first woman president. It was no match for Obama’s message of hope and change, embodied by his breaking of racial barriers and the new blood he drew into the political system.
“She just wasn’t well-positioned,” Axelrod said, “for the year this was.”
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mark.barabak@latimes.com
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f3a8ec110261349120be8a344aba4926 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-04-sp-mexico4-story.html | Mexico’s choice not that popular | Mexico’s choice not that popular
Like an Acapulco cliff diver leaping into the unknown, Mexico’s soccer federation Tuesday took the plunge and named Sven-Goran Eriksson as its national coach.
This is unchartered territory for Mexico -- selecting a high-profile European coach who speaks little Spanish, to take over a team that is about two weeks from its first qualifying game for the South Africa 2010 World Cup.
The 60-year-old Swede led England to the quarterfinals of the 2002 and 2006 World Cups and the quarterfinals of the 2004 European Championship and this season coached Manchester City to ninth place in the English Premier League. He was introduced at a packed news conference in Mexico City.
“I accepted because it’s a big challenge,” said Eriksson, speaking in a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish to the media. “Our target is the World Cup and to try to do better than last time.”
In 2006 Mexico was under the helm of Argentina’s Ricardo Lavolpe and was knocked out in the second round by Argentina, its opponent tonight in an 8 o’clock friendly at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego.
Lavolpe was replaced after the World Cup by Hugo Sanchez, a former Mexican national team idol, but Sanchez lasted only until this March, when his failure to qualify Mexico for the Beijing Olympics cost him his job.
Now, Eriksson has the helm, or at least he will have in a few weeks.
For the moment, Jesus “Chucho” Ramirez, who in 2005 won the FIFA Under-17 World Cup with Mexico, will hold onto the coaching reins. He will be in charge tonight, against Peru in another friendly in Chicago on Sunday, and for Mexico’s two-game World Cup qualifying series against Belize on June 15 in Houston and June 21 in Monterrey, Mexico.
After that, Eriksson takes over, although it is believed that he will retain Ramirez as his top assistant.
The need for a Mexican coach somewhere in the national team mix has been hammered home by several of the team’s veteran players. Jared Borgetti, Mexico’s all-time leading goal scorer, said last week that the time was not right for a foreign coach to take charge of El Tri.
“It has to be someone who knows Mexican football, who knows Mexican players, the lives of Mexican players and who knows the CONCACAF World Cup qualifiers, which are very different from Europe,” Borgetti said.
In considering Eriksson, along with another high-profile candidate who was approached by Mexico -- Portugal’s Brazilian mentor Luiz Felipe Scolari -- Borgetti claimed the federation was making a mistake. “The club owners want a renowned coach, who attracts worldwide attention, but that way we are not going to win anything because we are putting footballing matters to one side,” he said.
Another national team veteran, defender Carlos Salcido, earlier said he would “prefer someone who knows the Mexican league.”
Borgetti and Salcido are on Mexico’s roster for tonight’s game, with Ramirez having selected a strong squad for a match that is expected to draw 60,000 or more.
Argentina too has most of its first team available, the most notable exceptions being Carlos Tevez and Juan Roman Riquelme. Still, Coach Alfio Basile has Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero and Javier Mascherano at his disposal.
Argentina is using tonight’s game and Sunday’s match against the U.S. in New Jersey to prepare for this month’s World Cup qualifiers against Ecuador and Brazil.
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grahame.jones@latimes.com
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0ec79c76adf1e95052f49d1578093aae | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-05-me-drought5-story.html | Gov. proclaims statewide drought | Gov. proclaims statewide drought
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed a statewide drought Wednesday, warning that California’s water supply is falling dangerously low because of below-average rainfall and court-ordered water restrictions aimed at protecting fish.
“We must recognize the severity of this crisis we face,” Schwarzenegger said at a Capitol news conference. He said this spring has been the driest on record in Northern California, which supplies most of the water to the state.
Along with the proclamation, the governor issued an executive order intended to speed transfers of water to areas experiencing the most severe shortages, help local water districts boost conservation efforts, identify risks to the state’s water supply and assist farmers.
The governor stopped short of declaring a water emergency. Administration officials say Wednesday’s move is a first step, putting Californians on notice that large-scale rationing could be coming if the situation does not improve. Some areas of the state are more vulnerable than others.
The governor said his proclamation adds urgency to a proposal he has been pushing for years to borrow $11.9 billion for new water projects such as reservoirs, river restoration and water-quality improvement. Schwarzenegger would like the Legislature to put such a plan on the November ballot, but lawmakers have balked amid opposition from environmentalists, who argue that new reservoirs threaten wildlife and fish habitats.
California has no official guidelines for what constitutes a statewide drought, and the governor’s proclamation this early in a dry spell is unusual. The state is in its second dry year.
When the last such proclamation was made, in 1991, former Gov. Pete Wilson waited until the fifth dry year. Only a month ago, the state’s meteorologist said California was not in a drought.
Administration officials say the governor is moving proactively because of unique circumstances that could cause the water situation to rapidly deteriorate. They point to a federal court order last summer aimed at protecting endangered smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that has put a substantial share of the state’s water supply off-limits.
Additionally, state Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow said odd weather patterns, perhaps related to global warming, are creating problems for the water supply.
The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which accounts for a large share of the state’s water supply, was at 97% of normal in March. By May it was down to 67% of normal. Warm weather throughout the spring caused the snow to melt quickly, Snow said, with much of the water evaporating instead of running downstream into reservoirs.
“The snowpack has been disappearing, and it has not manifest itself as runoff,” Snow said.
Most of the state’s residential customers are unlikely to face severe water rationing this year. But they are being asked to cut back their use. Major conservation campaigns have been underway in many parts of the state.
Water districts in several cities, including Long Beach and Oakland, are imposing restrictions on outdoor water use and are asking residential consumers to cut their overall use by 10% to 20%. Washing cars and driveways is banned in some places, as is serving drinking water in restaurants unless the customer asks for it.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Wednesday voted to put such restrictions in place, subject to City Council approval. DWP officials said they expect to have up to 18 “drought busters” patrolling neighborhoods and ticketing offenders.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 18 million people, will consider asking other member cities and counties to adopt such measures June 13. The proposed resolution would also encourage local governments to consider tiered rate structures that encourage conservation, mandatory installation of low-flow toilets when properties are resold, and rebates for consumers who install water-saving devices.
Timothy F. Brick, chairman of the district board, warned the state is “entering a new and worrisome water era.”
Farmers could be particularly hard hit. In the San Joaquin Valley, water shortages this year could force some to abandon tomato crops during the summer.
Schwarzenegger warns that conservation will help the state address such mounting water problems in the short term only.
“Our drought is an urgent reminder of the immediate need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure,” he said. “I hope the legislators get the point. . . . Let’s fix all of these things that need to be fixed rather than waiting and waiting and waiting.”
The governor noted that in 2006 the state had so much rain and snow that “raging storm water drained off into the ocean without us catching it” as large reservoirs released excess water. “Today, those same reservoirs are 40% below capacity. It is absolutely insane.”
Environmentalists on Wednesday said the governor’s call to bring his bond package before voters as soon as possible was misguided.
“I don’t think we are at this point where people are not going to have water if we don’t put his package on the November ballot,” said Jim Metropulos, a senior advocate with the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club and other conservation groups said they would like to see a water bond package geared toward projects they view as more beneficial to the environment.
The Natural Resources Defense Council released a statement encouraging the governor to focus on his goal of reducing water usage in California cities by 20%. A bill the group sponsored that would set such a target for the state, AB 2175, recently passed the Assembly.
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evan.halper@latimes.com
Times staff writers David Zahniser and Nancy Vogel contributed to this report.
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fd33c8df67ba030ec11a1481a2d5fd4e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-05-me-marriage5-story.html | Bids to halt gay marriages rejected | Bids to halt gay marriages rejected
Gay couples in California rushed to set wedding dates Wednesday after the California Supreme Court’s unusually quick rejection of challenges to its historic decision permitting same-sex couples to wed.
By rejecting petitions asking for reconsideration of the May 15 ruling, the court, in a 4-3 vote, removed the final obstacle to same-sex marriages starting June 17.
The court also refused to delay enforcement of the decision until after the November election, when voters will decide whether to reinstate a ban on same-sex nuptials.
Hours after the court made the timing clear, a jubilant Jason Lyon scheduled his wedding in Los Angeles to his partner of eight years, Tim Hartley.
“I’m thrilled -- over the moon,” said Lyon, 39, who scurried to invite friends to the couple’s Silver Lake home for a caravan to the county clerk’s office and a celebratory lunch on the first day gay marriage is legal.
County clerks have been warned to prepare for an onslaught of weddings. As of June 17, the words “bride” and “groom” on marriage licenses will be replaced with “Partner A” and “Partner B.”
A soon-to-be-released study by the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law predicts that thousands of gay couples will rush to the altar before the November election.
The study projects that the numbers will swell if voters reject the anti-gay-marriage initiative, forecasting that 51,320 gay California couples and 67,513 from out of state will marry in the state during the next three years.
Extrapolating from the study, based on census data and Massachusetts’ experience after it permitted same-sex matrimony, the director of the institute -- which focuses on sexual orientation law and public policy -- said more than 20,000 weddings were anticipated by November.
While some gay Californians finalized their plans for the altar Wednesday, others were unsure whether to pop the question.
Matt Dorsey, who works for the city of San Francisco, explained the likely hesitation of some gay men to tie the knot.
“We may be gay, but we’re guys. We’re a little commitment-phobic,” he said.
The court’s decision to reject the appeals was unusually speedy. Petitions for rehearing, even those that are all but certain to be turned down, usually delay enforcement of rulings for 30 to 60 days.
Voting in favor of rehearing the case were Justices Marvin R. Baxter, Ming W. Chin and Carol A. Corrigan, who dissented in May’s ruling. Chief Justice Ronald M. George and Justices Joyce L. Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos R. Moreno voted to reject the appeals.
Opponents of same-sex marriage were quick to denounce the court’s decision and warn gays that their marriages might not stand if voters amend the state constitution in November to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples.
“This is another 4-3 vote for legal chaos,” said Glen Lavy, senior counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian-affiliated group that had asked the court to put its marriage ruling on hold.
“The court has not only ignored the will of the people and imposed a redefinition of marriage on Californians, it has inflicted years of legal chaos quite possibly on the entire country,” Lavy said.
Attorneys general from 10 states also had asked the court to delay finalizing the ruling until after the November election, saying they anticipate a lot of litigation from couples who wed in California and want their home states to recognize the marriages.
If the November initiative to ban same-sex marriage passes, the status of gay couples who already married will be heavily litigated and decided ultimately by the California Supreme Court, said UCLA law professor Brad Sears.
A legal rule that says laws should be interpreted retroactively only if they explicitly state they are retroactive “weighs in favor of this court continuing to recognize the marriages,” Sears said.
But some opponents of same-sex marriage said that if the initiative passes, they will again ask the court to invalidate the entire ruling, which also gave gays heightened constitutional protections against discrimination.
The court turned down the appeals in closed session, as it does in all petitions for rehearing.
The nine-sentence order dispatched the case without stating the justices’ reasons for acting, also standard procedure.
While county clerks in large cities were bracing for wedding madness, those in rural counties said they expected that few same-sex couples would apply for marriage licenses.
“I personally have had only one call,” said Rose Gallo-Vasquez, assistant county clerk in rural Colusa County, north of Sacramento. “I don’t think we’re going to have a lot of them.”
The clerk’s office in San Francisco was scheduling appointments for couples, but the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office said it would simply try to accommodate those people who show up.
The Los Angeles County office was considering extending hours June 17 in Norwalk and West Hollywood and marrying couples on Saturday, June 21.
“We can’t gauge the size of the crowds,” said spokesman Paul Drugan.
Pasadena’s All Saints Church, a liberal Episcopal parish whose clergy have endorsed gay marriage, has so far scheduled 14 same-sex weddings for the summer.
“We’re very excited,” said the Rev. Susan Russell.
Palm Springs Councilman Rick Hutcheson said the city was “planning and preparing.”
Hutcheson is among several City Council members who have been deputized to perform marriage ceremonies, and local hotels have been trying to create wedding packages that include airfare and accommodations.
“We’re going to be ready to roll on the 17th,” he said.
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maura.dolan@latimes.com
jessica.garrison@latimes.com
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8021d68c4dbccef6e024a3074260605a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-05-me-props5-story.html | Prop. 98 backers seek eminent domain limits | Prop. 98 backers seek eminent domain limits
Backers of the defeated Proposition 98, which would have phased out rent control and broadly limited government’s ability to take private property, vowed Wednesday to take the eminent domain issue to the state Capitol, in hopes of persuading legislators to do what voters would not.
At the same time, Tuesday’s voter approval of Proposition 99, a more limited measure that protects owner-occupied residences from eminent domain, is forcing Baldwin Park officials to consider scaling back a 125-acre commercial development to exclude land now occupied by 81 homes.
“It may have to be smaller, but the rest of the project will not be affected,” Baldwin Park Mayor Manuel Lozano said Wednesday.
He added that the city’s attorneys will be reviewing the effect of Proposition 99 on the San Gabriel Valley development project. The project would have been jeopardized if Proposition 98 had passed, Lozano said.
In an election that saw a dismal 22.2% turnout, a record low according to preliminary figures from the California secretary of state, Proposition 99, a measure that did not change rent control, won with 62.5% of the vote.
Some provisional ballots had not yet been counted.
The uncounted ballots could boost the turnout figure to about 27%, still well below the previous record low, said Stephen Weir, the Contra Costa County clerk-recorder who heads the statewide association of elections officials.
Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, said the previous low was 33.6%, in 2006.
One factor in Tuesday’s turnout may have been the decision to hold the presidential primary in February, rather than combine it with the legislative primary, Winger said.
Los Angeles County had the lowest turnout in the state, at 16.3%, another possible record. The largest turnout, 63.7%, was in Alpine County.
Only 39% of voters statewide favored Proposition 98, a measure by landlord groups that would have phased out rent control and barred government agencies from using eminent domain to force the sale of homes, businesses and farmland for private development.
Proposition 98 carried 20 of the 58 counties, all of them rural areas with low numbers of voters. The largest margins of defeat were in urban areas with large numbers of voters, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco counties.
“They had a narrow base of support and ours was broad,” said Tom Adams, president of the California League of Conservation Voters, who noted that the California Chamber of Commerce and California Building Industry Assn. joined with environmental groups and progressive organizations to oppose Proposition 98.
Backers of Proposition 98 said Wednesday that they would now ask legislators to expand restrictions on eminent domain powers.
“Those issues are not dead,” said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. “We will work in any forum we can to get enhanced property rights in California.”
Last year, the Legislature took up a measure that would have restricted local governments from acquiring homes, farmland and churches through eminent domain for the purpose of conveying the property to a private party. But it failed.
“I think people in the Legislature are going to feel that the voters have settled this issue,” Adams said.
Barbara Gonzalez hopes that includes rent control. She woke up Wednesday in her Echo Park apartment with a great sense of relief that California voters had spurned a rollback of the rent-control law that she is certain stands between her and the street.
Gonzalez, 49, lives with her grown daughter and her daughter’s husband in a two-bedroom apartment that costs $750 per month under rent control. Her son-in-law and daughter, who is expecting, would like to move out, but they cannot afford apartments suitable for the young family, Gonzalez said.
“It’s a huge relief,” she said of the defeat of Proposition 98. “I was very, very scared. I was scared because of my family. I’m a low-income person. I don’t know what I would do without rent control.”
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patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com
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More election coverage
* B8-B11: Coverage of the runoff for L.A. County supervisor, a rare upset ousts a veteran legislator, complete election tables and more.
* A24: California Democrats look to November.
* On the Web: Full coverage of the California races, including additional stories on Orange County results. latimes.com/california
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5b19c7b6978fff7ca711a5a05e0d9e4f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-05-na-campaign5-story.html | Clinton set to end run, back Obama | Clinton set to end run, back Obama
Bowing to pressure and the unyielding political math, Hillary Rodham Clinton will end her history-making campaign Saturday and endorse Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, aides said Wednesday.
Clinton’s decision followed a day of private consultation with donors, members of Congress and union supporters, who urged her to back Obama for the sake of party unity -- a sentiment that was voiced throughout the day by Democratic Party leaders. Some were angry that she failed to concede Tuesday night, when it was clear that Obama had clinched the nomination.
“Sen. Clinton will be hosting an event in Washington, D.C., to thank her supporters and express her support for Sen. Obama and party unity,” said Howard Wolfson, her campaign’s communications chief. Other details of Clinton’s exit were still being hashed out. She planned a private party with staff members Friday.
Clinton ran the strongest campaign ever waged by a female presidential candidate, only to fall to another historic candidate bidding to become America’s first black president.
She has several options. She could, for example, release her more than 1,900 delegates to Obama and be through as a presidential candidate. Or she could suspend her candidacy and keep control of her delegates, maintaining her political leverage until the Democratic National Convention in August.
Even before the New York senator made her decision to stand aside, there were signals that she would drastically scale back her campaign. Plans were underway to start laying off about 100 campaign workers, or nearly half her staff, at the end of this week. Obama aides were holding informal conversations -- peer to peer -- to discuss the possibility of some Clinton staffers joining their team for the fall race against Republican John McCain.
Obama had a brief comment about Clinton’s Saturday event. “Truth is, I haven’t had time to think about it,” he said Wednesday night en route to a New York City fundraiser. “This weekend I’m going home, talk it over with Michelle, and we’re going on a date.”
Clinton, a former first lady who entered the presidential contest 17 months ago as a prohibitive favorite, had resisted an immediate exit because “she wanted to touch as many of her supporters as she could,” according to an aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on Clinton’s behalf.
What Clinton found was strong sentiment that it was time for her presidential run to end. During a conference call Wednesday with about 30 House members, Clinton was urged to quickly endorse Obama, according to a Democratic aide familiar with the call.
Members of the New York delegation, in particular, wished to be released from their commitment to Clinton because of the pressure they were receiving from constituents who backed Obama, the aide said.
Clinton joined Obama on Wednesday in addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and, while praising the Illinois senator, made no acknowledgment of his triumph in their hard-fought contest.
Behind the scenes, however, Clinton recognized that the end of her candidacy was near, aides and supporters suggested.
“There’s a sense of reality in the campaign that, from everything you read and hear, Obama has gone over the top,” said Mickey Kantor, who chaired Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and has stayed close to the couple.
Obama betrayed no impatience, unlike many fellow Democrats. He stopped by Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where he received congratulations from senators on both sides of the aisle.
“I just spoke to her today, and we’re going to be having a conversation in coming weeks,” Obama told reporters after he and Clinton met briefly backstage at the AIPAC conference. “And I’m very confident how unified the Democratic Party’s going to be to win in November.”
Obama dismissed a question about Clinton’s failure to concede Tuesday night, saying she was “understandably focused on her supporters.”
At the same time, Obama was clearly putting the primary season behind him. His campaign announced the formation of a three-member team to vet potential vice presidential running mates.
The effort will be overseen by Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President Kennedy, who endorsed Obama in January; Eric Holder, former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration; and Jim Johnson, former head of Fannie Mae and a longtime Washington insider who helped former Vice President Walter Mondale and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts pick their running mates.
Obama was also weighing an invitation from McCain to join the Arizona senator for a series of town-hall meetings, though not as soon as the Republican would like. “Having just secured our party’s nomination, this is one of the many items we will be addressing in the coming days,” said Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe.
Still, for all the focus on the general election, the day after Obama sealed his victory felt like many before it, with the political world watching and wondering when Clinton would bow to the seemingly inevitable.
Sending a not-so-subtle message, Democratic Party leaders rallied behind Obama. “The people have spoken,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. “Barack Obama is the nominee of the Democratic Party.”
A group of eight senators who had stayed neutral -- including California’s Barbara Boxer -- issued a separate statement promising Obama “every ounce of our support.”
Even some Clinton backers signaled that it was time for her to step aside. Mondale announced he was supporting Obama. Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York criticized Clinton’s Tuesday night speech, saying she could have been “far more generous” after it was clear that Obama had the delegates needed to win the nomination. “I don’t see what they’re talking about in prolonging this,” Rangel said.
Speculation continued about the possibility of an Obama-Clinton ticket. On Tuesday, she told members of the New York congressional delegation that she was open to the prospect, and many of her supporters have begun lobbying for her selection.
Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, said Wednesday on CNN that he was working to rally members of the Congressional Black Caucus behind the idea.
But some were skeptical. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, one of Clinton’s most vociferous supporters, said that Clinton “couldn’t help but upstage” Obama and that the campaign would have to establish “strict rules . . . about what [former] President Clinton could and could not do during the campaign.”
Former President Carter panned the idea, telling London’s Guardian newspaper that a joint ticket “would just accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates.”
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peter.nicholas@latimes.com
mark.barabak@latimes.com
Nicholas reported from Washington, Barabak from San Francisco. Times staff writer Johanna Neuman contributed to this report.
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94cb96c88fa6fb57159c38c64519fb82 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-06-fi-nicholas6-story.html | O.C. tech billionaire indicted | O.C. tech billionaire indicted
Somewhere in the skies between Orange County and Las Vegas, federal prosecutors say, Broadcom Corp. co-founder and hard-partying billionaire Henry T. Nicholas III gave new meaning to the term “highflying.”
Winging their way to Sin City in 2001, Nicholas and his entourage generated so much marijuana smoke that it billowed into the cockpit, “requiring the pilot flying the plane to put on an oxygen mask,” according to a federal grand jury indictment made public Thursday.
The indictment, issued under seal a day earlier, accused Nicholas of doling out drugs and prostitutes as part of a freewheeling lifestyle.
A second indictment accused Nicholas of manipulating stock options at Broadcom, the Irvine-based maker of computer chips used in such products as mobile phones, Apple Inc.'s iPod and Nintendo Co.'s Wii consoles.
Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli was not charged, but was referred to as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the stock options indictment, which identified him by his initials.
The two founded Broadcom in 1991. They are among the best-known entrepreneurs in Southern California, having helped shape Orange County’s modern image as a technology magnet.
The Securities and Exchange Commission last month accused Samueli and Nicholas of backdating stock options to make them more valuable, leading Samueli to step aside as Broadcom’s chairman pending resolution of the case.
Samueli, who also owns the National Hockey League’s Anaheim Ducks, has denied any wrongdoing.
Nicholas, who stepped down as Broadcom’s chief executive in 2003, surrendered Thursday morning to the FBI.
In a 21-count indictment, Nicholas and William J. Ruehle, 66, Broadcom’s former chief financial officer, were accused of backdating millions of stock options for five years to improperly reward employees.
A second, four-count indictment names only Nicholas, 48, and alleges that he maintained homes and commercial properties in Orange County and Las Vegas for the “purpose of using and distributing controlled substances,” including cocaine and methamphetamine.
Among other things, Nicholas allegedly supplied Broadcom customers with prostitutes and narcotics he sometimes referred to as “party favors.” He is accused of slipping drugs into some of their drinks.
“Defendant Nicholas spiked the drinks of others with MDMA (ecstasy) without their knowledge, including . . . the drinks of technology executives and representatives who worked for Broadcom’s customers,” the indictment alleged. No victims were identified by name.
Lawyers for both men denied the allegations.
“Dr. Nicholas will contest these charges vigorously,” his lead attorney, Brendan V. Sullivan Jr. of Washington, D.C., said in a statement. “He is confident that he will be fully vindicated.”
Ruehle’s lawyer, Richard Marmaro of Los Angeles, said Ruehle “looks forward to the opportunity to clear his good name in a court of law.”
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Under close watch
At an afternoon hearing in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, Nicholas sat quietly in a jury box with criminal defendants from other cases, the unbuttoned sleeves of his dress shirt pulled over his handcuffs. He occasionally scowled as his lawyers and prosecutors argued over whether he should be held without bail as a flight risk and a threat to the community.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Nakazato ordered Nicholas freed on bail of $3.4 million secured by property pledged by his mother, who was in court Thursday, and a group of friends.
Nakazato ordered that Nicholas be confined to a Malibu drug treatment facility, with electronic monitoring, and that his two private planes be disabled. He warned Nicholas that he would be arrested if he violated any terms of his release, which also stipulate random drug tests.
He and Ruehle, who also appeared in court Thursday and was freed on a $2-million bond, are to be arraigned June 16.
The indictment that names both men details a conspiracy to backdate stock options to make them worth more to employees without having to report the expense to shareholders.
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An expensive fix
To correct its books, Broadcom last year recorded $2.2 billion in previously unreported expenses -- the biggest such adjustment among the more than 200 firms whose options practices have come under scrutiny.
“By fraudulently backdating and repricing option grants, defendants and their co-conspirators deceived Broadcom’s shareholders, potential shareholders and auditors as to the nature and amount Broadcom truly was compensating its employees and officers,” the indictment alleged.
Stock options were routinely used to recruit or retain employees during the high-tech boom of the late 1990s.
The indictment details one such arrangement, when Nicholas in June 1999 hired an engineer identified in the indictment by his initials, M.N.
The then-CEO allegedly told M.N. that the 120,000 options he was to get would be backdated to May 25 of that year, increasing their value. After starting work, M.N. discovered that the grant date had been recorded as May 28, which diminished their value.
He demanded that the date be changed to the more favorable one he’d agreed upon with Nicholas. After internal discussion that involved Ruehle and others, Nicholas and Samueli in July 1999 “signed Broadcom corporate records fraudulently reflecting” the earlier date, the indictment alleges.
It was a move that would come back to bite them, according to the indictment.
After Broadcom terminated the engineer -- and his stock options -- in October 2000, his attorney presented Nicholas and Ruehle with a draft of a lawsuit that would have exposed the illegal backdating if made public, prosecutors say.
Nicholas met the engineer at an Orange County hotel, “pleaded with M.N. not to come forward with his allegations” and cut a deal to vest 85% of the options that had been canceled if he would keep the matter quiet.
“At the time of the meeting with Nicholas, this settlement offer was worth over $7 million to M.N.,” the indictment says.
Nicholas also allegedly paid $1 million in June 2002 to buy the silence of another, unnamed Broadcom employee who was aware of his illegal drug activity, the other indictment unsealed Thursday alleges.
Ruehle’s attorney, Marmaro, said his client relied on the advice of Broadcom’s auditors in operating the stock option program. He characterized the backdating problems as accounting glitches with no intent to defraud shareholders or mislead financial analysts.
“This is a classic case of government overreaching,” Marmaro said in a statement. “The government’s indictment unsuccessfully attempts to transform a company’s technical accounting error into criminal conduct.”
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Claims of sex and drugs
In the drug indictment, Nicholas is alleged to have used death threats and payoffs to conceal his “unlawful conduct.”
The indictment describes repeated drug purchases for Nicholas, which were sometimes disguised as “supplies” or “refreshments” on invoices.
“In or around 2001, in the lobby of Broadcom’s offices . . . Nicholas directed a Broadcom employee to provide approximately $5,000 to $10,000 in cash to a drug courier in exchange for an envelope containing controlled substances,” the indictment alleges.
The document also lists three properties described in previous Los Angeles Times stories about Nicholas’ alleged indulgences in drugs and prostitutes:
* An equestrian estate in Laguna Hills, where Nicholas had constructed a series of tunnels and underground rooms, including one that contractors alleged was intended to become a “secret and convenient lair” to indulge his “manic obsession with prostitutes.”
* A warehouse-office complex in nearby Laguna Niguel, which contractors said was used for sex and drugs and nicknamed “The Ponderosa.”
* A Newport Coast residence where Nicholas was trying to start a record company and where rock groups frequently visited.
In a 2006 lawsuit seeking back wages, former Nicholas aide Kenji Kato contended that this home also was the scene of frequent drug use and other sordid behavior.
“The allegations of our complaint seem to be validated by the indictment -- both indictments,” said Joseph Kar, the attorney for Kato, whose lawsuit is pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The indictments illustrate that Nicholas used his businesses and employees “to protect himself and to carry out his personal whims,” Kar said. “The long and short of it is his personal whims were illegal.”
The stock option allegations outlined in the indictment were similar to the SEC lawsuit last month that accused Nicholas, Ruehle, Samueli and the company’s former general counsel, David Dull, of backdating stock options.
Samueli and Dull were not named in the indictment unsealed Thursday, although the government could still seek to charge them later.
Samueli, a prominent philanthropist, was Nicholas’ engineering professor at UCLA.
Nicholas quit the company in 2003, saying he wanted to spend time trying to repair his marriage, which later fell apart.
Although Samueli stepped down from his executive role at Broadcom when the SEC lawsuit was filed, he remains at the company in an advisory capacity.
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scott.reckard@latimes.com
kim.christensen@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Among the allegations
Federal grand jury indictments unsealed Thursday allege that Broadcom Corp. co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III:
* “Spiked the drinks of others with MDMA (ecstasy) without their knowledge, including . . . the drinks of technology executives and representatives who worked for Broadcom’s customers.”
* “Hired prostitutes and escorts for himself and customers, representatives and associates of Broadcom and other business entities with which he was affiliated and supplied such prostitutes and escorts with controlled substances.”
* “Used threats of physical violence and death and payments of money to attempt to conceal his unlawful conduct.”
* “Constructed an underground room and tunnel” at a home where illicit drugs were supplied.
* “Distributed and used controlled substances during a flight on a private plane between Orange County, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, causing marijuana smoke to enter the cockpit and requiring the pilot flying the plane to put on an oxygen mask.”
* “Entered into a $1-million settlement agreement . . . with a Broadcom employee who had knowledge of defendant Nicholas’ unlawful narcotics activities.”
* Fraudulently backdated millions of stock option grants over a five-year period, along with former Broadcom Chief Financial Officer William J. Ruehle.
* Persuaded a former Broadcom engineer to drop a lawsuit that would have exposed the backdating scheme at the Irvine computer chip maker.
Source: Federal grand jury indictments
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Broadcom’s history
Henry T. Nicholas III founded Broadcom in 1991 with Henry Samueli. Here is a history of the Irvine-based maker of computer chips used in iPods, mobile phone headsets and Nintendo’s Wii video console:
1991: Samueli and Nicholas write checks for $5,000 each to launch Broadband Telecom; it operates out of Nicholas’ Redondo Beach home.
1995: Broadcom moves to Irvine.
April 17, 1998: Broadcom goes public; the stock jumps 123% on its first day of trading.
2000: Broadcom, with 2,391 employees, joins the S&P; 500 as revenue tops $1 billion.
Jan. 23, 2003: Nicholas quits as chief executive.
Feb. 25, 2005: Samueli and his wife, Susan, buy the Mighty Ducks National Hockey League team from Walt Disney Co. for $75 million.
May 18, 2006: Broadcom’s audit committee begins review of option grants after analysts and the media suggest the company used backdating
to boost the value of grants.
June 9, 2006: The Securities and Exchange Commission tells Broadcom it will seek information on its stock option grants.
July 14, 2006: Broadcom says its own review found misdated option grants from 2000 through 2002.
Sept. 8, 2006: Broadcom reports finding misdated options back to 1998, estimates charges of at least $1.5 billion.
Dec. 14, 2006: The SEC issues formal order of investigation, giving it subpoena power.
April 22, 2008: Broadcom agrees to pay $12 million to settle SEC charges of backdating options.
May 14: The SEC files a civil complaint accusing Samueli, Nicholas, former Chief Financial Officer William Ruehle and General Counsel
David Dull of fraudulently backdating options. Samueli steps aside as chairman and chief technical officer pending resolution of the complaint.
June 4: A federal grand jury indicts Nicholas and Ruehle, accusing them of backdating millions of stock options for five years to improperly reward Broadcom employees. A second indictment naming only Nicholas alleges that he maintained homes and commercial properties in Orange County and Las Vegas to distribute illegal drugs.
Source: Times research
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f738958fdffca2f6f9892e8ceacd8d8a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-06-me-redlightmoney6-story.html | L.A. is a loser on red light cameras | L.A. is a loser on red light cameras
When it comes to collecting traffic ticket revenue from red light cameras, Culver City has been king in Los Angeles County.
The city generated nearly $2 million in photo ticket fines in the last eight months -- hundreds of thousands more than Los Angeles, which had cameras at twice as many intersections, according to new government estimates obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
And although Culver City makes money, Los Angeles’ photo enforcement program is running in the red and may never recover about $2 million in construction costs and past deficits, records and interviews show. In addition, Los Angeles officials recently reported that they overpaid their red light camera contractor by more than $500,000.
Critics say that red light cameras -- hailed for reducing deadly collisions at the intersections they monitor -- have essentially become ATMs for local governments, issuing citations around the clock that can cost up to $400.
But a Times review of more than two dozen systems in Los Angeles County found sharply mixed financial results. Some officials also acknowledge that because camera ticket revenue flows through a labyrinth of court and county agencies, it is hard to precisely gauge how much cash their systems generate.
Some cities, including Walnut, Santa Clarita and Montebello, have netted tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars above camera operating costs, officials say. Culver City could clear even more this year, based on budget documents and recent revenue estimates.
Yet Paramount shut down its camera program in 2006 after running a projected $178,000 deficit in two years.
“It just really wasn’t what we thought it would be,” said Assistant City Manager John Moreno.
Compton also canceled its program because of concerns over costs.
The reasons for the financial differences can include varying traffic volumes, citation and collection rates, as well as drivers adjusting their behavior, officials say.
Pasadena’s 6-year-old camera program has produced safety benefits, including reductions in red light running, but it is struggling to cover contractor costs, said Norman Baculinao, the city’s senior traffic engineer.
“You have less violations, you have less revenue,” he said. “We’re at that point now: Our violations are barely making the monthly fees.”
Protecting motorists and pedestrians -- not filling public coffers -- is the point of red light cameras, backers argue. In addition, cameras help reduce serious accidents, which saves money and frees up officers for other duties, police say.
Most of the cash generated by red light cameras goes to state and county agencies, along with private contractors who install and maintain the systems, and process violation data for police to review. Cities receive less than half the ticket fines and from that typically pay the vendors $4,000 to $6,000 per month per intersection approach monitored.
Culver City’s program will cost about $1.5 million this fiscal year in fees and personnel, according to the city budget. But for the last eight months alone revenue has exceeded that cost by about $400,000. Additional legal costs are not included in those calculations, said police Lt. Manuel Ariza. Still, he acknowledged: “The city doesn’t break even or lose. . . . It makes money at end of the year.”
Tickets and revenue are boosted partly because of the city’s location, near the heart of the Westside’s busy 405 Freeway, he said.
In Los Angeles, contractor Nestor Traffic Systems is paid about $2.5 million a year -- about 80% of the red light program’s annual costs, records and interviews show. The remaining expense is for Los Angeles Police Department officers who approve photo tickets and appear at traffic court trials.
Based partly on revenue projections supplied by Nestor, city analysts had predicted that the program would break even this summer, if only in terms of ongoing costs. But new estimates prepared by Los Angeles County Superior Court, which processes traffic tickets, indicates that Los Angeles’ red light camera income is falling short of expectations, possibly by tens of thousands of dollars a month, according to the city budget office.
“Based on the court figures, we’re not covering costs,” said a city financial analyst familiar with the program. He said superiors authorized him to speak with The Times but not to be quoted by name.
One problem has been that citation rates have been lower than expected. Payments to Nestor are supposed to be reduced if citations do not meet an agreed-upon threshold. A recent Police Commission review found that citation rates fell below that level in 2006 and 2007, and that the city overpaid the firm more than $500,000.
The city has recouped the funds by withholding payments, but the company disputes the action and hopes to negotiate a settlement, said Nestor’s general counsel, Brian Haskell.
The city also gets less photo enforcement revenue because the vast majority of its camera tickets are for rolling right turns. As issued by the city, those tickets carry a $159 fine and the city gets back about $58. In other jurisdictions, all photo tickets cost $381, not counting traffic school, and those cities receive $150 to $160 on each citation.
Los Angeles officials still hope that their red light cameras will cover future operating costs. But LAPD Sgt. Matthew MacWillie said: “This is a traffic safety program. The intent is not to raise money.”
Promises of sizable red light camera profits were a part of a vendor’s pitch to at least one city, records show.
South Gate officials were told they could reap an estimated $600,000 to $1.5 million in “annual net profit” from photo enforcement, according to a copy of a confidential memo by Redflex Traffic Systems obtained from the city.
A Redflex spokeswoman said she could not comment on the South Gate proposal. But cities often seek assurances that camera systems will be self-supporting and not require additional public funding, said Cristina Weekes, Redflex vice president of marketing.
Six years later, South Gate officials are reexamining the safety and financial performance of their camera program but have not decided whether to renew the contract, said city Finance Director Julia James.
For James and fiscal officials in other cities, red light camera financing has been frustratingly fuzzy.
The county court system combines red light camera funds due cities with fines and bail forfeitures from all other types of cases -- making photo ticket dollars difficult to identify or audit.
“This has been a thorn in my side,” said Joyce Rooney, a transportation manager in West Hollywood.
Because of such complaints, court administrators in September began producing estimates of what cities should receive each month from their camera systems, based on monthly snapshots of payments actually made on photo tickets. Though not precise, authorities say the figures are the best measure available of red light camera revenue going to cities.
Still, the Los Angeles budget analyst said, “It’s impossible for us to know exactly how much money we’re getting.”
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rich.connell@latimes.com
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958e8073622284ee84bfd89da86aee9c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-07-et-kusc7-story.html | KUSC finds tempo with a local angle | KUSC finds tempo with a local angle
In THE last year, listeners to classical music radio in Los Angeles have noticed something different about segments of the weekday sound of KUSC-FM (91.5) -- evidence of human beings talking to them live between the symphonies and concertos of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms. It’s a change from the public station’s deliberately generic classical programming that for the last nine years was prerecorded for distribution to more than 50 other outlets across the country with as little trace of Los Angeles or the announcers’ personalities as possible.
Now, in afternoon drive-time, host Rich Capparela serves up irreverent observations about Los Angeles and traffic, along with bits of news he has gleaned that day about the classical world -- in addition to selections from the classical canon. In the mornings, another KUSC alumnus returned home: Dennis Bartel shares his quietly ironic views of just about everything alongside the music, indicative of his background as a published author of fiction and nonfiction.
Apparently reflecting public approval of these changes and combined with the demise of its only significant rival, KMZT-FM, KUSC’s audience has boomed to an average weekly listenership of 525,800, as measured by the latest Arbitron ratings, pushing it to the No. 1 spot among local public stations, ahead of previous leader KPCC-FM (520,700), KCRW-FM (496,800) and KKJZ-FM (347,500).
KUSC already had the largest audience of any nonprofit classical station in the nation despite a decline in its membership numbers and audience in recent years. Its latest average quarter-hour share of the total radio audience in Los Angeles and Orange counties, a key statistic in radio ratings, more than doubled from the same period a year ago, from a 0.8 to a 1.9.
“What we were getting out of syndication was costing us too much in our ability to program the station locally,” says KUSC General Manager Eric DeWeese, who arrived four years ago from WRKF-FM in Baton Rouge, La., to assist KUSC President Brenda Barnes by overseeing the station’s day-to-day operations.
