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aa46b5c3e2e8282eab6474e7fa80ebd0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-24-sp-tyson24-story.html | Speed outside fast-food lane | Speed outside fast-food lane
ARLINGTON, Texas -- Tyson Gay’s mother was hardly surprised to hear that her son had dinner in a restaurant. After all, Daisy Gay Lowe said, he eats nearly every meal outside the two-bedroom furnished apartment where he lives alone while training in this Dallas suburb.
It was what Gay ordered in a Cajun-style restaurant that startled his mother.
“He ate that?” she said, after hearing that the leading sprinter in the United States had tucked into a dish called Grilled Mahi Mahi St. Charles, with the fish embellished by lobster, shrimp, sauteed mushrooms and spinach in a Dijon cream sauce, accompanied by dirty rice.
“Oh, my God, that’s awesome,” Daisy Lowe said, struck by the idea that, at age 25, her son finally may have swallowed the nutritional advice she -- and others -- had been giving him for years.
This is a guy who usually traveled overseas to compete with one bag full of training clothes and another crammed with potato chips, cheese nips, doughnuts, fruit roll-ups, chocolate chip cookies, gummy fruit snacks, and, in one near concession to healthy eating, granola bars. A guy who saw asparagus stalks on a plate and asked if they were zucchini.
There was a guilelessness about that question, a refreshing lack of pretense in exposing how green he remains about vegetables, a world champion who is not the least bit world-weary.
It also reflects a mannerly upbringing, full of love and empty of affectation, in a deeply religious, Southern family (his mother’s e-mail address expresses devotion to Christ). In one five-minute phone conversation last year, Gay addressed the caller as “sir” a half-dozen times.
Beyond the track, where Gay moves at a pace that made him reigning world champion in the 100 and 200 meters, he is a soft, polite drawl in a sprint world accustomed to a steady diet of stars who talk as loud and fast as they run.
What he does is the most fundamental and seemingly uncomplicated of sporting challenges: get from here to there faster than everyone, whether the older sister he finally beat at age 14 or the world-record holder he crushed for the 2007 world title in the 100.
He was slow only in coming to the realization that strictly fast food isn’t the right fuel for a fast man, a man favored to win both sprints at the 2008 U.S. Olympic trials that begin Friday in Eugene, Ore., a man whose running should earn him more than $2 million this year from his shoe contract and other endorsements -- including one for McDonald’s Southern-style chicken sandwich.
It wasn’t until he ran four 100s and four 200s over six days in oppressive heat and humidity at the 2007 worlds that Gay really understood the battering his body goes through over the time -- barely two minutes altogether -- spent in those races.
“I had some marathoners I train do a workout of six times 60 meters, with three minutes rest between them, and they couldn’t walk the next day,” said 2000 Olympic sprint relay gold medalist Jon Drummond, one of Gay’s two coaches. “The 60 did more damage to their bodies than long, hard runs.”
Gay saw the stress of sprinting in stunning detail in the high-definition video a Japanese film crew shot last fall of him and Jamaica’s Asafa Powell, the runners who had been expected to turn the Olympic 100 into a mano a mano.
The video shows Gay’s left calf distorted by effort as he pushes off for a stride, then the right ankle bending dramatically as he lands on that foot, over and over again for the 45 strides it takes him to run the 100.
“It looks so painful,” Gay said.
That helped him understand why Drummond advised him to eat just chicken, fish and vegetables, why the vitamins and mineral supplements and weightlifting Gay once shunned were necessary as preventive medicine to avoid having virtual pain become real, that he needed to bring more than just running skills to the table.
Last month, before he headed out to the track to prepare for his first 100-meter race of the season, Gay spent an hour at O’s Personal Training in Arlington. He pumped 25-pound dumbbells, waist to shoulder, as if swinging his arms in a race. He did eight sets of sidearm and overhead pull-ups on a Body Master. Then leg raises. Crunches. Knees pulled to chest in an explosive motion like a start.
“I always thought if you lifted weights, did this stuff, you were going to get bigger and slower,” Gay said. “I realized I had to do it just to be strong enough to get through a season.”
The burden on Gay shifted about three weeks ago, when Usain Bolt, another Jamaican, lowered Powell’s world record from 9.74 to 9.72 in a New York race. Gay was a distant second, even though his time (9.85) was just one one-hundredth off his personal best.
Bolt, 21, had been startlingly fast in two other races this spring, beginning his season the way Gay had a year ago. Now he faces the pressure of probably going to the Olympics as the world-record holder, and only one man in that position has won the 100-meter gold since 1988.
“I think him having the record does ease the pressure on me,” Gay said via telephone before leaving for Eugene. “People are going to be asking him all the time if he can do it again. I’m happy not to be the favorite.”
Gay also realizes the U.S. trials are too competitive to be thinking about the Olympics, especially in the 100, where one misstep could be enough to keep a man from the top-three finish necessary to make the team in the event. He already has to overcome notoriously slow starts that led last year to his working with Drummond on that phase of his race.
In the search for speed, Gay has kept moving.
He owns a house in Fayetteville, Ark., where he went to college at the University of Arkansas, and rents apartments in Arlington and Orlando, Fla., where he does base training with his longtime coach, Lance Brauman. He spends the fall with his sister in their hometown, Lexington, Ky., where Gay’s 7-year-old daughter, Trinity, lives with her mother.
“It can be lonely at times,” Gay said of his nomadic life. “I talk to my mother a lot about it, and she says there is a reason for everything. I can deal with it.”
It’s a good thing that like most athletes his age, Gay can multitask communications. As he slid behind the wheel of his white Cadillac Escalade for the drive to dinner, Gay was talking with a visitor, sending a text message and sorting out the best route in his head.
The situation got more complex last year, when Brauman spent 366 days in prison after being found guilty of mail fraud and embezzlement. Brauman, who had written out a year’s worth of workouts for Gay, was released two days after Gay won the 100 meters at worlds, and the runner returned to train with him for four months before going to Texas.
“I can’t have tunnel vision,” Gay said of the coaching arrangement. “I have to listen to advice on the left and on the right.”
Gay also wears no blinders on the drug issue that has sent U.S. sprinting into a dark tunnel of suspicion.
He was quick to volunteer for repeated testing in the new U.S. anti-doping program, Project Believe, that establishes baseline chemistry for each athlete, allowing variations in subsequent tests to be more easily classified as doping. He also understands denials have become meaningless in a sport so besmirched by the BALCO scandal.
“Some people probably are going to say, ‘Tyson Gay is on drugs,’ and some will say, ‘I know he is clean,’ ” Gay said. “I try not to focus on drug accusations and who is doing what. I just love to compete.”