The changes have not included altering the station’s largely mainstream classical repertoire, which is less adventurous than the classical programming at Cal State Northridge’s KCSN-FM (88.5), where the hosts have freedom to play whatever they choose. KCSN’s smaller signal only reaches about a third of the L.A. metro area, however, attracting in the recent survey 58,700 listeners per week.
KUSC uses a playlist, but, says DeWeese, “the hosts can modify it and be creative with it. We just have to make sure we don’t play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony three times in one week or a string quartet in a minor key in the afternoon.”
More freedom and contemporary classical music are expected after July 1, when Gail Eichenthal, now director of arts programming, is scheduled to become program director, coinciding with the end of Classical Public Radio Network, the syndicated service Barnes developed with Colorado Public Radio for distribution by National Public Radio.
Until then, KUSC’s midday programming will remain pre-recorded, but that will also change on July 1, when hosts Kimberlea Daggy and Alan Chapman will be live and unscripted. Evening host Jim Svejda, whose undeniably personal and idiosyncratic shows, though prerecorded, have long been the exception to KUSC’s anonymous soundprint, will continue to do what he has always done -- as will Duff Murphy, the knowledgeable host of “The Opera Show” on Saturday as well as the live L.A. Opera broadcasts Eichenthal initiated.
KUSC’s surge is particularly notable at a time when “news/talk” programming has superseded classical music as the dominant format in public radio nationally, growing by 115% from 1990 to 2005, according to a 2006 report by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“I think it’s a very exciting time for the arts in Los Angeles, and I want to believe KUSC is reflecting that,” says Eichenthal, who returned to the station in 2006 after more than a decade away at commercial news giant KNX-AM.
Eichenthal says she and Barnes were open with each other about their different points of view regarding the station’s direction. It was Eichenthal who suggested to Barnes that she consider bringing Capparela and Bartel back to the station, where both once worked before taking jobs in commercial classical radio -- Capparela at K-Mozart and Bartel at WGMS-FM in Washington, D.C. Both became available when their respective commercial stations threw out classical music.
Barnes didn’t hesitate to act on her suggestion. “It was a happy coincidence,” Barnes says. “Us taking advantage of two commercial stations changing formats. And there’s no doubt in my mind that hiring Dennis and Rich has been a huge step forward.”
Barnes said additionally about the changes, “We started CPRN 10 years ago. The world is a different place now. The Internet was not what it is now.”
Internet streaming of classical radio has made access to the genre more widely available than ever, offering anyone with a computer the chance to tune in WGBH in Boston, WQXR in New York or, for that matter, purely online services like Classical Music America or SKY.fm.
“We want to stand out on the Web by offering something unique,” DeWeese says, “by promoting Southern California’s fine arts scene -- the Phil and the opera. Outside of London and New York, you don’t see that.”
“As local as we can make it,” Barnes says.
“I think listeners have noticed a topicality that wasn’t here before,” Capparela says. “It’s a high-wire act, figuring out how to go tweaking expectations of the audience without alienating them. I know I’m speaking to people who are much, much better musicians than I’ll ever be and to people who don’t know what century Beethoven lived in but know they like the Ninth Symphony.”
Bartel, who habitually makes reference to such un-classical names as Tiger Woods and Alfred Hitchcock, also routinely gives the time and temperature in specific places, such as Encino and Carson, adding the unusual detail of each municipality’s census-reported median income.
When broadcasting behemoth Bonneville International axed classical music from top-rated WGMS in the nation’s capital last year, “I was going to get out of radio,” Bartel said recently, sitting in an office at KUSC’s 20th-floor bank tower studios on Figueroa Street downtown. “Pure, naked greed.” It was the excuse he was looking for to go back to writing full time.
Then KUSC offered him a chance to come back to where it all began for him. The late writer and USC professor Mark Harris once told Bartel, when he was an undergraduate, that his writing career was “doomed” by his good voice.
“He brings with him all that love for the written word, the spoken word,” Eichenthal says about Bartel. “I think it’s going to be more fun than it’s been here. It is remarkable the way things turned out.”
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b6b1e2f285745e9a122345bd47dea846 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-07-fi-garage7-story.html | Hummer: Requiem for a heavyweight? | Hummer: Requiem for a heavyweight?
A couple of years ago, I parked a Hummer H2, in all its blunt-trauma enormity, in front of a coffee shop in Santa Monica. When I returned I discovered a note written on a paper napkin under the windshield. “This thing is so stupid! Why don’t you grow up?”
America just got the memo.
General Motors Corp. said this week that it was considering ways to downsize the brand -- last month, sales plummeted 60% compared with May 2007 -- sell it off or kill it outright. Chairman Rick Wagoner’s “all options” remark didn’t leave a lot of hope for fans of the quasi-military sport utility vehicle. Obituaries will be many and eulogies will be few.
“GM killed the electric car and now skyrocketing gas prices have crushed the Hummer,” said Arianna Huffington, who founded the Detroit Project, an effort to pressure automakers to make more fuel-efficient cars.
“The Hummer embodied the worst impulses of the American auto industry,” said Josh Donner, spokesman for the Sierra Club, which also created a shame-based campaign against the Hummer, including the satiric website Hummerdinger.com. “GM’s move this week shows the absolute bankruptcy of GM’s business model.”
And yet, Hummer lovers are a resilient bunch, and, while the skirmish line has moved, it’s clear many are not prepared to disarm in the automotive culture wars.
“Whatever the price of gas,” said Glen Peck, director of the Hummer Club, a national organization of enthusiasts, “we’ll drive them to hell and back.”
The fate of the Hummer brand is up in the air. GM, which bought the brand from military contractor AM General in 1998, has plowed a load of capital into Hummer, including $250 million for a plant expansion in Shreveport, La.
It has a pickup truck version of the mid-size H3, the H3T, in the pipeline for a summer release. Meanwhile, product development is well along on a Jeep Wrangler-size 4x4 called the H4.
Hummer is a charismatic brand with its own merchandising, including fleece jackets and flashlights. Even if the division operated at a fraction of its historical volume, Hummer could be an attractive proposition to a potential buyer. India’s Economic Times reported Thursday that India’s Tata Motors and Mahindra have each made overtures to GM about Hummer.
If this is the end of Hummer, it would close the books on what will probably go down as the most controversial vehicle since the Chevrolet Corvair.
Hummer was always unavoidably political. The name began as a soldier’s nickname for the “HMMWV” (High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee), the mega-Jeep that drove into America’s living rooms during news coverage of the Persian Gulf War. In the early 1990s, AM General, allegedly at the suggestion of Arnold Schwarzenegger, produced a civilian version of the enormous tractor-like truck. It was here that the brand’s cultural DNA was fixed as a twin helix of oil and militarism.
The H1 didn’t arouse much ire, however, because it was a relatively low-volume vehicle; at worst, an appalling curiosity. It was the H2, introduced in 2002, that became the lightning rod for criticism. A 6,614-pound, 6-foot-8 goliath, all armor and bolts and bumpers, with fenestration like gun slits and a grille like the bared teeth of a charging infantryman, the H2 set off a fury.
“It was just so over the top,” said Michael Marsden, an auto culture historian at St. Norbert College. “It had excess written all over it, the SUV times 10. Everything about it suggested not practical, not reasonable. It was consumerism at its peak.”
And fuel economy at its nadir. The H2 returned single-digit fuel economy at a time when the American body politic had largely squared off on matters of energy and the environment. “The eco movement needs a villain, and, unfortunately, the Hummer has been drafted to play the role,” said Bryan Pullen, a Hummer owner from Davis, Okla.
The H2 was also featured in a minor drama involving the U.S. tax code, which provided massive tax breaks for vehicles over 6,000 pounds that were used for business.
Clearly, for many H2 buyers, who never thought of taking the rugged trucks off-road, the H2’s excessiveness was part of its charm. Hummer prospered in part because it came along just as automotive culture was exploring the limits of wild, chrome-rimmed excess: bling. The Hummer was embraced by hip-hop stars, professional athletes and, of course, “CSI: Miami” detectives.
“I will have to admit that when I see some little blondie, obviously some older man’s princess, pile out of an H2 at the mall it makes me cringe,” said Otto Frederick, a Hummer advocate from Lakeland, Fla. “The H2 was not built to be a princess car, but that’s what it became.”
As the biggest, baddest SUV on the planet, it was natural that the H2 become the target of cultural blowback against the category, which came in many forms. Keith Brasher’s 2002 book “High and Mighty” psychologized big-SUV owners as vain, self-centered and insecure. The Hummer became shorthand for cynicism and excess, an indictment of the American psyche on wheels.
Whatever profit-and-loss realities are at work in GM’s announcement this week, one thing is certain: The company, now desperately tacking to get on a greener course, no longer wants to deal with the contradictions and image liabilities that Hummer represents.
“Cutting jobs is never good press, but for a company to go green is,” said Hummer owner Steve Scott of Plano, Texas. “This is GM’s attempt to do both at the same time.”
Hummer owners are feeling misunderstood. In spirited e-mail exchanges this week, many point out that although the H2 was a gas guzzler, the smaller, similarly styled H3, based on GM’s mid-size truck platform, gets better fuel economy than many competitive vehicles.
“When the H3 came along, it was branded. Hummer was synonymous with bad gas mileage,” Hummer owner Scott said. Advocate Frederick noted: “H3 owners resent the fact that many people can’t tell the difference between an H2 and H3.”
With all the controversy, it’s perhaps surprising to find that people are still buying the iconic H2. Tarek Abdellatif is now the lone salesman in the Hummer showroom at Clippinger Chevrolet in West Covina, where an arsonist firebombed Hummers on the lot in 2003.
“My sales manager quit two weeks ago,” he said. “People are jumping like rats from a ship, but I stay because I love Hummer so much.”
And for him, business is good. Abdellatif said he had sold “seven or eight” in the last month.
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dan.neil@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
OFF THE CHART: The Hummer 3 is so expensive and fuel inefficient that it wouldn’t fit on the chart at left.
Combined mpg: 15
Lowest price: $35,595
Sales in May: 1,467
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45b529929fa49dd68b83ed375d700d1c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-07-me-exodus7-story.html | U.S. a haven for Tijuana elite | U.S. a haven for Tijuana elite
The Plascencia family boasts the brand name for fine dining in Tijuana. Their showcase restaurant -- Villa Saverios -- is a foodie destination, its elegant dining room a gathering spot for the city’s political and social elite.
But the family’s success has also drawn other attention.
Three years ago, gunmen tried to kidnap chef Javier Plascencia’s younger brother. A year later they tried again but, in a case of mistaken identity, snatched the wrong man.
Enough close calls, the family decided.
Nearly 40 years after they opened their first Tijuana restaurant, the entire extended family -- 18 people, including Javier Plascencia’s wife and four children -- moved across the border to a suburb southeast of San Diego.
Such migrations have become increasingly common in metropolitan areas along the U.S.-Mexico border, as the ongoing violence of a brutal drug war has disrupted lives from Tijuana to Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Texas. The Mexican government has sent more than 3,000 troops into Tijuana in the last 1 1/2 years, and on several occasions soldiers have shot it out with drug cartel gunmen on residential streets.
“San Diego is the only place you can forget the sense of insecurity and fear. There, you can breathe. Psychologically, crossing the border relieves the stress,” said Guillermo Alonso Meneses, a professor of cultural studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana.
In San Diego County, the Plascencias opened a new restaurant, brought in their violinist and piano player, and found that they had no shortage of customers. Romesco was soon full of others who had fled the growing violence in Tijuana, including members of the city’s most prominent families.
Real estate agents, business owners and victims groups estimate that more than 1,000 Tijuana families -- including those of doctors, lawyers, law enforcement officials, Lucha Libre wrestlers and business owners -- have made this move in recent years as the drug- fueled violence has worsened.
People have arrived in south San Diego County with only the clothes on their back. Kidnapping victims released after lengthy captivities have shown up long-haired and disheveled, sometimes with fresh wounds.
Real estate agents tell of clients with fingers missing, sliced off by kidnappers who sent them to relatives as proof the victims were alive.
The presence of the immigrants, most in the U.S. legally, is unmistakable in the many gated, master-planned communities of eastern Chula Vista, where parking lots for upscale stores and spas are sprinkled with Baja California license plates.
So many upper-class Mexican families live in the Eastlake neighborhood and Bonita, an unincorporated community adjacent to Chula Vista, that residents say the area is becoming a gilded colony of Mexicans, where speaking English is optional and people can breathe easy cruising around in their Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs.
“I always say that Eastlake is the city with the highest standard of living in all of Mexico,” joked Enrique Hernandez Pulido, a San Diego-based attorney with many Mexican emigre clients.
Kidnappings rampant
Tijuana suffers more kidnappings than almost any other city outside Baghdad, according to a global security firm that handles ransom negotiations south of the border. And a crime wave that started three years ago has only intensified. Most abductions are not reported to authorities, but victim support groups and others estimate the number in the hundreds in the last three to four years.
Experts say the Mexican government’s crackdown on drug cartels may have inadvertently intensified the problem. With Tijuana’s major organized crime group, the Arellano Felix drug cartel, ravaged by arrests and killings, cartel lieutenants have been turning more and more to kidnappings to supplement their dwindling drug profits.
Heavily armed gunmen, often wearing federal police uniforms, snatch people from shopping centers, restaurants, country clubs. The victims are warehoused in networks of safe houses and often shackled and put in group cages until ransoms are paid.
Some families have seen loved ones abducted, released, then abducted again. Many of the kidnapped have been killed, even after large ransoms have been paid. The threat has forced many families that have stayed in Tijuana to employ large security details, bar their doors and windows and retreat behind thick gates or high walls in the Chapultepec Hills.
These days, the drug war’s spiraling violence keeps people away from Tijuana’s restaurant row on Sanchez Taboada Boulevard. Bodyguards shadow children to and from school. About half of the businesses on Avenida Revolucion, the city’s downtown tourist district, have been shuttered.
Fleeing in fear
Some people must take flight suddenly.
One prominent attorney, who asked not to be identified for security reasons, drove from his office directly to the border with a police escort after being notified that kidnappers planned to kill him for speaking out against the crime wave.
He and his family slept on air mattresses and sofa beds in a San Ysidro apartment for weeks until he closed escrow on a home in Eastlake. He shut down his office in a Tijuana high-rise and now works from his American home.
“I had to change cities, houses, countries, offices,” he said. “It’s a life of constant fear.”
In the rolling hills of Eastlake -- only five miles from Mexico up California 125, the new South Bay Expressway toll road -- most of the gated mansions in the $2-million-to-$3-million range have been sold to Tijuana refugees, say real estate agents. Maids cross the border daily to work for families that have recently come north -- both in Eastlake’s mansions and in its lower-priced neighborhoods of large tract homes with red-tile roofs.
Though safely ensconced behind gates or in the cookie-cutter anonymity of manicured American suburbia, many people who leave Tijuana remain tethered to it by business.
Many continue to run their factories or businesses there from a distance, from nondescript office parks in Otay Mesa or Chula Vista. They monitor their employees via closed-circuit camera systems and shuttle messengers back and forth across the border with paperwork and cash.
If they must travel to Tijuana themselves, they take ample precautions -- varying their routes and driving junky cars that they hope will not attract attention.
“They’re running scared. They’re having to do clever things to not be seen crossing the border. They go in different clothes. They go in different cars,” said Father John P. Dolan, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Chula Vista. Dolan said six families in his parish have fallen victim to kidnappings in the last year.
Dr. Fernando Guzman, who was kidnapped in April, said he occasionally commutes by motorcycle across the border to his hospital near downtown Tijuana.
The prominent attorney armor-plated his SUV for $66,000. Another business owner wears a GPS tracking device hidden on his body so that in an emergency his family will be able to determine his location via satellite.
Still, any return to Tijuana is risky. About 30 people from the Chula Vista area who travel back and forth across the border have been kidnapped in the last 1 1/2 years while conducting business or visiting relatives in the Tijuana area, according to the FBI. Some have been killed.
Extraordinary security measures aren’t limited to visits to Mexico. Many families won’t tell even their closest friends their new addresses in San Diego County. Some parents with kids who carpool tell them to get dropped off a few blocks from home and walk the rest of the way.
Homeowners cast wary eyes on nosy landscapers, maids, busboys, members of their health clubs -- fearful that someone will pass along valuable information about them to kidnappers.
A lifestyle adjustment
Many emigres miss their old lifestyles in Tijuana. Accustomed to lives of privilege in Mexico, some had to downsize their tastes to afford the more expensive San Diego suburbs. Some traded customs homes for tract houses. Their social lives, which revolved around country club lunches and all-night parties, have been dialed down in their adopted country of early last calls.
Slowly, an emigre culture is taking root. Golfers tee up at the Eastlake Country Club instead of Tijuana’s Club Campestre. The Vega Caffe in the Eastlake Design District offers carne asada tortas with cappuccino shots. English isn’t an issue in most Eastlake stores, where signs are in Spanish and clerks are bilingual.
Power lunch spots such as Frida Restaurant and Romesco have filled the gaps left by Villa Saverios and Sanborn’s in Tijuana.
For many, Romesco has become the next best thing to an elegant night out south of the border. Its shopping center locale lacks the curb appeal of the Plascencias’ Tuscan-style restaurant on Sanchez Taboada Boulevard. But the fare is familiar: Baja-Mediterranean seafood, featuring olive oils and wines from the Guadalupe Valley.
Plascencia, who recently joined elite chefs at a West Hollywood culinary event called Tables of Ten, says his restaurant offers the kind of gourmet experience that his fellow refugees crave. “The people who come here miss the atmosphere of Tijuana,” he said. “They’re like us. They can’t go back very often.”
Before his infrequent visits to Villa Saverios, he has trusted friends scout the area for suspicious-looking people. He never stays long.
“I can’t play host anymore and say hello to guests,” he said. “I take a quick tour of the kitchen, walk the dining room and come back.”
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richard.marosi@latimes.com
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de27acbfcd6da9281754b32409ef4bf9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-07-na-fowler7-story.html | Watch out for that face in the crowd | Watch out for that face in the crowd
Tim Russert, Katie Couric or Larry King eventually may deliver telling blows of their own, but score Round 1 in the contest to extract the most provocative presidential campaign quotes to . . . Mayhill Fowler?
The 61-year-old self-described “failed writer” and amateur Web journalist helped create two of the most unexpected moments in the 2008 election -- most recently on Monday, when she recorded former President Clinton’s fiery denunciation (“slimy,” “dishonest”) of Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum.
That scoop came six weeks after Fowler rocked the Democratic race for president by reporting (from a “closed press” fundraiser in San Francisco) Barack Obama’s now infamous discussion of “bitter” small-town Americans who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
The latest incident cemented Fowler’s place as the unlikely face of the new-media revolution that is remaking presidential campaigns. Online videos can dominate the evening news. Or an unpublished novelist “with absolutely no journalism training” can alter the national debate.
In her first public remarks on Clinton’s outburst, Fowler attributed her success to persistence, serendipity and an acknowledged flouting of the old rules of mainstream journalism.
“Of course he had no idea I was a journalist,” Fowler said by phone from her Oakland home, recalling her close encounter with Clinton for “Off the Bus,” a citizen journalism project hosted by the Huffington Post website. “He just thought we were all average, ordinary Americans who had come out to see him. And, of course, in one sense, that is what I am.”
Fowler said she felt empathy for Clinton before and after he shattered the “elegiac” final hours of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign with his agitated statements.
“He is exhausted. It’s the end of the road. He realizes it might be his last day campaigning,” Fowler said in explaining Clinton’s three-minute eruption. “He does not have the impulse control he once had. And, at that time at least, he still could not understand or appreciate why Barack Obama is so popular.”
The Clinton swing through South Dakota began like many others for Fowler -- with long days scrambling after the candidate and prolonged nights filing dispatches “in my pajamas and pashmina in the business center of some Hilton Garden Inn.”
She was on hand when he addressed hundreds of voters in Milbank, waxing about what he said “may be the last day I’m ever involved in a campaign of this kind.”
Fowler left after the rally, then turned back on the longshot hope that she might be able to slip him her business card and request an interview with his wife, who was just days away from ending her campaign.
In the jostling crowd surrounding Clinton, however, Fowler dropped the card. She only managed a handshake and went blank -- her mind suddenly void of any worthwhile question.
“I missed my moment,” Fowler thought, discouraged. But Clinton, ever the ebullient retail politician, reached out a second time. Fowler’s mind flashed to the Vanity Fair profile, which accused Clinton of dirtying his legacy by running with unsavory friends and business associates.
“Mr. President,” Fowler asked, “what do you think about that hatchet job somebody did on you in Vanity Fair?”
A tape of the incident has Clinton describing the magazine piece with escalating anger, even as admirers seemed to grow uncomfortable and tried to steer the conversation to lighter ground.
Fowler, at one point, interjected that Purdum, the author, is married to onetime Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers. Clinton retorted: “Yeah, that’s all right. He’s still a scumbag.”
A man on the rope line tried to distract Clinton with a personal appeal. “I grew up in Hope too,” the fan said. “Hope, North Dakota.”
Clinton wouldn’t be distracted. He continued on about the magazine and Purdum: “Let me tell you, he’s one of the guys, he’s one of the guys that propagated all those lies . . . " Clinton ended the harangue by assuring, unpersuasively: “It didn’t bother me. It shouldn’t bother you.”
Fowler captured the whole thing on her candy-bar-sized digital recorder, which she says she held in plain view. She rushed to download the audio, slowed on her way to her hotel only by a state trooper in front of her who insisted on “going 78. I would have been going a lot faster than that.”
She has spent about a year reporting from the field for the “Off the Bus” project, which was designed to offer outsiders the chance to write about the candidates and their campaigns.
Fowler had become excited about Obama, so she filed her first dispatches from the Illinois senator’s campaign stops. Unlike traditional journalists, she openly reported her preference for Obama (while she occasionally tweaked him for arrogance or elitism).
Some Obama supporters became so angry over her posting of the “bitter” comments that they accused Fowler of being a Clinton operative. She says she received hundreds of angry e-mails.
Nonetheless, she said she will “certainly” vote for Obama in November, even though she now sees him as more flawed, like all candidates. “I don’t think I’m dazzled anymore.”
And fair warning to another candidate who might soon discover a tiny, unassuming woman with a question on the rope line.
“Next,” Fowler said, “I’m going out with McCain.”
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james.rainey@latimes.com
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3194e38b10db77a5a439eb2581bc6ac8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-08-fg-colombia8-story.html | Colombia says ammunition delivery to FARC thwarted | Colombia says ammunition delivery to FARC thwarted
A Venezuelan national guard sergeant will face “the full weight of national law” after being arrested in a remote border area, allegedly on his way to deliver 40,000 rounds of ammunition to Colombia’s largest rebel group, this country’s foreign minister said Saturday.
Sgt. Manuel Agudo Escalona, was arrested Friday with another Venezuelan and two Colombians in the eastern jungle state of Vichada with ammunition for AK-47 rifles destined for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the government said.
Foreign Minister Fernando Araujo said at a news conference Saturday that he had made contact with counterparts in Venezuela to “verify the identity of the group and who could be implicated. . . . There will be an investigation coordinated by both ministries.”
As of Saturday evening, Venezuela had made no official comment on the arrests.
The arms case is a potential source of additional tension between the two countries, led by ideologically opposed presidents. Colombia, whose president is a conservative strongly backed by the United States, has charged that leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has given “systematic and intentional help” to the FARC as it carried out attacks on Colombia from Venezuelan territory, calling that support a “crime against humanity.”
In March, electronic files found in the laptops of a slain FARC commander included messages that the Colombian government says indicated that Venezuela promised to supply the rebels with arms and a haven as well as political and logistical support.
Colombia recovered the FARC laptops after its aircraft and soldiers entered Ecuadorean territory March 1 in a raid that killed the rebels’ No. 2 rebel commander, known as Raul Reyes. The action sparked a regional crisis, and Chavez briefly sent tank battalions to the border with Colombia.
The content of the messages has not been corroborated, and Chavez later told Colombian President Alvaro Uribe at a meeting in Brazil that he has not given “the tiniest bullet” to the rebels.
Citing unidentified sources, Colombian news reports said the munitions recovered Friday had been stolen from a military barracks in the Venezuelan city of Valencia, but a spokesman for the Colombian special prosecutor, Mario Iguaron, said Saturday that he could not verify the reports.
The four suspects were brought to Bogota on Saturday for questioning. Araujo said the four would suffer “the full weight of Colombian law.”
Iguaron’s office said the capture was made possible by the arrest Thursday of a FARC operative, Hernando Gamboa Sanchez, believed to be the chief of security for a top-ranking rebel commander.
Racked by civil conflict for more than four decades, Colombia is a hub for arms trafficking. Leftist rebels, right-wing militias and drug traffickers acquire weapons here, often in exchange for the cocaine that they process and traffic.
In one raid last month, the Colombian National Police seized 293 AK-47s near the Venezuelan border that were allegedly destined for the Black Eagles, an emerging Colombian paramilitary gang.
In another seizure three days later, the Colombian army in Cali found 607 Chinese rifles that allegedly were intended to be delivered to a drug gang called the Rastrojos.
In April, Colombian forces uncovered a FARC arsenal near the Ecuadorean border that included 8,000 land mines and 2 tons of bomb-making materials.
The FARC is known to cast lines far afield in its efforts to buy arms. In March, U.S. undercover agents arrested a Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, in Thailand, accusing him of trying to sell missiles and other weaponry to police officers posing as FARC rebels.
Last June, reputed arms dealer Monzer Kassar was arrested in Spain as he allegedly prepared to complete a multimillion-dollar transaction to sell guns, ammunition, missiles and grenades to agents also posing as FARC operatives.
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chris.kraul@latimes.com
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7be509c6feb74e419568928d473628c2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-08-me-trafficdayone8-story.html | Isolated in our cars, but suffering together | Isolated in our cars, but suffering together
In this neighborhood, nobody knows your name.
There you are in the photograph above, crawling anonymously along a cheerless stretch of real estate known as the 110 Freeway at rush hour. The roads are slick with rain and cluttered with wrecks, and you’ve become a citizen of Stalled Nation, a community of the trapped. You’re having a quintessential Los Angeles moment, partaking of a civic ritual more widespread than voting or church, one of the few universal experiences in this segmented, far-flung metropolis.
If you’re seeking the city’s ever-elusive center, it looks exactly like this. It’s anywhere the tires are stopped dead, a thousand deep. As a motorist in Southern California, your average rush-hour speed has plunged from 26 miles per hour in 1980 to about half that today. High gas prices have thinned traffic in some places recently, but the improvement is unlikely to last. In L.A. and Orange counties, by one conservative estimate, you’re now delayed by rush hours 72 hours a year, about double the time you were 25 years ago.
That’s no small part of your waking life, yet you never get to know your neighbors, all the sufferers stacked up left and right, ahead and behind. You never learn why they’re taking up space on your freeway at this particular hour, when you urgently have to be someplace. Seriously, where are all these people going?
Like you, we were curious. So we found a spot near the city’s busiest freeway interchange -- the 110 at the 10, clogged by more than half a million cars each day -- to photograph the gridlock at exactly 7:30 a.m., dead-center of a Friday morning crush. We then tracked down as many drivers as we could -- running their plates through the Department of Motor Vehicles -- to find out what their stories might say about how we live, in a way that statistics alone cannot.
John Kannofsky inches south along the inside lane in his Chrysler PT Cruiser, deep into the 23-mile commute from his Highland Park apartment to his job at a charter school near Los Angeles International Airport.
An art teacher, Kannofsky, 49, wears a soul patch and combed-back, shoulder-length dark hair, and few situations shake his composure like the one he finds himself in right now. Scanning the tableau of stalled steel, he thinks: “What idiot made a wrong turn somewhere and got clipped?”
He left home early, as always, but by the time he crawls into the camera’s view, he’s been on the road for 45 minutes and he’s nowhere near school. He’s supposed to get his first-period students started on making cultural masks. If he doesn’t make the 8:30 a.m. bell, they will be stuck in the rain.
He’s already given up on the possibility of his usual nonfat latte at the Century Boulevard Starbucks. It’s the way he celebrates having made it most of the way to work, and he knows skipping it will leave him groggy and a little depressed.
He’d like to use his time on the clogged 110 to get a head-start on his work. But for that he needs his notebook, and his notebook’s in his shoulder bag, and his shoulder bag’s in the back seat, and despite heroic contortions -- one hand still on the wheel -- he can’t quite reach it.
Most mornings, the drive is just barely endurable. Except for rare drizzly days like today, he keeps his 2006 Cruiser’s sun roof open, easier here than in his native Virginia. The car also has satellite radio, which helps, and at the moment it’s purring with the cadences of the BBC World News.
He loves Los Angeles, mostly. In the last few weeks alone, he’s seen a Latin American art exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art, a Murakami show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, an avant-garde dance performance at UCLA, and flamenco dancing at El Cid restaurant on Sunset Boulevard.
Tonight, he’ll meet friends at Papa Cristo’s Greek restaurant in L.A. to dine on fried octopus and feta. He realizes how spoiled he is when he visits Virginia, where all he sees are miles and miles of chain restaurants, and where his best option is the buffet at his parents’ assisted-living home.
The price for living here? He’s paying it now. He tries not to dwell on how much time traffic steals from his life. He tries to think of it as a chance to reflect, to meditate, because it’s about the only free time he gets. Right now, he’s trying to observe all the buildings along the 110 that he’s never noticed before.
But he can’t help himself -- he picks up his cellphone to call his wife, Ursula, a florist, to remind her how lucky she is to have a five-minute commute. He tried taking the train to work, but it took three transfers and an hour and a half, and how would he run his evening errands?
His wife sometimes asks why he doesn’t get a job closer to home. The answer is there aren’t many union jobs for art teachers, and he’s not about to give up their $600-a-month rent-controlled apartment, which allows him to be a culture maven on a teacher’s salary.
Still, it’s gotten so that he gets home and just wants to sleep. There are streaks of gray in his hair. He can’t imagine how he’d manage if they had kids. “The only way to stay awake is to go out with people,” he tells his wife.
He has an agenda in advertising his suffering in traffic. He’s hoping to ward off any domestic chores his wife may require of him later. She’s on to him, of course, and hardly needs reminding of his plight. She replies, “I hope you have a good day, sweetie.”
An aqua-colored Toyota RAV 4 carries technician Carlos Paredes. He’s heading north after an overnight shift at his Torrance office, where he repairs laser printers.
The challenge now is to get home to Silver Lake -- a 20-mile drive -- to pick up his two sons and deposit them at nearby Marshall High in time for the first bell.
Like the teacher passing by on his left, Paredes, 43, feels the urge to call his wife. “Hang in there, I’ll make it,” he says into his cellphone.
On a day like today, Paredes is reminded of why he had to change his life. For 11 years, he roamed the city by day servicing copying equipment, gobbling junk food, racing from job to job. Now and then, the stress of battling gridlock induced headaches and the shakes. Then, on the 101 Freeway seven years ago, a pain in his chest was so frightening that he had to pull over. A stroke, the cardiologist said. He took a pay cut and went to the overnight shift, figuring a faster commute would be good for his health.
A sensible move. One stark study, published in 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that nearly one in 12 heart attacks was linked to traffic. Left unresolved was whether the culprit was stop-and-go car exhaust, which can starve the heart of oxygen, or stress, which spikes blood pressure, leading to strokes and heart attacks.
Now Paredes sees more of his kids. He coaches baseball after school, and he notices the harried looks on other parents’ faces. “They’re always fighting traffic. They’re always in a bad mood. Parents are constantly trying to beat the clock.”
He’s spent most of his life in L.A., watching the roads he cruised along almost 30 years ago grow steadily impassable. He’s watched the Staples Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Nokia Theatre rise over downtown, jamming the roads during games and concerts.
Still, he’s ambivalent. To him, construction cranes mean progress. They mean a city is doing well and providing jobs for people. “I know that we need all these businesses,” he says. “I can put up with it, as long as it doesn’t get any worse than it already is.”
His commute takes him past the $2.5-billion L.A. Live project, the centerpiece of a development that, when completed, will add more than 40,000 car trips a day to downtown’s crowded streets and freeways. When asked about it, he sounds resigned. “It’s gonna get worse,” he says. “You really don’t have much choice.”
His in-laws are here, and he’s raising kids here, so it’s not easy to leave. Plus, he bought his home 17 years ago at a good price, and he’s not able to pay $600,000 for a new one in the South Bay just to be closer to work. Ditch his car? He tried. It took three hours to reach work by bus and train.
His radio is tuned to KFI-AM (640), where host Bill Handel has been denouncing Berkeley’s homeless squatters. Handel, the most listened-to local talk show host in the country, rants regularly about traffic. But he is one of the beneficiaries of all this misery. A vast army of captive commuters has made Los Angeles the nation’s most lucrative radio market, an $890-million-a-year juggernaut.
As Handel’s voice rails from the radio, Paredes inches closer to home and his kids. They will be driving soon, and he’ll advise them to leave early and stay calm on the road. What more can a father say? “You just have to live with it,” he says. “You can’t change anything.”
For Markus Schmid, a native of Switzerland now motoring north in his 2001 Volvo wagon, the promise of the United States once shimmered in chrome and sang in speed.
He envisioned the wonderland of the car commercials, a nation of “open land and wide roads and freedom,” the perfect place to live out his fantasy of buying “a real American V8 car,” preferably a Ford Mustang.
When he moved to Southern California two years ago, he became rudely acquainted with gridlock culture, potholes and endless idling. He worried about contributing to global warming. He scuttled the muscle-car dream.
“Once I was here, I realized how stupid it is. It’s really just a waste of money and fuel,” says Schmid, 35. “You cannot even enjoy it. In the U.S., there’s really no point.”
Which is why he’s making his 38-mile morning commute in a practical wagon with 105,000 miles on the odometer. He listens to the Mark and Brian show on KLOS-FM (95.5), because it helps him with his English. During ads, he finds rock ‘n’ roll on JACK-FM (93.1).
In Zurich, he had a three-minute walk to work. On a good day here, it takes 45 minutes by car to get from his home in Venice to Monrovia, where he works for a company that makes special-effects fog machines. Today, getting there will take him two hours. “It’s hard for me to understand that there’s not a high pressure on the government to create public transportation,” he says.
He and his wife rent a house a block from the Pacific, which for a native of Switzerland feels like “vacation every day.” On weekends, they stroll to the beach and the farmers market.
He’s not giving that up, even though his office will soon move even farther from home. “It’s getting closer to the edge where I’d consider other options,” he says. “I would not do much more.”
Saleswoman Alexis Bilitch is nosing south through the drizzle in a 2003 BMW. She’s heading to Santa Monica, a 23-mile drive from her home in the San Gabriel Valley, for a seminar on “Effective Negotiating.” After an hour and a half, she’s not close to her destination.
During commutes, she has tried audio books and Spanish lessons but had trouble absorbing them. So she listens to talk-radio. All morning, she’s been listening to KABC’s Doug McIntyre, who is outraged that Sudan ordered a schoolteacher lashed for naming a teddy bear Muhammad.
Weather guy Capt. Jorge has explained that today there’s a wreck ahead, near Washington Boulevard, which accounts for the logjam. She pounds the steering wheel, thinking, “I can’t believe it. This is the worst.”
A couple of months back, when she had to attend a meeting in Orange County, she doubled the time MapQuest had estimated for the trip.
She was still 10 minutes late, which brought a swift rebuke from management. “I thought, ‘That means I have to plan for three hours if I’m going to go anywhere,’ ” she says. “You can’t plan in this traffic. It’s everywhere.”
A MapQuest spokesperson acknowledged that their algorithms don’t “currently have the ability to take traffic into account.” But the company is working on it.
To kill time this morning, Bilitch puts on her cellphone headset and calls her sister in New York City. She tells her how long she’s been crawling along. “And I’m not even near where I need to be,” she says. It’s a short conversation. Her sister, who has an appointment too, wishes her luck.
In his 1995 Toyota Camry, process server John Evans is struggling to get from his downtown office to a stakeout in West L.A. He’s hoping to thrust a no-travel order into the hands of a man about to leave town with his 6-year-old daughter. His caseload today will then take him to Encino, Burbank, Santa Ana, La Mirada, Long Beach, San Pedro and back across L.A. -- a circuit of more than 100 miles before he heads home to the Westside.
Evans, 34, hits the road early because he must find people who don’t want to be found, and he logs four to five hours a day in traffic he describes as “unbearable on any given day.”
All morning, Evans has been watching motorists cut each other off, stop abruptly and generally behave like lunatics.
To calm his nerves, he listens to HOT 92.3 FM, the oldies and R&B; station, which as he passes through downtown L.A. is playing the Dazz Band’s 1982 funk classic “Let it Whip.”
He calls his wife on his Bluetooth. They chat about their kids and about maybe grabbing dinner out tonight. But he has a lot of road to cover first, none of it clear.
Janet London, advancing haltingly in a Toyota RAV 4, has a 22-mile haul from her home in South Los Angeles to the Judicial Council of California in Burbank, where she works as an executive assistant.
It usually takes her about 45 minutes to get to work, and today, so far, she’s making average time. She’s absorbed in the conclusion of the thriller she’s listening to, “Obsession” by Karen Robards. Every week, she checks out a couple books on tape from the library. “That’s the only thing that keeps me from losing my mind,” London, 57, says. “Sometimes I don’t even know how I got where I’m going because I’m listening to the book.”
Californians yearn to fill the dead time in their cars, and so they are voracious consumers of audio books. One industry leader, Simply Audiobooks, says one in four of its subscribers lives here.
Whatever her distractions, London describes traffic in L.A. as something that “completely controls your life,” and adds, “That’s probably the most stressful thing in my life, just getting to and from work.” Some days, getting home takes two hours. “The 110 is always jammed for no reason. No accidents, nothing going on, just too many cars on the freeway. I can practically count on one hand the number of times the 110 has been clear.”
She’d take mass transit if she could, but she doesn’t know how she’d get to Burbank from her home. “I don’t know what the solution is. Things are definitely getting worse.” She’d like to live closer to work, but she owns her own home and can’t afford the Burbank area.
What keeps her in L.A. are her grown daughters. She hopes they’ll follow her to North Carolina, where she’d like to retire in a few years. “I don’t want to be 75, 80 years old and living in this crowded city.”
Behind the wheel of a silver 2001 Lexus RX 300, accountant Diane Duncan is enduring a 40-mile slog from her home in Marina del Rey to a client in Monrovia. With its all-wheel drive and front-and-side air bags, the SUV makes her feel safe.
When the windows are up, Duncan feels a world removed from the freeway’s industrial bleats and roars, and she can catch every word of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” playing now. “If you listen to rock ‘n’ roll, it amps you,” she explains. “You want to drive fast, and you can’t.”
She will make slow, steady time till just past the Interstate 5 turnoff, where the cars stop dead. This puzzles her because she never sees the wreck that causes it -- thereby illustrating, as it happens, the kinetic forces that make traffic like today’s so hideous: For every minute an accident blocks the road, four minutes of delay result, as cars stack up far behind it. Even if a car is towed off the highway 30 minutes after it crashes, the snarl can last for two hours.
She’s been driving in L.A. for 20 years, and her current job -- visiting clients all over town -- keeps her on the freeway at least 12 hours a week. “Before, it seems like there were times there wasn’t traffic,” she says. “Now, it doesn’t matter if it’s the middle of the night or the middle of the day.”
When she travels to other states, she’s reminded of why L.A. is home. In Indianapolis once, she asked the locals what there was to do, and “all they could do is list the names of the bars.” Here, she hears classical music at the Hollywood Bowl and Disney Hall, and she lives a mile from the ocean. Worrying about traffic “doesn’t get me there any faster,” she says. “It’s part of being here, and I guess I just accept that.”
She bought the Lexus knowing that she’d be stuck in it for large chunks of the week, a motive that carmakers are keen to capitalize on, rolling out new fleets with ever-slicker creature comforts. The manufacturer has equipped current models with “things that make the commute more palatable,” in the words of one dealer -- voice-dialed phones, auxiliary plugs for MP3 players, 30-gigabyte hard drives, even live traffic-navigation maps.
And, of course, there’s that all-important place to put a drink. Duncan is pleased with the capacious cup holder now cradling her coffee mug. She has already logged hard time as she passes through downtown, however, and the mug is empty. She could use a refill.
This is a snapshot of the humanity moving through one swath of overused asphalt in the City of Angels at exactly 7:30 on a drizzly Friday morning. It’s a transient village of chrome and steel, anxiety and resignation and grudging choices. It’s about to dissolve, this configuration of souls that will never reproduce itself in just this way again. When the minute ends, everyone remains strangers. It’s now 7:31 a.m., and in the drizzle, in the shadow of downtown’s skyscrapers, another neighborhood is forming.
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christopher.goffard @latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
$12 billion
The estimated yearly financial loss due to traffic congestion for motorists and businesses in greater Los Angeles.
72 hours
The average amount of congestion-related delay per year that a motorist experienced in Los Angeles and Orange counties in 2005.
67%
The percentage of highways in Orange County’s urban areas moving at less than 35 miles per hour during rush hour.
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79a00d657f9d528b183583ecbfecca1f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-09-et-winslow9-story.html | Surfing shamus | Surfing shamus
WAVES breaking just a few feet away, the detective novelist Don Winslow was sitting on the patio of a Laguna Beach cafe with a view of the ocean below, looking like a private eye trying to avoid detection. A compact, wiry man whose intense green eyes flashed under a baseball cap, Winslow, 54, was talking about the strip of the coast that runs from San Diego through southern Orange County.
“What I think is emerging is a different kind of society,” said Winslow, “based on the amazing ethnic variety. San Diego County no longer has any ethnic majority. Look around you,” he said, pointing across the diners, most of them digging into fish tacos, who included a mix of Asian, Pacific Islander, Latino and Caucasian.
“It’s also developing its own language, with little bits of Hawaiian and Filipino and Spanish, especially when you mix the language of surf culture, which has always been fun to me,” he continued. “I wanted to write in that new language, about that new scene.”
Winslow’s new novel, “The Dawn Patrol,” is set in that milieu, with a Japanese cop nicknamed Johnny Banzai, a Hawaiian drug mogul named Red Eddie, a collection of migrant workers from Mexico and a cast of Anglos that includes the macho strip-club owner Dan Silver and the uptight lawyer Petra Hall. Although the story never gets more than a few miles from the ocean, it spans a wide world, indeed.
The book’s core is a collection of five friends who, despite working jobs that sometimes bring them into conflict with each other, meet at sunrise each morning to take the early waves as the Dawn Patrol. Among them is Boone Daniels, an ex-cop with a beat-up van who runs a private-investigation office above a surf shop.
Echoes of McGee
BESIDES the setting, the book has little in common with the often brooding “surf-noir” novels of Kem Nunn. A cult figure for years, Nunn became nationally known after his novel “John From Cincinnati” was turned into a (short-lived) HBO series, directed by David Milch. Daniels is more a West Coast equivalent of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, the beach-bum P.I. who lived on a Fort Lauderdale houseboat.
“The Dawn Patrol” -- which could be a breakthrough for Winslow, who has garnered praise from James Ellroy and Ian Rankin without becoming well known -- seems an inevitable step for the journeyman writer who’s about a decade into a career setting noir novels in Southern California. And though he’s lived for the last few years in the ranch country an hour inland from San Diego, the book was a way for this swamp Yankee to get back to his love of surfing and the sea.
With its short chapters, comic characters, hairpin plot turns and snappy dialogue, the novel can feel at times lighter than air. But it includes a considerable amount of violence, a heartbreaking subplot and its share of sleazy characters.
“One reason I find SoCal so interesting is that there’s so much beauty -- and that’s real,” Winslow said. “But there’s another layer underneath it that’s not so pretty. One thing I wanted to do was run those two tracks simultaneously -- without backing off of either.”
Making of a storyteller
WINSLOW’S hometown, next to the Rhode Island fishing village of Matunuck, was the kind of place where poverty was close -- if you don’t study hard, parents used to tell their kids, you’ll be sweeping fish guts off the plant floor.
But he retains an affection for those years as well: Winslow calls a “khaki-collar” upbringing -- he’s the son of a Navy noncom father who was “a great raconteur” and a librarian mother who encouraged him to read widely -- the best possible preparation to become a writer.
His parents would rent a lakeside cottage for a month each summer, inviting his dad’s Navy friends to come visit as long as they would toss aside any privilege of rank.
“You’d wake up and there would be five sailors on the floor, and there were scuba divers and Marines and Navy nurses. So you had these storytellers around you. I learned very early that if I was quiet and kind of hid, they’d pretend not to know I was there. So I had these stories from around the world -- and I always thought it would be the best thing in the world to be, if I could, to be a storyteller. But it was a bit of a long and winding road to get there.”
Winslow moved to New York in the late ‘70s to help a friend manage a series of movie theaters as a way to finance his literary ambitions.
When the theater job fell through, he turned to something that offered, at least, a steady paycheck. He became a private investigator, working in the back alleys off Times Square -- “you’d think you were walking on seashells, but they were crack vials” -- and busting pickpockets in movie theaters. That, he said, was fun, but it didn’t seem to be leading anywhere.
That was followed by a master’s degree in military history, itinerant years leading safaris in Kenya and hiking trips in China’s Sichuan province and, eventually, gigs as a consultant and investigator who made frequent trips to the West Coast. He was writing novels, starting with “A Cool Breeze on the Underground” in 1991, set amid London’s punk scene and written in tents and buses all over the world, but wasn’t making much money.
“I started to come out here because of arson,” Winslow recalled. “This was in the ‘90s and everything that people had bought on margin, when things were fat and happy, they were burning down.”
Working as an investigator meant picking up some technical knowledge -- an accidental fire has one point of origin, but a building burned to the ground will have several -- as well as a lot of paperwork and fact checking.
“The really fun stuff was finding ways to explain the science to a jury in a way they could understand. That’s really what they wanted me for -- as much as a storyteller as an investigator.”
That narrative became important, since the visual evidence of an arson case was usually a black, ashy photograph. “It’s hard to photograph a burned structure. If you’re trained to look at it, you can see a certain burn pattern that tells you one thing but not another. But how do you communicate it?”
By the mid-'90s, fascinated and inspired by views of the Pacific, he moved out here with his wife, Jean, and infant son. “We lived in hotels and residence inns, in Orange County and San Diego, for close to three years, and it was great.” He wrote and surfed -- not well -- at beaches like San Onofre and Laguna.
Along the way, he kept writing until, in 1997, his novel “The Death and Life of Bobby Z” -- a thriller written on the Metrolink train between San Juan Capistrano and downtown L.A. -- took off. Warner Bros. bought the rights to it one day, and Knopf a few days later. “And my life changed, literally, overnight.”
Finally, after six books, he could quit his day job.
Film in the works
HE HAS also spent some time writing screenplays, and his 2006 novel, “The Winter of Frankie Machine,” is currently in pre-production, with Michael Mann directing and Robert De Niro in the lead.
“I like his brevity, I like the way he can cover a lot of time in a few pages,” said Southland novelist T. Jefferson Parker, a friend and admirer. “He’s so light and so nimble with the storytelling. He gets this high-velocity storytelling going, seemingly effortless, though I know there’s a lot of effort involved in writing that perfectly. He knows what to leave out and when to get offstage.”
So far, it’s been a fruitful season for surf books.
Spring has seen David Rensin’s “All for a Few Perfect Waves,” about surfer Miki Dora; Bob Greene’s “When We Get to Surf City”; and “Breath,” a coming-of-age novel by Tim Winton, one of Australia’s most decorated novelists.
As he drove and walked past some of SoCal’s legendary surf spots -- Salt Creek, Dana Point Harbor, once home to the fearsome “Killer Dana” wave that crashed into a wall of rocks and took surfers with it -- Winslow talked about surf lore, about how shape is often more important than a wave’s size, about how angry he gets to see construction and development at his old favorite spots. He was so into this history that he offered a “stop me when you’ve had enough” before one of his miniature lessons.
But it’s clear that Winslow is more interested in the characters and their argot than the technical or even physical side of surfing. His larger-than-life characters are among his novel’s pleasures.
Winslow’s P.I., Daniels, seems like the kind of laid-back dude whose most deeply held principle is that everything tastes better on a tortilla. Over the course of the book, he shows himself to be tormented, heroic and complicated.
“I wanted a lead character who embodied the ocean,” Winslow said. “So in the sense that if you look out there at it now, it looks very placid, but that can change in a heartbeat. There’s something going on underneath.”
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scott.timberg@latimes.com
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5f3557cc4e87e8f3bb41676eb6c0a3ff | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-09-fg-beauty9-story.html | Pakistani men are sitting prettier than ever | Pakistani men are sitting prettier than ever
The facialist at a popular salon here couldn’t help being a bit nervous. Her client that afternoon was a particularly demanding one, certain to quiz her unrelentingly about the latest anti-wrinkle creams and pore-reduction potions.
But such exactitude, she said, is typical of her male customers.
Pakistan may be a macho, tradition-bound society with conservative Muslim mores, but the male-beauty trade is booming here. Urban professional men, following a trail blazed by their counterparts abroad, are waxing and highlighting and plucking and primping like never before.
The trend appears to be a durable one, even in tough economic times. Banker Nauman Zafr said that although things were little tight these days, he had no intention of relinquishing his monthly manicure- pedicure.
“I like to look good and feel good,” he said languidly, relaxing in a “nail bar” while his nails were buffed to a pearly pink sheen. “I’d definitely give up other things before this.”
Attention to male glamour is apparent in the public sphere, where the country’s new political leaders have demonstrated an affinity for looking their best.
Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the senior party in the coalition government, has stopped dyeing his mustache a harsh black, letting it grow in silver-gray.
“Mustache-dyeing is seen now as a little passe -- a natural look is more subtle and sophisticated,” said Nadia Furqan, who manages Nirvana, a popular day spa and salon in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
Nawaz Sharif, head of the governing coalition’s other main party, returned last year after nearly a decade in exile to lead his party in parliamentary elections. He and his politician brother, Shahbaz, had receding hairlines when they left; on their return, both had luxuriant locks, leading to reports of hair transplants.
“They used to be called ‘the Bald Brothers,’ ” said a journalist in Lahore, the eastern city that is the Sharifs’ power base. “They’re looking different these days. Better.”
Not content with raiding their wives’ cosmetics cases, Pakistani men are spending more on beauty products of their own, shopkeepers say.
“They buy everything -- hair products, skin products -- and they want to talk and talk and talk about which one is the best,” pharmacist Riaz Assam said. “They take it all very seriously.”
The beauty business is not without its perils. Nirvana closed its doors for more than two weeks last summer after clerics at a radical mosque nearby spearheaded a campaign against perceived vice that included the abduction of several masseuses from another establishment.
In still-rare unisex salons, female stylists tend to be either foreigners or Pakistani Christians, because few Muslim families would want their daughters to have a job that brought them into such close contact with men. Some are cautious about disclosing their livelihoods to outsiders.
For the growing male clientele, attention to appearance has entered previously uncharted realms, some not only expensive but also painful. Lately, hirsute but image-conscious men have been getting their backs waxed regularly.
“Once they start, they don’t want to go back to the way they were,” Furqan said.
Preening, of course, is not an entirely new phenomenon among Pakistani males. Many long-standing grooming practices have cultural and religious permutations. After returning from the hajj, some conservative older Muslim men dye their beards with henna, which turns gray hair flaming orange. Pashtun tribesmen often line their eyes with kohl. Even in Taliban circles, men sometimes sport dainty sandals with a slightly raised heel.
But the metrosexual lifestyle that has taken hold in big cities such as Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore is probably a product of globalized pop culture, a growing middle class -- and female expectations.
“If I like it when a woman looks pretty, I should make an effort too,” said Munir Imtiaz, who was booking a manicure. “At least, that’s what my girlfriend tells me.”
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laura.king@latimes.com
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2e49373edc7eb5da15fa986dddecc0f9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-09-me-finegan9-story.html | Arranger for Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller | Arranger for Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller
Bill Finegan, an architect of the big band sounds of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller who later traded in commercial success to co-create the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, which produced music that still stands as some of the most experimental of the swing era, has died. He was 91.
Finegan died Wednesday at a Hospital in Bridgeport, Conn., from complications of pneumonia.
In 1938, Dorsey bought Finegan’s score for “Lonesome Road” and played it for Miller, who offered the young arranger a job. Between 1938 and 1942 Finegan wrote more than 300 arrangements for Miller, including some of the band’s biggest hits: the classic “Little Brown Jug,” “Sunrise Serenade” and “Song of the Volga.” Finegan also wrote arrangements for the films “Sun Valley Serenade” in 1941 and “Orchestra Wives” in 1942, and had begun a lifelong profession as a teacher.
One of his students was Nelson Riddle, celebrated arranger for Frank Sinatra.
“Bill’s arrangements for Glenn [Miller] demonstrated that great originality and inventiveness are possible even within the restrictive confines of a highly stylized band, which the Miller Orchestra was,” Riddle said in the book “September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle.”
When they met, Riddle was a young trombone player, intent on becoming a professional musician. Finegan encouraged him to leave the trombone behind and focus on writing.
“I cared a lot about what I did, and I think I transferred that to Nelson,” Finegan said in “September in the Rain.” “I once saw a documentary on the artist Chagall. In it, Chagall said, ‘Never say “That’s good enough.” ’ That’s what I think I taught him.”
Finegan worked intermittently for Dorsey and wrote arrangements for the film “Fabulous Dorseys” in 1947. He also wrote for bandleaders Horace Heidt and Les Elgart.
But Finegan bristled at the restrictions placed on the writing by the industry and bandleaders. In 1952 he teamed with another leading arranger, Eddie Sauter, to create a band that would explore and expand the concept of the jazz orchestra.
Time magazine called the group “the most original band heard in the United States in years.” Their albums include “New Directions in Music,” recorded in 1953, “The Sons of Sauter-Finegan” (1955) and “Adventure in Time” (1956).
The band lasted about five years and became known for its rich harmonics, extraordinary voicing and varied instrumentation. In addition to the standard instruments, the orchestra included kazoos, toy xylophones and recorders.
“They came up with this idea to supplement the big band with all this extra orchestral instrumentation that would allow them to expand their writing and give them more color to work with,” Finegan’s son, James Finegan, who is also a musician, told The Times. “They had very specialized musicians, very high level musicians.”
Humor, fun and adventure came with the music. When the orchestra’s record label required them to play show tunes, the group responded by playing them on kazoos.
Born April 3, 1917, in Newark, N.J., Finegan grew up in a family of musicians. Like his parents and siblings, he played piano. While still in high school in Rumson, N.J., Finegan formed a band and began writing for it.
In the early 1930s the band played on Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour, a popular radio program that featured a talent competition.
Finegan’s band won and was hired to tour the U.S. and Canada, performing in Bowes’ vaudeville-style shows on a bill that might include a dog act, an opera singer and somebody playing a classical piece on the piano while wearing mittens.
“The humor of it all never escaped him,” James Finegan said.
During World War II Finegan served in the Army, and after his discharge he spent time in Europe and studied at the Paris Conservatory; he also studied with composer Stan Wolpe.
In the years after the breakup of the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, Finegan wrote music for commercials and taught at the University of Bridgeport and elsewhere.
He also wrote and arranged, notably with vocalist Carol Sloane, saxophonist Sonny Stitt and the Mel Lewis Ensemble in the ‘80s. His most recent work includes arrangements for Warren Vache’s “Don’t Look Back” and for the Gotham Wind Symphony in 2007.
“My father is obscure because he never was interested in the limelight,” James Finegan said. “He was a behind-the-scene guy until the end. He just cared about his work.”
Finegan, who was a widower, is also survived by a daughter, Helen Dzujna, of Shelton, Conn., and three grandchildren.
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jocelyn.stewart@latimes.com
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642a67e60f68b24b8118f96ac6af4b9a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-09-me-obscene9-story.html | Trial to gauge what L.A. sees as obscene | Trial to gauge what L.A. sees as obscene
If all goes according to plan, an otherwise stately federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles will be converted into a makeshift movie theater this week, screening a series of graphic -- many would say vulgar -- sexual fetish videos.
At issue is how a jury will define obscenity in a region that boasts its status as the capital of the pornography industry and at a time when technology has made the taboo adult flicks of a generation ago available to a mainstream audience.
Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs says the videos he sells are works of art, protected under the Constitution. Federal prosecutors contend they are criminally obscene.
The prosecution is the first in Southern California by a U.S. Department of Justice task force formed in 2005 after Christian conservative groups appealed to the Bush administration to crack down on smut.
For jurors to determine whether Isaacs’ work is obscene, they will view hours of hard-core pornography so degrading that in one film, an actress cries throughout, prosecutors said in court papers.
But if jurors find that any of the four videos at issue in the case have any “literary, scientific or artistic value,” the work is not legally obscene, according to a 1973 Supreme Court ruling.
“All they’re going to do is turn on a DVD machine and hope the jury is going to be so shocked and disgusted and offended that they’re going to throw me in prison,” said Isaacs, 57, a native of the Bronx. He said he hopes that jurors will be shocked -- he’s a self-described “shock artist” -- but also that they will see artistic value in the work.
The portly defendant, who sports a ponytail and goatee, produced and starred in one of the videos. He contends that the sex in the movie is incidental to the art. It’s merely a marketing tool to drive sales of the videos on the Internet, he said.
In a statistic that some may find every bit as shocking as his work, Isaacs said he was selling about 1,000 videos per month at $30 apiece before being raided by the FBI early last year. The number has since dropped to between 700 and 800 per month, but they still generate enough money to pay the rent on a house with a pool in the Hollywood Hills.
Isaacs predicted that many jurors would not be able to stomach viewing the movies, some of which feature acts of bestiality and defecation.
“It’s going to be a circus,” he said of the upcoming trial. “I think I’d freak out if I had to watch six hours of the stuff.”
Jury selection is expected to begin today. Presiding over the trial will be Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Kozinski was assigned the case as part of a rotation in which he and other appeals court judges occasionally oversee criminal trials in addition to deciding appeals.
His involvement in the case may be a stroke of luck for Isaacs. That is because Kozinski is seen as a staunch defender of free speech. When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court’s Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed.
“I did some rabble-rousing about it,” Kozinski said in a brief interview last week. He said he was made aware of the issue when a law clerk researching a case was banned from accessing a gay bookstore’s website.
“I didn’t think the bureaucrats in Washington should decide what the federal judiciary should have access to,” the judge said. “I thought that was incredibly arrogant for them to decide on their own.”
Kozinski declined to comment on any aspect of the Isaacs case.
Isaacs said he would testify as his own expert witness at trial and planned to lecture jurors on how perceptions of art have changed over the years. There was a time, he said, when the works of authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence were called obscene.
The point, Isaacs said, “is do we really want to throw artists in jail in America?”
Kenneth Whitted, the Justice Department prosecutor assigned to the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, declined to be interviewed for this report.
According to the Justice Department’s website, the task force “is dedicated exclusively to the protection of America’s children and families through the enforcement of our Nation’s obscenity laws.”
The task force has won convictions in more than a dozen cases, the vast majority resulting from plea bargains, according to case summaries provided by the department. Only a few defendants have elected to fight the charges at trial. Punishment in most cases included some prison time, ranging from one to seven years, as well as stiff fines and forfeiture of proceeds.
At a time when even hard-core pornography is available in major hotels, through cable companies and on the Internet, prosecutors have focused their efforts on particularly outrageous material, often involving sex with animals and defecation.
Most of the cases were brought in relatively conservative areas of the country, five of them in Texas.
Whether jurors in Southern California have more lenient views on obscenity will be tested at Isaacs’ trial.
Federal agents raided Isaacs’ Koreatown office in January 2007. Isaacs said he was told by authorities that the investigation was initiated after a local person complained, and was eventually turned over to the task force in Washington.
He is now facing charges related to the importation, transportation and distribution of obscene material in connection with four videos he was selling over the Internet, including the one he produced. Isaacs admits to producing that film and to distributing all four.
But he denies that they’re obscene.
“That’s for the jury to decide,” he said.
He said that prosecutors have made several overtures inviting him to take a plea in the case, but that he has refused every time.
Pleading guilty would be admitting that he was just another pornographer, he said.
“If I get convicted and go to prison now,” Isaacs said, “I go as an artist.”
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scott.glover@latimes.com
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8503552a91542b6c8e0c1189d48cc047 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-09-na-ohio9-story.html | A GOP machine sits silent | A GOP machine sits silent
As the architect of Ohio’s ballot measure against gay marriage, Phil Burress helped draw thousands of conservative voters to the polls in 2004, most of whom also cast ballots to reelect President Bush. So Burress was not surprised when two high-level staffers from John McCain’s campaign dropped by his office, asking for his help this fall.
What surprised Burress was how badly the meeting went. He says he tried but failed to make the McCain team understand how much work remained to overcome the skepticism of social conservatives. Burress ended up cutting off the campaign officials as they spoke. “He doesn’t want to associate with us,” Burress now says of McCain, “and we don’t want to associate with him.”
That meeting and other run-ins with conservatives, some Republicans say, have revealed the depth of the challenge facing McCain: mollifying Republican constituencies that have distrusted many of his policy positions, in order to build the machinery needed to push voters to the polls in November.
If McCain tried to gather his volunteers in Ohio, “you could meet in a phone booth,” said radio host Bill Cunningham, who attacks the Arizona senator regularly on his talk show. “There’s no sense in this part of Ohio that John McCain is a conservative or that his election would have a material benefit to conservatism.”
Were McCain running on Bush’s 2004 strategy, fractures like these might be devastating. Bush and his chief political hand, Karl Rove, built their winning plan on exciting conservatives with hard-line, often religious-themed rhetoric and policy proposals, such as backing the same-sex-marriage ban and giving churches federal funds to perform social services.
But as the 2008 general-election campaign begins, it is clear this year will be different. Both McCain and presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama hope to energize core party activists, but each also hopes to win votes in the political center -- from the independents, moderate women, blue-collar whites and Latinos who tend to swing from one party to the other, and who are turned off by highly partisan rhetoric.
For McCain, who has spent four months since securing the GOP nomination stockpiling money and planning the fall campaign, these tasks may prove difficult to balance. As his run-ins with some conservatives here show, burnishing his image as an independent-minded Republican has sometimes left bruised feelings among reliable friends in the GOP base, who in the past have helped the party as voters and volunteers.
On the ground
Some Republicans say they are also troubled that the McCain campaign has not been faster to build a get-out-the-vote operation in Ohio, a state that is again expected to be a key battleground. These Republicans, who have a close-up view of events, worry that McCain will be overpowered by Obama’s ability to motivate activists.
“I’m going to be very honest with everyone in this room,” said Hamilton County GOP Chairman Alex Triantafilou as he threw his hands in the air during a speech last week at a Republican club dinner in suburban Cincinnati. “We are a little bit frustrated with the ability of the McCain campaign to get going.”
This time four years ago, Triantafilou recalled, he had already taken leave from his county government job to work full time for Bush’s reelection. “By June 1, we were humping hard on the presidential campaign,” he said. While waiting for the McCain team, the county party has launched a voter registration drive of its own.
Volunteers such as Triantafilou were crucial to the Republicans’ 2004 strategy, which entailed sorting through voting histories, church affiliation data and consumer information -- such as magazine subscriptions and grocery store purchases -- to identify millions of potential new conservative supporters. Then volunteers would visit or call these people and urge them to vote.
Many political analysts say the strategy played a large role in Bush’s reelection. Bush won Ohio, for example, by about 120,000 votes -- roughly equal to the combined margins of victory in the GOP-leaning communities around Cincinnati, where the voter-identification plan was used heavily.
This time, Republican officials say, they are preparing to use these “data mining” techniques to reach voters, but will point the strategy at an additional segment of the electorate: the independent and swing voters whom Obama is targeting too.
For McCain, the challenge is to win enough of these voters to make up for a potential lack of passion among conservatives, and he is betting that his image as an independent and his moderate views on issues such as global warming will help. McCain is positioned to “find a new layer of voters . . . that’s probably not available to the average Republican,” said Mike DuHaime, a McCain campaign advisor.
In Ohio, McCain will target blue-collar workers outside Cleveland and Youngstown, and in the state’s Appalachian counties in the southeast, who turned their backs on Obama in his primary contest with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
GOP officials also say that new voter-identification technology will help them make up for any falloff in conservative zeal. For example, volunteers will survey voters on special Internet phones that automatically insert their answers into the party’s massive database, called “Voter Vault.” The phone calls are used to identify potential new supporters by asking a series of questions about issues and candidates. In the past, volunteers and party staff would have spent hours typing information into the database.
Officials said the system was tested in a number of local elections last year, including the Canton, Ohio, mayoral race.
A new angle
The net that Republican officials are casting for potential supporters is wider than in the past. Party leaders in recent weeks have met with evangelicals, hunters, African Americans and Latinos, as in the past. But they have even started conversations with representatives from the gay and lesbian community.
“These meetings have been fascinating,” said Ohio GOP spokesman John McClelland, “and we’re getting new views.”
And Republican officials say that they have in recent days begun installing state and regional directors, and that offices are beginning to open this month in Ohio and other battlegrounds.
Democrats, too, are adjusting their strategy in Ohio and elsewhere, as they examine how to shape the general election around the unusual biography of the country’s first black presidential nominee.
The state Democratic Party last year conducted a major poll on voter attitudes that included questions on race and gender, in anticipation of a black or female nominee. Party officials said those results have helped them create a plan to target independents and conservatives, which entails recruiting neighborhood-level volunteers with local credibility to make the case for Obama. That means finding white volunteers to help in rural and exurban counties that went for Bush in 2004 and for Clinton in the primary.
In addition, about 10 Obama staff members are at work in Ohio registering voters, with an emphasis on African Americans and other core supporters. And the campaign has begun talks with a top strategist for Ohio’s popular Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, who was an early Clinton backer.
But as both campaigns aim for voters in the less ideologically driven center, McCain may have the tougher challenge in retaining voters in his party’s base at the same time. A falling-out he had with Cunningham, the radio talk show host, shows the problem.
Cunningham’s anger traces back to February, when he was asked to introduce McCain at a rally in Cincinnati. In warming up the crowd, the talk show host repeatedly mentioned Obama’s middle name -- Hussein -- in a way that some found disparaging.
When he learned of Cunningham’s introduction, McCain apologized and said: “I absolutely repudiate such comments.”
McCain’s move left some hard feelings, and Cunningham is now attacking him regularly on the airwaves. “I think he was doing what he needed to do for his national audience, but it didn’t do much to endear him to local people, how he treated Cunningham,” said Republican activist Christa Criddle, who volunteered for Bush in 2004 but has decided to focus her time this year on local elections.
She added: “A lot of people were not very happy.”
Burress, who led the successful campaign for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage, said he would vote for McCain, largely because he said an Obama victory would lead to new liberal Supreme Court justices and more emphasis on abortion rights. And he suspects that McCain’s coolness toward conservatives could be a calculated gamble to win centrists.
But he will not work directly for McCain, and he suspects that many conservatives will stay home on election day.
“They think we have no place to go [other than the Republican Party], and in some respects, that’s true,” Burress said. “But it’s going to take a whole lot more than that for him to win.”
Wait and see
Unlike Bush before him, McCain might be forced to build his campaign without volunteers like Lori Viars, who lives in exurban Warren County and runs the Family First Political Action Committee. Four years ago, she spent months working on the Bush campaign. This time, she’s holding back, waiting to see if McCain picks a “strong pro-family, pro-life conservative” as his running mate.
“In 2004, it was six days a week. I didn’t see my family,” she said.
“I’ve got to be really motivated to do that again.”
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peter.wallsten@latimes.com
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ab0f41e14281e1c8b08bf827b0824a3c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-10-me-homicides10-story.html | Surge in slayings is rare, police say | Surge in slayings is rare, police say
In the wake of 14 killings that occurred across Los Angeles County this weekend -- most within the city of Los Angeles -- authorities attempted to reassure the public Monday that the spike in violence was rare and no cause for alarm.
Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger said that while homicides were up 8% so far this year, overall violent crime -- as well as shootings -- was down.
He called the recent spike in violence that left 10 dead in the city “troubling but an anomaly.”
“It was a very challenging weekend,” Paysinger told reporters at Parker Center. “But there is no reason to panic. This is a spike we periodically see in this city.”
Killings were also reported in Inglewood, Long Beach and two cities patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department: Baldwin Park and Walnut Park. Also, an hour after the 2:30 p.m. news conference Monday, two people were shot and wounded near the junction of the Metro Blue and Green lines in Willowbrook, according to the Sheriff’s Department.
Most of the victims died from gunfire, including Michael Smith, 20, who was killed in a drive-by shooting Saturday near 95th Street and Vermont Avenue after escorting a woman to a bus stop.
Similarly, Johnny Ray Lopez was approached Sunday afternoon in Panorama City by a man on a bicycle who asked Lopez where he was from and then fired a handgun multiple times into his midsection. Family members say Lopez had no gang ties.
Others died in domestic disputes. In one incident, a 20-year-old North Hollywood man was hit over the head with a bottle and stabbed with a knife Saturday night. Police said the suspect was angry that the victim was dating his mother.
Another man was shot in the mouth and chest in downtown Los Angeles. That assailant was allegedly angry the victim was flirting with his girlfriend.
LAPD officials say the homicide rate this year has fluctuated. In March, it was 27% higher than the previous year. So far this year, the homicide rate is 8% higher than the same period last year, with 175 killings compared with 162 last year, according to the LAPD.
Paysinger said the last time killings reached the double digits over a weekend was in January, amid gang clashes in Watts and northeast Los Angeles. Beyond those incidents, there are no clear patterns emerging from this year’s figures, authorities say.
UC Irvine professor George Tita said that despite the recent spikes, the trend toward overall reduced violence appeared to be holding. “There’s no common thread linking them,” Tita said of the slayings. “With respect to policing, these [killings] are tough to predict, understand and intervene in.”
But on the streets of the northwest Valley and South L.A., some residents say gang activity -- a frequent common denominator -- is getting worse.
Along the 8400 block of Dorrington Street in Panorama City, where Johnny Lopez was gunned down, neighbors say such violence is new to them.
Lynn Dumaop, a laboratory assistant who lives at Truesdale Street and Dorrington, said her children saw Lopez being shot and ran to help him.
Her 14-year-old son saw six blood spots on Lopez’s white T-shirt, heard his breathing slow, took his pulse, which was fading, and called 911.
“My kids grew up here, and this is the first time we heard gunshots,” said Dumaop, who has lived in the neighborhood with her husband and parents for more than a decade.
After the shooting, she told her 16-year-old daughter to stop taking her evening walk.
“Gang members, when they see a person in the street, they go for them,” Dumaop said.
Security guard Apai Pinwattana, 56, moved to the block a decade ago from El Monte. He first noticed problems during the last month, when gang graffiti began appearing on his neighbor’s walls and fences. Many of his neighbors are fellow immigrants from Thailand, Mexico and Korea, who work as nurses, mechanics and letter carriers.
Pinwattana said police cannot solve the problem. He wishes neighbors would call a community meeting, as his former neighbors did after shootings and other violence in El Monte. “Because it never happened before, we have not had a meeting,” Pinwattana said, but, “the neighbors have to help each other first,” before turning to police.
Jesus Torres, 16, a junior at Cal Poly High School, lives on Dorrington and said he has learned to be wary of possible gang members who drive by him on the street. After the shooting, his father told him to stop jogging after dark.
“He didn’t want me to be mistaken for the wrong person,” Torres said as he walked past the site where Lopez was shot.
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molly.hennessy-fiske @latimes.com
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andrew.blankstein @latimes.com
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639ba3b36d6b5ae01d0322fbb8f07b1a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-10-na-fbi10-story.html | Audit faults FBI’s immigrant screens | Audit faults FBI’s immigrant screens
The FBI system for performing background checks on immigrants has become so overloaded since the Sept. 11 attacks that thousands of legal immigrants are waiting years to get into the United States or obtain citizenship, according to findings from an internal investigation released Monday.
The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that the FBI’s National Name Check Program is working with outdated technology, and that poorly trained personnel and overworked supervisors are falling far behind. As of March, there was a backlog of 327,000 requests for names to be validated, some of which had been pending for up to three years.
The report also said the breakdown in the name checks means that potentially thousands of criminals are slipping through the system.
“The name-check process can result in lengthy delays and the risk of inaccurate information,” said Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. He warned that improvements to the system, particularly with the government’s ongoing effort to search for potential terrorists in this country, should be “a priority.”
The FBI must vet all immigrants before they can get citizenship or a green card. The bureau has been criticized by lawmakers and immigration rights groups for slowing the immigration process.
John Miller, the FBI’s head of public affairs, said in a statement that the inspector general’s recommendations are being implemented, and that FBI officials will work hard to catch up.
He noted that more than 4 million name-check requests from various law enforcement agencies were made in the 2007 fiscal year alone, and that about 86% were processed within 60 days. The FBI is making 77,000 name checks a week -- completing nearly 97% of all requests submitted in the last five years, he said.
Nevertheless, Miller acknowledged that the 2001 terrorist strikes jammed the system, especially when federal immigration officials asked the bureau to rerun 2.7 million names for more thorough reviews after the attacks on New York and Washington.
“This unexpected deluge of immigration-related name checks overwhelmed existing resources,” Miller said. “As a result, the NNCP was not able to address the increasing demand.”
In his report, Fine acknowledged the extra burden posed after Sept. 11. Before the terrorist attacks, the system only searched the FBI’s main files to see if individuals might be connected to criminal activities. After the attacks, the searches were broadened to encompass information from all sorts of law enforcement databases, adding to the time required for each background check.
“This change was designed to detect derogatory information about individuals who may not have been identified as the direct subject of an FBI investigation, but who are connected to subjects with criminal and investigative histories,” Fine said.
The name-check program and its FBI fingerprint database are the largest in the world, containing prints and background histories on more than 50 million people.
The system was taxed all the more after Sept. 11, and the inspector general’s investigation turned up processes that are “inefficient and untimely, rely on outdated technology and provide little assurance that pertinent and derogatory information is being retrieved and transmitted.”
As of March, 371 employees were working on name checks, an increase of 30% since November. By the end of this fiscal year 300 employees more will be assigned to the system.
But Fine worried that without improvements, “limited training, supervision and quality control measures may result in a higher potential for name-matching errors.”
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richard.serrano@latimes.com
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8b70bec498672ef584ac0171891d1882 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-10-na-immig10-story.html | Bush widens worker checks | Bush widens worker checks
The Bush administration, in an aggressive new effort to keep illegal immigrants out of the workforce, on Monday ordered all companies doing business with the federal government to begin ensuring their employees can legally work in the U.S.
The order will require thousands of firms to use a government system called E-Verify to check workers’ Social Security numbers. The system has been voluntary for private firms but mandatory for government agencies.
The policy, which initially applies to new hires, eventually could affect millions of federal contract workers nationwide whose jobs range from serving cafeteria food to launching NASA spacecraft. The step is one of several the administration planned after Congress failed last year to pass an overhaul of immigration laws.
“The federal government should lead by example and not by exhortation,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has encouraged firms to use E-Verify.
Groups advocating immigration restrictions have embraced E-Verify as a way to weed out illegal workers. But it has been criticized by business groups and immigrant advocates because errors in the Social Security database can lead to red-flagging legal residents.
And with the rapid expansion of federal contracting under President Bush, some critics questioned whether the order would be workable.
“I just don’t know how the administration is going to enforce this,” said Paul C. Light, a New York University professor and federal contracting expert who said such outsourcing had grown by 70% under Bush. “It’s a very large number and very difficult to track. Who is responsible for making sure the sub-sub-sub-contractor is using E-Verify?”
E-Verify is already a success, Chertoff said, predicting that the executive order would affect “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers.”
Chertoff made the announcement during an appearance with Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez in which they touted administration progress in enforcing immigration laws and beefing up border security. They also urged Congress to pass an immigration overhaul including guest worker programs, enforcement, and some accommodation for illegal immigrants currently in the United States.
“We cannot neglect our economic security, and that is exactly what we’re doing by neglecting comprehensive immigration reform,” said Gutierrez, who worked with Chertoff and a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the 2007 legislation.
E-Verify is now used by more than 69,000 companies, with about 1,000 firms signing up weekly for the free Internet-based system.
Many companies have enrolled because of stepped-up federal immigration raids. In industries that traditionally rely on immigrant labor, such as meatpacking, companies understand that not using E-Verify can prompt immigration officials to take a closer look.
Chertoff said E-Verify cleared 99.5% of qualified employees automatically. But in 2006 the Social Security inspector general found discrepancies in 17.8 million records for citizens and legal immigrants that would create a “significant workload” to correct.
Lawmakers and other critics warned that forcing the more than 200,000 federal contractors to join E-Verify could overwhelm the Social Security Administration and create havoc for legal workers.
“As the administration requires more employers and workers to move into E-Verify, it should at the same time ensure that the system does not impinge upon U.S. citizens’ fundamental right to earn a living,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), head of the House subcommittee on immigration.
Firms doing business with the government risk losing their contracts if they break federal rules. Some business executives worry the new requirement could add expenses.
“There’s concern about increased costs and delays in hiring brought about by inaccuracies in the database,” said Neal J. Couture, executive director of the National Contract Managers Assn.
Timothy D. Sparapani of the American Civil Liberties Union argued that E-Verify was “not real immigration enforcement” because the system could not detect applicants who used documents stolen from legal workers. He predicted the system would prompt more identity theft by illegal immigrants.
“American workers’ identities are essentially going to become a black market commodity,” Sparapani said.
Still, many were pleased by Monday’s action. “With today’s announcement by Secretary Chertoff, we are diminishing the ability of illegal immigrants to find employment in the United States,” said Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-Carlsbad).
Added Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates restricting all immigration: “It’s an excellent idea, long overdue.”
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nicole.gaouette@latimes.com
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c1c04038580248e9b14ee7ffe04bb312 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-11-fi-soap11-story.html | State alleges Whole Foods failed to warn of carcinogen in soaps | State alleges Whole Foods failed to warn of carcinogen in soaps
California’s attorney general has filed suit against four manufacturers, including Whole Foods Market Inc., accusing them of failing to label soap products that contain a potentially cancer-causing chemical.