To aid his performance legally, Gay takes ibuprofen, potassium, calcium, magnesium, multivitamins and fish oil. And, yes, he cleaned his plate of it all, the mahi mahi and the shellfish and the vegetables, to the last grain of dirty rice.
He has put his mouth where his money is.
--
Philip Hersh covers Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.
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Begin text of infobox
In the running
Tyson Gay, above, who has volunteered for repeated testing in the U.S. anti-doping program, is expected to be one of the top sprinters for the U.S track and field team in Beijing. Trials to qualify for the team will be held this Friday through July 6 at Eugene, Ore. Gay’s career highlights and top times for U.S. sprinters in 2008:
TYSON GAY
* Age: 25.
* Height/weight: 5-11, 165
* College: Arkansas.
* Hometown: Lexington, Ky.
* Personal bests: 9.84 (100 meters), 2006 and 2007; 19.62 (200 meters), 2007, second-fastest 200 ever.
* Career highlights: three gold medals (100, 200, 400 relay) at 2007 world championships; U.S. champion, 100 and 200 meters, 2007; NCAA champion, 100 meters, 2004.
* Past Olympics: none.
100 METERS
World record: 9.72, Usain Bolt, Jamaica, 2008. U.S record: 9.79, Maurice Greene, 1999.
Top 10 U.S. performances of 2008:
9.85... Tyson Gay
9.96... Travis Padgett
10.04... Preston Perry
10.05... Trindon Holliday
10.06... Mike Rodgers, Darvis Patton
10.08... J-Mee Samuels, Evander Wells
10.09... Ivory Williams
10.10... Carlos Moore
200 METERS
World and U.S. record: 19.32, Michael Johnson, 1996
Top 10 U.S. performers of 2008:
20.0... Tyson Gay
20.07... Wallace Spearmon
20.08... LaShawn Merritt
20.10... Walter Dix
20.22... Charles Clark
20.25... Xavier Carter, Evander Wells
20.30... Rodney Martin
20.32... Travis Padgett, J-Mee Samuels
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3f3807f4af2458022539ee2c468d5f58 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-ed-visas25-story.html | Catwalking in | Catwalking in
Unable to muster the political will last year to pass comprehensive immigration reform and address the dearth of both unskilled and highly skilled labor that drags on our economy, Congress is now ready to act. Standing tall in the courage of their convictions, lawmakers are proposing to give supermodels their own category of work visa. This is especially bold because while easing the way for several hundred models to work during New York’s Fashion Week, they must resolutely ignore the pleas of high-tech businesses seeking more visas for well-educated workers.
The number of H1-B visas awarded each year to skilled foreign employees is 65,000 (plus 20,000 for foreign graduates of U.S. universities), despite the desperate demand. On the first day of the application period this year, H1-B visa requests exceeded 120,000. Meanwhile, the shortage of workers has inspired employers to put down roots elsewhere. Last July, Microsoft Corp. announced it would open shop in Vancouver, Canada, where U.S. immigration policies won’t hinder it from hiring the highly skilled people it needs.
Thankfully, Congress’ reform efforts don’t stop with models. Other bills in the pipeline would make it easier for athletes and entertainers to work in the United States. Our crops may go unpicked, but never again will Amy Winehouse have trouble getting a speedy visa. The key to amassing support for such legislation is to make the tough compromises necessary to ensure their minuscule social impact. Last year’s behemoth reform bill tangled with border security, guest worker programs, a pathway to citizenship -- far too controversial. Now, even Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River), who sponsored a bill to deny citizenship to babies born to illegal immigrants, is backing the bill giving the Department of Homeland Security 30 days to process visas for entertainers.
If, however, Congress does give -- shall we call them catwalk engineers? -- their own visa category, they will no longer have to compete with computer wizards for H1-Bs. That could free up to 1,000 slots for high tech. We’ll take them any way we can get them.
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3e3d6d76ca765d166bc40f99c1dee81d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-fg-cambodia25-story.html | Cambodia genocide tribunal says it’s running out of cash | Cambodia genocide tribunal says it’s running out of cash
Plagued by long delays and corruption allegations, the special court prosecuting Cambodia’s former Khmer Rouge leaders on genocide charges is running short of money months before its first trial is set to start.
The court, which was set up by the United Nations and Cambodia’s government two years ago, needs $43.8 million to continue operating through 2009, administrators said Tuesday in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.
“The money is not going to come easily,” Knut Rosandhaug, the court’s Norwegian deputy director of administration, told reporters. “We have to work for the money.”
The tribunal is holding five former Khmer Rouge officials on charges stemming from the deaths of at least 1.7 million people during the Communist regime’s reign of terror from 1975 to 1979. The charges include murder and crimes against humanity.
The prisoners are elderly, and most are in failing health, so many Cambodians fear that the suspects may die before survivors’ long wait for justice is over.
After almost a decade of bickering between the U.N. and Cambodia’s government over the court’s rules, the special court finally began work in 2006 with a combination of foreign and local judges and support staffers.
The tribunal was originally expected to cost $56.3 million for three years. But the estimated budget has ballooned to $143 million for a five-year term ending in 2010, the administration said Tuesday.
So far, Japan is the only country to answer the tribunal’s pleas for more funds. By far the court’s largest foreign donor, Japan pledged $3 million last week, raising its total donation to more than $24 million.
Last year, the Open Society Justice Initiative, a New York law reform organization founded by billionaire George Soros, said judges and other tribunal staff were forced to pay kickbacks to keep their jobs.
The U.N. said in April that an audit showed that management reforms had produced “significant improvement” in the court’s administration. But many Cambodians are losing faith in the promise that Khmer Rouge leaders will have to answer for their crimes.
Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar, escaped justice when he died in 1998 in the northern Cambodian jungle.
He was Brother No. 1 in a ruthless revolution that emptied the cities, forcing millions of people to work on collective farms where many died of starvation or exhaustion.
The tribunal’s prisoners awaiting trial are:
* Kaing Geuk Eav, 65, also known as Duch, a former high school math teacher who was director of the notorious S-21 prison where more than 14,000 of the Khmer Rouge’s victims died. Most were Communist Party members who Khmer Rouge guerrillas accused of betraying the revolution.
Also known as Tuol Sleng, the prison was a converted high school compound, with classrooms turned into torture and execution chambers.
Duch has been in detention for more than nine years. The youngest of the tribunal’s prisoners, he is expected to be the first to stand trial, but not before September. He has admitted his guilt but says he was only following orders. The rest of the accused insist that they are innocent.
* The highest-ranking detainee is Nuon Chea, 82. He was Brother No. 2 and complained in an interview last year before his arrest that he had heart problems.
As deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge’s official name, he had “effective control” over the regime’s detention centers and also directed “forcible transfers of the population, enslavement, forced labor and other inhumane acts,” the prosecution alleges.
* Khieu Samphan, 76, head of state in the Khmer Rouge government, says he was just a figurehead and had no real power in the regime. Khieu’s lawyer said this month that the prisoner was rushed to a hospital with high blood pressure on May 21, and is now paralyzed on one side from an apparent stroke.
* Ieng Sary, 82, Pol Pot’s former minister of foreign affairs, was arrested along with his wife, Ieng Thirith, 76, former minister of social action, in late 2007.
Ieng Sary has been treated at a hospital for numerous ailments since his arrest and is awaiting a court ruling on a request to be transferred to a hospital until his health improves.
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paul.watson@latimes.com
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8b17482a952e15786bad98b3100bc125 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-me-billygoat25-story.html | The trail is his destination | The trail is his destination
In the southern sierra, an old man with an untamed beard hikes a familiar trail, his sinewy legs pumping like pistons for mile after mile toward an ideal and away from civilization.
George Woodard is his name in the legal sense, but he no longer is that person. On the trail he is known by his nom de guerre: Billy Goat.
“George is the name my mother gave me,” he said.
Billy Goat has hiked more than 32,000 miles -- which would have taken him around the world and a third of the way again. He has walked across the South and the Southwest, the Northeast and the West. He has crossed the Rocky Mountains on four occasions, twice in each direction. He has conquered the so-called triple crown of American hiking -- the Appalachian, Continental Divide and Pacific Crest trails -- multiple times.
He has a wife, his third, and a home in Nevada. That is where George, the 69-year-old retired railroad worker, would live if Billy Goat cared to be George. Billy Goat lives more than 10 months of the year outdoors, drinking unfiltered water from streams, eating vacuum-sealed meals he prepares himself, sleeping under the stars without a tent. He carries what he needs in a backpack weighing less than 10 pounds.
“I’m not on vacation. I’m not out for a weekend,” he said, settling in for the night under a fire-scarred tree next to a gurgling creek and surrounded by the rugged granite outcroppings of the Dome Land Wilderness. “This is where I live. When you do that, all the other trappings of life fade away.”
For six months of the year, Billy Goat’s home is the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile uber-trail of the West that stretches from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon and Washington.
He is a legend in the small but growing fraternity of ultra-long-distance backpackers, renowned for his stamina and trail knowledge and envied for a single-minded devotion to living outdoors. First-timers on the PCT inevitably hear about Billy Goat. They spy his signature entry in trail-head logs -- a red-ink stamp of a goat. Chance encounters are described in awed tones in Internet journals.
I met the most extraordinary man just two days ago. . . .
“He’s the heart and soul of the PCT,” said Monte Dodge, 50, who hiked the length of the trail when he was 19 and does a portion of it nearly every year. “It’s his wisdom, his longevity -- the whole package. He’s a modern-day John Muir.”
The resemblance goes beyond the hawkish nose, determined eyes and gray beard that Billy Goat hasn’t tended in 13 years. Muir spent months at a time wandering the Sierra alone, carrying little more than a blanket, bread and tea as he developed his philosophy of the restorative power of nature on the human spirit.
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home,” Muir wrote. On another occasion he observed: “Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.”
Billy Goat has never read any of Muir’s prose. But more than any scholar, he understands through experience what Muir meant.
They head north each spring from a sun-baked wood marker in eastern San Diego County a few feet from a corrugated-metal wall along the Mexican border.
An encampment of Minutemen, a citizens group that patrols for illegal immigrants, surveys the area from a nearby hill. The only sound is the clink of small metal squares attached to a fence paralleling the border that are engraved with messages denouncing illegal immigration. “This is sovereign America,” one declares.
The writings contained in a log book at the PCT trail head glow with anticipation. “It’s like my life is beginning,” one hiker hoping to make it to Canada wrote. “Scary, new, awesome!”
Each year about 300 people attempt to hike the PCT in one season, generally April to September. Of those, about 60% make it -- fewer people than scale Mt. Everest in a year.
It’s a grueling odyssey through the stratum of the American West. From broiling deserts near sea level to snow fields above 14,000 feet. Along rocky ridgelines and through rain forests. Across swift, frigid streams and plunging canyons. In California, the trail zigzags through the Mojave Desert, the Sierra, Yosemite National Park and the southern Cascades
Planning a Pacific Crest expedition takes longer than the journey itself. Timing is everything: The desert must be crossed before it becomes dangerously hot, while the window for traversing the Sierra’s snow is relatively narrow. A steady pace must be kept -- 20- to 25-mile days are the norm. Daily life is rendered primeval -- food, water, shelter and miles are all that matter. Small-town post offices and other resupply spots constitute stations of the cross for weary hikers.
The challenge is so engrossing that hikers shed their identities and adopt trail names. Tattoo Joe and Mr. Wizard. Bad Pack and Thunder. Dirty Bird, Numskull and Good to Go.
“You’re going to be hot, cold, hungry, dirty, tired, sore all the time. Once you get past that, you’re gold,” said Jackie “Yogi” McDonnell, a 43-year-old waitress from suburban Kansas City who has hiked the triple crown and wrote a PCT guidebook. “Your body can do it. The challenge is mental.”
Because of that, McDonnell has learned it’s impossible to predict a hiker’s ability to complete the trail. An athletic college student on summer break may not have the mental toughness of a 45-year-old who takes on the PCT to exorcise a midlife crisis.
“You’ll see Billy Goat and say, ‘No way, he’s 69 -- he can’t make it,’ ” said McDonnell, who has hiked with him numerous times.
Indeed, at first glance Billy Goat looks as if he might have just emerged from a homeless shelter. Twelve years ago, he was diagnosed with diabetes.
But at 5 feet 7 and 150 pounds, there isn’t an ounce of fat on him. His shoulders are as square as a sawhorse from carrying a pack. His legs, scarred by innumerable cuts in the wild, are as taut as wire rope.
“He’s an amazing man. Ask him, ‘Where do you live?’ and he’ll point to the ground and say ‘Here,’ ” McDonnell said. “He’s so completely comfortable in his own skin. There’s just an aura that surrounds him.”
Toby Woodard says his father has diametrical personalities: On the trail, he is bursting with life -- gregarious, charming, in total command of his domain. Off the trail, he is often stern and moody, an anxious recluse who struggles with depression.
“He is two different persons who has lived two different lives,” said Woodard, 37, who lives in the former mill town of Gardiner, Maine. “The man has walked more than 32,000 miles purely for one reason: to escape from our culture.”
Toby’s parents divorced when he was 5, and for years he had little contact with his father. The two eventually bonded through a shared love of hiking. He calls his father BG; he is known as SOBG -- Son of Billy Goat. “The only reason we have any relationship at all is because of the trail,” he said.
George Woodard grew up in northern Maine surrounded by poverty and the infinite outdoors that would become a respite for a troubled soul.
Woodard left home at 17. A poor student, he had no interest in college and sought a railroad job because it was steady and paid well. Except for a stint in the Army, he would work for more than 30 years as a conductor and yard foreman for a number of railroads in the Northeast, including Amtrak.
“When I was in my 40s I was bound by my job,” he said. “I would dream and fantasize about hiking all the time. And when I would finally go, I used every available moment. I would drive back just in time to go back to work.”
The outdoors lifted his mood and silenced his anxieties. A roof over one’s head was nothing more than a cage, he concluded. Woodard lived frugally, stockpiled money and, at 50, retired and escaped into the woods.
“We’re only here for a short while. Time runs out on us,” he said. “When we’re in our 30s, we think we have lots of time. I’ll do things later, we say. But now is later.”
Mary Woodard, 63, a former chemist, met her husband in the mid-1990s when Billy Goat hiked through the Colorado town of Buena Vista, where she lived.
Today, they have a unique marriage: He hikes. She runs their home in Wellington, Nev. -- and provides support on the trail by mailing out resupplies of food, using Billy Goat’s railroad pension. She also spends weeks every summer as a volunteer “trail angel,” leaving out jugs of water for thirsty hikers and picking up garbage along the PCT.
When Billy Goat comes home for a break, he prefers to sleep in the garage, which is equipped with a workshop where he prepares his meals. It doesn’t take long indoors for his mood to darken, his wife said.
“He doesn’t want anyone to know his real name because I think he knows that George isn’t really likable. . . . When he’s off the trail, he’s Billy Goat Gruff,” she said, laughing. “He hikes because it makes him feel good. He’s addicted to it.”
Billy Goat’s first fix of the day begins at or before dawn. Once he gets going, he rarely stops. His steady, slightly bowlegged march propels him at 2 mph for hours on end. He stops only to eat a stew made from a mix of dried groats, beans and vegetables.
His day typically ends after dark. His goal is to cover ground, not to linger and drink in the grandeur of the outdoors.
“It’s beautiful and all that,” he said. “But it’s the walking that I’m interested in. Doing it every day and the challenge of that. I’ve hiked in plenty of ugly places.”
Over tens of thousands of miles, Billy Goat has developed a Zen-like asceticism in which life is reduced to one dimension, a straight line toward an ever-receding goal.
“The reason people fail is they start dreaming of home,” he said. “They think about how nice a bed is. How nice a bathtub is. Wouldn’t it be great to have hot water? Home is wind-free, dust-free, ant-free. You meet people on the trail who say, ‘I haven’t had a shower in days.’ If that’s so important, why are you out here?”
Billy Goat has learned a great many things living outdoors. How to find water where there seemingly is none. How to utilize a cluster of boulders to hang food overnight out of the reach of bears. How to navigate using a compass and map -- a dying art in a world of global positioning devices, which Billy Goat would no sooner carry into the woods than he would a bowling ball.
He is obsessed with shedding every last unneeded ounce, a passion common among ultra-long-distance hikers. He carries one spoon; who needs a fork? Why lug a fancy Swiss Army knife when a simple paring knife will do? He has an expensive lightweight backpack and a high-quality down jacket and sleeping bag. He goes through four pairs of trail shoes a year -- boots are too heavy. He doesn’t bother carrying extra socks or underwear.
When traveling between trail heads, he’d rather sleep in his car -- a battered 1990 Toyota Tercel dubbed the Goatmobile -- than a motel.
“The more you hike, the less you need,” he said. “You find out you don’t need a big first aid kit. I carry just some moleskin and a bandanna. . . . People always say, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ I don’t think we should be too consumed with what-ifs. . . . I’d be more afraid of what I’d encounter on the streets of L.A.”
It’s a philosophy he freely shares with younger hikers. Given his age, almost all of them are.
Claire Porter, a 26-year-old from Minnesota, started out on the Pacific Crest Trail in early April with a friend who was forced to drop out because of a back injury. She pushed on and intends to finish her first hike-through before the snow falls.
She ran into Billy Goat near a mountain pass where the PCT transitions from the desert into the high country.
The two hiked together and shared a camp near a stream.
As the sun set, they talked strategy: the merits of crampons versus an ice ax in the snow up ahead. Whether a tent was needed at points up the trail. How much equipment was necessary.
Porter pulled out a satellite beacon that e-mails her parents with her exact location at the push of a button. In an emergency, she could send out a call for help.
“It’s worth the weight for the peace of mind my parents get,” she said. “I’m kind of a gear nerd.”
“I’m not,” Billy Goat mumbled to himself.
He got up and demonstrated how one piece of gear -- a tarp -- could be used both as a tent and a rain poncho.
“You look like a wise sage,” Porter said as Billy Goat modeled the poncho. “A guru with your cloak on.”
Soon, a nearly full moon lit up the night sky, and the only sound was the gurgle of the stream.
Early the next morning, the two parted company. Time is of the essence on the PCT, especially when one is 69. Billy Goat needs to keep moving.
His goal is “50 by 80" -- 50,000 miles by the age of 80, more than 1,600 miles a year.
“The only thing he lives for is to be on the trail,” his son said. “When the point comes when he can’t go out and walk a couple thousand miles -- he’s scared to death of it.”
But today is not that day. The sun is barely up and Billy Goat is adding to his internal pedometer, legs pumping like pistons up and over a ridgeline, each step taking him further away from a man named George.
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mike.anton@latimes.com
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4cc5ec0b6a6282297ad46ccecd0d14d4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-me-species25-story.html | State’s flora at risk from climate change, study says | State’s flora at risk from climate change, study says
Two-thirds of California’s unique plants, some 2,300 species that grow nowhere else in the world, could be wiped out across much of their current geographic ranges by the end of the century because of rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, according to a new study.
The species that cannot migrate fast enough to higher altitudes or cooler coastal areas could face extinction because of greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet, according to researchers.
California’s flora face a potential “collapse,” said David Ackerly, an ecologist at UC Berkeley who was the senior author of the paper. “As the climate changes, many of these plants will have no place to go.”
Half of the plant species that are unique to the continental United States grow only in the Golden State, from towering redwoods to slender fire poppies. And under likely climate scenarios, many would have to shift 100 miles or more from their current range -- a difficult task given slow natural migration rates and obstacles presented by suburban sprawl.
The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed on-line journal PLoS One, is the first to analyze the effect of climate change on all of the plants unique to one of the world’s most biologically diverse areas. Previous models have focused on fewer species in areas such as the eastern United States, Europe, South Africa and Australia.