The suit, filed by Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown in Alameda County Superior Court late last month, didn’t name the specific body washes, gels and liquid dish soaps that allegedly contain 1,4-dioxane. Under Proposition 65, companies must label products that contain chemicals known to the state to cause cancer.
The four companies are Whole Foods, Avalon Natural Products, Beaumont Products Inc. and NutriBiotic.
“We’ve been talking with all four of them and we’re hoping that the end result of this is an effort to reformulate to get the dioxane out of the product,” Deputy Atty. Gen. Susan Fiering said Tuesday. “We think that would be the best possible result for everyone.”
Eighteen other companies were also warned that some of their products contained the chemical, Fiering said. She added that consumers shouldn’t become too alarmed.
“Using a shampoo or a bottle of body wash by itself doesn’t pose a risk,” she said. “It’s only when these products are used over a lifetime.”
Libba Letton, a spokeswoman for Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods, said the company believed its products were safe.
“We have conducted our own investigation into the allegations that some of our products contain 1,4-dioxane and do not believe these products represent a health risk or are in excess of California’s Proposition 65 safe harbor level for 1,4-dioxane,” Letton said. “We’re cooperating with the attorney general’s office to resolve the claims as quickly as possible.”
The other companies couldn’t be reached for comment.
Each violation carries civil penalties of as much as $2,500 a day.
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andrea.chang@latimes.com
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493d88d78b09c674a0107ffae6d8abae | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-11-hy-throttle11-story.html | Inconvenient truths about motorcycles and smog | Inconvenient truths about motorcycles and smog
I’D LIKE to begin this column with an apology. I’m sorry for ruining your day.
This story is about emissions. More specifically, it’s about the surprising level of emissions spewing from on-road motorcycles and scooters. In California, such bikes make up 3.6% of registered vehicles and 1% of vehicle miles traveled, yet they account for 10% of passenger vehicles’ smog-forming emissions in the state. In fact, the average motorbike is about 10 times more polluting per mile than a passenger car, light truck or SUV, according to a California Air Resources Board comparison of emissions-compliant vehicles.
For those of you who are wondering why I’m being such a killjoy, my reason is this: I’ve been hearing from an increasing number of readers who want to know if two-wheelers, which consume far less fuel, are also smog busters. Because scientific questions tend to come with complicated answers, I thought I’d do my best to explain what pollutants a gas-powered motorbike emits and why.
Motorcycles and scooters are, on average, about twice as fuel efficient as cars. Compact and lightweight, their internal-combustion engines do a better job of converting fuel into energy that makes the vehicle move. But extracting more energy from the fuel has a downside. It produces greater amounts of a smog-forming emission called oxides of nitrogen.
Oxides of nitrogen are one of three pollutants the Environmental Protection Agency and the Air Resources Board measure to see whether vehicles meet acceptable emissions levels and can be sold legally. Smog-forming hydrocarbons -- unburned compounds in fuel that escape through the tailpipe, fuel lines and gas tank -- are also measured, as is carbon monoxide. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, isn’t measured by either agency, but motorcycles are generally better than other vehicles in this regard since they use less fuel per mile.
As with other passenger vehicles, there are technologies to offset motorcycle emissions, such as catalytic converters, but those technologies tend to be too big, too heavy or too hot to fit on a motorcycle and work as effectively as similar systems on larger, enclosed vehicles that have more space to accommodate them. That’s why the EPA and the air board are more lenient on bikes than they are on other passenger vehicles.
“The emissions picture [for motorcycles] is fairly grim,” said John Swanton of the Air Resources Board, “but we think it’s fair for where motorcycles are today.”
Emissions standards for motorcycles are already more forgiving than they are for cars, light trucks and SUVs. Not only are motorcycles allowed to emit more than cars, they are also tested at lower speeds, which pollutes less. And motorcycle manufacturers only have to ensure that their vehicles of 179 cc and above meet governmental emissions criteria for the first 18,600 miles of a bike’s life, compared with 150,000 miles for cars.
Five years ago, the EPA tightened its emissions standards for on-road motorcycles with a two-tier system, the first of which tightened requirements for the 2006 model year. The second, even stricter phase kicks in for 2010.
California is the only state in the country with its own emissions standards, which are the same as the EPA standards except they’ve been fast-tracked to kick in two years earlier. In effect, the stricter standard has already been met for many of the on-highway motorcycles on the market because any 2008 model year bike that is sold in California already meets the EPA standard for 2010.
Right now, there are no plans for the air board or the EPA to further tighten motorcycle emissions requirements because:
* Motorcycles account for such a small portion of vehicle miles traveled.
* There haven’t been enough advances in motorcycle emissions technologies to enable further pollution reduction to any significant degree.
* There are other, even bigger polluters to deal with, such as diesel trucks, construction equipment and non-emissions-compliant products from China.
Noncompliant Chinese vehicles have become such a pollution issue in California, in fact, that the Air Resources Board has just added a new motorcycle emissions facility at its Haagen-Smit Lab in El Monte to test them. The board estimates as many as 20,000 all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes and scooters are shipped into California from China each month, many of them with emissions that are at least 10 times higher than the state’s requirements.
Long story short: Motorcycles, even small ones, are more polluting than Hummers, but it’s the best that can be done for now. If you want to make a difference, consider an electric two-wheeler for your next bike or a gas-powered model with fuel injection and a 3-way catalytic converter.
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susan.carpenter@latimes.com
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c7994aad0c46182454d4024cf996645b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-12-et-book12-story.html | When the literary sci-fi and movie worlds collide | When the literary sci-fi and movie worlds collide
IN “The Reel Stuff,” Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg have gathered an eclectic collection of fantasy and horror stories gone Hollywood that offers an opportunity to examine how these speculative tales were adapted for the screen.
The results are not always pretty. In many cases, the originals supersede their celluloid successors. It is also a great pity that the editors have failed to cough up the names of the screenwriters who savaged some of these gems. But this is, after all, what the Internet Movie Database is for.
Seminal stories like Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel” and Harry Bates’ “Farewell to the Master” are mysteriously absent. The inclusion of George R.R. Martin’s excellent novella “Sandkings” is something of a cheat; it kicked off the 1995 incarnation of TV’s “The Outer Limits.”
But on the whole, this book -- which was originally published in 1998 and has now been reissued in an expanded edition -- provides a reliable litmus test for those wondering whether a story or a motion picture is more convincing.
Some of the pieces here -- John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (which inspired two versions of “The Thing” and an obscure Christopher Lee flick named “Horror Express”), Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic,” Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West -- Reanimator” -- suggest a relationship between fiction and film that is little more than conceptual.
In most cases, this is just as well. Campbell’s talky 1938 novella, with its quaint fixations on anti-gravity and its needless pulp bravado, hasn’t aged particularly well. Lovecraft’s serial, while striking in places, was disowned by the author himself.
But other stories raise a different set of questions. Why did anybody think William Gibson’s giddy but incomprehensible “Johnny Mnemonic” could be turned into a movie? A story with a swastika embedded into the text and sentences like “The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension” don’t exactly scream quality film material, and the infamously awful result is an unintentional laugh riot. (It’s disheartening to know that Gibson wrote the screenplay.)
Then there are the true catastrophes: great stories that were transformed into execrable movies. Edward Khmara and Wolfgang Petersen should be confined to a barren planet for cheapening the moral complexity of Barry Longyear’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella, “Enemy Mine.”
Longyear’s tender take on companionship was given a treacly “don’t die on me” treatment, and its poignant ending was replaced with a more literal resolution involving an actual mine run by third-party scavengers, presumably because the film’s producers felt the author’s metaphoric complexity was beyond the audience.
One of “The Reel Stuff’s” best stories, Dick’s Cold War-vintage “Second Variety,” was adapted into the 1995 film “Screamers” by Dan O’Bannon and Miguel Tejada-Flores. Perhaps because the times were different, the movie shifted Dick’s dystopian premise -- which pitted humans against advanced technological weaponry -- to the terrain of a silly mining war.
Although the film works somewhat well as camp, the text is far creepier, with Dick describing a mysterious boy with arms and legs “like pipe cleaners, knobbly and thin.” The movie never quite captures the story’s atmosphere of paranoia and betrayal.
The piece here that has probably fared best on the big screen is Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden,” which was transformed by Bernard Rose into the underrated 1995 horror movie “Candyman.”
Reading the original, we see just how much made it into the film. Although the setting shifts from London to a Chicago housing project and the structure has been given a major overhaul, one is struck by how much Rose maintained: the photography-driven thesis, the protagonist’s fractious marriage, much of the imaginary killer’s dialogue and even a brief dinner scene demonstrating class disparity.
But one also sees that even the young Barker was taken with film as a medium. (He has gone on to direct a number of movies.) In one telling passage, he describes “the polished lens of his spectacles reflected only the plate of pasta and chopped ham in front of him, not his eyes.” Rose did not take advantage of this.
What all this suggests is that no matter how good the story, something is inevitably surrendered during the course of adaptation. And yet, in bringing together these stories, Thomsen and Greenberg have provided invaluable context, continuing the important conversation about how fiction of any stripe is transformed to film, for better or worse.
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Edward Champion hosts a cultural website at www.edrants.com.
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0d55b6c66d8b3e335dbb15e4f24b4785 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-12-fi-schmidt12-story.html | Search engine aims to help papers | Search engine aims to help papers
Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that the Internet search leader hoped its recently acquired advertising service DoubleClick would aid newspapers as they struggled to corral more online revenue.
“It’s a huge moral imperative to help here,” Schmidt said at an event hosted in San Francisco by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick’s system for serving up online display ads could generate “significant” revenue online for newspapers.
Still, he acknowledged the boost probably wouldn’t be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google completed its $3.2-billion acquisition of DoubleClick in March after an extensive antitrust review that focused on whether the deal would give the combined entity too much power over the $40-billion online ad market.
Google also has a financial incentive to bolster newspapers because the stories, pictures and other content that they distribute online creates more opportunities for the company to make money from advertising links that appear daily on millions of Web pages.
But footing the bill to gather news and other information has become a more daunting task in recent years as advertisers have shifted more of their budgets to the Internet in an effort to connect with consumers who are increasingly eschewing newspapers and other traditional media.
The shift has been particularly painful for newspapers, which have been laying off hundreds of workers and trimming other costs as their revenue crumbles.
Newspaper publishers also are boosting their online revenue, but so far those efforts haven’t been nearly enough to offset the decline in print advertising. Last year, for instance, the U.S. newspaper industry’s overall ad revenue fell by 8% to $45.4 billion, according to the Newspaper Assn. of America.
In contrast, Google’s revenue last year rose 56% to $16.6 billion, widening the company’s lead as the Internet’s most profitable business.
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ac7bc2533395537507fa0539c6b89964 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-12-me-kozinski12-story.html | Porn trial in L.A. is halted | Porn trial in L.A. is halted
A closely watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court was suspended Wednesday after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.”
In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as “funny” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.
Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.
Kozinski is one of the nation’s highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.
After publication of an latimes.com article about his website Wednesday morning, the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site. Tuesday evening he had told The Times that he had a clear recollection of some of the most objectionable material and that he was responsible for placing it on the Web. By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.
“Yale called and said he’s pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it,” Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to Abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. “I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don’t remember putting some of that stuff there.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed concern about Kozinski’s website.
“If this is true, this is unacceptable behavior for a federal court judge,” she said in a statement.
Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and has known Kozinski for years, called him “a treasure of the federal judiciary.” Gillers said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was “seriously negligent” in allowing it to be discovered.
“The phrase ‘sober as a judge’ resonates with the American public,” Gillers said. “We don’t want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people.”
Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would “harm his reputation in many quarters” but that the controversy should die there.
He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, “that’s a transgression of another order.
“It would be very hard for him to come back from that,” he said.
Kozinski has a reputation as a brilliant legal mind and is seen as a champion of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.
The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the trial of filmmaker Ira Isaacs in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appellate judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars, and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.
Isaacs is on trial for distributing sexual fetish videos, featuring acts of bestiality and defecation. The material is considerably more vulgar than the content posted on Kozinski’s website.
The judge said he didn’t think any of the material on his site would qualify as obscene.
“Is it prurient? I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I think it’s odd and interesting. It’s part of life.”
Before the site was taken down, visitors to https://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: “Ain’t nothin’ here. Y’all best be movin’ on, compadre.”
Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski’s essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.
The sexually explicit material on the site was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women’s crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear.
Kozinski told The Times that he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest on his website years ago.
“People send me stuff like this all the time,” he said.
In turn, he said, he occasionally passes on items he finds interesting or funny to others.
Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself. In the other, two women are sitting in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair and genitalia. Behind them is a sign reading “Bush for President.”
“That is a funny joke,” Kozinski said.
The judge said he planned to delete some of the most objectionable material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was “degrading . . . and just gross.” He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.
Before suggesting that his son might have been responsible for posting some of the content, Kozinski told The Times that he, the judge, must have accidentally uploaded the cow and shaving images to his server while intending to upload something else. “I would not keep those files intentionally,” he said. He offered to give a reporter a demonstration of how the error probably occurred.
The judge emphasized that he never used appeals court computers to maintain his site.
The presence of copyrighted music files on Kozinski’s site raises other issues.
More than a dozen MP3 tracks were listed, and they were neither excerpts nor used to illustrate legal opinions, which experts said might have qualified their copying as “fair use.” The artists included Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic.
Uploading such files could violate civil copyright laws if friends or members of the public visited the site and downloaded the songs, according to attorneys who have litigated file-sharing cases for both copyright holders and accused infringers.
Even if no one downloaded the songs, just making them available might run afoul of the law, said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which often argues the other side of such issues.
Late last year, three of Kozinski’s Circuit Court colleagues noted in a ruling that “the owner of a collection of works who makes them available to the public may be deemed to have distributed copies of the works,” a violation of copyright law if done without permission.
“For him to actually be held liable would take some further investigation, but I think it’s possible,” McSherry said. “It’s a strange story. It’s surprising to me.”
Kozinski was not asked in the Tuesday interview about the music files, and he could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.
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scott.glover@latimes.com
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Times staff writers Joseph Menn, Andrew Blankstein, Ben Welsh and Eric Ulken contributed to this report.
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083bdf676ab270f1486a62873ff2fd3e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-12-me-rauch12-story.html | Coach led Oakland Raiders to Super Bowl | Coach led Oakland Raiders to Super Bowl
John Rauch, the former Georgia quarterback who coached the Oakland Raiders to a berth in the second Super Bowl, died Tuesday at his home in Oldsmar, Fla. He was 80.
His wife, Jane, said Rauch died in his sleep, possibly because of a heart problem.
Rauch was 33-8-1 in three seasons as the Raiders’ coach, from 1966 to 1968. He also was head coach of the Buffalo Bills for two years.
“Our hearts go out to his family, who we knew well,” the Raiders said in a statement. “John Rauch gave us several great years as an assistant and head coach for the Oakland Raiders, and he took us to our first Super Bowl in 1967. They were memorable years for the Raiders, and they will never be forgotten and they should not be forgotten.”
Rauch was a Raiders assistant coach for three years before he was named to follow owner Al Davis as head coach after Davis became commissioner of the American Football League.
“Any time you follow Mr. Davis as head coach, everybody will have all eyes on you watching what you can do,” said Raiders defensive backs coach Willie Brown, who played for Rauch in 1967-68 on his way to becoming a Hall of Fame cornerback. “John did quite well, no question about it.”
Brown said Rauch proved he was willing to serve his players on and off the field. “When I got traded to the Raiders, he was the head coach, and my wife got sick,” Brown said. “This was training camp. I said, ‘Hey, coach. I have to go home. My wife is sick. She has nobody out here; she doesn’t have a car. I have the car.’ So he called his wife, and she took my wife to the hospital. It’s the little things like that that stick in my mind.”
Davis hired Rauch as an assistant coach in 1963. Rauch’s promotion to head coach occurred three years later.
Rauch, who had John Madden and Bill Walsh as assistant coaches, led the Raiders to a 13-1 record in 1967 and a berth in the Super Bowl, where they lost to Green Bay. Rauch was named American Football League coach of the year. He led the Raiders to a 12-2 record in 1968 but left to coach the Bills in 1969, with Madden replacing him as Raiders coach.
“I had a problem with management there,” Rauch said of the Raiders in a 1999 interview with the Tampa Tribune. “When I got an opportunity to go someplace else, I took it. Whether I made the right move remained to be seen.”
Despite having a team built around star running back O.J. Simpson, the Bills went 7-20-1 under Rauch. After leaving the Bills, Rauch coached the Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League. He was also an assistant coach with Philadelphia, Atlanta and Tampa Bay in the NFL and with the USFL team in Tampa Bay.
Rauch was born Aug. 20, 1927, in Philadelphia. He was a four-year starting quarterback at the University of Georgia from 1945 to 1948 and the first player in college football history to start four consecutive bowl games. He set the NCAA record with 4,044 career yards passing while leading Georgia to a 36-8-1 record and two Southeastern Conference championships.
He was the second pick in the 1949 NFL draft, but the Detroit Lions traded Rauch to the New York Bulldogs for running back Doak Walker, the No. 3 pick from Southern Methodist. Rauch played three years before becoming an assistant coach at four schools, including Georgia from 1955 to 1958.
Rauch, inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2004, retired from football in the ‘80s and worked in insurance.
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news.obits@latimes.com
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7f573bc4372203ded40a549dbbc380dc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-12-sp-heisler12-story.html | If league indeed is rigged, it’s not doing it very well | If league indeed is rigged, it’s not doing it very well
Where insanity happens.
Trying to judge the impact of last summer’s Tim Donaghy scandal, I recently called around to assess the reaction of the congenitally suspicious core audience . . . the gamblers.
It turned out there was no impact.
The Donaghy blockbuster, the latest story that seemed to presage The Death of the NBA, quickly faded away in what turned out to be a great season for the league.
“My gut feeling,” says Bruce Marshall, associate editor of the Gold Sheet, “is it didn’t change NBA betting one way or the other.”
In other words, it looks as if gamblers accepted the notion that Donaghy was what the league insisted he was, a rogue.
However, there was one wrinkle that was pure NBA.
One local bookmaker, asking to remain anonymous since bookmaking is illegal, said a lot of NBA bettors grumble about conspiracies -- while continuing to bet on NBA games.
“They’re betting on games they think may be fixed?” I asked.
“They’re trying to figure out which way the league is fixing it,” the guy said, laughing.
This just confirms what I’ve always known:
Everyone connected with the NBA from the league office to the owners, coaches, players, entourages, mascots, fans and, of course, press people, is out of his gourd.
Just how this ongoing conspiracy theory attaches itself specifically to the NBA -- and only the NBA -- has never been explained.
NFL officials are part-timers who can call holding on any play. Baseball umpires have personal strike zones. College basketball is almost as hard to officiate as the NBA game and, as its history of point-shaving scandals shows, easier to corrupt.
All have ongoing conflict with officials . . . but only in the NBA is it perceived as part of a wider conspiracy.
Every baseball team has umpiring crews it hates. Managers kick the ground, remove the bases and get ejected, but the next day everyone starts over without any talk of a plot.
The skepticism with which the NBA is perceived stems from the league’s image as a perennial mutt.
In the ‘50s it was derided as a “YMCA league,” in the ‘60s as “bush.”
In the ‘70s, it was the league that was obliged to try to market predominantly African American players to white fans.
Then after race declined as an issue in the NBA’s golden age with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in the ‘80s and its zenith with Michael Jordan in the ‘90s, along came hip-hop, the Internet and worldwide tabloid journalism.
The assumption is always that the NBA is endangered and has to get the best matchup.
Worse, it’s assumed by all participants, coaches, players, etc., who never stop working the referees . . . even as they insist, as Lakers Coach Phil Jackson and Celtics Coach Doc Rivers did Wednesday, the system is totally honest.
Actually, the NBA has long been on solid footing, now getting $925 million in annual rights fees from its network partners to baseball’s $670 million.
The most famous urban myth is the “frozen envelope” in the first NBA lottery in 1985, supposedly enabling Commissioner David Stern to deliver Patrick Ewing to the hometown New York Knicks.
Amid annual speculation that young stars would be sent to glamour teams, David Robinson then went to San Antonio, Shaquille O’Neal to Orlando, Tim Duncan to San Antonio, Yao Ming to Houston, LeBron James to Cleveland and Greg Oden to Portland.
The Knicks, the league’s tattered flagship franchise, never again drew a pick higher than No. 5.
The NBA actually bends over backward to avoid even the appearance of doing anything wrong . . . amid ever-increasing accusations it’s fixing everything.
Let’s put it this way: If it is fixing anything, it’s doing a really lousy job.
Small-market teams from San Antonio, Utah and Indiana have appeared in seven of the last 12 Finals along with crowd-pleasers such as the Detroit Pistons (twice), New Jersey Nets (twice) and Cleveland Cavaliers.
Meanwhile, the league was proving its impartiality by taking draconian action against glamour teams.
In 1997 with the Knicks leading their second-round series with Miami, 3-2, Stern suspended so many of them after the Heat’s P.J. Brown tackled Charlie Ward, they had to sit out in shifts to have enough players for Games 6 and 7.
Four Knicks -- Ewing, Allen Houston, John Starks and Larry Johnson -- were suspended just for leaving the bench.
The Knicks lost.
Not to suggest the learning curve isn’t all you could hope for, all around, but it just happened again last spring.
The Phoenix Suns, who had just won in San Antonio to tie their second-round series, 2-2, saw Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw suspended for leaving the bench during a “fight” that was actually just players milling around after the Spurs’ Robert Horry hip-checked Steve Nash into the scorer’s table.
The high-scoring Suns, the most entertaining team in the NBA, then lost Game 5 at home, got their players back and lost Game 6 in San Antonio.
It’s hard for me to imagine the league rigging a matchup. On the other hand, I’m not in the business of assuming what can happen but of trying to learn what did.
What I can’t believe is that the NBA could fix something like that and get away with it. Legal whizzes that these guys are, they’re not that slick.
We hear a lot about what goes on in the office . . . like it wasn’t Stern who suspended Stoudemire and Diaw but NBA vice president Stu Jackson, after which Stern noted that people were always telling him not to micromanage everything and look what happened.
Or that second-guessing of the referees after Game 4 of the Lakers-Spurs series this season came from Stern, not Jackson, part of the new “transparency.”
Now we’re in the throes of the usual lemmings rush into the sea after Donaghy’s latest allegations of referees manipulating Game 6 of the 2002 Lakers-Kings playoffs series in the Lakers’ favor, or as ESPN.com headlines had it, “Season Shaken . . . Finals Shadow . . . League is inviting suspicion.”
Of course, if Donaghy doesn’t have something more tangible than a Lakers-Sacramento box score from 2002 and a directive to watch moving screens in the Dallas-San Antonio series in 2005, this could go away as fast as it did last summer.
I still love this game, even if it’s hard to watch while waiting for the sky to fall.
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mark.heisler@latimes.com
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2e94eab87df613e63de61cb15a37a2e8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-12-sp-nbatv12-story.html | Game 3 draws highest TV ratings since third game of 2004 Finals | Game 3 draws highest TV ratings since third game of 2004 Finals
ABC’s Tuesday night broadcast of the Lakers’ first win of the NBA Finals generated a preliminary 9.2 rating and drew about 14.5 million viewers, the network said Wednesday. Early ratings data for the third game of the series with the Boston Celtics showed a 44% jump over the third game of last year’s San Antonio-Cleveland broadcast.
Tuesday night’s game was ABC’s highest-rated and most-watched NBA Finals broadcast since Game 3 of the 2004 Finals, when the Lakers played the Pistons in Detroit. Ratings for Tuesday night’s game were noticeably higher than any game during last year’s lackluster series, but they fell short of the third Finals broadcast in 2004 that drew a 10.5 rating and 16.2 million average viewers.
Nonetheless, ABC credited the ratings boost from the Lakers’ 87-81 victory with helping it to “win the night” among all television networks -- including the 18-to-49-year-old males who remain a top demographic for advertisers.
Through three broadcasts, the NBA Finals are averaging 13.8 million viewers, which is a 52% increase over the same period last year. Tuesday’s Game 3 scored a 28.6 household rating in L.A. and a 23.3 rating in Boston.
Adam Silver, the NBA’s deputy commissioner and chief operating officer, described ABC’s Finals ratings as healthy given the decrease in prime-time viewers since 2004. But he also said that the NBA is delivering consumers to its advertisers and sponsors through the Internet and mobile devices.
“Even if you stick just to television, ABC is handily winning the night, which is the most important measure in broadcast television,” Silver said. “And if you compared today’s NBA TV ratings to 2004, they’re winning with a margin that’s greater than it was in 2004.”
The NBA’s media rights contracts give its television partners rights to push game highlights and other content onto the Internet and constantly evolving mobile devices. “Over time, that’s going to continue chopping away at ratings on conventional network TV,” Silver said.
ESPN on Wednesday said that its online NBA section drew about 5.6 million page views on Tuesday night, or a 67% increase over last year’s third game. ESPN’s NBA section has averaged 5 million page views, or a 79% increase, over the first three contests.
The NBA also is benefiting from increased fan interest in Asia, Europe and Latin America, where, despite time zone differences, the league is tracking increased television ratings and growth in the number of fans who are tracking NBA action online.
“We clearly need a new metric other than the conventional Nielsen rating,” Silver said.
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greg.johnson@latimes.com
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9220392b42c9ac2c71b0e8379c13ccee | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-13-a2-correx13.s2-story.html | For the Record | For the Record
Baseball: An item in Thursday’s Sports section about the New York Yankees’ new stadium gave its cost as $1.3 million. The cost is expected to be $1.3 billion. Also, an item about Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine said he throws right-handed. Glavine throws left-handed.
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8d267aecd339689a2e7d6e5e00568ce8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-13-ed-kozinski13-story.html | Free country | Free country
Judge Alex Kozinski’s statements about the stash of sexually explicit images he collected and that the public (until this week) could view on his website have been varied, although not necessarily inconsistent: He thought the site was for private storage and offered no public access (although he shared some of the material on the site with friends). People have been sending him this stuff for years (implying that it just accumulates, like junk mail). He might accidentally have uploaded the photos and videos when intending to upload something else. His son did it.
There’s a different statement we’d like to hear from him, and no, it’s not an apology, an expression of regret or even an explanation. It’s this: “So what?”
Not everyone may like it, but pornography is freely available on the Internet, whether it be from a commercial site dedicated to adults-only material or from the personal site of the chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Any adult has, and ought to have, the right to view those sites and to download those photos and videos -- subject, of course, to the strictures of copyright law. People who don’t want to see such images can, and should, avoid them.
Scolds who argue that judges should uphold a higher standard of decorum than the common citizen and should somehow be prevented from engaging in such private activity as gathering subjectively amusing or even appalling smut should recall that the 1st Amendment is not limited to high-minded endeavors.
The controversy about the site, to which Kozinski blocked public access after a story by Times reporter Scott Glover, would be less engrossing were the judge not so highhanded when holding forth on judicial propriety or taking apart a legal argument. The story might have a higher profile on TV and radio if he were a supposedly typical 9th Circuit liberal, rather than one of the nation’s most brilliant conservative legal scholars. But it makes no difference whether the person with the porn site is left or right, smart or dull, a judge or anybody else.
It is also true that judges are charged with administering justice and instilling public confidence in the law. Under the circumstances, it makes sense for Kozinski to recuse himself from the obscenity trial he was assigned to hear -- not because there is any readily apparent conflict but because the website controversy has become a distraction and will undermine public trust in the verdict.
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ac446dbc380fc04ad1e0ee43d8ddb5b9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-13-fi-yahoo13-story.html | Yahoo’s new best friend -- rival Google | Yahoo’s new best friend -- rival Google
Microsoft Corp. turned to Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc. for help in fighting its biggest-ever competitive threat, then only made that threat stronger.
Yahoo and Microsoft on Thursday said they had ended nearly five months of merger and partnership talks born of the software giant’s frustration with falling far behind Google Inc. in online advertising.
Yahoo shares plunged more than 10% to $23.52.
But after the stock market closed, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company turned around and struck an online advertising alliance with rival Google. Yahoo said it would get a financial boost by using Google’s superior system for placing text ads next to its search results and on some of its Web pages.
The deal between the top two search engines triggered objections from antitrust groups, which said advertisers in effect would lose a major alternative for touting their wares. Consumer groups warned of an increased risk to privacy, and an influential senator pledged to investigate.
Yahoo and Google said they would delay the start of their partnership by as much as 3 1/2 months to give the Justice Department a chance to scrutinize the deal.
For Microsoft, analysts said, the tie-up was the worst possible outcome of the unsolicited, $44.6-billion bid it made to buy Yahoo more than four months ago.
Advertisers pay Google each time someone clicks on one of the text ads it brokers. With Yahoo, Google will get its ads on one of the world’s most-visited network of websites, while denying Microsoft the chance to do the same.
“There is no hope for Microsoft in the search space,” said Brian Bolan, an analyst with Jackson Securities.
Still, investors were relieved that Microsoft wouldn’t have to shell out so much money to acquire an Internet company that is also struggling to keep up. Its shares rose more than 4%, to $28.24, after Yahoo said talks had ended.
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., continues to dominate the markets for operating system software that runs personal computers and productivity tools such as word-processing and presentation programs.
But Google, of Mountain View, Calif., controls the lucrative search-advertising market. The company is bumping up against Microsoft in an increasing number of fields, which already include Internet banner ads, e-mail and software for advanced cellphones.
On Feb. 1, Microsoft announced an offer of $31 a share in cash and stock for Yahoo, more than 60% above where Yahoo’s stock was trading. It later offered $33. Yahoo resisted as it held discussions with Google and other parties. When it began talking in earnest with Microsoft, Yahoo co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang asked for $37.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer walked away in frustration May 3 and has since refused to reconsider a full takeover, not even at the price levels he had floated earlier. He instead wanted to acquire only Yahoo’s search business.
On May 30, Microsoft proposed doing that, plus taking a 16% stake in Yahoo at $35 a share and paying Yahoo a slice of future search profit that it believed could have reached $1 billion over the course of the deal, according to two people who are familiar with the talks. Yahoo said Thursday that it didn’t want to sell its search business.
Two Yahoo investors, speaking on the condition that they not be named, said the matter wasn’t over. They said Yahoo stockholders might still want to oust the company’s board and resume talks with Microsoft.
“I’m so irritated it’s almost beyond verbalization,” said one investor who requested anonymity so he could keep talking to the companies.
Yahoo and prospective partner Google share Stanford University roots, Silicon Valley location and Internet metabolisms.
“We are very excited . . . to be working with Yahoo and that Yahoo remains a very strong independent company,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conference call with analysts and investors.
Executives from the two companies started meeting about a possible deal as far back as February, shortly after Microsoft made its bid, and accelerated talks in recent days. An all-nighter produced the final document signed Thursday.
Yahoo will continue to produce the regular search results and many of the search-related ads that its newly overhauled systems generate. But some of its search users in the U.S. and Canada will also see ads placed by Google. Google will give Yahoo a cut of the fees it charges advertisers.
“The flexibility of the deal lets us get the best of both worlds,” Yahoo President Sue Decker said in a conference call.
The two companies will also work to combine their instant-messaging platforms, and Yahoo executives said they might help Google improve its display ads.
Yahoo has come under substantial fire from shareholders for failing to reach a deal with Microsoft. It said the Google arrangement would bring in about $800 million in extra annual revenue and $250 million to $450 million in additional operating cash flow.
That might not be enough to appease major Yahoo investors, some of whom had been expecting a richer Google deal. By May 15, 12 days after the Microsoft talks first broke down, corporate raider and activist investor Carl Icahn amassed a Yahoo stake that included 10 million shares worth $280 million and options to buy 49 million more.
Icahn launched a campaign to replace the Yahoo board with his own slate of nominees at the company’s annual meeting, scheduled for Aug. 1. He’s running on the platform that he will seal a Microsoft pact.
Assuming he hadn’t sold any of his shares, his Yahoo stock holdings lost about $26 million Thursday. Icahn did not comment.
“Yahoo has always said -- and continues to say -- that search is critical to the future of its display advertising efforts and its long-term strategy,” said Anthony Valencia, an analyst at Trust Co. of the West. “But here, Yahoo is basically still admitting that its competitor’s technology is better.”
Though the Yahoo-Google alliance doesn’t require the approval of federal regulators, Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, said lawmakers would probe the risks to privacy and competition that it posed.
Observers doubted, however, that officials would object strenuously enough to scuttle the pact.
Yang said Yahoo would also continue to explore other alternatives. But the deal could add another cost for Microsoft, should it change its mind and make a new bid. If Yahoo is acquired in the next two years and cuts short the initial four-year term of the deal, it must pay Google a termination fee of as much as $250 million.
Yang said he wasn’t looking back. “Clearly,” he said, “it’s time to move on.”
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joseph.menn@latimes.com
jessica.guynn@latimes.com
Menn reported from Los Angeles, Guynn from San Francisco.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Deal’s nuts and bolts
What does this deal do?
It will enable Yahoo to run ads supplied by Google on its Web pages, including alongside its search results. In addition, Yahoo and Google agreed to make their instant messaging services work together.
What’s in it for Google?
Advertisers pay Google each time someone clicks on one of the text ads it brokers. By partnering with Yahoo, its ads will appear on one of the world’s most-visited network of websites.
What’s in it for Yahoo?
Google will share the ad revenue with Yahoo. Google’s search-advertising system delivers ads that are more relevant than Yahoo’s, resulting in more clicks and greater profit. Yahoo expects to pull in an extra $800 million in annual revenue and $250 million to $450 million in extra operating cash flow.
How long is the deal for?
The agreement has a term of as long as 10 years: a four-year initial term and two three-year renewals at Yahoo’s discretion.
When will this start?
The companies will hold off for as long as 3 1/2 months to give the U.S. Justice Department time to review the arrangement.
What’s the concern?
Google is the No. 1 search company and Yahoo is No. 2. Antitrust regulators and consumer groups are worried the two will dominate the market.
Times research by Scott J. Wilson
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6e0974807648f6893dc28e29d5b65f79 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-13-me-marriageqa13-story.html | The first bells ring at 5:01 p.m. Monday | The first bells ring at 5:01 p.m. Monday
With gay marriage set to begin in California on Monday, The Times is answering readers’ questions on the subject. You can submit questions at ron.lin@latimes.com. Check out full coverage of the debate about the gay marriage issue at latimes.com/gaymarriage. Here is a sampling:
When will same-sex couples be allowed to marry?
The earliest time gay couples will be allowed to marry is at 5:01 p.m. Monday, June 16. Alameda, Sonoma and Yolo counties will begin issuing marriage licenses to the public Monday night; most counties will start Tuesday morning. San Francisco and Los Angeles counties will issue one marriage license each Monday night to a designated couple to commemorate the ruling.
Who will be the first same-sex couple to marry in L.A. County?
Robin Tyler and Diane Olson, who on Valentine’s Day 2004 were denied a marriage license at the Beverly Hills Courthouse and challenged that rejection all the way to the California Supreme Court. Their license, to be issued in Beverly Hills, was given an exception “in recognition of their unique role in the court’s decision,” said acting Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan.
Could any further legal action delay the start of same-sex marriages in California?
Opponents of same-sex marriage asked the California Court of Appeal on Thursday to put the ruling on hold. Supporters of gay marriage rights quickly belittled the action as frivolous and certain to fail. The lower 1st District Court of Appeal, which had ruled 2 to 1 against same-sex marriage, is bound by the Supreme Court’s decision. San Francisco City Atty. Dennis Herrera, whose office helped litigate the marriage case, called the petition “beyond frivolous . . . absurd.” But Liberty Counsel, the group that filed the petition, said the Court of Appeal procedurally regains the case June 16 and could issue a stay. “This court should stay the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples to prevent a violation of federal and state law by opening the door to de facto polygamy and polyamory,” the petition by the Christian-affiliated group said.
How do I and my partner apply for the marriage license and find someone to perform the ceremony? -- Larry and Lee, Las Vegas
You need to go to a county clerk’s office with photo identification, fill out a form and purchase a marriage license. Many counties offer same-day civil marriage ceremonies. Take cash, check or money order; most county clerks do not accept credit cards.
We were married in Canada four years ago. Can we marry in California . . . to ensure our marital status? -- Stuart and Robert
No. Only unmarried people can marry.
My partner and I were married in Spain two years ago. Can we apply somehow to have our marriage recognized by the state? -- Chris
There is no need to register out-of-state or foreign marriages with California authorities. As of 5:01 p.m. June 16, California will automatically recognize same-sex marriages performed legally elsewhere. Massachusetts, Canada, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and South Africa grant gay marriages.
I’m getting married and want to change my last name to my spouse’s. Do I need to go to court? -- Jim
No. To change your name, you need to present your marriage license and photo identification to the Social Security Adminstration. “We will be accepting the new same-sex marriage California certificates” for the purpose of changing a spouse’s last name, Social Security spokesman Mark Hinkle said. You’ll need to change your last name on your Social Security card before you change your driver’s license.
Does marriage for same-sex couples provide any more legal benefits than a registered domestic partnership? -- Vern and Neil
California law already grants domestic partners virtually all of the legal benefits married couples enjoy. But having the married status can help in how couples are treated by other people and in crisis situations, such as when a spouse is hospitalized, said Jon Davidson, legal director for Lambda Legal. “If they say, ‘I’m a domestic partner,’ someone might say, ‘What’s that?’ ” Davidson said. “But if they say, ‘I’m a spouse,’ they’ll know what that means.”
If I don’t live in California, can I come to California and get married?
Yes, you do not have to live in California to marry here, and Massachusetts and New York state will recognize the marriages. Other states may not recognize the marriages, and some, including Wisconsin and Delaware, impose criminal penalties on its residents “if they enter a marriage outside the state that would have been prohibited in the state,” such as gay marriage, according to a fact sheet posted on Lambda Legal’s website. The law in Wisconsin, for example, permits authorities to punish offenders with a fine of up to $10,000 and nine months imprisonment.
What should I know if I’m in the military and want a same-sex wedding?
Marrying or attempting to marry a person of the same sex is grounds for dismissal from the service.
What should I know if I want to adopt a child from another country and want to have a same-sex marriage?
Some countries prohibit same-sex married couples from adopting. But they would permit a single adult to adopt.
Do you know of any pending laws to be passed by Congress to have our same-sex marriage recognized by the federal government?
No, but the issue has come up in the presidential campaign. Democratic candidate Barack Obama has called for the repeal of the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing gay marriage. Obama also supports giving same-sex couples who join in a civil union the same legal rights as straight married couples. Republican John McCain supports the Defense of Marriage Act and has said that states have a right to ban gay marriage. Both say marriage should be defined by individual states.
If the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage passes, can the California Supreme Court be petitioned to review the matter and therefore set it aside?
It’s possible, said David Cruz, a professor of constitutional law at USC. Supporters of gay marriage could argue that the state constitutional amendment violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from denying any person “equal protection of the laws.”
Has a state Supreme Court ever overturned a constitutional amendment approved by the voters?