“The climate is changing 10 times faster than it did during the last ice ages,” said ecologist Scott Loarie, who has a doctorate from Duke University and who conducted the study over five years with Ackerly and other collaborators. “The first thing we need to do is to reduce the pace of change.”
The study, which was based on more than 80,000 specimens, was hailed as groundbreaking by leading scientists in the field. “It is a timely analysis of the likely fate of the plants of California in the face of climate change,” Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden and coauthor of seminal texts on California flora, said in an e-mail.
And in Southern California, given water shortages and habitat disruption, he added, “lots of the populations are right on the edge. . . . The balance could easily be tipped so we could lose many of them in a very short period of time.”
As California’s unique species migrate, they could be separated from the creatures that pollinate them. Animals could be divided from the plants on which they depend, the researchers noted.
“Individual plants can’t pick up and fly away like birds,” Ackerly said. “A seed grows into a tree. Then the adult tree drops another seed, which can be carried by the wind or an animal. And that seed grows into another tree.”
The state may also have to set aside new refuges and corridors, and prepare to move some plants if necessary. “Planning for plant refugees will become a new but important concept for natural reserves to think about,” said biologist Brent Mishler, director of the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley, the state’s most important flora collection.
The study is likely to add urgency to a decades-long movement to protect the state’s flora. The California Native Plant Society, which has 33 chapters, warns that less than 10% of the state’s original coastal sage-scrub land and less than 1% of its native grassland remain intact.
But the paper foresees even more dramatic changes. Coast redwoods may range farther north, it said, while California oaks could disappear from Central California in favor of cooler weather in the Klamath Mountains along the Oregon border. Many plants may no longer be able to survive in the northern Sierra Nevada or in the Los Angeles Basin.
It also predicts that plants of northern Baja California will migrate into San Diego County ranges. Meanwhile, the Central Valley could become the preferred habitat for plants of the Sonoran Desert.
And what would replace Southern California’s native plants? “We don’t know what will move into the void,” Loarie said. “Possibly desert plants similar to those in Nevada and Arizona, but more likely unpleasant agricultural weeds.”
Coauthor Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University scientist who serves on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, prepared projections under a scenario of a relatively rapid rise in global temperature of 3.8 to 5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and under a conservative estimate of 2.3 to 3.3 degrees Celsius.
The study looks at eight scenarios that used different rates of warming and of species mobility. Loarie cautioned that there were uncertainties in the analysis, such as the known range of individual plants, the precise microclimate each plant prefers, and the magnitude of predicted changes in rainfall patterns.
“But there is a clear trend,” he said. “The climate is outpacing these plants.”
Under the worst-case scenario, plant diversity would decrease everywhere by as much as 25%, and 66% of all species unique to California would suffer more than an 80% decrease in range.
In the most optimistic scenario, under which governments move to rapidly decrease greenhouse gas emissions globally, and plant species prove able to move into new habitats, diversity might increase along the state’s northwest and central coasts, the study concluded.
But even under this scenario, many species would disappear from Southern California and the Northern Sierra.
The authors steered clear of predicting specific extinctions.
“If a plant loses 80% of its range and goes from 100 to 20 square kilometers, it is hard to say if that plant is extinct or not,” Loarie said. “In a hot year, that plant’s gone.”
Native plants often support 10 to 50 times as many species of native wildlife as nonnative plants, and biologist Philip Rundel, a California plant specialist at UCLA, noted that the effects measured by the study “will surely be paralleled by what we can expect to occur with animal species.”
“This article is a wake-up call for all Californians that global change impacts on our environment are more than just a theoretical issue.”
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margot.roosevelt@latimes.com
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62a4ec87d9453273aff1479aed491b58 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-me-ucla25-story.html | UCLA health center readies move | UCLA health center readies move
On Sunday, 2,100 doctors, nurses, technicians and managers at UCLA Medical Center will participate in a task of epic proportions: moving to the gleaming new hospital across the street.
Although the distance is short, the details are daunting. The shift to the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center will require military-style precision. Using 30 ambulances and 80 gurneys, three teams of professionals will transfer 350 patients -- many of them hooked up to monitors and respirators -- at the rate of one every two minutes.
“Patient move day” will cap a months-long process. Getting the hospital ready involved installing 18,000 pieces of furniture, 2,800 computers, 1,700 networked medical devices, 3,100 phones and 580 flat-panel TVs; ordering and stocking fresh gauze, linens and pharmaceuticals for 65 departments; rehearsing rescue-helicopter landings on the two new helipads; and ensuring that every radiologist, pharmacist and surgeon will know how to navigate the building and operate the latest in high-tech equipment from Day 1.
The long-awaited move to what UCLA officials describe as the nation’s most up-to-date hospital has been eight years in the planning.
The 1-million-square-foot building, which visitors have likened to a concert hall or museum, was designed by C.C. “Didi” Pei and his firm, Pei Partnership of New York, with guidance from his father, architect I.M. Pei. It replaces the 53-year-old center that was heavily damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
After it is “decommissioned” as a hospital, that structure will continue to house the David Geffen School of Medicine, the UCLA School of Dentistry and the UCLA School of Public Health.
The new hospital, clad in Italian travertine from a quarry owned by a former UCLA cancer patient, features 520 large patient rooms -- all of them private -- with expansive views and day beds for family members. It has wireless Internet access, outdoor play areas for children and operating rooms with state of the art video equipment.
“This facility is historic,” said David T. Feinberg, chief executive of the UCLA hospital system. “We have really created a place of healing.”
Although it’s world renowned for surgical breakthroughs and caring for acutely ill patients, the UCLA Medical Center has been the subject of scandals in recent years: the possibly illegal sale of hundreds of donated cadavers, employee snooping into celebrities’ medical records and liver transplants for four Japanese patients later shown to have ties to organized crime.
Then there were the delays and cost overruns in the building of the new hospital itself -- the largest building ever constructed in the UC system. UCLA officials blamed the rising costs on construction materials and design changes to accommodate medical advances.
The most recent hitch, a water leak caused by the faulty installation of an institutional coffee maker, pushed the opening back from early May.
During construction, the budget ballooned to about $829 million from an initial projection of $598 million in 1998, when officials envisioned a late 2004 opening. Equipment purchases brought the total cost to $1 billion.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency contributed $432 million in earthquake relief toward the project, and the state of California gave $44 million. Private donors contributed nearly $300 million, including a $150-million pledge in the late President Reagan’s name. The rest came from hospital financing and bonds.
The eight-story hospital has two basement levels and three towers, shaped more or less like quarter circles, with patient rooms along the outer walls. Nurses operate from stations toward the center of each floor.