Yes. In Colorado, voters in 1992 approved Amendment 2, which would have overturned local laws protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled the amendment unconstitutional, as did the U.S. Supreme Court, which said in 1996 that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.
If I get the marriage license Tuesday, must I get married the same day?
No, but the wedding ceremony must be held in California within 90 days of receiving the license.
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ron.lin@latimes.com./p>
maura.dolan@latimes.com
Times staff writer Jean-Paul Renaud contributed to this report.
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0361b6441db549b7e385d8aa5b813bb4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-13-me-showercurtain13-story.html | That ‘new shower curtain smell’? It’s toxic, study says | That ‘new shower curtain smell’? It’s toxic, study says
Vinyl shower curtains sold at major retailers across the country emit toxic chemicals that have been linked to serious health problems, according to a report released Thursday by a national environmental organization.
The curtains contained high concentrations of chemicals that are linked to liver damage as well as damage to the central nervous, respiratory and reproductive systems, said researchers for the Virginia-based Center for Health, Environment & Justice.
The organization commissioned the study about two years ago to determine what caused that “new shower curtain smell” familiar to many consumers.
“This smell can make you feel sick, give you a headache, make you feel nauseous or [cause] other health effects,” said Michael Schade, a coauthor of the report.
Researchers tested the chemical composition of five unopened polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, plastic shower curtains bought from Bed Bath & Beyond, Kmart, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart. One of the curtains was then tested to determine the chemicals it released into the air.
The study found that PVC shower curtains contained high concentrations of phthalates, which have been linked to reproductive effects, and varying concentrations of organotins, which are compounds based on tin and hydrocarbons. One of the curtains tested released measurable quantities of as many as 108 volatile organic compounds into the air, some of which persisted for nearly a month.
Seven of these chemicals -- toluene, ethylbenzene, phenol, methyl isobutyl ketone, xylene, acetophenone and cumene -- have been identified by the Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous air pollutants, said Stephen Lester, the center’s science director and a coauthor of the report.
Potential health effects include developmental damage and harm to the liver and the central nervous, respiratory and reproductive systems, according to the report.
Phthalates and organotins, which are not chemically bonded to the shower curtain, are often added to soften or otherwise enhance the curtain. These additives evaporate or cling to household dust more easily than the chemicals in the curtains themselves, Lester said. Volatile organic compounds also evaporate more easily than the less harmful chemicals, he said.
Vinyl chloride, which is a major building block of PVC, is a known human carcinogen that causes liver cancer, Lester said.
“PVC is just bad from cradle to cradle,” said Martha Dina Arguello, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “It’s a mess when you create, it’s a mess when you get rid of it, and it’s off-gassing when you’re using it.”
Representatives of Target and Sears Holding Co., the parent company of Kmart, said their companies were phasing out curtains that contain PVC. Target said about 90% of the store’s “owned brand” shower curtains offered this spring were made of materials other than PVC. Officials from the other companies were not immediately available for comment Thursday.
The report said that Bed Bath & Beyond had increased the number of PVC-free shower curtains it offered by selling those made of ethylene vinyl acetate and fabrics, but that Wal-Mart did not respond to the organization’s faxes or letters requesting the retailer’s PVC policy.
The American Chemistry Council issued a statement Thursday saying there was “no reliable evidence” that phthalates were harmful or linked to serious health problems, or that they were tied to the new shower curtain smell.
Arguello said studies were still being done on the effects of phthalates and other chemicals on people.
Little information on toxicity is available for 86 of the 108 chemicals detected in the curtains, Lester said.
The EPA has tested vinyl shower curtains and in 2002 said it had found that many of the same chemicals listed in the center’s report.
Lester said the test drew attention to the lack of government regulations or health-based guidelines governing indoor air pollutants.
“The EPA does not regulate indoor air, period,” said Barbara Spark, the indoor air program coordinator for the EPA’s Pacific Southwest region. “We have not been given that authority by the Congress.”
The Center for Health, Environment & Justice sent a letter to 19 major retailers Thursday informing them of the new report and encouraging them to stop selling PVC products.
“Most companies aren’t aware of some of the risks these products entail,” Lester said. “Once they’re informed of this, they’re in many cases ready to make changes and purchase alternative products.”
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tami.abdollah@latimes.com
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c2128588ef7646a7485c4dd5eec4426d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-13-sci-methuselah13-story.html | Seed from Masada is the oldest to germinate | Seed from Masada is the oldest to germinate
Scientists using radiocarbon dating have confirmed that an ancient Judean date palm seed among those found in the ruins of Masada in present-day Israel and planted three years ago is 2,000 years old -- the oldest seed ever to germinate.
The seed has grown into a healthy, 4-foot-tall seedling, surpassing the previous record for oldest germinated seed -- a 1,300-year-old Chinese lotus, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.
The tree has been named Methuselah after the oldest person in the Bible. It is the only living Judean date palm, the last link to the vast date palm forests that once shaded and nourished the region.
Sarah Sallon, who directs the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem, became interested in the ancient date palm as a possible source of medicines. She enlisted Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura to coax the seeds out of dormancy.
One sprouted. Scientists estimated that it was about 2,000 years old based on carbon dating of other seeds found at the site, but they had no way of directly testing the planted seed without risking its chance of germinating.
After the Methuselah seed germinated, Solowey found fragments of the seed shell clinging to the roots -- enough for dating.
The shell fragments initially dated to AD 295, give or take 50 years, but a small percentage of “modern” carbon incorporated as the seed germinated made it appear 250 to 300 years younger. Correcting for this factor, the researchers reported that the seed dates from 60 BC to AD 95, similar to the other seeds from the site.
That placed the seed at Masada a few years after the Roman siege there in 73, when, according to the ancient historian Josephus, nearly 1,000 Jewish Zealots in the Masada fortress committed mass suicide rather than capitulate to the Romans. They burned most of their food stores, leaving a single cache to show that they did not starve to death.
“These people were eating these dates up on the mountain and looking down at the Roman camp, knowing that they were going to die soon, and spitting out the pits,” Sallon said. “Maybe here is one of those pits.”
Archaeologists excavating the ancient fortress of Masada unearthed the seeds in 1965, and they sat in storage for four decades before being planted.
The seeds probably survived for so long because of the extremely arid conditions of the Masada mesa, said Cary Fowler, seed preservation expert and executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which maintains the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
Preliminary comparison of Methuselah’s DNA with modern date palms shows a 20% to 50% difference from current varieties, differences which may include lost traits for resistance to pests and diseases.
Sallon and her colleagues hope to cultivate more ancient date seeds and eventually reintroduce the Judean date palm to the area. “It should be there because that’s where it belongs,” she said.
They also plan to test the tree for the medicinal properties hinted at in historical writings.
“Is it really the tree of life?” Sallon asked.
That question won’t be answered until around 2010, when Methuselah -- if female -- may bear fruit.
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wendy.hansen@latimes.com
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b19f8cca4025efd0993918902fea7f2a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-14-me-kozinski14-story.html | U.S. judge in obscenity trial steps down | U.S. judge in obscenity trial steps down
A federal appeals court judge on Friday stepped down from a high-profile obscenity trial in Los Angeles, three days after acknowledging that he had posted sexually explicit material on a publicly accessible personal website.
“In light of the public controversy surrounding my involvement in this case, I have concluded that there is a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial,” wrote Alex Kozinski, chief judge for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. “I will recuse myself from further participation in the case and will ask the chief judge of the district court to reassign it to another judge.”
On Wednesday, Kozinski suspended the trial of Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs to allow the prosecutor to explore what he saw as “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.”
Prosecutor Kenneth Whitted, who had expressed dismay with one of Kozinski’s earlier rulings in the case, declined to comment on the judge’s recusal.
Isaacs, the defendant, said he was disappointed Kozinski was no longer the judge.
“I thought he was a fair judge,” he said. “I feel terrible that my trial caused this information to come out.”
He added, though, that it was somehow fitting for the trial, which he predicted would be a spectacle from the start. Isaacs planned to argue that his hard-core videos depicting acts of bestiality and defecation were works of art and therefore not legally obscene. Jurors spent several hours Wednesday watching the videos before the trial was interrupted.
“This whole trial is one big piece of performance art,” Isaacs said. “I just can’t imagine what’s going to happen next.”
The halting of Isaacs’ trial came after The Times published an article on its website describing some of the sexually themed content on the judge’s website. In an interview Tuesday, Kozinski had acknowledged posting the images but said he believed it was a private storage area that could not be accessed by the public. Had he known it was not properly protected, he said, he would have been more careful about the content he kept there. He acknowledged that some of the material was inappropriate but defended other items as funny. He said he must have uploaded some of the material by accident.
Following the interview, he blocked access to the site. After the story broke, the judge issued a statement saying his adult son told him that he may have placed some of the controversial material on the website.
In addition to declaring a mistrial, Kozinski -- a nationally respected judge who has been mentioned as a potential Supreme Court candidate -- also called for an investigation of himself. He issued a statement Thursday asking the Judicial Council of the 9th Circuit to “initiate proceedings” in response to The Times article.
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said Kozinski has taken the right steps to put the issue behind him.
“The best thing for him to have done was to extricate himself as much as possible, and I think that’s what he’s done,” she said.
Before it was taken down Tuesday, visitors to https://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: “Ain’t nothin’ here. Y’all best be movin’ on, compadre.” But adding "/stuff” to the address revealed a hodgepodge of material, including music files, essays, cartoons and family photos.
Kozinski himself occasionally linked the public to his site. For example, in a letter published on the New York Times website in November 2005, he directed readers to his site so they could see an old clip of him on “The Dating Game” show.
More recently, the files containing the sexual content were found by Cyrus Sanai, an attorney from Beverly Hills, who then alerted The Times. Sanai said he was conducting research in connection with a dispute he was having with Kozinski when a Google search led him to a directory on the judge’s website containing the material.
Many of the items on the website, some of which the judge said he received and sent via e-mail, are intended to be crudely humorous.
One such item is a photo of two women seated in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair. Behind them is a sign reading “Bush for President.” Kozinski defended that photo as “a funny joke.”
Among other items were a photo of two nude women painted to look like cows, a video of an encounter between a half-dressed man and a sexually aroused farm animal, a striptease slide show featuring a transsexual, a series of photos of women’s crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear and a step-by-step pictorial of a woman shaving her pubic hair.
Some nonsexual material on the website might also be considered demeaning to women: There was a mock mathematical equation presented as “proof that girls are evil,” and a photo of a 1950s-era mother and her daughter sharing a book titled, “Becoming a Bitch.”
Legal experts who had called on Kozinski to recuse himself from the Isaacs case said it wasn’t necessarily a problem that the judge had collected sexually explicit material but that he was reckless in allowing it to be discovered.
“The real problem is that once this came to light, it made people question whether he was the right judge to handle the case,” Levenson said. “And that’s a question that would never have arisen if he had not been so reckless in how he handled these materials.”
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scott.glover@latimes.com
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e816f2170408aa56b7539ba70b1eeaa5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-15-me-dui15-story.html | Wife of rap artist arrested on DUI | Wife of rap artist arrested on DUI
The wife of Grammy-nominated rap artist Snoop Dogg was arrested in Fullerton early Saturday on suspicion of drunk driving, police said.
Shante Broadus, 32, was stopped by police near Highland and Orangethorpe avenues about 12:15 a.m. and arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, said Fullerton Police Lt. Craig Brower.
Broadus, a resident of Sherman Oaks, was taken to Fullerton City Jail, where she was booked, issued a citation to appear in court and released, Brower said.
He said Broadus would appear in court next month.
Brower could not comment on why officers stopped Broadus, the vehicle she was driving or whether other people were in the vehicle.
Broadus and Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Cordozar Calvin Broadus Jr., have been married since June 1997.
The couple have three children.
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tami.abdollah@latimes.com
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70566742135e487cc32af1c1c0afdf83 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-15-me-fire15-story.html | Firefighters make headway against 4 blazes | Firefighters make headway against 4 blazes
Firefighters in Northern California had contained 90% of a 520-acre blaze in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Saturday, and slowly gained the upper hand on three other major fires burning from Monterey County north to Tehama County.
Dying winds, cooler temperatures and beefed-up crews helped in the fight against the blazes, which had burned more than 53,000 acres and at one point had firefighters concerned about the town of Paradise.
“That happened yesterday, but we were able to hold it back,” Janet Upton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said Saturday. “So we’re expecting the same thing today.”
The Humboldt fire, which has destroyed 74 homes, damaged 20 others and still threatens as many as 4,000 structures, has consumed 23,162 acres. The blaze was about 45% contained, with more than 3,800 firefighters, 521 fire engines and eight air tankers on scene, according to state forestry spokesman Scott Upton.
Containment is expected by Monday night.
About 8,000 people have been evacuated over the last three days, primarily from the southern part of Paradise, said MaryAnn Aldrich, a spokeswoman for the state forestry agency.
After wind-whipped flames gusted toward Paradise on Thursday, fire officials ordered the evacuation of about 1,500 residents in the southern part of the town of 30,000, which is 90 miles north of Sacramento. On Saturday, the fire was mostly burning near Doe Mill Ridge, just below Paradise.
“We’ve always called it the big one, it’s always the one we’ve trained for and it’s been our worst-case scenario; it’s the one we use for our tabletop exercises,” Janet Upton said. “This is that fire.”
Eight firefighters have been injured: one suffered a leg injury, two had first-degree facial burns and five suffered heat exhaustion-related injuries as temperatures Friday climbed into the triple digits, Upton said. She said temperatures over the weekend are expected to be lower, in the mid-90s.
Several residents were also treated for smoke inhalation at area hospitals, Upton said. Investigators were still trying to determine the cause of the fire, which started on the south side of California 32 off Humboldt Road, Upton said. Officials on Saturday allowed some residents back into their homes.
The Indians fire in the Ventana Wilderness of the Los Padres National Forest continued to burn in the Pinon Peak area in rugged terrain and was 38% contained early Saturday. Nearly 1,900 firefighters were battling that blaze, which has burned 24,818 acres west of King City in Monterey County. So far, the fire has cost $4.3 million to fight, destroyed one home and its outbuildings and damaged another home.
The fire continues to threaten more than 800 structures in the Pine Canyon area, said Manuel Madrigal, a spokesman for the Indians fire management team.
The fire started last Sunday at Escondido Campground when a campfire burned out of control, Madrigal said. Eight firefighters have been injured, he said.
“The weather conditions are still pretty extreme for us here,” Madrigal said. “High temperatures, low humidity and wind conditions. They vary depending on where you are in elevation, but at the higher elevations of course it’s a little windier.”
The fire has been especially hard to fight because of the back-country terrain, which makes it hard to get crews and supplies in, Madrigal said.
“We’re having to back off toward old existing roadways to try to get containment lines in place,” said Richard Hadley, a fire information officer. “But if we’re lucky, and the weather holds, we’re making some good progress.”
The Whiskey fire in Tehama County, which has burned 3,477 acres and grew during the day because of the steep terrain and stretched thin firefighting resources, was 15% contained Saturday, said Mickie Jakez, a state forestry agency spokeswoman. The fire started Thursday in the Mendocino National Forest, and its cause was still under investigation, Jakez said. One inmate crew member has suffered heat-related injuries, Jakez said.
Firefighters were working aggressively to protect high-value commercial timber in the area owned by Crane Mills, Jakez said. The fire was five miles northwest of the small community of Paskenta and was threatening Thomes Creek, which is its main water supply, she said.
The 600-acre Martin fire near the Santa Cruz County town of Felton was 75% contained Saturday, according to fire officials. One firefighter suffered minor injuries battling the blaze that destroyed two homes and eight outbuildings, said Firefighter Mike Dargetto. Some residents who had been evacuated were allowed to return home Friday afternoon.
“The weather is working in our favor, the winds have died down,” Dargetto said. " . . . We pretty much have a wrap on this, and we’re expecting full containment this evening [Saturday]. We’re not expecting the fire to spread beyond the lines, it’s staying at 600 acres.”
Those easing conditions also allowed firefighters to fully contain the Electra fire in Amador County on Saturday after it burned for 16 hours through about 400 acres, officials said.
Although the National Weather Service is predicting continued temperatures in the mid- to upper 90s in the area through the weekend, senior meteorologist Dan Gudgel said that “winds are kind of out of the equation.”
“The winds this weekend are not expected to be particularly high anywhere,” Gudgel said. “This is a good thing for the firefighters. They’re dealing with low fuel humidities.”
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tami.abdollah@latimes.com
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5811f9292a35ede85ce3d0a1d0d10fee | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-15-me-tang15-story.html | He gives to stir charity in others | He gives to stir charity in others
Steel magnate Cyrus Tang, once described by an Asian American news website as “the most secretive of Asian American billionaires in America,” recently spoke about his philanthropy to a reporter for the first time.
The 78-year-old China native, who came to the United States in 1950 as a student, has invested more than $150 million in three foundations that focus on education, healthcare and community involvement.
Tang, whose 40-plus steel, pharmaceutical and furniture affiliates in four countries annually gross more than $1 billion, said he employs a deliberate strategy of using philanthropy to inspire charitable impulses in others.
In China, for instance, he has given more than 10,000 scholarships to students with the proviso that they reciprocate through community service. The experience transformed many of them from “feeling sorry for themselves to wondering what they can do to help others,” the soft-spoken Tang said during a recent interview in Las Vegas.
Among other projects, Tang has built hundreds of schools and hospital facilities in China and supported a traditional Chinese medicine research center there and at the University of Chicago, a new U.S.-China institute at Rand Corp. in Santa Monica and nonpartisan voter education, analysis and demographic research at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.
Tang said he intends to bequeath to his foundations all of his personal assets -- an undisclosed figure that associates say numbers in the hundreds of millions.
“I believe success in life is not based on assets gained or knowledge acquired,” Tang said. “It is how we make use of what we have to contribute to society.”
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teresa.watanabe@latimes.com
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4964d13d1397e4a6807070303e668b53 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-15-sp-pickup15-story.html | Changing the CULTURE | Changing the CULTURE
She enters the dimly lighted gym at UCLA and adjusts her red knee-high sock, making a point. It screams out this message: I am a good player. It is part of the culture of pickup basketball games, a culture dominated by guys.
And the guys do as expected -- their heads turn as one.
She walks up to one, easily a foot taller. “Hey, who has next?” she asks. He studies her, gazes at her sock. OK, she’s in. But when her turn comes, heated words are exchanged over who will guard “the girl.”
The guy stuck with the task starts a Buick’s length away, desperately wanting to avoid contact. She shoots. Two points. She shoots again. Two more points. He is two Buicks away by then.
One of his teammates takes over, blocks her next two shots, then crashes into her on a fastbreak, sending her crashing to the court.
I know, because I am that girl (age 14 at the time), and have played organized basketball since I was 5.
Of course, knocking a woman down is bad behavior -- unless she is on a basketball court. Then the rules change. Some guys don’t get near. Other guys are all hands, unwelcome hands. And still others treat her as an equal.
It is, in effect, a male moral dilemma. How do you play hoops against a woman?
Perhaps no woman has seen this dilemma more up close than Ann Meyers Drysdale, the only woman to sign a contract with an NBA team, the Indiana Pacers, in 1979.
“Playing with the Pacers was tougher mentally for them than it was for me, " said Drysdale, who starred at UCLA and is now the general manager of the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury. “They were raised to open doors for women.”
Brian Shaw, a Lakers assistant coach, knows the problem only too well after scrimmaging with the Sparks last summer.
The former Lakers guard, who retired in 2003, said he was looking to stay in shape by hitting a few baskets. Instead, he hit the dilemma.
“When playing against females you have to get over the initial holding back,” he said. “After they hit you a few times and do some of the same stuff that guys do, you forget you’re playing against girls.
“The first night we played them, we lost. The second night, we played harder and we won. When it comes down to it, it’s just basketball.”
More and more women are turning to pickup games to sharpen their basketball skills, and men are slowly learning to deal with it.
The reason I play in pickup games was born in kindergarten. I liked to steal erasers, colorful ones that were my sister’s. I stole four before she cried foul and demanded my parents sign me up for a sport to keep me busy. Any sport.
AYSO soccer? I lasted two days. Basketball? I was hooked, for here was a game where stealing was admired.
Lauren Rode, 5 feet 5, shares my passion for the game. She played varsity basketball in high school and plays in pickup games four to five times a week in Hollywood.
“When I step onto the court and call ‘next’ most of the time guys will be really cool about it,” said Rode, 23. “But sometimes you’ll go up to them and ask for next and they’ll be silent and look away.”
She takes this in stride. Guys who are good at basketball, she said, are inclusive and encourage women to join. Guys who are insecure about their basketball skills, well, they are insecure, period.
Besides, Rode said, “Basketball is my life. No one can stop me from playing.”
Consuelo Lezcano, who played for UCLA from 2003 to 2007, never gets the silent treatment. Because she’s 6 feet 4, both sides want her and neither side wants to guard her -- “terrified of being embarrassed,” she said.
For Jake Guernsey, guarding a woman is a lose-lose situation.
“If she scores on me, it’s humiliating,” said Guernsey, a UCLA sophomore who often plays pickup games and dreads having to guard a woman. “If I score on her, I’m a jerk.”
Humiliating? A jerk? Basketball is such a mind game. It can be something else too, as some guys get flustered by being so close to a woman who may be placing her butt on them (boxing out) and touching their hip (hand-checking). It can throw a guy’s game off.
Then there are the guys who are all hands, if you get my drift. One grab too many. My quickness on the court has saved me. Simply put, I don’t mind getting hit during a game, but hate getting hit on.
Rode laughs about guys who turn on the sweetness, trying to hit on her.
“When I get on the court, some guys will be like, ‘Oh, you smell so good,’ ” Rode said. “That’s always before my first game, though,” before she has broken a sweat. But then she acknowledged, “I like being the only girl out there. It’s kind of fun. Everyone notices me.”
Pickup games can do one other thing: Let a woman become one of the guys. Off the court, if a guy tries to pick me up, I get defensive. If a guy approaches me while I am clad in baggy shorts, holding a basketball and drenched in sweat, well, friendships can be formed.
Ironic that on the basketball court I play defense but never feel defensive.
Bottom line? Guys need to ditch the dilemma and follow the advice of Emma Tautolo, Lezcano’s former teammate.
“Guard me like a woman would,” she said.
Yes. Instead of man-up, the optimal phrase is woman-up.
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2e62937884a618463660d1d6e6203d31 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-16-oe-kirchick16-story.html | The White House didn’t lie about Iraq | The White House didn’t lie about Iraq
Touring Vietnam in 1965, Michigan Gov. George Romney proclaimed American involvement there “morally right and necessary.” Two years later, however, Romney -- then seeking the Republican presidential nomination -- not only recanted his support for the war but claimed that he had been hoodwinked.
“When I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get,” Romney told a Detroit TV reporter who asked the candidate how he reconciled his shifting views.
Romney (father of Mitt) had visited Vietnam with nine other governors, all of whom denied that they had been duped by their government. With this one remark, his presidential hopes were dashed.
The memory of this gaffe reverberates in the contemporary rhetoric of many Democrats, who, when attacking the Bush administration’s case for war against Saddam Hussein, employ essentially the same argument. In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate’s 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that “the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress.”
Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.
Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”
Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”
Yet Rockefeller’s highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.
Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.
In 2003, top Senate Democrats -- not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others -- sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month’s report, titled “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees -- who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors -- many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.
This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats’ lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers.
“I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop communist aggression in Southeast Asia,” Romney elaborated in that infamous 1967 interview. That was an intellectually justifiable view then, just as it is intellectually justifiable for erstwhile Iraq war supporters to say -- given the way it’s turned out -- that they don’t think the effort has been worth it. But predicating such a reversal on the unsubstantiated allegation that one was lied to is cowardly and dishonest.
A journalist who accompanied Romney on his 1965 foray to Vietnam remarked that if the governor had indeed been brainwashed, it was not because of American propaganda but because he had “brought so light a load to the laundromat.” Given the similarity between Romney’s explanation and the protestations of Democrats 40 years later, one wonders why the news media aren’t saying the same thing today.
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983ca835fbb7f812f835100b49997ceb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-17-et-mirisch17-story.html | Career stories from a storied producer | Career stories from a storied producer
Oscar-winning producer Walter Mirisch has lived the American dream. He grew up in a poor immigrant family, and despite suffering hardships during the Great Depression, he found his way to Harvard. He later went on to a storied career producing some of the finest films of the 20th century, including “West Side Story,” “The Magnificent Seven” and “In the Heat of the Night.”
On Thursday, the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre will honor Mirisch with screenings of “The Apartment” and “In the Heat of the Night.” Mirisch will introduce the program and sign copies of his new memoir, “I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History.”
“The American dream is to be president,” says the 86-year-old Mirisch, laughing one recent morning in his office at Universal Studios. “I didn’t become president. However, I did take advantage of opportunity and luck and whatever talent God gave me. To combine them all and have the career that I wanted to have . . . I certainly did fulfill that dream.”
Mirisch produced his first film, 1947’s “Fall Guy,” for low-budget studio Monogram Pictures Corp. when he was just 25. In 1957, he and his brothers Harold and Marvin formed the Mirisch Co. at United Artists. For two decades, their company produced some of Hollywood’s most memorable movies, including best picture winners “West Side Story” (1961) and “In the Heat of the Night” (1967). Other hits from Mirisch include 1959’s “Some Like It Hot,” 1964’s “The Pink Panther” and “A Shot in the Dark,” 1960’s “The Magnificent Seven” and 1963’s “The Great Escape.”
Mirisch has been getting good notices for his memoir. Kevin Thomas said in The Times the book is “unpretentious, straightforward and is suffused with a sustaining love of family and of filmmaking.”
The book is filled with candid and often funny reminiscences of work with such directors as Billy Wilder, John Sturges, George Roy Hill, Blake Edwards, Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins and Norman Jewison, and actors including Steve McQueen, Jack Lemmon, Peter Sellers and Yul Brynner. Mirisch also discusses involvement in the development of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“We were trying to make the best films you possibly could,” says Mirisch. “I don’t think anybody starts out to paint a masterpiece or write the great American play. You try and do the best piece of work you know how. It is only in retrospect that you say: ‘My God. How did all of that work out?’ ”
American Cinematheque’s Egyptian TheatreThe book’s title came from a chat Mirisch had with Sturges, who directed “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape.”
“He had retired and he called me one day,” recalls Mirisch. “He was off on his boat somewhere and said he had a request to do a magazine piece about ‘The Great Escape.’ He didn’t remember some of the details of a story . . . and [asked whether] by some chance did I still have a copy of the script.
“I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about, John? “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape” are the best movies you ever made in your whole life. You mean you never kept copies of the script?’ He said to me, ‘What are you talking about? I thought they were just movies, not history.’ The truth of all that . . . provided me with a perspective on my whole career.”
Though Mirisch had some incredible hits during his career, there were also several disappointments, including the 1970 comedy-drama “The Landlord,” Hal Ashby’s first film as a director.
“I thought it was going to be a huge success, and it wasn’t. . . . Sometimes [films] are ahead of their time. Sometimes they don’t find an audience. That’s what makes this business so enigmatic.”
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susan.king@latimes.com
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a865496b12a4e8973461da1f05b7a698 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-17-me-kozinski17-story.html | Probe of judge shifted to court in East | Probe of judge shifted to court in East
A panel of federal judges on the East Coast was selected Monday to oversee a misconduct probe into California Judge Alex Kozinski, who declared a mistrial last week in an obscenity case he was presiding over after acknowledging that he had posted sexually explicit material on his publicly accessible personal website.
Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, requested the investigation after an article in The Times described the website and its contents.
At the request of the Judicial Council of the 9th Circuit, the investigation will be handled by judges outside Kozinski’s circuit. U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. transferred the matter to the 3rd Circuit Court in Philadelphia, and the chief judge there appointed a special committee to investigate.
Walter K. Stapleton, one of the judges appointed to the five-member panel, said Monday evening that he was unaware of the allegations against Kozinski and had no details on how the proceedings would be conducted.
“I just got drafted, and I have no idea what’s contemplated by way of a next step,” Stapleton said in a brief telephone interview. He added that misconduct proceedings involving judges were typically confidential.
Arthur Hellman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and an expert on federal judicial misconduct proceedings, said he thought it was unprecedented for a special panel in one circuit to investigate alleged misconduct by a judge in another circuit. He predicted that panel members would first decide how broad their probe would be and whether there were any disputed facts that would require the appointment of a special counsel.
“They may not know yet for a little while how much they’re investigating,” he said.
Hellman said the federal statute under which judges can be punished pertains to “conduct prejudicial to the effective and expeditious administration of the business of the courts.” If the investigation reveals that Kozinski posted sexually explicit material made available to the public, he said, it could lead to a finding that he “cast disrepute on the federal judiciary.”
Hellman said the issue would likely revolve around “just how private this [material] was.”
Kozinski could not be reached for comment Monday evening.
The Times reported last week that Kozinski posted sexually explicit photos and videos on his personal website.
Among the items were a picture of two nude women painted to look like cows; a file with dozens of pictures of women in snug-fitting clothes that outlined their genitalia; a picture of a man fellating himself; a video of a couple simultaneously orally copulating one another; a video of a naked woman showering and massaging her breasts; a striptease slide show featuring a transsexual; and a step-by-step pictorial depicting a woman shaving her pubic hair.
There was also a video of an encounter between a half-dressed man and a sexually aroused farm animal.
Some nonsexual material on the website might also be considered demeaning to women. There was a mock mathematical equation presented as “proof that girls are evil” and a photo of a woman and her daughter sharing a book titled “Becoming a Bitch.”
In an interview last week, the judge said he thought the site was a private storage area to which the public did not have access.
He defended some of the material as funny but acknowledged that other items were inappropriate. For example, he said he found the cow photo “degrading . . . and just gross.”
Kozinski blocked public access to the site after being interviewed by The Times. After publication of the article, Kozinski said his adult son had told him that he might have placed some of the sexual content on the site.
The Times reported that visitors to the site, which contained a hodgepodge of photos, videos, essays, music files and other materials, were greeted by a message telling them: “Ain’t nothin’ here. Y’all best be movin’ on, compadre.” Adding "/stuff” to the address revealed the directory containing the sexually explicit material.
The items were found by Beverly Hills attorney Cyrus Sanai, who was engaged in a dispute with the judge. Sanai alerted The Times.
Kozinski was presiding over the obscenity trial of Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs when the article was published. Isaacs was accused of violating federal obscenity laws by distributing hard-core pornographic films depicting acts of bestiality and defecation. He planned to defend the materials as works of art.
After The Times article appeared, the judge issued a 48-hour stay when the prosecutor asked for time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.”
Two days after ordering the stay, Kozinski declared a mistrial in the case.
On Monday, the judge’s wife, Marcy Tiffany, assailed The Times’ coverage of the judge’s site.
The Times articles were “riddled with half-truths, gross mis-characterizations and outright lies,” she said in a statement posted on the blog patterico.com.
“Alex is not into porn -- he is into funny -- and sometimes funny has a sexual character,” she wrote. “The tiny percentage of the material that was sexual in nature was all of a humorous character.”
The Times was unable to reach Tiffany, but she authenticated her e-mail to the website to the Associated Press.
Times California Editor David Lauter said in a statement that the articles were “fair and accurate” and “speak for themselves.”
The stories “raised important issues on a matter of significant public concern,” Lauter wrote. “The judge was presented with the facts once the matter became newsworthy and was given a full opportunity to respond. We took his responses into account before publication and included what he said in our stories.”
Hellman, the law professor, said he could not guess at a timetable for how quickly the proceedings regarding Kozinski would unfold.
Developments so far, he said, have happened with “astonishing speed” for the federal judiciary. As for what’s next, he said, “there’s no book to go by.”
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scott.glover@latimes.com
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f10eb2c11c38bdf01f351b5c2a0bf745 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-18-et-cameron18-story.html | Kirk Cameron grows | Kirk Cameron grows
Kirk Cameron didn’t need to reach rock bottom to become a Christian -- no plunge to the depths of despair or debauchery for the former teen idol and star of the 1980s sitcom “Growing Pains.” He didn’t awaken one day, surrounded by empty tequila bottles and prostitutes, then fear for his mortal soul and choose God over celebrity.
Instead, the smirking kid who gave us the impishly wholesome Mike Seaver for seven seasons on ABC was, according to his new autobiography, “Still Growing,” just an indifferent atheist from the Valley who realized that becoming an adult meant far more than being a rich and successful young TV star.
Not that he doesn’t continue to work his Hollywood mojo. It’s just that now he does it less for himself than for what he considers a higher purpose. He has starred in a trilogy of movies based on the bestselling Christian apocalyptic “Left Behind” books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Later this year he will appear, gratis, as the only name actor in “Fireproof,” a pro-marriage film made by Sherwood Pictures, a Georgia production company that uses the congregation of Sherwood Baptist Church as its primary, and unpaid, talent.
“I’ve never tried to intentionally re-create Kirk Cameron as this religious guy,” Cameron said recently, sipping iced tea at the Wood Ranch in Agoura Hills, a hangout for him and his wife of 17 years, Chelsea Noble, and their six children (ranging in age from 5 to 11, with four adopted). The 37-year-old actor can still muster the patented Mike Seaver grin -- you know, the one that provoked wincing from his overachieving TV sister, played by Tracey Gold, and affectionate exasperation from his TV parents, Alan Thicke and Joanna Kerns. However, Seaver’s appalling wardrobe of ‘80s staples has been replaced by simple jeans and a zip-neck sweater, and Cameron himself now looks more like an alumnus of a Midwestern college fraternity than a guy who has been acting since age 9.
He insisted that he undertook “Still Growing” -- published by Ventura-based Regal, which has also brought out inspirational titles from UCLA coaching legend John Wooden -- not to revive a stalled career nor to enlarge the flock of his ministry, the Way of the Master, which he conducts with New Zealander Ray Comfort (among other things, they advocate “intelligent design” and are critical of evolution theory).
“It just seemed like a good time to write a book, due to all the ‘80s nostalgia, the ‘Where are they now?’ stuff,” he explained. “But it was also a good time to tell my story, from ‘Growing Pains’ to coming to faith in God.” He added, modestly, that he “thought it would be a good read for ‘Growing Pains’ fans” as well as for “people of faith that have some convictions they have struggled with.” He wrote the book with the assistance of Lissa Halls Johnson, who also helped Cameron’s mother, Barbara, with her memoir, “A Full House of Growing Pains” (Cameron’s sister Candace was on the TV series “Full House” for eight years).
He took a stand
Part of telling his story includes addressing controversy. As Cameron acknowledges in “Still Growing,” some “Growing Pains” fans continue to believe that he wrecked the show because he refused to cooperate with producers’ plans to make it edgier by introducing what they felt were typical American teenage struggles to Mike Seaver’s life, including safe-for-prime-time sexual adventures. Cameron, who had begun to embrace Christianity by the show’s waning seasons, took a stand against these story lines, leading to conflict with the writers.
Cameron admits that he was overly fervent back then and has since apologized for his missteps. But he still doesn’t consider his behavior during this period to have been misguided or unprincipled, just a natural outgrowth of a goofy kid’s emergence into an adult morality.
“If I wasn’t on a show where I was shouldering the responsibility of a money-making machine called ‘Growing Pains,’ it would have been OK,” he said of his objections to scenes in which Mike was to be depicted in what Cameron considered to be immoral circumstances.
This wasn’t a classic child-star, prima donna maneuver; he wasn’t asking for a bigger dressing room, a stint in rehab, or for staffers to look the other way while he seduced Tiger Beat groupies between takes. Unlike fellow Christian and “Eight Is Enough” star Willie Aames -- who has published his own memoir “Grace Is Enough” -- Cameron didn’t wander down the path of booze and drugs. Professional and workmanlike with his acting, he said that he was simply sticking up for the audience that “Growing Pains” had built over its run, using his own sacrifice as leverage.
“You’ve got to be willing to work with me while I give up my childhood” was how he characterized his attitude toward the producers. And although he reports in “Still Growing” that he and the producers have buried the hatchet and moved on, the experience still rankles him. “I was trying to not break the level of trust we’d developed with families,” he said. (His assessment of the show’s impact was backed up by Alan Thicke, who compares “Growing Pains” with similar fare such as “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties.” "[T]he reason they’re never off the air and always in reruns is that they were the last of a breed of shows that was made for everybody to watch,” he told a celebrity interview website this year.)
Cameron acknowledges that he could have better prepared his TV “family” for his new moral code, but all that was really happening was that he was leaving his childhood behind and trying to decide what kind of adult he was going to be. The show was called “Growing Pains,” after all.
“It would have been far easier to go with the flow,” he writes. “I would have made a lot more money . . . if I had played the game. It’s not easy to stand up for what you believe. I learned that from a very young age.”
Refuses to categorize
Cameron is a laid-back true believer, but a true believer nonetheless. When his managers advised him to keep his work with the Way of the Master quiet, he couldn’t accept the idea that he would lead a dual Hollywood life: secular actor during the work week, Christian on Sundays. According to an unnamed “famous screenwriter” he quotes in the book, he “sure picked the one unacceptable religion” for an actor.
Cameron’s teenage spiritual crisis was quick: He felt that something essential was missing in his life, and he did something about it. He clearly has done his best to lead an exemplary adult life -- and he hopes fans and readers pick up on his cautionary message: “If you don’t have personal convictions you will be swept up by the tidal wave of culture, which doesn’t care about you in the end.”
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f8f55005f2a7bcb932506fc0e7713ca3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-18-me-capitol18-story.html | Capitol fears for its sonic signature | Capitol fears for its sonic signature
They were singing the blues in the legendary Studio A at Hollywood’s Capitol Records tower.
“Losing this place would be a big deal. There’s nothing better than this anywhere in the world,” said recording engineer Al Schmitt.
Schmitt, a 19-time Grammy winner, was standing over the banquet-table-size mixing board in the Vine Street studio’s control room. Punching a button on the console, he played back a silky smooth track recorded minutes earlier by jazz singer Roberta Gambarini. The sound was flawless.
Those involved in Hollywood’s thriving music scene fear that’s about to change.
A developer plans to build a 16-floor condominium and 242-car underground parking garage next door to the landmark cylindrical Capitol Records tower.
The Los Angeles Planning Commission has signed off on the project, but Capitol Records’ parent company, EMI, has appealed to the City Council to overturn the approval. The council’s planning and land-use committee is scheduled to consider the issue Tuesday.
Musicians, producers and sound engineers warn that the project would produce noise and vibrations that will make quality sound recording impossible at Capitol’s famed studios.
At risk are Capitol’s unique echo chambers: concrete bunkers that allow recording engineers to sweeten tracks with a rich reverberation.
The eight chambers are built 30 feet underground and are about 18 feet from where pile-driving and excavation work would be done for the condominium project.
“There is nothing like these echo chambers anywhere. Nobody can replicate them,” Schmitt said.
He ought to know. He has mixed and recorded for the likes of Elvis Presley, Henry Mancini, Rosemary Clooney, Sam Cooke, Barbra Streisand, Natalie Cole, Ray Charles, Madonna, Steely Dan, Quincy Jones and George Benson.
“I come here 200 times a year,” said Schmitt, a Bell Canyon resident. “This is a big deal. That intrusion could shut this building down. It would be a shame to have the history of this studio gone like that. People want to come here to work.”
Some travel across the country to use the studios.
“We’re here from New York to do this,” said record producer Larry Clothier. “We can record in New York; that’s where everybody lives. We could, but it wouldn’t be the same. The chambers under here are legendary. They’re the best in the world. Nothing can replace them. It would be a travesty to lose them.”
Next door in Studio B, musicians were recording for the Rockettes’ Radio City Christmas show. Producer John Porter bemoaned the disappearance of Hollywood’s recording studios.
“The sad thing is there were a lot of historic studios turned into parking lots and office buildings without anybody saying anything,” said Porter, of Malibu. “There aren’t that many rooms left set up to accommodate as many musicians as this one.”
Capitol’s Studio A and Studio B can be combined into a single room with space for 75 musicians. That allows the recording of movie soundtracks and orchestral music.
Studio workers said such items as Frank Sinatra’s chair and favorite microphone are still in use in Studio A. So is Nelson Riddle’s wooden conductor’s stand and Nat King Cole’s piano.
Designed by architect Welton Becket, the 150-foot-tall Capitol Records tower opened in 1956. From the beginning, elimination of noise and vibration from the building was a goal.
To prevent the hum of fluorescent lighting, the fixtures’ ballasts were mounted outside the studios. The heating and air-conditioning system used “decoupled ducts, sound traps and soundproofed vents,” as the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society report put it in 1957.
Exterior walls are 10-inch-thick concrete. A 1-inch air gap separates the outer wall from the studios’ inner wall, which in turn stands on a floor which “floats on a rubber-tiled, 3-inch concrete slab. This upper slab floats on a layer of cork, which rests on the 6-inch concrete foundation slab,” according to the engineering journal report.
The studios’ interior walls were built with shutter-like baffles. One side is birch wood, which creates a hard sound, and the other is fiberglass, which has a softer sound. Ceilings are suspended beneath thick, rock-wool, soundproof insulation.
The echo chambers were even trickier to build. Designed as trapezoidal rooms by recording artist and sound expert Les Paul, they have 10-inch-thick concrete walls and foot-thick concrete ceilings. With speakers on one side and microphones on the other, they can provide reverberation lasting up to five seconds. Sound engineers “use them like an artist’s palette,” as one Capitol worker put it.
As the City Hall showdown has grown closer, the chorus of Capitol supporters has grown louder.
Council committee members have been flooded with letters, such as the one from Professional Musicians Local 47’s Linda Rapka, who pointed out that during the last few years Los Angeles has lost the Todd A-O scoring stage, Cello Studios and the Paramount scoring stage.
Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, national executive director of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, warned that the proposed condominium project could result in “an enormous loss to the music and entertainment community.”
Added Maureen Droney, executive director of the Producers & Engineers Wing of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences: “One cannot overstate the importance of Capitol Studios within the Los Angeles music scene and, indeed, to the history of recorded music.”
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bob.pool@latimes.com
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c93e2bec13190ee2c2c4869e132a0393 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-18-me-sat18-story.html | Revised SAT is better grade predictor, study finds | Revised SAT is better grade predictor, study finds
The addition of a mandatory writing section to the SAT three years ago slightly improved the exam’s ability to predict academic success for college freshmen, according to a report by the test’s owner.
The study, sponsored by the College Board, also found that scores from the new writing section were somewhat better at predicting grades in the first year of college than the other two SAT sections.
The best predictor of all is a combination of all three test sections as well as high school transcripts, according to the report released Tuesday.
College Board officials pronounced themselves delighted with the report, saying it proved that the SAT’s changes in March 2005 were fair and academically valid.
“Now the results are in, and it is clear that the writing section has tremendous value,” College Board President Gaston Caperton told reporters in a conference call Tuesday.
But critics said it was much ado about nothing. They suggested the report was an attempt to deter more colleges from joining the small but growing number of campuses that have dropped the SAT as an admissions requirement.
The marginal improvement in the test’s ability to predict college grades was not worth all the debate, higher fees and extra testing time that came with the 2005 SAT changes, contended Robert Schaeffer, public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
“It is not better than the old SAT, and it is no fairer,” said Schaeffer, whose group, based in Cambridge, Mass., opposes most standardized tests.
Most universities require applicants to take the SAT or its main competitor, the ACT, as a uniform standard in an era of grade inflation and vastly different high school experiences.
The SAT has sections on math and critical reasoning along with the newer writing component, which includes a student-produced essay and multiple-choice questions about grammar.
The test now takes three hours and 45 minutes, which is 45 minutes longer than the old exam, and a perfect score is now 2400, up from 1600. The test-taking fee has risen from $29.50 to $45 over the last three years.
College Board officials said the report was the most comprehensive since the new version was introduced. The study was based on data from more than 150,000 students at colleges and universities across the country.
The changes were prompted, in large part, by the University of California, the SAT’s biggest customer, which had threatened to drop the test as an admissions requirement. In 2001, then-UC President Richard C. Atkinson criticized the SAT as testing ill-defined notions of aptitude and said it was unfair.
Besides the new writing section, the revisions also toughened up the math component with more advanced algebra questions and eliminated verbal analogy questions.
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larry.gordon@latimes.com
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0c7dc55c1e42b5abd54829335f03f87e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-19-me-mayor19-story.html | Villaraigosa says Israel trip paid dividends for L.A. | Villaraigosa says Israel trip paid dividends for L.A.
Back from a weeklong trip to Israel, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Wednesday touted agreements to enhance anti-terrorism efforts at Los Angeles International Airport and the harbor, and defended the cost of the 18-member delegation he led while the city faces a possible $300-million budget shortfall.
Villaraigosa said the pacts would make the city “stronger, safer and more secure,” and added that his meetings with President Shimon Peres and other top Israeli leaders also would foster Los Angeles’ international reputation as an economic and cultural powerhouse.
When asked to estimate the cost of his travel, Villaraigosa replied, “I think the taxpayers of Los Angeles can go to bed knowing that the mayor of Los Angeles is doing everything he can to secure our airport and protect . . . the safety of the people of the city.”
The mayor’s office has not released the estimated cost of the trip, Villaraigosa’s third abroad as mayor. The mayor said those figures would be made public as soon as possible.
The city’s Department of Water and Power, airport and port agencies will pay for all official expenses incurred by city officials. Religious and civic leaders who accompanied the mayor to Israel paid their own way.
Villaraigosa said taxpayers “got their money’s worth,” which will be realized in upgrades to security at LAX and the Port of Los Angeles and efforts to combat potential terrorist attacks.
Under the agreement, which formalized a pact reached two years ago, Israel will send three security experts from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Los Angeles for regular inspections as $1,000-per-day consultants. LAX is considered the state’s No. 1 terrorist target and has been singled out by the Al Qaeda network.
Villaraigosa said he was most impressed by the “many layers of security” at Ben-Gurion and the exceptionally trained personnel, saying LAX would benefit from adapting to those Israeli models: “They don’t just rely on technology. They rely on people. They think people are the most important line of defense.”
During the trip, Villaraigosa and city officials reached an agreement to share their most recent innovations in water conservation and offered L.A.'s expertise on reducing pollution and other green measures at the city’s port.
Along with the president, Villaraigosa met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski, saying it is essential for the mayor of such a major city to foster and reaffirm relationships with world leaders.
“I’m mayor of the city of Los Angeles, not some small town in the desert somewhere. We are a global city,” Villaraigosa said.
While overseas, Villaraigosa ordered an investigation to determine why illegally dumped refuse has been allowed to sit for weeks in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, a problem reported Monday in The Times. The mayor called for a report on how long it takes to clean up refuse after residents call in a complaint to the city’s 311 non-emergency number.
The city official who oversees enforcement for the Public Works Department said that budget cutbacks have, in part, led to a 40% reduction in surveillance operations to catch people dumping illegally.
Villaraigosa on Wednesday dismissed that assertion.
“I’m led to believe that’s not the case,” the mayor said. “Sometimes people make excuses when they’re not doing their job. And the fact of the matter is, we have the resources to address illegal dumping. That’s why I ordered an investigation. I want to make sure people whose responsibility it is to pick up the trash in South L.A. are doing their job.”
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phil.willon@latimes.com
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4f44c5bd2c138dfcbce92e38a233a97d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-19-me-text19-story.html | Prying bosses get the message | Prying bosses get the message
A federal appeals court Wednesday sharply limited the ability of employers to obtain e-mails and text messages sent by employees on company-financed accounts.
The text message portion of the ruling, issued by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, will affect all employers who contract with an outside provider for messaging, as most do. Access to e-mail would be barred if the employer contracts out its e-mail service rather than maintaining an internal server to handle it.
A majority of companies keep employee e-mail on their servers, analysts said. Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook program, which has a 65% share of the corporate e-mail market, can be used either on a company’s internal systems or on systems managed by vendors. Currently, about 28% of Outlook users have their e-mail handled by an outside vendor, according to research firm Radicati Group.
The ruling also gives all government workers 4th Amendment protection against searches of text and e-mail communications by their bosses, lawyers said.
“This ruling is a tremendous victory for your online privacy, helping ensure that the 4th Amendment applies to your communications online just as strongly as it does to your letters and packages,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates civil liberties in the digital world, said in an online posting.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel was the first federal appellate decision to provide 4th Amendment protection to electronic messages, which lawyers said would require police to obtain a warrant before they could access someone’s e-mail or text messages.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by Ontario Police Sgt. Jeff Quon and three others against the city’s service provider and the city and Police Department for violating the 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.
In August 2002, Quon and another officer exceeded a department limit of 25,000 characters per month for texting. The police chief ordered a subordinate to obtain transcripts of the officers’ text messages to determine whether the pagers were being used purely for work purposes.
The provider, Arch Wireless, sent the department transcripts of the messages. The city determined that many of Quon’s messages were personal, and several were sexually explicit.
The court found that Arch Wireless violated the federal Stored Communications Act, which prohibits providers from divulging the contents of any communication that is maintained on the service without a warrant.
“I think right now service providers are going to be a little leery of providing anything to the subscriber because of this case,” said John H. Horwitz, who represented Arch Wireless in the case.
The court ruled against the Police Department even though the city had informed employees that it had the right to read e-mails and text messages. The court said that despite the policy, text messages were not monitored for content and employees had an expectation of privacy.
“There were a host of simple ways to verify the efficacy of the 25,000 character limit [if that, indeed, was the intended purpose] without intruding . . . on 4th Amendment rights,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the court.
The department could have warned Quon that for a month he was forbidden from using his pager for personal communications, and that all his messages would be reviewed, the court said.
Dieter C. Dammeier, who represented Quon and three other plaintiffs who communicated with him by text message, said reading one’s text message “really is like somebody trying to eavesdrop on your phone conversations.” He said some of the sexually explicit messages were between Quon and his wife.
“Nowadays, people text message,” Dammeier said. “It’s a new wave of communication, and hopefully this decision is going to be the trend that keeps them more private.”
He said the case would return to the lower court to determine monetary damages.
The defendants’ lawyers said they did not know whether their clients would appeal.
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m aura.dolan@latimes.com
Times staff writer Joseph Menn contributed.
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37894c60b90a5f8f89df1ccd12b1e979 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-19-sp-lakersfyi19-story.html | Numbers tell bad tale | Numbers tell bad tale
The stats and records kept stacking up against the Lakers throughout their staggering 131-92 loss to Boston in Game 6.
Among the things they hope to forget in the off-season are:
Boston’s 39-point margin of victory was the largest for any team in a clinching game in the NBA Finals. The previous record was the Celtics’ 33-point victory (129-96) over the Lakers in Game 5 in 1965.
The Celtics set a Finals record by collecting 18 steals against the Lakers in Game 6. The old mark was 17 by Golden State against Washington in Game 3 of the 1975 Finals.
The Celtics’ margin of victory was the second-largest in Finals history, falling short of Chicago’s 42-point victory (96-54) over Utah in Game 3 of the 1998 Finals.
Coach Phil Jackson tried to sound positive after Game 6, saying the Lakers would look back “favorably” on a season in which they won the Western Conference. Just the same, he acknowledged dissatisfaction.
“We’re very disappointed, our fans are disappointed,” he said. “I think everybody is disappointed that we didn’t get a game out of this” return to Boston.
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Quick hits
Celtics forward Paul Pierce was the unanimous choice for Finals MVP, earning all nine votes from a panel of media members. . . . Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom were dreadful from the free-throw line in the series. Gasol made 22 of 34 attempts (64.7%) and Odom was 18 for 28 (64.3%).
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1ef0ae824280db1755c94583ae90d024 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-20-fg-violence20-story.html | U.N. deems sexual attacks a security issue | U.N. deems sexual attacks a security issue
The U.N. Security Council affirmed Thursday that rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, and called for measures to combat such attacks.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced the U.S.-sponsored resolution at a special session attended by diplomats from 60 nations.
Rice said the resolution brought an end to a debate about whether sexual violence was a security issue and belonged on the council’s agenda. A similar resolution last year failed to pass, with several members disputing the need for it.
“I am proud that today we respond to that lingering question with a resounding yes,” she told the Security Council. “This world body now acknowledges that sexual violence in conflict zones is indeed a security concern.
“We affirm that sexual violence profoundly affects not only the health and safety of women, but the economic and social stability of their nations.”
The resolution established U.N. procedures to monitor sexual violence in armed conflicts and called for the secretary-general to report in one year on their implementation. It also urges the U.N. to impose sanctions on violators.
Advocacy groups pushed the issue back onto the council agenda after China, Russia and South Africa said last year that sexual violence was an unfortunate byproduct of war and one that was addressed by a number of U.N. agencies, but was not a matter of international peace and security.
The resolution also urged the secretary-general to clamp down on peacekeepers who prey on vulnerable women and children instead of protecting them.
Despite an attempt by the U.N. to revamp the regulations and culture among peacekeepers and staffers after incidents of sexual exploitation over the last few years in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, reports of further abuses surfaced last year in several countries.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the council that he was committed to “zero tolerance” and “zero impunity” for sexual abuse by U.N. personnel and urged countries that provide troops to follow through with prosecution because the U.N. has no authority to try the perpetrators.
He pledged to strengthen the world body’s code of conduct and hold supervisors accountable for assaults committed by soldiers and staffers.
The presence of high-level female officials at Thursday’s meeting was deliberate. Rice chaired the gathering. France’s secretary of state for human rights, Rama Yade, called for the prosecution of sexual violence at the International Criminal Court. British Atty. Gen. Patricia Scotland denounced recent attacks on women in Zimbabwe, especially the killing Wednesday of the mayor’s wife in the capital, Harare.
The wives of the U.S. and British ambassadors to the United Nations also have worked to raise awareness that rape is a deliberate war tactic meant to intimidate and destroy communities, as seen in the former Yugoslav federation, Sudan’s Darfur region and Congo.
After adopting the resolution, the council held an informal session to condemn increasing violence in Zimbabwe in the run-up to the June 27 presidential runoff election.
Next week, the Security Council will have its first formal meeting on the violence there and will be briefed by U.N. envoy Haile Menkerios, who was in Zimbabwe on Thursday.
South Africa, China and Russia have blocked official discussion so far, saying it would be interfering in a nation’s internal affairs.
Rice cited concern among council members that “free and fair elections cannot possibly be held” in Zimbabwe because of the increasing intimidation of and violence against the opposition by the government of President Robert Mugabe, who is seeking reelection.
“I think that the mood in the room was one of extraordinary concern and a desire for President Mugabe to hear that there is tremendous international concern about what is happening in his country,” the secretary of State told reporters after the meeting.
“I don’t see anything that President Mugabe has done that has been helpful to Zimbabwean people, so maybe it’s time for international pressure.”
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maggie.farley@latimes.com
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bf2055f38fdda5587f200eb4efdaa17c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-21-et-culture21-story.html | Latinos lose an urban voice | Latinos lose an urban voice
It was meant to be a magazine for “your city” -- Tu Ciudad. But in the end, the glossy lifestyle publication aimed at affluent, assimilated Latinos failed to find a home in the region’s turbulent media landscape.
After more than three years serving as a guide for the city’s best mojitos, taco stands and cultural trendsetters, Tu Ciudad magazine abruptly shut down this week. The bimonthly leaves behind a stunned staff of eight, thousands of disappointed readers and millions in losses for Indianapolis-based parent company Emmis Communications, which also publishes Los Angeles magazine.
The demise marks the end of a bold experiment in targeting -- and capitalizing on -- an enormous but elusive demographic. The readers of Tu Ciudad are the children and grandchildren of immigrants who still feel connected to their cultural roots, no matter how thoroughly they blend into the urban mainstream. The dilemma in reaching them arises from the very thing that defines them as a group, their bicultural identity.
The question remains: Do they need a specialty magazine to appeal to their Latino side?
“Frankly, this experience has left me with the feeling that the jury is still out,” says editorial director Angelo Figueroa. “I’m not convinced that highly assimilated, U.S.-born, English-dominant Hispanics necessarily want to be separated and marketed to as a group. They don’t want a Latino L.A. Times; they just want to be included in the L.A. Times.”
That’s quite a postmortem from the man who helped develop the magazine’s editorial plan. Yet Figueroa, who was also founding editor of People en Espanol, wasn’t ready to throw in the toalla at Tu Ciudad. “We created a great magazine which never actually got close to its real potential,” he says. “I thought our best days were way into the future.”
That was one common regret I heard this week from Figueroa, editor in chief Oscar Garza and publisher Jaime Gamboa. They all wish they had had more time.
Launched in November 2004 with a $5-million commitment from Emmis, the magazine was expected to break even early in its fourth year, says Gamboa. It was still losing money -- an estimated $1.3 million this year -- and was lagging 10 months behind projections. But revenue was trending upward, he says, to a projected $3.1 million this year.
The consensus at Tu Ciudad is that the magazine was hit by “a double whammy,” as Figueroa put it: a harsh economy that cut overall ad budgets, plus a particularly tough climate for the parent company’s radio division that saw Emmis stock plummet from about $20 per share when the magazine opened to less than $3 today. Emmis issued a one-sentence statement saying Tu Ciudad folded because its financial performance failed to meet expectations. Period. Still, some caution not to interpret this setback as definitive. “New Latino media have always had an uphill battle in getting advertisers, whether it’s radio in the 1920s and ‘30s or SIN [Spanish International Network], the forerunner of Univision” in the ‘70s, says Felix Gutierrez, a journalism professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Now you see a new force in a new area, English-language print, fighting some of the same battles. But in the long term, I think that’s where the audience is going. People are becoming more and more bilingual and there has to be a way to reach them.”
Latino magazines have enjoyed some success at a national level, in both languages. In 2007, the top two Hispanic magazines with the highest reported ad revenues were People en Espanol ($49.7 million) and the English-language women’s magazine Latina ($36 million), published in New York by Latina Media Ventures. According to Media Economics Group, total ad revenue for Latino magazines rose last year by almost 8% to $263.8 million, led by automakers, hair care products and pharmaceuticals.
But that represents a puny share of the more than $5 billion U.S. companies spend trying to reach the Hispanic market, mostly through TV and radio in Spanish. I’ve had firsthand experience in this field, so I appreciate how hard it can be. As a student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s, I edited a Chicano monthly, La Voz del Pueblo, published by a student/community group known as Frente. In those days, content was driven by activism, and so was the staffing. We were too tiny (and too political) to attract corporate ads, but I was thrilled when the Tamale Parlor in Hayward bought a small display ad.
The Chicano movement, which fueled so much creativity, has long since faded. But the sense of identity it fostered among second- and third-generation Mexican Americans, not to mention their ambition for better jobs and education, helped shape the market that made Tu Ciudad possible.
It was easy to dismiss Tu Ciudad as frivolous, but for some reason I saved every copy. It filled a void, so it felt important, even historic.
“And that’s the shame of it, because there won’t be something that can easily take its place,” says Garza, a former Times Calendar editor. “Nobody had ever tried to do this for a city, and I think we proved there’s a population that really appreciated the acknowledgment of the way that bicultural Latinos live in Los Angeles.”
The challenge for the magazine was to strike a balance between two groups of Latinos, the politically conscious and the upwardly mobile. The former was more likely to be interested in Latino culture and the latter was more likely to afford what the advertisers were selling, the BMWs, Rolex watches and imported Grolsch beer.
“We didn’t want to be too earnest and hit you over the head with the whole Latino [identity] thing,” says Figueroa. “On the one hand, we’re trying to be as worldly as possible. But on the other hand, if we got too worldly there was no need for us. There were already other magazines covering all that stuff.”
Critics say the magazine was too slow to go online and appeared too infrequently in print (every other month). Its final issue, June-July 2008, featured a typical mix of celebrity profiles (Chilean actor Cristian de la Fuente), fashion layouts, consumer tidbits, oddball columns (“What Your ‘Stache Says About You”) and, on the serious side, UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta’s remembrance of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.
The mix didn’t always work for Chimatli, an online blogger at www.laeastside.com. She’s the quintessential Tu Ciudad reader: female, 37, fourth-generation Angelena, proud resident of Lincoln Heights and owner of her own vegetarian catering business, selling soy tacos. Plus, she was one of the magazine’s rare paid subscribers, since almost three-fourths of its 117,000 circulation was delivered free to households.
Chimatli paid for her copy because “I thought I should support it.” But she came to see the product as out of touch with average Latinos. “In the magazine’s first year, I really enjoyed the articles and their L.A. based coverage,” Chimatli wrote. “Lately though, it seems like the writers and editors are all living in Brentwood or something because almost nothing in the magazine interests me.”
Gamboa says he’s trying to revive the magazine, possibly through another partnership. He still dreams of a chain of regional publications aimed at Latinos in big cities.
“I’m not giving up,” says Gamboa, 34, the youngest of eight children raised in El Monte by an immigrant gardener. “But I’m going to make sure next time it’s set up for the long haul, because I don’t want to have to live through this again.”
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agustin.gurza@latimes.com
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d91bfa24131ca4ec082c6b4500173ce4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-21-fg-peacepush21-story.html | Israel’s peace efforts widen | Israel’s peace efforts widen
The tentative truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is just part of a larger effort by the Jewish state to reach out to longtime adversaries. In the process, it confronts a number of difficult, domestically unpopular negotiating options.
One key issue faced by Israeli diplomats is both straightforward and highly sensitive. Syria wants the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967, returned in exchange for peace.
Analysts believe that giving up the Golan Heights, regarded by Israelis as a beloved vacation spot and a crucial strategic asset, could fundamentally alter the regional equation.
The change, they say, could result in less Iranian influence over Syria; less animosity between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which receives support from Syria and Iran; and a stronger peace agreement with Hamas, whose senior leadership mostly lives in Damascus, the Syrian capital.
“It’s a move to break the Damascus-Tehran-Hezbollah front, and Syria is the weakest part of that chain,” said Anat Kurz, director of research at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank.
Israeli diplomats also continue to conduct direct talks with the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, though little progress has been seen in recent months toward an independent Palestinian state. Indirect peace talks with Syria exist under Turkish mediation, and talks with Hezbollah over a prisoner exchange appear to be making headway. On Wednesday, Israel publicly offered direct negotiations with the new Lebanese government, in which Hezbollah is a crucial player.
The flurry of Israeli diplomatic activity comes amid domestic turmoil for beleaguered Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and as U.S. influence in the region is waning in the final months of the Bush administration.
Some of the recent initiatives, particularly the Hamas truce, which took effect Thursday, and the Syrian talks, are departures from the once-unified Israeli-U.S. strategy of confronting regional adversaries with diplomatic isolation and the threat of force. The shift toward negotiations may indicate an Israeli conclusion that the hard-line approach had not produced results.
A senior official said the various tracks of diplomatic talks weren’t part of an overall umbrella strategy of multilateral engagement. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the talks were based on case-by-case developments that favored diplomacy.
U.S. officials have been openly supportive of the Gaza truce and more circumspect regarding the Israeli-Syrian talks. But both represent an Israeli break from Bush administration doctrine.
On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the U.S. was “supportive of the efforts that Israel is making to reach out and engage in discussions.”
In Gaza, more than a year of virtual siege failed to dislodge Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and later routed the rival Fatah faction to take full control of the impoverished coastal sliver.
Olmert faced growing public clamor to end the near-daily rocket attacks by Gazan militant groups on southern Israeli communities, but a large-scale reoccupation of the densely packed strip could have proved complicated and bloody.
Observers said Olmert also needed some good news to deflect from his list of domestic woes: a corruption investigation and mounting signs of rebellion in his ruling coalition.
If it holds, the cease-fire will open the door to more intensive negotiations involving the possible release of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and the opening of Gaza’s border with Egypt. The pace of future steps probably will be on the agenda next week when Olmert travels to Cairo to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
With Syria, Israeli officials concluded that diplomatic isolation failed to reduce Damascus’ support for Hezbollah, blunt its alleged nuclear ambitions or influence its close relationship with Iran, analysts and observers said.
“There is a growing realization that waiting until Syria has a change of heart and gives up everything is fruitless,” Kurz said.
Turkey, which has close relations with Israel and Syria, has played mediator so far. But the process could soon proceed with face-to-face talks. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said this week that he hoped to bring Olmert together with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Paris during a summit in July.
Israeli officials have indicated that the Golan is on the table for discussion, but such negotiations could be highly unpopular for the Olmert government.
This week’s offer to directly negotiate with Lebanon over the disputed territory known as Shabaa Farms was quickly dismissed by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and criticized by some Israeli analysts as a domestically motivated smoke screen.
“It was a kind of Olmert gimmick,” said Alon Liel, a former Israeli diplomat and founder of the Israeli-Syrian Peace Society. “Israelis believe some of it is Olmert spin to shift attention away” from his domestic troubles.
Despite Syria’s removal of its troops from Lebanon in 2005, the country maintains a strong hold on Lebanese politics and any negotiation Israel might entertain with Beirut would have to start with Damascus, Liel said.
The talks with Hezbollah center on the return of two Israeli soldiers captured in 2006 in exchange for a still-undetermined number of Lebanese prisoners held by the Israelis. According to Israeli radio reports, the families of the two soldiers were briefed by Israeli officials about the state of the talks this week and believe that a deal is imminent.
Somewhat overshadowed in the recent diplomatic activity are Olmert’s long-term talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose shaky and unpopular government has little to show for its negotiations with Israel.
Casey, the State Department spokesman, expressed concern that Israel was seeking to obscure failure of the Palestinian negotiations with success elsewhere.
“We don’t think that any other track or any other negotiating path ought to be a substitute or a distraction from the primary set of discussions and negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians,” he said.
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ashraf.khalil@latimes.com
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0b664022823fe5550209f5565b05e04e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-21-fi-megabus21-story.html | Megabus was poorly marketed, riders say | Megabus was poorly marketed, riders say
Megabus.com’s short-lived run in Los Angeles was what one critic called a megabust, and loyal fans are taking its final departure pretty hard.
The ultra-cheap bus service, which rolls out of town for the last time Sunday, had a devoted, albeit limited, following and had been gaining a steady stream of new riders -- though not quite steady enough. In online reviews and message boards, they raved about the clean and roomy buses, shared stories of their experiences and offered tips on how to obtain the lowest fare: $1.
Now they’re lamenting the abrupt exit.
“My friends and I are all in mourning,” Jan Brown of Van Nuys wrote on Yelp.com.
Brown, 66, became an early enthusiast, riding the bulky blue-and-yellow buses five times to San Francisco and Las Vegas. She loved the convenience and cost, she said, and talked it up to “anybody who would listen.”
One-way fares started at $1, plus a 50-cent booking fee, and the highest price for a ticket to San Francisco was $39.
“People would say, ‘Are you crazy? There’s no such thing,’ ” recalled Brown, who works at an animal shelter. “It was just such a fabulous deal.”
A subsidiary of Paramus, N.J.-based Coach USA, Megabus said last month that it was shutting down its Los Angeles hub because of low ridership, less than a year after launching the service. Despite the bargain fares, the 56-seat buses would sometimes leave Union Station with just a few riders.
“Megabust,” said Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, a Southern California mass transportation advocacy group. “It was kind of a good concept but it wasn’t carried out.”
Megabus entered the Los Angeles market last August, with daily service to San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Las Vegas, San Diego and Phoenix. Stops in Millbrae and San Ysidro, both in California, were later added.
Company officials predicted that Southern Californians would try an express bus to escape rising gasoline costs and congestion, and that people concerned about the environmental effect of driving or flying would appreciate the bus alternative.
But within months, Megabus began offering fewer trips and canceling routes, until only San Francisco and Oakland remained.
“It’s really unfortunate,” said Stefanie Cheng, 19, a student at Santa Monica College and a first-time Megabus rider who traveled to the Bay Area last week. “I was like, ‘No, why are they shutting down? I just found out about this!’ ”
Bhoomi Patel, a student at Cal State Los Angeles, visits friends and family in the Bay Area a couple of times a month. Patel, 23, doesn’t own a car, so she always traveled by Megabus, spending about $20 or less each way.
“Now I should cut down my visits,” she said while waiting to board her last Megabus to San Jose recently. “I need to manage my budget.”
Mike Ricanor, who used to take Megabus trips frequently to San Diego to visit family, snagged the coveted $1 fare a few times. After the company canceled the route this year, he began paying $34 each way for the same trip on Amtrak.
Megabus’ decision to pull out of Los Angeles was hardly a surprise, Ricanor said. The first bus he took carries just one other passenger.
“I was like, I wonder how they’re going to stay in business,” said Ricanor, 29, an information technology systems administrator. “I kind of figured that it was going downhill.”
Megabus is flourishing elsewhere. The service, which began in Britain five years ago, has taken off in the Midwest, where Megabus serves 17 cities and has seen business increase 137% during the last year, said its president, Dale Moser. The company recently expanded to eight East Coast cities.
In Los Angeles, where public transportation has long taken a back seat to driving, the market was harder to penetrate. It seems that even record gasoline prices couldn’t persuade enough Angelenos to ride Megabus.
“It was either timing, or the network wasn’t right, or we were just unsuccessful in getting people to give us a try,” Moser said. “We’re disappointed too.”
Riders blamed poor advertising, although Moser said Megabus had spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to promote the service in newspapers, leaflets and on billboards. Many fans said they had never seen ads and questioned why Megabus hadn’t advertised on college campuses and youth-oriented online sites such as Facebook.
Instead, most riders said they had heard about the service from friends.
“You have to spend a lot of money to be a player in the Los Angeles market,” said Reed of the Transit Coalition. Megabus “seemed like they kind of skimped on the things that make products work.”
Some fans are holding out hope that this won’t be the end.
“Write to Megabus on their website,” Brown suggested. “Maybe if enough people howl, they’ll give it another chance.”
But just in case, she said, “I was going to take a camera down to Union Station and take a farewell photo with Megabus pulling out.”
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andrea.chang@latimes.com
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02268753b1f58e0d082e7103515f4112 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-21-na-epa21-story.html | White House says no to Congress’ EPA subpoena | White House says no to Congress’ EPA subpoena
Escalating a fight with Democrats on Capitol Hill, the White House on Friday invoked executive privilege in refusing to turn over documents to a congressional committee investigating the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to deny California permission to implement its own vehicle emission standards.
The Bush administration asserted executive privilege hours before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to vote on whether to bring contempt-of-Congress proceedings against EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson and Susan Dudley, administrator of regulatory affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents.
Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) put off a vote on the contempt resolutions while he considers his options.
“I don’t think we’ve had a situation like this since Richard Nixon was president,” he said, appearing determined to press ahead, even if it leads to a court fight. “We don’t know whether this privilege that’s being asserted is valid or not.”
Presidents since George Washington have claimed rights to executive branch confidentiality, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The Bush White House invoked executive privilege to prevent officials from testifying about the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. President Clinton cited presidential privilege during investigations into the Monica Lewinsky scandal and on other issues.
House and Senate committees have been investigating what role the White House played in EPA decisions preventing California and other states from enacting tougher emissions rules than the federal government and in the EPA’s approval of new ozone pollution standards.
The administration’s claim of executive privilege is the latest twist in the escalating legal and political battle over California’s efforts to implement its own law combating global warming. Critics of the EPA decision contend that it was based on politics, not science or the law.
As Waxman considered his next move in his fight with the White House, another House committee in the room next door grilled former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote a revealing book about his days in the White House. The hearings were a sign of determination by Democrats not to ease up on their oversight activities, even in the final months of the Bush administration.
In asserting executive privilege in the EPA inquiry, the administration made public a copy of a letter sent to the president by Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey saying that releasing internal documents “could inhibit the candor of future deliberations among the president’s staff.”
EPA spokesman Tim Lyons said the agency had provided the committee with more than 7,000 documents and devoted 2,200 hours of staff time to responding to requests for information, and he called it “disappointing” that the committee had decided to “politicize environmental regulations.”
Jim Nussle, director of the Office of Management and Budget, took issue with Waxman’s “sudden and unwarranted” move to consider contempt proceedings, noting that Dudley had appeared before Waxman’s committee last month and was asked “only four questions” -- and only one by the panel chairman.
“There is no valid reason for moving from mutual cooperation to unilateral confrontation,” Nussle wrote Waxman.
Waxman said: “I am very disappointed and disturbed that the administration is keeping this information from us, and I think we have a right to it.”
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richard.simon@latimes.com
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899295119b697f419d8f10411d967f1c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-22-ca-bear22-story.html | In the wilds (sorta) with Bear Grylls | In the wilds (sorta) with Bear Grylls
Bear GRYLLS threw a lizard at me.
We were climbing in Franklin Canyon Park in the Santa Monica Mountains on a cool, hazy afternoon recently when Grylls, host of Discovery Channel’s popular survival series “Man vs. Wild,” spotted a small dark reptile, no longer than a pencil, scurrying up the trail.
Our group quieted. Grylls stopped, squared his lean body, pounced. Too late. The reptile darted away. “That’s one lucky lizard,” Grylls said with a smile.
A few moments later, our guide plunged headfirst into a thicket of scrub and, to my astonishment, emerged holding his prey by the tail.
“See, if I were doing this on the show,” he said in his British accent, “I’d do like this and” -- he mimed biting off the lizard’s head.
“Oh, please don’t!” someone in our party pleaded.
Grylls chuckled and gave the wriggling lizard an appraising stare. He gazed down the path toward me. “Here, catch,” he said, suddenly lofting the critter in my direction with an underhand pass. I stepped aside and watched it disappear in a pile of brush.
If you’re unacquainted with Grylls, any culturally aware grade-school student can likely tell you all you need to know. That he travels to the most dangerous wildernesses in the world. That he brims with survival tips and camping lore. And yes, that he literally sinks his teeth into all sorts of disgusting things, from a blood-engorged grub to a still-flopping-about salmon to a rotting carcass not quite finished by maggots and hyenas. The poor man has demonstrated how to hydrate oneself by squeezing water out of elephant dung.
In the wake of the 2006 death of Australian wildlife guide Steve Irwin (“The Crocodile Hunter”), Grylls has become Discovery Channel’s premier ambassador of outdoor danger. The son of a politician, he trained in the British military, where he seriously injured his back in a parachuting accident. Nevertheless, he climbed Mt. Everest at age 23 and parlayed his minor celebrity into a book. His TV career started humbly enough with a deodorant commercial. Grylls now spends the few weeks each year when he’s not working with his wife and two young children on a houseboat on the Thames.
Yet whether Grylls’ exploits can be trusted as dependably “real” has made him the subject of controversy. A fuss erupted last year when Britain’s Sunday Times reported that he and his producers exaggerated dangers he encountered during filming, stayed in hotels during supposedly overnight camping trips and contrived certain scenes for dramatic effect, including adding fake smoke to a volcano sequence. (Who among TV producers would do such things?) The network has since added a disclaimer; viewers are told that Grylls and his crew receive support in “potentially life-threatening” predicaments.
Although Discovery executives consider “Man vs. Wild” -- which starts its third season this summer -- more of a how-to than a reality show, the series is caught up in the debate over whether reality TV is a contradiction in terms. Partisans of “Survivorman,” another lost-in-the-wilderness show on Discovery, have compared Grylls unfavorably with that program’s host, Les Stroud, who travels into the bush alone, no crew in tow.
I hoped to get a sense of what Grylls is really like in his more customary habitat during our trip to Franklin Canyon, a dense, 605-acre preserve tucked amid the stately mansions of Beverly Hills. Naturally, I also wondered what backwoods delicacies I might sample during an encounter with a man known for devouring creepy-crawlies most people wouldn’t dare touch, let alone eat.
The first rule
Iarrived a few minutes early. In the back seat sat my daughter Gabby, an inquisitive third-grader and devoted “Man vs. Wild” fan. (It might be less humiliating to have a close family member rather than Grylls run for help if something dreadful happened on the trail.)
A black limousine glided past on the main paved road through the park and out tumbled Grylls, a tall, wiry, boyish-looking man of 34 dressed in a plaid earth-tone shirt and loose trousers from his own line of branded clothing (to be released this year). A photographer and a Discovery publicity executive rounded out our party.
After pleasantries, I suggested that we pretend as if we were stranded in the wilderness and had to battle for survival so that Grylls could show us some basic tips. This was a plan that required a healthy imagination, since we stood at a few miles north of the fancy boutiques of Rodeo Drive.
Grylls immediately shot down the proposal. If we pursued the survival scenario, he explained, we’d have to go in search of a stream and follow it downhill -- among the first steps for any unfortunate truly lost in the wilderness. Climbing was what he wanted to do. The chauffeur popped the trunk of and Grylls reached inside. “Rule 1: Take plenty of water,” he announced, launching plastic bottles at us.
Once on the trail he seemed to relax. He asked if we could figure out which way we were headed based on the angle of the sun. I craned my neck toward the sky and hazarded a guess, whereupon Grylls gently corrected me.
I asked about a David Letterman taping this spring, where he’d seemed uncomfortable as the host pressed him on last year’s dust-up. After a pause, he explained that he doesn’t like doing talk shows. “I’m not good with large groups,” he said. (In November, Grylls told the Los Angeles Times that he regretted not being more forthcoming earlier about how the show is made. “Looking back now, I should have made it absolutely clear and said, ‘Listen, tell people, show it all.’ ”)
We kept ascending, and at one spot where the hillside leveled off we came upon a piece of black excrement about the size of a shotgun cartridge. Grylls knelt down and asked Gabby, “What do you think left this? I’d say a coyote.” He pointed and added, “The tapered end means it’s a carnivore.” We moved on.
For myself, I was greatly relieved that the moment did not lead to a demonstration of the amazing hydrating properties of coyote dung.
Leading us higher toward the scrubby summit, Grylls cautioned us against getting “track-happy,” or following a trail just because it’s there, rather than sticking to a course based on a plotted direction. But he noted that trails can still be quite useful to the wilderness survivor.
He turned again to Gabby. “A trail leads to what?”
My daughter, who is shy by nature and also seemed to be recovering slowly from the effects of star-struck-ness, shrugged. “Animals, I guess?”
“Water,” Grylls corrected.