Each floor features a lobby with a big window, and most hallways have windows at each end, making it much easier to navigate than the old facility. “We used light to help people get around,” C.C. Pei said.
The new hospital, begun in late 1999, is one of the first built to the state’s stricter seismic-safety standards. It is designed to withstand an 8.0 magnitude earthquake and remain structurally sound and fully operational without outside resources for as long as 72 hours.
Its design is a far cry from the old center, which has long, gloomy hallways that served as thoroughfares for carts, wheelchairs, doctors, visitors, patients, students and custodians. The new hospital has four separate elevator banks: regular passenger elevators for staff and visitors, deep and narrow elevators for patients in gurneys, elevators for materials and trash hauling, and an elevator that connects the rooftop helipads with operating rooms and the emergency department.
Preparing for the patient move has required coordination with a gaggle of city and county departments. From 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. on patient move day, UCLA will divert ambulances to other hospitals, with trauma patients going to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Police will block off several streets to keep spectators and traffic at bay.
Local hospitals “have been notified that they may expect a little bump in their census,” said Johanna Bruner, a family nurse practitioner who directs cardiology and emergency services for the UCLA health system.
What happens if someone shows up at the emergency entrance of the new hospital on move-in day? “If you walk in, we will totally accept you,” Bruner said. At 5 a.m., the old emergency department will close and the new one will officially open.
To get everyone geared up, the 60-person transition team in recent months has carried out mock moves and sent nurses on scavenger hunts, to make sure they know where to find the most obscure catheter or the most obvious emergency room cart.
James Atkinson, a pediatric surgeon who is directing the transition, said the old center a few weeks ago began whittling down the facility’s usual patient level of 500 to reduce the crush on moving day.
Starting at 5:30 a.m., about 50 psychiatric patients will travel by ambulance or bus to the new facility. They are in addition to the 350 medical or surgical patients being moved from one bed to another.
The schedule calls for one patient to be moved every two minutes. If all goes as planned, the final patient should be settled in by 3 p.m.
The transition team is taking no chances. UCLA has rented 60 ventilators. Backup porters and respiratory technicians will be on hand, as will elevator mechanics and electricians. Health Care Relocations, the moving company hired for the job, has closed its three offices and brought all 30 employees to Los Angeles.
The company moves about 20 hospitals a year, but this one is distinguished by its sheer size and the severity of patients’ condition, said Patrick Moriarty, president.
“All the hard work is done, and now it’s just executing,” he said. “It’s right down to the minute.”
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martha.groves@latimes.com
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518e6fb4bb2cf565d3ab0f1c631582fd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-me-whale25-story.html | Artist’s whale request causes a flap | Artist’s whale request causes a flap
The Laguna Beach artist who created California’s iconic whale-tail license plate is making a splash with state coastal officials, revoking the state’s right to use his art after they snubbed his request to share profits from the image with his environmental group.
Wyland, the famed marine muralist whose paintings of ocean life envelop buildings around the world, let the state use his hazy blue image of a whale’s flukes for environmentally themed license plates 14 years ago in what state officials describe as a “handshake deal.”
The artist approached the California Coastal Commission several months ago asking for 20% of the state’s annual profits from the plates to fund his nonprofit ocean conservation foundation. California earns about $3.77 million a year from the plates, but the Coastal Commission receives only a third of the funds: about $15 for each new plate sold. The rest goes to other state environmental programs.
“At the end of the day, the whale tail is my art and my idea, and I own the rights to my intellectual property,” Wyland said in an interview Tuesday from his Laguna Beach studio. “I won’t be stepped on: I’m sticking up for artists’ rights, for the common person. I’m sticking up for the oceans and the coast big-time. We’re not going away.”
In recent weeks, the two sides attempted to negotiate terms to preserve the use of the painting on license plates. According to Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas, the agency offered to give a $100,000 grant to Wyland’s foundation each year for a decade in exchange for rights to the image, but talks fell through. Wyland, who goes by his last name only, says such an offer was never communicated.
Douglas termed Wyland’s demand for 20% of the plate’s sales “outrageous,” adding that the state Legislature, not the commission, distributes the license plate funds among agencies. According to Douglas, Wyland gave his image to the state unconditionally.
The 51-year-old artist disputes that characterization: “I was being very generous in allowing them to use, to borrow one of my images for a period of time. It’s not up to [Douglas] to determine what the time is -- it’s up to the artist.”
The image, one of Wyland’s most famous, is titled “Tails of Great Whales.”
An estimated 126,000 whale-tail plates are on California roads, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles. The money the commission gets from the plates, which cost $50 more than regular plates and an extra $40 to renew, is distributed among hundreds of groups for beach cleanups, education and wheelchairs that can navigate the sand. In 1995, the commission gave Wyland’s group a $20,000 grant.
The DMV offers 11 specialty plates. Wyland’s whale tail is one of the top-selling designs, along with the palm tree-lined Arts Council plate, said DMV spokesman Mike Marando.
The whale-tail plates have raised about $40.5 million for the state since their introduction in 1997.
While the state’s conservation work has similarities to the Wyland Foundation, Wyland argues that his group is unique because it uses art to introduce people to ocean preservation.
“We reach an audience that’s not ordinarily going to be receptive to an environmental message,” he said.
Douglas counters that the free publicity afforded Wyland by the distribution of his work, complete with signature, is plenty.
“Maybe he hasn’t gotten the money that they were looking at, but he’s gotten lots of advertising,” Douglas said.
But the whale-tail plate’s popularity is no fluke. Wyland has painted 99 giant murals of ocean creatures internationally, including the 116,000-square-foot work covering the Long Beach Arena. An official artist for the U.S. Olympic team, Wyland plans to paint his 100th mural in Beijing this summer. Wyland also designed a similar whale plate for Florida; his foundation receives 10% of the profits.
“It’s like lightning in a bottle,” Wyland said of the piece on the California plate. “You can’t just replace it by doing an imitation of it.”
Wyland is considering taking legal action against the commission. The commission, however, isn’t too concerned with hanging on to the name brand.
Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) introduced legislation last week to allow the commission to find a replacement whale-tail design and still comply with restrictions against new specialty plates.
The DMV subsequently agreed to begin the search for a replacement artist, and Huffman, who has already received an offer from an artist to create a new whale tail for free, withdrew the proposition.
“People really buy these license plates because they really support the programs,” Douglas said. “The notion that people wouldn’t buy these plates if it weren’t his art . . . There’s sort of a self-aggrandizement factor here.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be any problem finding a nice, aesthetic whale tail,” Huffman said.
The commission’s priority is to keep state-supported ocean conservation programs afloat, he said.