Much as it does on “Man vs. Wild,” this or that sight tended to remind Grylls of incidents from his travels. Seeing the common lizards that skittered across the dusty paths, for example, led to a story of how he recently killed a large monitor lizard in the Sumatran jungle.
“It was a ravished place, teeming with snakes,” he recalled with enthusiasm. “Every few feet you’d come upon some nasty stuff!”
Days before our excursion, in another exploit that will win him no friends among members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, he’d wrestled a 7-foot alligator in Louisiana. The pas de deux ended with Grylls’ knife sticking out of a soft spot in the back of the gator’s head. Then, he said, he smeared the animal’s fat on his face to ward off mosquitoes (“an old Indian trick”) and ate the tail.
“It was lovely!” he said.
He spoke with relish about one of his favorite books, “Skeletons on the Zahara,” by Dean King, a retelling of a desert trek in North Africa by 19th century sailors who survived by drinking their own urine.
Yet whatever Grylls does in the name of showmanship -- and it’s abundantly clear he’ll do just about anything -- the wild mountain man image doesn’t entirely fit. For all the exotic raw animal flesh he pops into his maw for the cameras, he said, at home he’s actually semi-vegetarian. And it became apparent that he regards nature in a way that’s more Sierra Club than Outward Bound.
We neared the summit. Perched on a ridge to the west was a long row of gigantic estate homes, any one of which could have made an inviting cover photo for Architectural Digest.
Someone happened to mention Southern California’s wildfires. Grylls pointed out that the phenomenon is as nature intended, although the effects are probably worsened by reckless land use and misguided fire-control efforts. “It’s all to protect . . . those things,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the distant mansions.
“We live in an amazing world, and we’re charged with living boldly,” he had said earlier. “It’s a shame to lose these skills that allow us to live in nature. So much of our brain is absorbed with moneymaking and computers. The most fulfilled people I know are absorbed with nature. We have, deep within us, a love of the outdoors. There’s more to the world than your boss and trying to impress your girlfriend with a big car.”
Larvae hunt
It WAS time to head back. Grylls gave Gabby a quick primer on navigation with a mnemonic, “Bear Drinks Tea For Breakfast.” This was a reminder to steer one’s way using bearings, distance and time, plus the terrain’s features and backdrop.
The descent was much harder than the way up -- steeper and more rutted than I’d noticed earlier. My sneakers kept sliding as if on ice. Ahead of me, Grylls and my daughter seemed to be almost sauntering down the hillside. A voice behind me prompted: “Try bending your legs more. It’s easier to walk that way.” It was the Discovery PR executive.
We arrived back at the trail head with surprising speed. Grylls paused by a felled tree trunk and started stripping off bark. “It’s a good place to look for larvae,” he explained.
Oh, here it comes, I thought. The part where we all ingest something gross. Or maybe the table will be set only for me, as punishment for my sorry lack of hiking skills.
I put my fingertips on the trunk, impersonating someone trying to help. But after a few moments, Grylls gave up. “It’s all about patience,” he said cheerfully. “My worst quality!”
Our party rested in the shade of a dry creek bed. Grylls finished off his water bottle and asked for a few sips from mine. I’d barely touched it. He listened avidly as the photographer described his travels in Baja California, on the Sea of Cortez. Grylls has spent little time in the region but is nevertheless interested in buying a house there.
A short time later, after Grylls had climbed back into his limousine and motored away, I thought again of something he’d told us on the trail, when discussing his unlikely renown. “I’m lucky to be able to do the only thing I know how to do,” he said, with a mix of cheerfulness and matter-of-factness. “I’m probably unemployable after this!”
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scott.collins@latimes.com
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167833e6e97e6a2bc14cd838a780a458 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-22-ca-groundlings22-story.html | Like magic, Groundlings turn viral | Like magic, Groundlings turn viral
WHEN members of the Groundlings improv troupe headed to the alleyway behind their Melrose Avenue theater to shoot “David Blaine Street Magic,” they had no idea the spoof would end up becoming one of the most popular videos in YouTube history.
The sendup (with its sometimes-salty language) starts with Blaine -- actually, it’s Groundling Mitch Silpa -- playing mind tricks with two supposed passersby, and soon ratchets up the level of “magic” to outrageous proportions. The video short co-written by Groundlings Michael Naughton and Mikey Day, who also costar, currently ranks in the Top 100 of the most-viewed videos on the content-sharing site. It has logged more than 18 million plays, an average five-star rating from viewers and over 37,000 comments that by and large go something like this:
-- best video I’ve seen on YouTube.
-- ooooomg i’m dying over here. that was hilarious. thank you so much. Hahahaha.
-- Oh, please do more! . . . you gotta do some more.
The video’s endurance, combined with sentiments such as that last one in particular -- a request for more of the same -- helped persuade Sony Pictures Television that L.A.'s improvisational comedy troupe has the potential to strike online gold.
User-generated video -- particularly the funny stuff -- is clearly here to stay, said Sean Carey, senior executive vice president of Sony Pictures Television. But ferreting out the good is proving harder and harder in the often random online world. When the public gets tired of watching homemade videos of “people falling off roofs and dogs on a skateboard . . . we want to be in the position of producing quality content on this platform,” Carey said. “Who better to do that than people who have been doing sketch comedy and had a track record doing it?”
Under a deal made public in April, the Groundlings will deliver 50 so-called webisodes; the first will debut later this year on Crackle.com and other Sony distribution platforms.
The pact comes as Hollywood scrambles to find The Next Big Thing -- the next lonelygirl15, if you will -- in the hopes of parlaying that into something more marketable, be it a TV show, a movie or, an online show. Sony is also mulling ways to repackage on-line material through their various channels. (Other recent deals include HBO’s investment in comedian Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die website, and a cash infusion for the creators behind the lonelygirl15 phenomenon.)
“It’s definitely the wild, wild West . . . a world where consumers have almost infinite choices,” said Brent Weinstein, the chief executive who heads up 60Frames, which does its own producing of online content. “Everyone is trying to figure out their way through the muck. But I do think that creating quality content is really the starting point.”
Video that comes courtesy of the Groundlings could prove particularly attractive to advertisers who want to invest in a sure thing, said Bobby Tulsiani, an Internet analyst with JupiterResearch.
“Right now, most of the views are going to user-generated online content,” he said. “But advertisers don’t always feel safe with that. When a brand is created, you’ve pre-vetted the content, and now an advertiser can say ‘We want to be a part of this skit.’ ”
For the Groundlings -- a troupe that helped give wings to the likes of Ferrell, Lisa Kudrow, the late Phil Hartman and others -- the deal is an opportunity to get their work in front of a bigger audience than ever before.
“In the theater, we have 99 people watching us. Online, we can have a million,” said improv actor Jeremy Rowley, who has been affiliated with the troupe for nearly a decade.
Remade for the monitor
TRANSLATING THE Groundlings’ particular brand of humor -- and its emphasis on character development -- from the stage to the computer screen has created a learning curve for the roughly 30-member troupe.
“Stuff that works onstage, in my opinion, has a pretty slim chance of working online,” Rowley said. “It’s not like ‘Aim the video camera at the stage’ and you’re done.”
Unlike the Groundlings’ weekly theater shows, which mostly revolve around a series of single-scene skits and improv moments, video shorts often work best when they can stand on their own as self-contained stories that have a beginning, middle and end, said Tim Brennen, a 6-year Groundlings veteran who is the liaison between the troupe and Sony.
“Something that might be hilarious onstage can be too stagnant for video,” Brennen said. “It needs to be more action-oriented, more dynamic.”
On a recent Friday, Brennen and Rowley were inside the Groundlings’ theater, working on separate sketches for Sony.
Upstairs, Brennen was playing the part of an overzealous national security agent tapping the phone calls of unsuspecting Americans.
On center stage, Rowley was wearing a blond wig and red spandex leggings that left little to the imagination as he played the costar of a German TV show teaching safety to schoolchildren. We won’t give any jokes away, but suffice it to say you wouldn’t want your children -- or anyone else’s, for that matter -- exposed to the “Kids Are Safe Now Fantasy Musical Adventure Journey Show.”
At one point, children are given a multiple choice question: Is it a felony to have too many friends? Refuse to share toys? Or kill a cop? Cut to a laser sight aiming right between the eyes of a law enforcement officer. (Told you.) Rowley and the rest of the crew gather around the video camera to watch a playback. The talk is about the use of the laser sight. “Is that going to play on the small screen? I don’t know,” Rowley wonders aloud. The actor wearing the police uniform is sent back to his mark for another take, only this time the laser will focus on his forehead for a longer beat -- and a close-up.
Any initial fears that a pact with Sony would lead to big studio interference have since been dismissed. There have been some creative suggestions here and there, Rowley said, but “they’ve been letting us be the captain of the ship.”
That’s a responsibility that cuts both ways, he said. If a skit hits, the writers and actors get all the glory. If it flops, there’s no one to point the finger at.
Failure, though, is not something that scares off actors who specialize in improvisation. In fact, they find that threat part of the thrill.
“Once you’ve had the experience of failing onstage in front of a live audience, and then you wake up the next morning and realize, ‘Oh, the world didn’t end,’ it helps you take more chances,” Rowley said.
“We know we’re doing something that’s a little funnier, a little better than what’s out there,” Brennen said, “but it’s really a shotgun approach: see what sticks and what goes viral.”
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rene.lynch@latimes.com
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8301ef7372d88f11b4b660cb37ee6d50 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-22-fi-lazarus22-story.html | Insurance ‘eggheads’ make women pay | Insurance ‘eggheads’ make women pay
When it comes to health insurance, Valencia resident Tova Hack’s first problem is that she works part time and thus needs an individual policy for medical coverage because her employer doesn’t offer one.
Her second problem is that she’s a woman.
Hack, 22, a grad student at Cal State Northridge, is insured by Blue Shield of California. She just found out that the cost of her bare-bones, high-deductible insurance plan is going up 20%, to $119 a month from $99.
But the real surprise -- which Blue Shield neglected to point out in its recent letters to individual policyholders but which was apparent from a close reading of an accompanying chart -- is that men and women will now be charged different rates.
The change takes effect July 1.
“I don’t think it’s fair at all,” said Hack. “I’m in perfectly fine health.”
That may be. But as far as Blue Shield is concerned, Hack and all other women are somehow more accident-prone, or more likely to break a bone, or more susceptible to costly ailments.
Why? Because they’re women.
“Our egghead actuaries crunched the numbers based on all the data we have about healthcare,” explained Tom Epstein, a Blue Shield spokesman. “This is what they found.”
That women get sicker than men?
“It’s all about the statistics,” Epstein said.
It’s not about pregnancy, though. Hack’s policy doesn’t even cover pregnancy and maternity care.
No, this is purely a matter of Blue Shield deciding that women, as a general rule, are more expensive to insure than men.
Perhaps this is partly because women are more likely to seek preventive care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But this should make them better insurance risks. After all, they’re proactively working to stay healthy.
And isn’t that exactly what insurers encourage people to do?
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Alice Wolfson of United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. “The insurers aren’t assessing risk. They’re assessing how much healthcare is used, even when it’s preventive treatment.”
A spokesman for the California Department of Insurance said there were no regulations preventing gender-based pricing for individual policies.
Vehicle insurers also use gender in determining rates. In their case, though, men often pay more for coverage because they’re viewed as the greater risk. Supposedly guys drive more recklessly and get into more accidents.
Yet men are nevertheless viewed as a lesser medical liability than women, who live longer on average because they tend to eat right, exercise more frequently and take better care of themselves.
Men and women start out as equals in Blue Shield’s eyes. The pricing chart for the insurer’s Balance Plan 1700 -- the plan Hack signed up for -- shows that 18-year-old men and women are both charged $98 a month.
By age 20, women are paying $119 monthly, while men are charged $110.
When they turn 35, women are paying $174 a month compared with the $162 men are paying. By age 45, women are up to $271 a month, while men pay $25 less, or $246.
The gap persists until women and men reach the age of 60. At this point, women are paying $548 a month for insurance, while menfolk see their premium soar to $589.
From 65 onward, just as Medicare is kicking in, women are charged $633 and men are shelling out $681.
None of these rates include dependents.
Epstein couldn’t explain the trend, saying again only that Blue Shield’s “egghead actuaries” concocted the numbers.
But he emphasized that Blue Shield wasn’t the first to come up with gender-specific pricing for individual health insurance. Aetna Inc. apparently introduced the idea to California, followed by Anthem Blue Cross.
“We’ve done it because our competitors are doing it,” Epstein said. “We don’t want to get a disproportionate share of high-risk people.”
By “high-risk people,” what he means is “women.”
And what Epstein is basically saying is that if women are indeed costlier to insure, and if Blue Shield doesn’t price its policies accordingly, more women will want to be insured by Blue Shield.
Can’t have that.
A spokeswoman for Aetna said the company has used gender to set rates since it began offering individual policies in California in 2005. She said the practice reflects “the underlying difference in costs between males and females by age,” which is “well documented by actuarial studies.”
A spokeswoman for Anthem Blue Cross said the company’s individual rates can be affected by “current health status, medical history, age, gender, residence and occupation.” She said gender was added to the mix last year.
A Kaiser Permanente spokesman said the company didn’t differentiate by gender. But he said Kaiser was aware that other insurers were doing it and was keeping an eye on the market.
Blue Shield’s Epstein said gender-specific pricing was being phased in for all of the insurer’s 330,000 individual policies. He also said that although some policies were going up in price, others were holding prices steady but cutting back on benefits.
“Healthcare costs are going up dramatically,” Epstein said. “If you have the same benefits, the rate is going to go up.”
Individual health insurance typically costs more than group coverage because the risks can’t be spread among a large number of people. Such risk pools allow all people with group policies to be insured equally, without biases for age or gender.
Many individual policies come with high deductibles and are intended primarily to cover major problems.
Blue Shield is by no means alone in jacking up rates or cutting benefits for policyholders. Premiums for employer-sponsored insurance plans rose by an average 6.1% last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The average premium for family coverage ran $12,106, with workers paying $3,281 of that amount.
Premiums for nongroup policies ranged from $1,163 to $5,090 for individuals and $2,325 to $9,201 for families.
But parsing rates according to gender is a relatively new phenomenon. If women are more expensive than men to insure, and middle-aged women are significantly more expensive than middle-aged men, what about, say, older women with red hair? After all, they have fairer skin and thus are more susceptible to skin cancer.
How about if, statistically speaking, blacks are more expensive to insure than whites? Or Christians more expensive to cover than kosher-observing Jews?
How far will insurers go in determining risks?
“That’s a good question,” Epstein replied, although he said it’s “not economical to try” distinctions that go beyond age and gender.
Hack said she’ll be graduating next year and looks forward to landing a full-time job as a teacher.
“Hopefully I’ll be working for a school district,” she said. “I hear they have really good insurance.”
For the moment at least.
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Consumer Confidential runs Wednesdays and Sundays. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.
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280b3134808e3341aa717fb4d5ecf3e7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-22-me-heat22-story.html | Crowds take the plunge on fourth day of heat wave | Crowds take the plunge on fourth day of heat wave
Nine-year-old Luis Dasilva held a towel over his head, wiping the sweat off his brow, as he waited in a long line under a sweltering Saturday sun to get into the Hollywood Recreation Center’s pool. “It’s just too hot,” he said.
A half-hour later, he rushed to the water slide in his purple and gold Lakers swim trunks.
“Last year wasn’t this crowded,” pool manager Windie Beranek said of opening day. “But it also wasn’t this hot.”
On the second official day of summer and the fourth consecutive day of the heat wave, hundreds of thousands of Angelenos flocked to city pools and beaches as temperatures rose to triple digits in many areas.
The beaches from Malibu to Marina del Rey had about 500 lifeguard rescues Saturday, said Capt. Terry Harvey, a spokesman with the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s lifeguard division. One woman was hit by a lifeguard vehicle at Manhattan Beach and was taken to a hospital with noncritical injuries, Harvey said. The woman was later released, authorities said.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had 50 crews working to restore power to about 4,000 customers in North Hollywood, Canoga Park, Reseda, Northridge and other areas.
Saturday’s demand, which peaked at 5,383 megawatts, broke a weekend day record of 4,682 megawatts set in June 2006, said Joe Ramallo, a DWP spokesman.
Southern California Edison crews were working to restore power to about 2,200 customers mostly in Lake Elsinore, Corona, Whittier and Altadena.
“This is a combination of extreme heat and, consequently, extraordinary demands for energy and a strain on our system,” Ramallo said. Officials urged people to avoid running major appliances in the afternoon, when energy demand is highest, and to keep thermostats at 78 degrees.
Temperatures today are expected to hit triple digits inland and reach the 80s and 90s in coastal areas, with cooling forecast for Monday, when a marine layer is expected to roll ashore, according to the National Weather Service.
The heat wave has been the result of a high-pressure system above the Los Angeles area and weak offshore wind that trapped heat over land, said Bonnie Bartling, a specialist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
Residents who didn’t want to make the drive to the beach started lining up outside the Hollywood Recreation Center an hour before the pool opened at 1 p.m.
“It’s closer, and gas prices are too high,” said Jose Gonzales, 35, a maintenance worker from Hollywood who walked to the pool with his son, Louis, 16, and daughter, Rosie, 9.
Beaches were packed and parking lots full throughout the day.
Water temperatures were in the low- to mid-60s, said Lifeguard Section Chief Garth Canning. South-facing beaches, such as Santa Monica and Manhattan, were seeing 3- to 4-foot waves, he said.
“So there are rip currents pulling,” Canning said. “People should always go up and talk to lifeguards” about the safest spots to go in.
“All the variables aligned today,” lifeguard spokesman Harvey said late Saturday. “We had no wind, we had a southwest swell mixing with a little bit of northwest wind swell . . . We were extremely busy throughout the day, starting at 9 a.m.”
Attendance was “outrageous,” he added.
“The berm was littered with people with umbrellas, just a thick line of umbrellas coating our beaches,” Harvey said, after patrolling from Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro to Marina del Rey.
The swells will probably drop today, with 2- to 3-foot waves, Harvey said.
Health officials advised people to drink plenty of water but to avoid caffeine and alcohol, which can cause fluid loss, and to drink fruit juice or sport drinks to replace salt and minerals lost through sweat. Children, the elderly and pets should never be left in an enclosed vehicle, even briefly, officials said. Temperatures can quickly rise to life-threatening levels even with the windows partly open.
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tami.abdollah@latimes.com
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Times staff writer Deborah Schoch contributed to this report.
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3bb47599b47f4fed39530878153980dc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-22-re-hotprop22-story.html | Malibu X-odus? Maybe | Malibu X-odus? Maybe
It’s no secret that David Duchovny and wife, actress Tea Leoni, wanted to move back to New York. On June 1, they listed their 6,578-square-foot Malibu ocean-view home for $12 million. And then last week, they withdrew the house from the market.
Why the about-face? Depends on who’s talking.
Media reports said Duchovny and Leoni wanted to be settled back East before their children returned to school in the fall. Their agent, Ellen Francisco of Coldwell Banker Malibu West, said they simply changed their plans and, because they like the house so much, are trying to figure out what they want to do. When asked if the house was withdrawn because there’s an offer, which is another distinct possibility, she declined to comment further. Clever agents sometimes withdraw celebrity listings as a means to deflect attention. It’s an easy way to thwart the nosy public.
It’s known that Leoni has been itching to move for some time now, and the Malibu fires -- their home was not damaged but was in the mandatory evacuation zone -- tipped the scales for her, according to news reports.
The two-story house -- listed and unlisted -- has two swimming pools; one is a regulation lap pool. There are five bedrooms, four bathrooms and a separate gym. The 5 1/2 -acre property includes membership in the La Costa Beach Club. There is a two-room guesthouse over a three-car garage. The house was built in 1996.
It’s also possible that realty mood swings are just prevalant on this particular street. The property sits two doors from one bought earlier this year by country singer Kenny Chesney, who paid $7.4 million for it and then put it back on the market at $7.95 million about six weeks later. It remains unsold.
Duchovny, 47, is best known for his role as special agent Fox Mulder on TV’s “The X-Files,” for which he won a Golden Globe. He re-created the role for this summer’s “The X-Files” movie and also stars in Showtime’s “Californication.”
Leoni, 42, played Nora Wilde in TV’s “The Naked Truth” (1995-98). More recently, she was in the films “Spanglish” (2004) and “Fun With Dick and Jane” (2005).
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Fast move even for Hollywood
Not everything on the market is languishing into the next millennium. Reese Witherspoon’s ex-husband, actor Ryan Phillippe, recently bought a home in the Hollywood Hills for $7,175,000.
The house, which had been listed at $7.47 million, was on the market for 34 days. (Pessimists, take note.) The five-bedroom, seven-bathroom house has 8,300 square feet, according to the listing details. There are two master suites with an office area in each, a large living room and deck for parties and a media room with 14-foot ceilings. The outdoor living area includes a spa, a sauna and steam room, a fire pit and an Asian-style gazebo overlooking a pool. There’s also a two-story gym.
Phillippe, 33, began his acting career playing a gay teenager on the soap opera “One Life to Live.”
His 2006 breakup with Witherspoon came replete with rumors of another woman. The other woman was said to be actress Abbie Cornish, 25, who starred with Phillippe in “Stop-Loss.” They denied romantic involvement at the time, but Cornish and Phillippe have since gone public.
Among his other acting credits: “Breach” (2007), “Flags of Our Fathers” (2006) and “Crash” (2004).
Mia Trudeau of Hilton & Hyland had the listing, according to the MLS/CLAW.
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Designer cutting one home loose
Mossimo Giannulli -- yeah, the Target sportswear designer -- has listed his Laguna Beach house for $12,995,000. Who knew that making comfortable, affordable clothes could make you rich? Actually, I did; I just didn’t think anyone was listening to me.
Giannulli (looking in my closet, I feel like I know this man; may I just call him Mossimo?) and his wife, actress Lori Loughlin, are selling a three-bedroom, two-bathroom contemporary Craftsman just two houses from the sand in the gated Emerald Bay enclave.
The 2,000-square-foot beach house has custom-designed metal windows and doors and extensive marble. The millwork -- wood paneling, ceilings and furniture-grade cabinetry -- is master-carpenter crafted. It’s also one of those “smart technology” houses that require a teenager to operate the lights and audio and visual systems. The rear courtyard is designed for al fresco dining and entertaining.
Emerald Bay is regarded as the O.C.'s Malibu Colony. The one-level property is one of several vacation homes Mossimo owns. He and his wife live full time in Bel-Air.
In his 20s, Mossimo began his company working from his family’s garage with a loan from his father. After eight years, Mossimo Inc. became a multimillion-dollar sportswear maker, and Mossimo was reported to be the youngest CEO of a New York Stock Exchange company, according to Target Corp. (And here I pegged him as a genius just based on those seriously wonderful capri pants from two summers ago.)
Loughlin played Becky “Full House.” She was also in 2004-05’s “Summerland” and on “The Edge of Night” from 1980 to 1983.
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Ex-Giant didn’t fumble the deal
There is nary a New York Giants fan alive who doesn’t know about the legendary “catch” of 1987. It was near the end of Super Bowl XXI against the Denver Broncos. Quarterback Phil Simms released the ball, which bounced off the fingers of wide receiver Mark Bavaro into the waiting arms of teammate Phil McConkey for a touchdown, helping the Giants to a 39-20 victory.
Well, McConkey just scored again with a relatively quick sale of his contemporary home above La Jolla Cove in San Diego County for $2.85 million. The 2,990-square-foot home, built in 2001, has three bedrooms and four bathrooms. There are ocean views and a stone-and-tile patio with an outdoor fireplace.
Area Giants fans needn’t fret, though. McConkey and his wife, Erin, are sticking around. They are in escrow on another home in the Beach Club Terrace neighborhood of La Jolla Shores, just a few blocks north of the house they sold, said their agent, Edward J. G. Mracek of Willis Allen Real Estate in La Jolla.
The McConkeys are purchasing a 4,000-square-foot home that they snatched up before it even hit the Multiple Listing Service. The Spanish-style house was listed at $4.5 million and has five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The two-story home sits on a 10,100-square-foot ocean-view lot. Built in 1931, it has since been renovated, though the McConkeys plan to further remodel.
La Jolla Shores fronts a mile-long sandy beach with summer waves so gentle that many novice scuba classes are conducted there. (Sure they can dive, but can they catch a pass off another guy’s fingertips in the biggest game of the year? Didn’t think so.)
Mracek and Karen Rockwell, also of Willis Allen Real Estate, represented the McConkeys.
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Saddle up or write a film score
Every once in a while, a “breathing-room” property comes along in the Los Angeles area -- one of those special places with enough room to stretch. You have neighbors, but if you prefer, you can wait until the next natural disaster to meet them. And though you are living in nature, you’re just 10 minutes from a latte.
This is one of those places.
Grammy Award-winning music producer Danny Bramson and wife Julee are selling their hacienda-style 40-acre horse ranch in Topanga. Listing price: $4,195,000. And if breathing room isn’t your thing, the land can be subdivided into three parcels.
The 3,425-square-foot house oozes charm: stone floors, archways, shady verandas. There is a sun-filled center courtyard. The property has five bedrooms and 3 1/2 bathrooms; a separate guesthouse contains two of the bedrooms. There is a large pool and spa. And it’s a serious horse facility with stables, an arena, a large lawn and miles of trails.
Bramson, whose 2001 Grammy was for the compilation soundtrack for the movie “Almost Famous,” also worked on “Vanilla Sky” and two of the “Austin Powers” films.
Carol Bird of Westside Estate Agency, Malibu, has the listing.
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ann.brenoff@latimes.com
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d3e1615d6d786f397009bea409ab0711 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-22-sp-newswire22-story.html | Arreola beats Witherspoon to stay perfect | Arreola beats Witherspoon to stay perfect
Chris Arreola of Riverside defeated Chazz Witherspoon in a battle of undefeated heavyweights when Witherspoon was disqualified at the end of the third round in Memphis, Tenn., on Saturday night.
Arreola (24-0, 21 knockouts) pounded Witherspoon late in the third round, knocking him down after three left hands to the head.
Witherspoon, of Paulsboro, N.J., stumbled to his feet as the bell rang, but a member of Witherspoon’s corner entered the ring before the end of the mandatory eight-count, causing the disqualification.
Witherspoon (23-1) was in trouble anyway, but the decision by referee Randy Phillips ended the fight.
“They can’t get up on the apron,” Phillips said of the cornermen. “That ends the fight right there.”
In the main event, Andre Berto stopped Miguel Rodriguez in the seventh round to win the vacant World Boxing Council welterweight title.
Berto had knocked Rodriguez down twice in the seventh before the referee stopped the bout with 47 seconds left as Berto continually rocked Rodriguez with right hands.
The bout became a battle for the belt after former champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. retired earlier this month, setting the stage for Berto and Rodriguez, the top contenders, to fight for the championship.
Berto entered the fight undefeated in 21 previous bouts, 18 by knockout. Rodriguez had lost only twice in 31 fights, with 23 knockouts.
Mikkel Kessler stopped Dimitri Sartison in the 12th round at Copenhagen to win the vacant World Boxing Assn. super-middleweight title.
Kessler (40-1) dominated the bout from the beginning. For Sartison, it was his first loss after a 22-0 start.
International Boxing Federation champion Arthur Abraham knocked down Edison “Pantera” Miranda three times in the fourth round at Hollywood, Fla., to win by technical knockout. The title wasn’t at stake in the bout.
About 30 seconds into the fourth round, Abraham (27-0) landed a clean left hook to the temple that floored Miranda (30-3). Abraham’s sweeping left hook caught Miranda on the chin for the second knockdown.
Abraham ended the fight seconds later with a third left hand to the head, bringing an automatic stoppage via the three-knockdown rule. The time of the knockout was 1:13.
TENNIS
Ferrer, Tanasugarn win Ordina Open titles
Top-seeded David Ferrer won his first grass-court title by defeating Marc Gicquel, 6-4, 6-2, at the Ordina Open in Den Bosch, Netherlands.
In the women’s draw, qualifier Tamarine Tanasugarn upset third-seeded Dinara Safina, 7-5, 6-3, to win her first grass-court title.
Fourth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska won her third title of the year, beating eighth-seeded Nadia Petrova, 6-4, 6-7 (11), 6-4, in the final of the Eastbourne International Open in England. She joined Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova as the tour’s only three-time winners in 2008.
Fourth-seeded Ivo Karlovic successfully defended his Nottingham Open title with a 7-5, 6-7 (4), 7-6 (8) victory over third-seeded Fernando Verdasco. Rain forced the match to be played indoors.
COLLEGE BASEBALL
North Carolina beats Fresno State, 4-3
Chad Flack’s two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth inning kept North Carolina alive in the College World Series with a 4-3 victory over Fresno State at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha.
It’s the second straight elimination game that the Tar Heels have won on a late home run. Tim Federowicz’s grand slam in the ninth inning Friday night gave them a 7-3 win over Louisiana State.
The Tar Heels (54-13) forced another elimination game today against Fresno State (44-30), the first No. 4 regional-seeded team to reach the CWS.
A win sends North Carolina to the best-of-three championship round against Georgia, which eliminated Stanford, 10-8, earlier Saturday.
Ryan Peisel hit a three-run homer that gave the Bulldogs (44-23-1) a 9-3 lead in the fifth inning against the Cardinal (41-24-2).
SOCCER
U.S. women win, 1-0, on Hucles’ late goal
The U.S. women’s team won the Peace Queen Cup tournament at Suwon, South Korea, beating Canada, 1-0, on a 92nd-minute goal by Angela Hucles.
Goalkeeper Hope Solo made two game-preserving saves at the end of the game for the American women, who tuned up for the Beijing Olympics by winning their fourth tournament of the year.
Fernando Arce and Jared Borgetti each scored twice to help Mexico beat Belize, 7-0, in a 2010 World Cup qualifying game at Monterrey, Mexico.
Mexico won the CONCACAF region series by an aggregate of 9-0.
Gonzalo Romero scored two goals to lead Guatemala to a 3-1 victory over St. Lucia in a World Cup qualifying game at the Coliseum. Guatemala won the two-game series by an aggregate of 9-1.
HORSE RACING
Jockey injured, horse euthanized
Jockey Shaun Bridgmohan received minor injuries and his horse, Vinstar, was euthanized after the horse took a spill during the first race at Churchill Downs.
Bridgmohan was taken to a Louisville hospital but had no broken bones or serious injuries, an agent for the jockey said.
According to a statement from Churchill Downs, the 29-year-old jockey was dropped near the sixteenth pole during the six-furlong sprint when the horse appeared to take a bad step.
MISCELLANY
Scheckler prevails in Skateboard Park
Ryan Sheckler of San Clemente won the Skateboard Park event at the AST Dew Tour stop in Baltimore.
Scheckler landed a succession of technical tricks on the rails to earn an average score of 94.65.
Paul Rodriguez of Tarzana was second at 89.80.
The L.A. Riptide was defeated, 19-18, by the Long Island Lizards in a Major League Lacrosse match at the Home Depot Center in Carson.
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fac01ec86bb3f6e948d0b3e9fc181c2c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-23-na-blackvote23-story.html | Obama banking on black turnout | Obama banking on black turnout
As they ponder a political map that has spelled defeat for Democrats in the last two presidential elections, Barack Obama’s campaign strategists are quietly laying plans to draw African American voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers by capitalizing on the excitement over the prospect of electing the nation’s first black president.
Obama strategists believe they have identified a gold mine of new and potentially decisive Democratic voters in at least five battleground states -- voters who failed to turn out in the past but can be mobilized this time because Obama’s candidacy is historic and his cash-rich campaign can afford the costly task of identifying and motivating such supporters.
In Florida alone, more than half a million black registered voters stayed home in 2004. Hundreds of thousands more African Americans are eligible to vote but not registered. And campaign analysts have identified similar potential in North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri and Ohio.
In these five states, which were crucial to the GOP’s presidential success in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush’s victory margins were generally slim enough to suggest that a major expansion of black turnout could lead to Democratic gains this year.
“I think the numbers are going to be astonishing,” said Florida state Rep. Joseph A. Gibbons, who heads the state’s black legislative caucus and has been discussing the strategy with leading Democrats.
John Bellows, a database expert in the Obama campaign, said he had already identified “big pockets of potential voters” in key states. “There are pretty big numbers lying around to turn out,” he said.
The strategy requires a deft touch and carries risks, however.
In large part, Obama, an Illinois senator who is the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, has succeeded so far by appealing across racial lines. Strategists say he cannot afford to appear to be exploiting race or running solely as a black candidate -- particularly as he courts moderate whites and blue-collar workers who did not support him in the primaries.
“It’s a sensitivity,” said Ronald Walters, a strategist for African American Democrat Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in the 1980s. Walters has criticized Democratic candidates in the past as sidelining black voters by ceding the South to Republicans. “You’ve got to have a black strategy, but it has to be a biracial strategy.”
Obama’s formula for energizing blacks while appealing to whites relies in part on demonstrating independence from the more militant traditions of black politics and using rhetoric that spans race. He has opposed monetary reparations for descendants of slaves, for example. And he has said that he does not think his daughters should benefit from affirmative action, because they have had a “pretty good deal,” and he has expressed openness to programs that could help disadvantaged whites, Latinos and women.
That enables Obama’s campaign to mobilize black voters while shielding him from being portrayed as the black candidate, supporters say. “No community can complain of being shortchanged,” said Virginia Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, who in 1989 became the nation’s first African American elected governor.
Party strategists believe that Obama’s competitive showing in primary contests proves that the approach will work. In some primaries, notably North Carolina and Virginia, he ran strong among white voters, but his victory margins came from drawing blacks, including new African American voters, to the polls in overwhelming numbers.
Major get-out-the-vote efforts in 2004 managed to increase black voter turnout just 3 percentage points, to 60%, compared with 64% of voters overall. Obama’s campaign believes it can far surpass that this time.
David A. Bositis, an expert on black voting trends at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, predicts that turnout could rise by as much as 20%, and some Democratic strategists feel they can spur black turnout in the battleground states to as high as 75% of registered voters.
“This will be a completely new precedent,” said Bositis. “This year we’re going to be looking at record territory, and this will be a level of black turnout that’s never been seen before.”
The pursuit of black voters is part of the Obama campaign’s broader strategy of targeting constituencies that have been underrepresented in past general elections but that proved crucial to his victory over New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Another key target is voters of all races under 35, including college students and even high-schoolers who will be 18 by election day. In Virginia, for example, nearly 90,000 people 34 or younger have registered in recent months -- and the Obama campaign is targeting many more who have not registered. Florida strategists have identified about 600,000 young Democrats with “little to no voting history,” according to an internal memo. The campaign is applying the same effort to reach unaffiliated Latinos in New Mexico and Nevada.
What makes the idea of bringing in so many new voters more than just political fantasy is the Obama campaign’s deep pockets and the sophisticated apparatus it has begun building to achieve its goals -- using techniques to ferret out and mobilize potential supporters that only a few years ago were the secret weapons of Republican strategists and their ideological allies.
Four years ago, it was President Bush’s campaign that used microtargeting to scope out sympathetic African Americans, helping Bush win 16% of that vote in Ohio, up from 9% in 2000. Republican strategists believe the black vote in Ohio provided Bush the cushion he needed to avoid a 2000-style recount battle there. This time, not only are more African Americans expected to turn out, but Obama aides believe he will win more than 90% of those who do.
In a political twist, Democrats can thank a Republican for empowering one new group of voters: Florida felons. Gov. Charlie Crist last week announced that, thanks to a new rule he enacted, about 115,000 felons who had completed their sentences had become eligible under his administration to have their civil rights restored. Liberal groups such as People for the American Way hope to track down even more who could have their rights restored in time to permit them to register and vote in November.
Experts say felons are disproportionately black and, if they can be found, more likely to be Obama backers. This provides a huge potential; about 1.1 million felons in Florida were ineligible to vote in 2004, according to a 2006 book by sociologists Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. Here too the potential for gains has risk: It could open a door for Republicans to portray Democrats as soft on crime.
The push for new and nontraditional voters is so targeted and aggressive that an NAACP official in Ohio said her organization plans to pursue individuals who are incarcerated but who have not yet been tried or sentenced and, therefore, under state law, remain eligible to vote.
The group is also tracking felons who often don’t realize that, in Ohio, they are eligible to vote as soon as they leave prison.
Ex-offenders are “just everywhere,” said Jocelyn Travis, who heads the Ohio NAACP’s voter outreach program. “People who have a felony or criminal background are throughout our community, and they don’t realize that they have the right to vote.”
Democratic strategists believe that if the Obama campaign can reach even a fraction of African Americans who have not voted in the past, it can cut dramatically into Bush’s 2004 victory margins. According to a Democratic strategy memo in Florida, where Bush won by about 381,000 votes, “encouraging just one-third of the non-2004 voters to cast a vote would alone [make up] more than half the margin.”
In Florida, hundreds of campaign “fellows” have signed on to canvass targeted neighborhoods throughout the summer. Similar efforts are underway in Virginia, where campaign workers have been dispatched to parking lots, bus stops and grocery stores in heavily Democratic areas.
“It’s safe to say that we could come close to registering enough to make up the difference” in 2004 between Bush and Democratic nominee John F. Kerry, said Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Va.). Bush won Virginia by about 260,000 votes.
In addition, a coalition of liberal advocacy groups, led by the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is trying to register 1.2 million voters -- with a special emphasis on blacks.
While the NAACP is nonpartisan and its officials say their efforts to register new voters are not specifically designed to help Obama, they say there is an added excitement among potential new voters.
“Hope is at an all-time high, and when hope is raised, people are moved to action,” said Sybil Edwards-McNabb, president of the Ohio NAACP.
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peter.wallsten@latimes.com
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da338b46a0b49d0840cf76e5cf297207 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-fi-actor24-story.html | Suspense scene | Suspense scene
Universal Pictures is getting ready to roll the cameras on some big pictures in the next few months.
There’s director Ridley Scott’s twist on the Robin Hood legend, “Nottingham,” starring Russell Crowe, set to begin production in August. And comedy zeitgeist filmmaker Judd Apatow is training his lens on stand-up comics in “Funny People,” starring Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Eric Bana, Leslie Mann and Jonah Hill, expected to get underway in September.
But these movies and others could be derailed if actors and studios can’t negotiate a new contract by the end of the month, when the current Screen Actors Guild pact expires. Despite several weeks of negotiations, there’s growing pessimism throughout Hollywood that the sides will resolve their significant differences any time soon.
If they don’t reach an agreement, actors could opt to strike early next month or work without a contract. For their part, studios could enforce a lockout by blocking SAG members from working on movies and prime-time TV shows. Although the lockout option -- full or partial -- has been discussed by some studio executives, such a move is considered drastic.
A protracted period of uncertainty is casting a pall over future film production. Just the threat of a strike has put a crimp on local production, which was cited Friday as a factor in the state’s highest unemployment rate for May in five years. Employment in the motion picture and sound recording sectors was down 4.4% from May 2007.
In anticipation of a possible actors strike, studios revamped their schedules last year so that most films would finish shooting by June 30. They’ve also virtually stopped greenlighting new movies, causing a sharp slowdown in production -- or a de facto strike -- that could drag on for months. Some executives speculate that the studios could push back start dates to early next year to hedge their bets.