The prospect of losing funding “over a little spat like this, over royalties to an image, just seemed like a tragedy,” Huffman said. “It’s really best that the two parties just part ways. . . . This is a bad marriage, and it’s time for it to end.”
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susannah.rosenblatt@latimes.com
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bd1e0ecaab3045ee8b216349269161e7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-na-poll25-story.html | Obama in the lead by 12 points | Obama in the lead by 12 points
Buoyed by enthusiasm among Democrats and public concern over the economy, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has taken a sizable lead over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) at the opening of the general election campaign for president, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
In a two-man race between the major-party candidates, registered voters chose Obama over McCain by 49% to 37% in the national poll, conducted Thursday through Monday.
On a four-man ballot that included independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr, voters chose Obama over McCain by 48% to 33%.
Obama’s lead -- bigger in this poll than in most other national surveys -- appears to stem largely from his positions on domestic issues. Both Democrats and independent voters said Obama would do a better job than McCain at handling the nation’s economic problems, the public’s top concern.
In contrast, many voters said McCain was the more experienced candidate and better equipped to protect the nation against terrorism -- but they ranked those concerns below economic issues.
McCain suffers from a pronounced “passion gap,” especially among conservatives who usually give Republican candidates a reliable base of support. Among voters who described themselves as conservative, 58% said they would vote for McCain; 15% said they would vote for Obama, 14% said they would vote for someone else, and 13% said they were undecided. By contrast, 79% of voters who described themselves as liberal said they planned to vote for Obama.
“I’m a Republican . . . but I don’t like some of the things McCain voted for in the Senate, especially immigration,” said poll respondent Mary Dasen, 77, a retired United Way manager in Oscoda, Mich., who said she was undecided. “There’s a big chance I might stay home and not vote.”
Even among voters who said they planned to vote for McCain, more than half said they were “not enthusiastic” about their chosen candidate; 45% said they were enthusiastic. By contrast, 81% of Obama voters said they were enthusiastic, and almost half called themselves “very enthusiastic,” a level of zeal found in 13% of McCain’s supporters.
“McCain is not capturing the full extent of the conservative base the way President Bush did in 2000 and 2004,” said Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus. “Among conservatives, evangelicals and voters who identify themselves as part of the religious right, he is polling less than 60%.
“Meanwhile, Obama is doing well among a broad range of voters. He’s running ahead among women, black voters and other minorities. He’s running roughly even among white voters and independents.”
Among white voters, Obama and McCain are each at 39%, the poll found. Earlier this year, when Obama ran behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) among whites in some primary elections, analysts questioned whether the African American senator could win white voters in the general election.
But the great majority of Clinton voters have transferred their allegiance to Obama, the poll found, with 11% of Clinton voters defecting to McCain.
Both Nader -- a consumer advocate who was the Green Party candidate in 2000 and an independent candidate in 2004 -- and former Rep. Barr (R-Ga.) appear to siphon more votes from McCain than from Obama. When Nader and Barr are added to the ballot, they draw most of their support from independent voters who said they would otherwise vote for the Republican.
Nader was the choice of 4% of respondents, Barr of 3%. Nader is seeking to place his name on the ballot as an independent in at least 45 states and so far has succeeded in four. Barr’s Libertarian Party is on the ballot in 30 states and is working on the remaining 20.
Obama’s strong showing seems to stem from a general trend of increased support for Democratic candidates and Democratic positions after almost eight years of an increasingly unpopular Republican administration.
In this national poll’s random sample of voters, 39% identified themselves as Democrats, 22% as Republicans and 27% as independents. In a similar poll a year ago, 33% identified themselves as Democrats, 28% as Republicans and 30% as independents.
Such numbers often ebb and flow with the popularity of each political party. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush’s popularity soared, the number of voters who described themselves as Republicans rose too. During the last three years, as his popularity slumped, the number who identify themselves as Republicans also dropped.
The survey found public approval of the president’s job performance at a new low for a Times/Bloomberg poll: 23%, compared with 73% disapproval.
Fifty-one percent of voters said they had a “positive feeling” about the Democratic Party; 29% said that of the Republican Party.
“It appears to be a Democratic year,” Pinkus said. “This election is the Democrats’ to lose.”
On domestic issues, voters preferred Obama’s healthcare proposals to McCain’s by a margin of almost 30 percentage points: 53% to 26%. They also preferred Obama’s proposals on taxes, 45% to 31%, and on relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, 44% to 32%.
But voters considered McCain better equipped to protect the country from terrorism, 49% to 32%. And though 68% favored withdrawing troops from Iraq within the next year or even sooner, a position close to Obama’s, many were not sure Obama was the right candidate to lead that effort. When asked which candidate would be best at handling the war in Iraq, voters split about evenly: 44% named McCain and 42% named Obama.
That result reflected persistent doubts among many voters as to whether Obama is sufficiently experienced to be president. Voters split about evenly on that question too, with 46% agreeing that Obama is “too naive and inexperienced for the job” and 50% disagreeing.
Among independents, 54% said Obama was too inexperienced -- a potential vulnerability for him.
McCain, by contrast, was seen as better prepared for the presidency. Asked which candidate has the right experience for the White House, 47% picked McCain, 27% Obama.
The Times/Bloomberg poll, conducted under Pinkus’ supervision, interviewed 1,115 registered voters. Its margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
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51a786418e58c90b9dcaeec42d2a0d57 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-25-sp-simers25-story.html | Not-so-artful Dodgers when it comes to a deal | Not-so-artful Dodgers when it comes to a deal
You might want to hold your nose.
Angel Berroa. Mark Sweeney. Scott Proctor. Thomas Perez. Brady Clark. Marlon Anderson. Julio Lugo. Greg Maddux. Wilson Betemit. Elmer Dessens. B.J. LaMura. Mark Hendrickson. Toby Hall. Ben Kozlowski. Danys Baez. Jae Sao. Tim Hamulack. Lance Carter. And Andre Ethier for Milton Bradley -- Bradley tied with Alex Rodriguez early Tuesday for the best batting average in the American League.
And now comes word Ned Colletti will be in meetings all afternoon, maybe the scariest news a Dodgers fan can hear these days if he’s in there working on another trade before the July 31 deadline.
Look at the list of what Colletti has acquired since being hired in late 2005, and that doesn’t include Esteban Loaiza plucked off waivers for $7 million, or the free-agent disasters.
“Hey, I was right there with Brian Cashman when we brought in Carl Pavano,” said Dodgers Manager Joe Torre in trying to defend Colletti, and isn’t that encouraging news, two guys now with no eye for talent putting their heads together to plot the Dodgers’ future.