“We’re kind of in no-man’s land right now,” said Patrick Whitesell, a partner at the Endeavor talent agency. “When you’re trying to plan your next move with your clients, you’re handcuffed because so little is getting made.”
Whitesell’s clients include Christian Bale, who is headlining the fourth installment of the “Terminator” sci-fi franchise. In the event of a strike, it would be among more than half a dozen current productions forced to shut down. They include sequels to such hits as “Night at the Museum” and “Transformers,” “The Da Vinci Code” follow-up “Angels & Demons” and a movie version of the Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana.”
The studios have contingency plans for a strike that would enable filmmakers to continue some work on movies, completing special effects that don’t require the use of actors, for example. But halting production for an extended period would be costly for the studios and jarring for the hundreds of actors, crew members and post-production technicians who would suddenly find themselves idled.
More than 1,800 people, both in the U.S. and abroad, are lined up to work on Disney’s nearly $200-million-budget “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” a video-game-based tale starring Jake Gyllenhaal that’s set to begin production in Morocco on July 28.
“Of course, we’re concerned,” said the film’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer. “We’d have to shut it down and everybody goes home. . . . But I can’t believe either side wants a strike.” Bruckheimer said if the production was delayed, the crew nonetheless would continue working on visual effects, editing, set building and other areas not requiring actors.
Moreover, if halting production pushes the eventual start date of “Prince of Persia” too far into the future, the film would risk missing its planned release date next summer.
Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures are counting on starting their nearly $150-million production of “Nottingham” in early August in Britain. A delay could ruin plans to shoot the fall leaves of the mythical Sherwood Forest on location. Not all feature film production would halt in the event of a strike, however.
SAG has granted waivers that would allow more than 350 independently produced films to continue shooting, such as the drama “Shrink,” starring Kevin Spacey as a pot-smoking psychoanalyst, and “A Good Old Fashioned Orgy,” a romantic comedy produced by Endgame Entertainment.
If it happens at all, a strike would probably not occur until after July 8, when a smaller actors union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, will announce the results of a membership vote on its recently negotiated contract.
SAG is waging a long-shot campaign to defeat the accord, contending that it undermines the union’s bargaining goals. SAG’s efforts, however, were dealt a setback over the weekend, when about 250 actors, including Tom Hanks, signed a letter supporting the AFTRA agreement.
Although an actors strike would hit feature films hardest, it would also disrupt the TV sector. Television is the biggest driver of production in Los Angeles, employing thousands of people. The writers strike forced the shutdown of many hit shows whose ratings haven’t recovered since they came back on the air.
A walkout by actors would start just when most TV shows were gearing up to produce episodes for new fall series, possibly delaying the start of the season. Over the next two months, such series as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Lost” and “The Office” are scheduled to resume filming.
Some prime-time TV shows will be better off than others -- at least in the short term. Partly in anticipation of an actors walkout, series such as “ER” and “Bones” banked several extra episodes when they returned this spring after the writers strike ended. Fox’s hit drama “24,” which has resumed production, already has 12 episodes completed.
A handful of prime-time shows represented by AFTRA, including HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Flight of the Conchords” could continue filming if the federation’s members vote for the contract.
However, SAG, which accounts for more than 90% of prime-time shows, would probably put heavy pressure on members who belong to both unions to not cross picket lines, further squeezing the business.
“The TV industry took a significant hit during the first strike,” said Deana Myers, a senior analyst with SNL Kagan, a media research firm in Monterey. “A lot of viewers forgot about shows and didn’t come back. If actors strike, the broadcast networks would likely experience a further erosion in viewers.”
Added Chris Silbermann, president of International Creative Management: “The business is just starting to bounce back from the Writers Guild strike, so there’s a lot of trepidation about going down that road again.”
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claudia.eller@latimes.com
richard.verrier@latimes.com
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bb0f29c7d20d7a5c89eb79032a5840bc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-fi-samueli24-story.html | Broadcom billionaire admits guilt | Broadcom billionaire admits guilt
Technology billionaire and philanthropist Henry Samueli pleaded guilty Monday to a felony charge of lying to regulators about his role in an alleged plot to secretly reward his Broadcom Corp. employees by manipulating stock options.
Under a deal with prosecutors, Samueli pleaded guilty in federal court in Santa Ana to making a false statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The government is recommending five years’ probation and $12.2 million in fines and penalties at sentencing, scheduled for Aug. 18.
Samueli, 53, who also owns the Anaheim Ducks National Hockey League team, becomes the most prominent executive convicted in the federal investigation of the manipulation of stock options. His guilty plea Monday spares him jail time but complicates the legacy of one of Southern California’s biggest philanthropists.
“There are people who come back from criminal convictions, but usually only after a long period of penance and full admission of responsibility,” said John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor and expert in white-collar crime. “But if he continues to give away a billion dollars in a thoughtful manner, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who will forgive him.”
Born to survivors of Nazi Europe who arrived destitute in the United States, Samueli started off stocking the shelves of his family’s Los Angeles liquor store, launched a chip-making firm in his partner’s home and rode the 1990s tech boom to a multibillion-dollar fortune.
Along the way, he gained a reputation as a sober-minded scientist and a soft touch for good causes that included the arts, higher education, a Holocaust memorial library and a marine science institute for children.
Samueli, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at just under $2 billion, can afford the fine, said Barry Slotnick, a white-collar defense attorney in New York. And by pleading guilty, Slotnick added, Samueli avoids an even greater threat to his name: jail time.
“At the end of the day Henry Samueli has a huge legacy and will be remembered not for his guilty plea but for his generosity to needy causes,” Slotnick said.
The statement that prosecutors focused on was made May 25, 2007, when Samueli denied under oath a role in making options grants to high-ranking executives.
“I was not involved in the actual granting process,” Samueli said.
That statement was false, Samueli said Monday, because in January 2002 he twice helped to decide the date on which options should be granted. In his plea, he admitted being part of the options-granting process but stopped short of acknowledging that the options awards were flawed.
Stock options are rights to buy shares at a set price at a future date. If the stock price goes up, recipients make money. Irvine-based Broadcom, like many other technology companies, backdated the grant dates to take advantage of dates when the stock price was low, so that the options were already “in the money” when they were awarded.
During the tech boom, Samueli and Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III awarded millions of stock options to attract and reward employees. Samueli and Nicholas didn’t receive backdated options themselves, but prosecutors alleged they granted them to others, including some other top executives, to avoid having to report $2.2 billion in compensation costs to shareholders.
Last month, the SEC filed a civil suit against Samueli and Nicholas, leading Samueli to step aside as chairman and chief technical officer of Broadcom, which makes chips used in a variety of products, including Apple iPhones and Nintendo Wii game consoles. The SEC is also seeking to bar Samueli from serving as an officer of a public company, though Broadcom said in a statement that the plea agreement, if approved at sentencing, would allow Samueli to remain as a technical advisor.
A federal grand jury indicted Nicholas this month on 25 counts of backdating stock options, distributing drugs to associates and spiking the drinks of Broadcom customers. He has pleaded not guilty and faces the possibility of lengthy prison time if convicted.
Samueli’s plea agreement does not require him to cooperate with or testify for the government. Legal experts said it would be problematic for prosecutors to call a witness who had admitted to lying to the SEC. Even so, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney suggested Samueli might wind up on the stand -- for the defense.
“I don’t think I have to be a rocket scientist to think Dr. Nicholas is going to call him,” Carney said.
Samueli’s attorney, Gordon Greenberg of Los Angeles, said he was aware that might occur. He acknowledged that if Nicholas called Samueli to the stand, Carney might rule that Samueli had waived any right not to testify on grounds he might incriminate himself.
Samueli’s guilty plea Monday did not have any immediate bearing on his ownership of the Ducks, the team he purchased in 2005, or Anaheim Arena Management, which operates Honda Center.
“The Ducks and Anaheim Arena Management will not be commenting on this matter, except to say that today’s events will not affect Henry Samueli’s role with the team or arena,” Ducks CEO Michael Schulman said.
According to NHL bylaws, the league can assume control of a club whose owner is convicted of a crime. It has happened as recently as 2002 when John Rigas, facing fraud charges involving his family’s firm, Adelphia Corp., was forced to relinquish his ownership of the Buffalo Sabres.
AEG Chief Executive Tim Leiweke, whose company owns the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, voiced support for Samueli.
“Although this is a difficult time for Henry and his family, I believe he will come through this and continue to be a great partner and an important part of the sports and entertainment scene in Southern California,” Leiweke said.
At Broadcom, Samueli’s quiet personal manner contrasted sharply with that of his partner. Samueli had a reputation as a straight-arrow family man, and as an encouraging father figure to his engineers. Nicholas was known as a brash, hard-driving deal maker who did not shy from browbeating his staff to get results.
Samueli’s parents, Sala and Aron, were Polish immigrants who survived Nazi Europe and arrived in the United States with almost nothing.
In 1991, Samueli co-founded Broadcom with Nicholas, his former engineering student at UCLA. They each threw in $5,000 and worked out of Nicholas’ Redondo Beach home, moving to Irvine four years later and taking the firm public three years after that.
Samueli has cut a singular figure in the world of Orange County philanthropy. His name adorns the engineering school at UC Irvine (as well as the one at UCLA) and a 500-seat performing arts theater in the county’s arts district. His gifts, which now exceed $200 million, have placed him at the vanguard of a growing generation of tech-wealth donors in a county once ruled by real estate fortunes.
Samueli’s donation launched the Sala and Aron Samueli Holocaust Memorial Library at Chapman University, which was dedicated in 2005. Speaking at the dedication, Samueli said that he got his best qualities from his parents.
“There was not a dry eye in the room,” said Mike Lefkowitz, a longtime friend of Samueli and Samueli’s wife, Susan, and former head of their charity foundation. “His parents, as my parents, were Holocaust survivors. When you come through something like that you want to be generous, you want to give back, you want to be thankful for having survived.”
James Doti, Chapman University’s president, recently recalled Samueli’s remarks at the library’s dedication.
“After we acknowledged him and Susan for the gift, he pointed to me in his remarks and said, ‘I know your mother passed away. For you to be here means a great deal to me.’ He personalized it. He knew what I was feeling at the time,” Doti said.
Allen Krause, rabbi of Temple Beth El in Aliso Viejo, which Samueli occasionally attends, said Samueli and his wife had “lifted the level of philanthropy in this county geometrically.”
“In the Jewish community, they created a golden age of philanthropy here, because they pushed the bar higher than it had ever been before,” he said.
Columbia University’s Coffee noted that it was common for white-collar defendants to be charged not for what they originally did but for their actions afterward. That happened with Samueli.
“Most of these high-powered people who rise to that level of stature have perfected their ability to talk their way out of problems,” Coffee said. “That’s a fatal mistake when you’re dealing with the government. You’ve got to shut up.”
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scott.reckard@latimes.com
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christopher.goffard@latimes.com
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Times staff writers David Reyes, Eric Stephens and Helene Elliott contributed to this report.--
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Henry Samueli
Age: 53 (born Sept. 20, 1954, Buffalo, N.Y.)
Family: Wife Susan and three daughters
Education: Fairfax High School in Los Angeles; bachelor’s, master’s degrees and PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA.
1980-85: Worked as engineer at TRW Inc. and taught classes at UCLA part time as a visiting lecturer
1985-95: Full-time professorship at UCLA
1991: Co-founds Broadcom with Henry T. Nicholas III, his former engineering student at UCLA
1995: Takes leave from UCLA, moves to Orange County
1998: Broadcom goes public.
January 2003: Nicholas steps down as CEO.
2005: Purchases the Anaheim Ducks National Hockey League team
2007: Federal authorities force Broadcom to fix its books by recording $2.2 billion in unreported expenses related to options backdating.
May 14, 2008: The Securities and Exchange Commission accuses Samueli and Nicholas of backdating employee stock options from 1998 to 2008. Samueli steps down as chairman of Broadcom.
June 23, 2008: Samueli pleads guilty to lying to federal regulators.
Source: Times research
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9a6a8598c8aa52e23a9db6f9b1bd118f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-me-faith24-story.html | State has a relaxed view on religion | State has a relaxed view on religion
Californians, long known for their propensity to buck convention, have apparently done it again: A national survey released Monday revealed that they are less religious and less certain about the existence of God than the nation as a whole.
Residents of the Golden State do not pray as much as people in other parts of the country. They are less inclined to take scripture literally. And they are likelier to embrace “more than one true way” of interpreting their religious teachings.
Fifty-nine percent of them say that homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared to 50% of people nationwide who hold that view, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.
And while 71% of the nation is “absolutely certain” of the belief in God, only 62% of Californians say so -- a difference that reflects similar attitudes in other states on both coasts.
“The West Coast generally is less religiously observant, less certain about religious beliefs,” said John Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which produced the survey. “It was settled last,” Green added. “It has been growing fairly rapidly and has a unique amount of dynamism” in its societies.
The survey, based primarily on interviews in English and Spanish with a representative sample of more than 35,000 adults during 2007, is the Pew Forum’s second report this year. (It also incorporated findings from a 2007 survey of about 1,000 American Muslims.)
It explores the religious beliefs and practices of Evangelical Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists and others, probing their attitudes about abortion, homosexuality, the environment, government and foreign policy.
An initial Pew Forum survey in February found that Americans are switching religious affiliations in ever-growing numbers while still believing in God, or cutting ties to organized religion altogether.
The newest report confirms past research showing the United States as an overwhelmingly religious nation. But it also reveals a vast diversity of opinion among religious groups as well as within traditions.
Americans, the report found, are not particularly dogmatic about religion even as they embrace it in their lives.
Seventy percent believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life”; 57% of Evangelicals feel that way, as do 79% of Catholics.
More than two-thirds of Americans, meanwhile, say there is more than one true way to interpret their religious teachings. Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses were the only two groups that significantly disagreed with that view.
Among the survey’s other findings:
* Ninety-two percent of Americans believe in the existence of God or a universal spirit, even as many shun weekly worship services; 41% who are unaffiliated say religion “is at least somewhat important in their lives,” and seven in 10 of the unaffiliated say they believe in God.
* Fifty-eight percent of Americans say they pray privately every day, and 74% believe in life after death.
* Thirty-one percent of Americans say they receive “a definite answer to a specific prayer request” at least once a month.
“History testifies that religious faith is very important to Americans,” Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl said in a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “At every juncture of our past, Americans have called upon God for guidance, protection and direction.”
California -- home to large numbers of Protestants, Catholics, Jews and other groups -- resists these trends.
While 63% of adults nationally believe that their holy books are the word of God, just 53% of Californians think so.
Similarly, 56% of Americans say religion is “very important,” while the figure in California is 48%.
Californians also are more likely to believe that scriptures were written by man rather than God. And they pray less than those elsewhere -- 33% attend religious services at least once a week, compared to 39% for the nation.
California stands out for another reason. One of its signature industries and locales, Hollywood, appears to be a corrupting influence in the eyes of at least some Americans. Forty-two percent say they feel their values are threatened by “Hollywood and the entertainment industry”; 56% say they are not threatened.
If California appears less religious than the rest of the nation, there are good reasons, says J. Gordon Melton, Santa Barbara-based author of “The Encyclopedia of American Religions.”
Successive generations of East Coast migrants have settled here since World War II, their connections to organized religion more tenuous than the people they left behind.
The more recent arrival of devout, predominantly Catholic immigrants from Mexico and Central America has not balanced the larger numbers of Americans from the East, he said. And many of the Spanish-speaking newcomers, undocumented and living in the shadow economy, often go uncounted in official reports, Melton said.
California trails other parts of the country in its Evangelical presence, Melton said, but has growing numbers of adherents of non-Christian traditions -- including Hindus, Buddhists and others. Their religions, which often take hold in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles or San Francisco, do not always subscribe to a single holy book as in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
“California is certainly leading the trend in generating new religions and sending them off to the rest of the country,” Melton said. “The pluralism is a function of toleration levels. That is a peculiarly California way.”
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duke.helfand@latimes.com
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03b0b654be9fb6ed03f7e9aaa2f7bb5f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-na-bedstuy24-story.html | Skyline views, the projects below | Skyline views, the projects below
Most everyone who’s been around this Brooklyn neighborhood long enough knows Mama Ruth, a zippy 87-year-old grandmother with toffee-toned skin, a few lonely teeth and indigo eyes.
Every morning when the weather is decent, she sits on the same red metal bench outside the Marcy Houses, a sprawling brick public housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she has lived for 55 years. With a scratched-up wooden cane leaning at her knee and the morning newspaper in hand, Ruth Butler scans the real estate section, glancing up to take in the changing neighborhood around her.
She has read the paper for enough years to know the story of New York. People with more money move into places occupied by people with less money. The ones with less money try to stick it out, but many end up leaving. She always figured it was a matter of time before that story played out here.
Real estate agents are calling Bed-Stuy the “new Williamsburg,” that funky Brooklyn neighborhood where artists used to migrate until the prices of rentals and condos shot up. New York Magazine hailed Bed-Stuy as “the next hipster enclave.”
A 15-minute subway ride to Manhattan, the neighborhood around Marcy for the last decade has been a halo of vacant lots, liquor stores, factories and run-down buildings. Developers knew it be would be tough to convince upper-income residents to move near one of the city’s most notorious housing projects. Slowly, they have made inroads on this block, where coexisting has become a sort of social experiment.
“Hey, Mama, how you doing?”
“I’m hanging,” Mama Ruth replies, a fluff of hair poking from beneath her Nike Air baseball cap, a dried leaf stuck in her white strands.
“I don’t know why everybody likes to talk to me,” she says. “They do. All of them, the Puerto Ricans, the West Indians, you name it, if they see me sitting here, they’re going to come up and give me a hug and a kiss, and talk.”
Lately, though, a new crop of folks has been moving into the neighborhood, and they don’t talk to Mama Ruth the same. She might pass them at the corner store, or near the subway stop. They’ll nod and smile, and she’ll do the same. But for the most part, Mama Ruth gets out of their way, and they get out of hers.
They came for the gleaming new housing complex across the street, the Mynt, with its stainless-steel appliances, parking garage, doorman, gym and rooftop terraces with Manhattan views. It opened in October, and leasing agents flooded Craigslist with ads. Agents dubbed it a place of “luxurious living” for people who are not millionaires, but want to live like one.
Police stepped up area patrols, and one month after the Mynt opened they arrested nine gang members for allegedly running a crack-cocaine operation at Marcy. Warm weather arrived, and white men began playing Saturday-morning tennis matches in the Marcy courts alongside black and Latino teenagers shooting hoops. Grocery stores agreed to start delivering to parts of the neighborhood deemed off-limits before.
A Duane Reade drugstore is set to open this summer downstairs in the Mynt, bringing promises of jobs, and competition for the cash-only corner stores that sell single cigarettes, called “loosies.”
News of Duane Reade thrilled one neighborhood blogger, but that didn’t stop him from poking fun: “No longer will we have to eat Utz and other second-class chips and cookies. Now we can raise our blood pressure with the finest of junk food like Doritos and Pepperidge Farm treats. No longer will we have to drink Tropical Fantasy ginger ale. We’ll be able to step it up a notch with the effervescence of Schweppes.”
Rumor has it an Internet cafe will soon follow.
All this fancy talk doesn’t mean much to Mama Ruth. “People just hanging around all the time drinking coffee and all that stuff,” she says. “I can’t afford it.”
The retired waitress pays $200 a month for her one-bedroom apartment, with enough room for a kitchen, bed, television, radio and her jigsaw puzzles. “I can’t pay no more than what I’m paying now. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to eat.”
Across the street, her new neighbors pay up to $3,400 a month for penthouses with sliding glass doors and balconies that look straight across the Hudson River to the sparkling Manhattan skyline, and straight down to Marcy’s 27 six-story buildings, spread over 28 acres, with more than 4,200 low-income residents.
Rapper Jay-Z grew up in Marcy. He described the place like this:
I’m a block away from hell, not enough shots away from straight shells . . .
You’re laughing, you know the place well, where the liquor stores and the base dwell . . .
Where we call the cops the A-Team, cuz they hop out of vans and spray things
And life expectancy’s so low, we making out wills at 18.
Cough up a lung, where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothing nice.
Mama Ruth is familiar with Jay-Z, but not with his recollection of Marcy. She moved here in 1953, three years after it was built. She raised two children -- one is 59, the other 69 -- and says they turned out just fine. When she moved in, her three-bedroom apartment cost $30 a month.
There has always been some crime, she says, and some rats. Once she found one swimming in her toilet. But for the most part, “it was beautiful,” she says. “It’s still beautiful.”
They used to call it “Murder Ave.”
Myrtle Avenue stretches through the gut of Brooklyn, separating Marcy from the Mynt. It is merengue music and Mercedes-Benzes, street preachers and strollers.
A mile down the avenue, change has already swept Fort Greene. The area used to have demographics much like Bedford-Stuyvesant’s. It hangs on to a handful of dollar stores, Caribbean restaurants and check-cashing centers, while making room for Pilates and yoga studios, dog-grooming centers and organic-vegan-vegetarian eateries.
On a recent Saturday open house at the Mynt, agent Richard Maggio, a former cruise ship social host, shows the three remaining apartments. Maggio remembers not too long ago when 72 units were up for grabs. He and his partner worked seven days a week signing off on all those leases.
Just after noon, two eager 24-year-olds show up. They’ve seen places in Manhattan’s East Village and Williamsburg. Three-bedrooms in those neighborhoods range between $4,000 and $5,000, too steep for Ben Carney, a high school teacher, and Colin Meehan, who works for Morgan Stanley.
“You come out here,” Maggio tells them, “it’s, like, a full-service building with a 24-hour doorman, you know?”
“How’s the rest of the neighborhood outside?” Meehan asks. Most of what he’s heard about Marcy, he got from rap songs.
“I never had a problem,” Maggio says. “Walk around. Come back, check it out at night. I mean, we have pretty much all young professionals in the building.”
He shows them a three-bedroom for $3,000, and leads them to a laundry room that opens to a communal patio. “For another $400 a month you can rent a penthouse,” he says. “Two-bedroom, two-bath.”
“Can we take a look at that?” asks Carney, who teaches nearby.
In the elevator, Maggio explains that a smaller Mynt-like building is soon to open next door. A shuttered BP gas station on the corner will also give way to a six-story residential development.
The elevator stops on the sixth floor. Maggio opens a door to a living room with glossy wood floors, 9-foot-10 ceilings, and a staircase leading to a rooftop terrace with a view of the Empire State Building, the Manhattan Bridge, Marcy’s racquetball courts, Jay-Z’s old building, Mama Ruth’s red bench.
“The view is awesome,” Maggio says. “Come back at night and sit with the lights out in the apartment. It’s so bright.”
Everyone outside stared when Randolph Ambroise moved into the second-floor three-bedroom corner apartment at the Mynt. Ballplayers, cops, loiterers, corner store patrons. “Everybody was watching us, like we were celebrities,” he says.
Ambroise, 29, a Manhattan real estate agent, and his two roommates were among the first tenants. They got a deal: $3,100 a month. One of the first nights, Ambrose watched five police cars with sirens blaring and lights flashing pull up to the corner. Officers jumped out and ran down the street alongside Marcy. Hoping to block the drama and gawkers outside, the roommates went to Home Depot and bought bundles of window shades.
Ambroise, who used to live in the suburbs, says he is by no means rich. He’s not white either, despite his blondish-brown, tousled hair. His family came from Haiti. The apartment he shares is a bachelor pad of paper lamps, laptop computers, empty vodka bottles, a drum set, video game controls and two brown sofas lined up one behind the other, like movie theater seats, facing a big-screen television.
But walking around the neighborhood, he feels the difference between himself and his neighbors. Ambroise had a car, but he didn’t want to pay to park it in the Mynt’s garage, and donated it to charity after it got broken into twice on the street. When he goes to work in a suit, people ask for change. One time he slapped down his credit card to pay for cigarettes and juice at the corner store, but it didn’t have a credit card machine. “It looks like they do, but it’s for food stamps,” Ambroise says. “I’ve never used food stamps.”
There’s rain on the horizon. Inside Marcy projects, Anthony Tranthan, who grew up here, is on the hunt for a loosie during a break from painting his mother’s apartment. He said it took too long for the neighborhood to change.
“I’m down to get along with everyone,” he says, “because the more we get along, the better the job opportunities.”
Drops start to fall as Tranthan continues his search. A store owner two buildings down from the Mynt refuses to sell him a loosie, but around the corner, a clerk agrees, for 50 cents.
Back at Marcy, Tranthan says hello to Mama Ruth on her bench. She asks how his mother is doing.
There are no plans to raze Marcy, though many fear that will happen. Tearing down a large-scale low-income housing project in New York would certainly be met with grand protests and political opposition. For now, residents on this island will coexist with their new neighbors.
“I mean, yo, it’s like, we, like, making a stew right now,” Tranthan says, “and nobody knows how it’s going to turn out.”
“Mama, what if they take the projects?” he asks.
“I don’t worry about it,” she says, steadying herself to hobble back upstairs to her apartment. “I pay my rent every month.
“I’ll be here for as long as it’s here,” she says, “or I’ll die first.”
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erika.hayasaki@latimes.com
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fbfbbc7401792febe57266cc1a1599ed | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-na-campaign24-story.html | Courting a creative spark | Courting a creative spark
Sen. John McCain added an unusual twist to his emerging energy agenda Monday, promising to award a $300-million prize to the inventor of a next-generation battery that could power electric vehicles. The prize amount is small relative to the billions of dollars the federal government spends on other energy industries. The Bush administration has already pledged $1.2 billion toward research on hydrogen fuel cells, a technology that proponents say is 10 or more years from viability.
But the Arizona senator spoke expansively Monday of the potential of American ingenuity. “We are the country of Edison, Fulton and two brothers named Wright,” he said at a town hall event at Fresno State University’s Satellite Student Union. “Think of all the highest scientific endeavors of our age: the invention of the silicon chip, the creation of the Internet, the mapping of the human genome.”
The presumed Republican presidential nominee also proposed a $5,000 tax break for consumers who buy zero-emission cars, tighter enforcement of federal fuel economy standards and the elimination of tariffs on foreign ethanol.
It is unclear how effective McCain’s proposal would be in reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil. Battery experts said the prize’s effect might be limited.
“In the battery business, you need to spend $100 million just to get warmed up,” said David Vieau, chief executive of battery maker A123 Systems, based in Watertown, Mass.
The company is one of two suppliers developing batteries for the much-anticipated Chevrolet Volt, which is intended to run on battery power for 40 miles before a gasoline generator kicks in. General Motors plans to deliver the car in late 2010.
McCain said he came up with the $300 million by comparing it with a much-ridiculed $233-million earmark for the so-called bridge to nowhere in Alaska and noting that his prize would cost about a dollar for “every man, woman and child in America.”
Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign dismissed the proposal as “tinkering at the edges.”
The two campaigns have been sparring over how to address skyrocketing gasoline prices and climate change.
In mid-April, McCain proposed a summer gas-tax holiday that would suspend federal gasoline and diesel taxes. That proposal was matched by Hillary Rodham Clinton but derided as a gimmick by Obama, who said it would not resolve the country’s reliance on petroleum.
The Illinois senator, who advocates more federal support for renewable energy sources and higher fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, has taken aim at oil speculators, whom he has blamed for the recent run-up in prices.
McCain said last week that he wanted to open up additional areas off the nation’s coasts for oil and gas exploration, and aggressively promote construction of more nuclear power plants.
A recent poll showed public support for increased drilling. But McCain’s proposals drew attacks from environmentalists, who have long criticized nuclear power as an expensive and hazardous substitute for fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas.
Environmental groups have fought for years for more federal support for gas-efficient and gas-free vehicles as a way to reduce oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. McCain has occasionally backed those efforts, joining Democrats to co-sponsor legislation in 2002 to raise vehicle fuel efficiency standards. But more often, he has fought such initiatives.
He opposed legislation to require utilities to derive more power from renewable sources such as wind or solar. He helped vote down higher vehicle fuel standards in 2003 and 2005, although he supported an increase that passed last year.
McCain senior policy advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin said Monday that McCain’s support of federal incentives for battery development reflected the urgency of the energy issue.
“It’s a good use of taxpayer money to solve this great danger,” Holtz-Eakin said, although he declined to say how much the senator’s new proposals would cost.
Battery-powered electric vehicles are not a new idea. A century ago, at least half a dozen manufacturers made electric cars, and the first car to break the 60-mph barrier was powered by electricity. But with improvements in the gasoline engine, the technology was shelved.
Electric cars returned in the mid-1990s as car makers produced them to comply with California laws mandating emission-free vehicles.
Those programs were soon abandoned, with General Motors, the most active participant, producing scarcely 2,000 of its EV1 cars. It recalled the last models (which were leased, not sold) and by 2003 had finished destroying them.
Now, with gasoline prices soaring, GM, Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi have all pledged to bring battery-powered cars to market in the U.S. between 2010 and 2012.
Only one highway-legal electric car is available for purchase in the U.S.: the $100,000 Tesla roadster. Like the cars proposed by the large auto makers, it relies on lithium ion batteries, the same technology used in cellphones and laptop computers.
Widely regarded as the most promising technology, lithium ion batteries still raise safety concerns, as evidenced by the laptop fires of recent years.
Perhaps a more important issue is cost. Today’s batteries cost as much as $25,000 per car, making them far too expensive for an auto maker to turn a profit.
Reducing that price is considered the battery car’s main challenge.
At Fresno State on Monday, McCain admired a pair of sleek, shiny Tesla sports cars -- which can go from zero to 60 in four seconds -- on site for the event, calling them “a breakthrough in technology.”
Yet he also spoke in favor of hydrogen fuel cells, which have consistently received more funding than batteries have. “We’ve got to have a thousand flowers blossom,” McCain said.
Electric car advocates reserved judgment on the candidate’s proposal to give a $5,000 tax credit for zero-emission cars, along with smaller credits for cars that have very low carbon emissions. In recent years, the government has given tax credits of as much as $3,150 for buyers of hybrids such as the Toyota Prius, although many of those credits have expired.
The House passed an energy bill in May that includes a tax credit worth up to $5,000 for electric and plug-in hybrids. The measure is pending in the Senate.
Chelsea Sexton, executive director of Plug In America, which advocates electric vehicles, said the McCain proposal is too vague about what sorts of vehicles would receive it. “The devil will be in the details,” she said.
Ed Kjaer, director of electric transportation at Southern California Edison, said any battery proposals should contain measures to ensure that they are made in the U.S.
“This is a national security issue and we don’t want to trade reliance on one foreign fuel for reliance on a foreign energy storage technology,” Kjaer said.
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noam.levey@latimes.com
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ken.bensinger@latimes.com
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Times staff writer Maeve Reston in Fresno contributed to this report.
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c1a12c458c8711ab6545feec563b879b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-na-gitmo24-story.html | Court rules in favor of detainee | Court rules in favor of detainee
A federal appeals court said Monday that the U.S. military improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim held at Guantanamo Bay an “enemy combatant” and it ordered that he be released, transferred or granted a new hearing.
The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington marks the first time a federal court has weighed in on the issue of a Guantanamo detainee’s classification and granted him the opportunity to try to secure his release through civilian courts.
A lawyer for Huzaifa Parhat, who has been kept virtually incommunicado for more than six years, said he and other members of Parhat’s legal team would seek to have him freed immediately. Parhat is one of 17 Uighur Muslims, an ethnic minority in China, who are still being held at Guantanamo even though the U.S. government acknowledges they pose no threat.
“It is a tremendous day. It is a very conservative court, but we pressed ahead and we won unanimously,” said lawyer P. Sabin Willett. “But Huzaifa Parhat is now in his seventh year of imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, and he doesn’t even know about this ruling because he’s sitting in solitary confinement and we can’t tell him about it. That’s what we do to people in this country -- we put them in solitary confinement even when they are not enemy combatants.”
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, declined to discuss the ruling and referred calls to the Justice Department, which issued a statement saying, “We’re reviewing the decision and considering our options.”
The decision was the latest in a series of legal setbacks for the Bush administration and its efforts to defend the military commissions process at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The order came just 11 days after the Supreme Court ruled that the 270 or so detainees at Guantanamo have a constitutional right of habeas corpus, which allows them to challenge their detention in federal courts. That ruling marked the third time since 2004 that the nation’s highest court has limited the government’s power to use the military to detain and prosecute foreign nationals at Guantanamo.
The appeals court specified that Parhat could “seek release immediately” through a writ of habeas corpus in light of the Supreme Court’s June 12 decision.
Parhat’s case and scores like it had been put on hold until the Supreme Court made its ruling on the habeas corpus issue.
“Now all of these cases have been revived and this is the first case to move forward,” said David Cole, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University. “And here is somebody that the military has been holding on to for six years and the federal court now says he shouldn’t have been held in the first place.
“Absent this independent judicial review, he might have been sitting there for another 10 to 15 years. Now he has a chance to find freedom,” said Cole, the author of two books on legal issues in the U.S.-led counter-terrorism campaign.
In a one-paragraph notice, the three judges on the appellate panel said they could not discuss their order publicly because it contained classified information and that a declassified version would be available later.
But those familiar with the panel’s decision, made Friday, said it suggested that other judges might follow its lead and challenge the government’s underlying reasons for keeping detainees like Parhat in military custody for so long.
The ruling came in response to a petition under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which allowed detainees a limited review of their enemy-combatant designation before the Washington appeals court.
Military officials designated hundreds of detainees like Parhat through combatant-status review tribunals, which allowed for them to be prosecuted by the military.
“The premise of the DTA was that the courts would rubber-stamp whatever the administration wanted to do to people designated as enemy combatants. But this shows that the courts are not going to roll over and play dead on the basis of bogus evidence,” said Willett, adding that the ruling “cleared” his client of any connections to terrorism.
Parhat, 37, and other Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. He has insisted that he sought refuge there from an oppressive Chinese government and never fought against the United States.
The U.S. government has produced no evidence suggesting that he ever intended to fight, but it designated him an enemy combatant because of alleged links to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a separatist group demanding independence from China that Washington says has links to Al Qaeda.
Five Uighurs were released from Guantanamo two years ago to seek asylum in Albania, after the United States said it could not return them to China because they would face persecution there.
Parhat is one of 17 Uighurs being held at Guantanamo, and all of them have been cleared for release as part of annual reviews, a U.S. official said Monday. Although they are still designated enemy combatants, they are not considered significant threats or to have further intelligence value, the official said.
The Uighurs at Guantanamo have become a legal and diplomatic headache for the administration, which says it cannot find a country willing to accept them.
The U.S. official said federal authorities have balked at allowing the Uighurs into the United States.
Some critics have also accused the administration of unfairly portraying the Uighurs as terrorists as a way of appeasing the Chinese government, which seeks to tamp down separatist efforts by the group.
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josh.meyer@latimes.com
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Times staff writer Peter Spiegel contributed to this report.
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5fedeebff010e52727b4df56c7a334eb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-sp-jarrin24-story.html | TUNED IN | TUNED IN
Sitting in a restaurant in Cincinnati last week, Jaime Jarrin shook his head and smiled.
“Increible,” Jarrin said.
He repeated the word several times over a lunch that lasted nearly three hours when describing his 50-year Hall of Fame career as the Spanish voice of the Dodgers.
He talked about how he came to the United States from Ecuador with $40 in his pocket on June 24, 1955, the anniversary of which will be celebrated this evening at Dodger Stadium before the Dodgers’ game against the Chicago White Sox. He talked about how he used to translate Vin Scully’s English-language broadcasts over the air from a studio in Pasadena. He talked about times he had to call games seated next to stadium loudspeakers or in places where his view of the field was obstructed.
For everything he endured, from his humble start in a factory on Alameda Street to surviving a nearly fatal car accident in spring training in 1990, Jarrin called himself fortunate.
He was fortunate to be at KWKW in 1958, when the station picked up the Spanish-language rights to the Dodgers and he was pushed by an ambitious station manager to learn a game about which he knew nothing. And he was fortunate to still be there in 1980, by which time he had worked alongside Rene Cardenas, Jose Garcia and Rodolfo Hoyos Jr.
That was when Fernando Valenzuela hit town.
“For me, Fernandomania didn’t start in ’81,” Jarrin said. “For me, it started in ’80.”
Specifically, in the final series of the season against Houston. The Dodgers entered trailing the Astros by three games in the National League West. Valenzuela pitched a pair of scoreless innings out of the bullpen in both the first and third games of sweep, forcing a one-game playoff the Dodgers would lose.
By the next spring, the entire country was in a frenzy over the 20-year-old Mexican left-hander who looked into the heavens when winding up.
The club asked Jarrin to be Valenzuela’s interpreter.
“We had to go to cities a day early for press conferences,” said Valenzuela, who works with Jarrin as an analyst. “Jaime was always there. He advised me on how to answer questions; he told me to think carefully before responding.”
Without any hesitation, Jarrin calls Valenzuela the player who had the single greatest impact on the Dodgers’ franchise.
“He created more new baseball fans than any other player,” Jarrin said of Valenzuela. “Fernando had that special talent, that special charisma to draw Mexicans, Central Americans and South Americans who were completely indifferent to the game.”
Jarrin’s listenership grew.
This wasn’t how Jarrin expected to leave his mark when he left Ecuador, where he was already an established newsman working for a 150,000-watt station that called itself “La voz de los Andes,” or “The voice of the Andes.” His sole purpose in leaving home, he said, was to “expand my horizons.”
With his future uncertain, his wife, Blanca, remained in Ecuador. He sold his pickup truck to a friend, only to learn that the friend never paid his wife. He had to send half of his $40 back to Ecuador.
He was initially rebuffed when approaching KWKW about employment, his inability to speak English and his age held against him. Jarrin, who landed his first radio job in Ecuador when he was 16 years old, was still only 21.
Over the first two decades of his U.S. radio career, his greatest on-the-air moments came outside baseball.
He won a Golden Mike in 1970 and again in ’71. He covered the slaying of journalist Ruben Salazar. He visited the White House twice on assignment. He was at Shea Stadium in 1979 for the visit of Pope John Paul II.
But there might not have been a place where the shift of the social landscape in this country was more visible than at post-Fernandomania Dodger Stadium.
“The team doesn’t win championships but draws 3.5 million fans a year,” Jarrin said. “One of my greatest satisfactions is that we might’ve been able to show other organizations the value of the Hispanic market.”
Latin players, once concentrated in a few markets, are everywhere. And Jarrin has helped usher in a new wave of Spanish-language reporters, among them broadcast partner Pepe Yniguez, who said he started listening to Jarrin when he was 16 years old and living in Tijuana. Yniguez said Jarrin inspired him to pursue a career in radio instead of print media.
“He is our Vin Scully,” Yniguez said.
Jarrin has a contract that runs through the 2011 season. His life, he said, is steady. He and Blanca live in the same San Marino home they bought in 1965 for $50,000. He hasn’t seriously pondered retirement.
“I was fortunate that a deep love for baseball awakened within me,” Jarrin said. “I love baseball. I could watch two games a day, seven days a week. I love it, I love it, I love it.”
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dylan.hernandez@latimes.com
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