The phone rings, and it’s Colletti. “Please, please, no more trades,” I begin, while suggesting a vacation that might take him overseas for the next few weeks.
“I’ve never been to Europe,” he says, and I think we could get a collection going and make that happen.
“Some of those are minor league deals and I had nothing to do with them,” Colletti protests when I mention his trading track record, and while I find it odd the Dodgers’ GM doesn’t have final approval of all deals, he adds, “The player development people made five or six of those.”
So we go over the list, and he distances himself from three of the stiffs.
“You’re looking in hindsight, so your vision is perfect,” says Colletti, who apparently works with blinders on, the only logical explanation for some of these deals. “Who has come back to haunt us?”
A better question, I said, “is who did you acquire who really improved the team?”
“Ethier helped us,” he says. “Maddux helped us, Lugo gave us some support, Anderson certainly helped us in September of ’06, and Hendrickson pitched. You do have to have players who pitch and play in the games.”
No question Hendrickson made it possible for the Dodgers to put nine men on the field on the days he got batted around.
“Most fans probably have you pegged as a GM who hasn’t done a very good job of bringing in talent,” I suggest, and he disagrees.
“I don’t know if that’s fact or fiction,” he says. “That’s your opinion.”
I offer to put it to the readers, but obviously so much hinges on the likes of Nomar Garciaparra, Jason Schmidt and Andruw Jones, and so a blindfold, please for Colletti.
Then again, the Dodgers could have those three players, Brad Penny and Rafael Furcal back by the trading deadline, giving the Dodgers the chance to win a division title -- taking into consideration the level of competition in the West.
In other words, “as long as I don’t foul it up by making a trade,” Colletti says, and had Dan Evans and Kevin Malone been so quick, they might still be here.
“The team needs to get healthy so we can figure out if we need any more help,” he says. “We definitely need to play better. We need a better feel and plan at bat. We’ve pitched pretty well and our bullpen has held up pretty well.
“But constituted as we are today and the approach we’re taking at the plate, it’d be a tough go the rest of the way.”
The Dodgers have God as manager, though, so why wouldn’t they be taking the proper approach at home plate 75 games into the season?
“Let’s not go with that [nickname],” Torre says. “What was it you called me the other day?”
“The great Joe Torre.”
“Let’s go with that,” Torre says with a laugh, and OK, so the great Joe Torre apparently is getting nowhere when it comes to managing the ability of his players at home plate.
“We have to find a better way to communicate,” he admits. “I’m concerned as Ned is; we need to be more consistent. Damn right 75 games is a long time, and so we have to find a better way to explain it so they understand.”
Torre says he likes the approach Juan Pierre and Jeff Kent take, and Russell Martin does well at times, but the rest of the Dodgers’ lineup is too impatient and swings at too many bad pitches.
Some of it is the young players inexperience and more so -- their stubbornness to change what has worked for them in the minor leagues. So 75 games into the season, the Dodgers have been unable to find a winning rhythm on offense.
Put it all together, and you have a GM who has yet to identify talent, a high-priced manager who has yet to make a connection with the talent brought in by previous GMs and the Diamondbacks just lost again.
So far, the Dodgers’ idea of a winning formula.
IN MEMORY of Jim Healy and Howard Cosell: “Who goofed? I’ve got to know.”
Goof No. 1: My mistake. I wrote about former Dodger Gary Carter, who said, “I went three for four against the Braves, throwing out three runners, one of them Deion Sanders and Tommy is playing Mike.
Carter said, “Mike,” and parenthetically I goofed and added, [Piazza], missing the fact Carter was talking about Mike Scioscia. My apology.
Goof No. 2: According to the Dodgers official media guide, on this date (June 24) in Dodgers history, “Sandu Kofax made his Major League debut.” Eventually, the guy would make a name for himself.
Goof No. 3: A Dodger advertisement in Sunday’s Times proclaimed Friday, July 11 Universal Studios night at Dodger Stadium; Friday, July 12 Fireworks Night; Friday, July 13 Travel Mugs Night; Friday, July 25 Brad Penny Bobblehead Night; Friday, July 27 Autograph Day; and Friday July 29 Baseball Card Night.
I think we know what the folks who do Dodgers advertising are thinking most of the time: Thank God it’s Friday.
AND FINALLY, when it comes to bragging rights, which local hockey team had the bigger crook as owner?
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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.
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e282cef9415954378be909e314570654 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-26-fi-laptops26-story.html | Is your laptop safe at customs? | Is your laptop safe at customs?
Bill Hogan was returning home to the U.S. from Germany in February when a customs agent at Dulles International Airport pulled him aside. He could reenter the country, she told him. But his laptop couldn’t.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said he had been chosen for “random inspection of electronic media,” and kept his computer for about two weeks, recalled Hogan, 55, a freelance journalist from Falls Church, Va.
Fortunately, it was a spare computer that had little important information. But Hogan felt violated.
“It’s not an inspection. It’s a seizure,” he said. “What do they do with it? I assume they just copy everything.”
For several years, U.S. officials have been searching and seizing laptops, digital cameras, cellphones and other electronic devices at the border with few publicly released details.
Complaints from travelers and privacy advocates have spurred some lawmakers to fight the U.S. Customs policy and to consider sponsoring legislation that would sharply limit the practice.
As people store more and more information electronically, the debate hinges on whether searching a laptop is like looking in your luggage or more like a strip search.
“Customs agents must have the ability to conduct even highly intrusive searches when there is reason to suspect criminal or terrorist activity, but suspicion-less searches of Americans’ laptops and similar devices go too far,” said Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who chairs a subcommittee that examined the searches at a hearing Wednesday. “Congress should not allow this gross violation of privacy.”
Authorities need a search warrant to get at a computer in a person’s home and reasonable suspicion of illegal activity to search a laptop in other places. But the rules change at border crossings.
Courts consistently have ruled that there’s no need for warrants or suspicions when a person is seeking to enter the country -- agents can search belongings, including computer gear, for any reason.
The latest decision was from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which in April ruled that agents had acted properly when turning over information used to charge a traveler with possession of child pornography. His laptop had been searched in 2005 at Los Angeles International Airport.
Any routine search is considered “reasonable” under the 4th Amendment, legal scholars agree. But Feingold is worried that the law has not kept up with technology.
Said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “People keep their lives on these devices: diaries, personal mail, financial records, family photos. . . . The government should not be able to read this information.”
In February, the group and the Asian Law Caucus sued authorities for more information about the program.
The issue is of particular concern for businesses, which risk the loss of proprietary data when executives travel abroad, said Susan K. Gurley, executive director of the Assn. of Corporate Travel Executives. After the California court ruling, the group warned its members to limit the business and personal information they carry on laptops taken out of the country.
Of the 100 people who responded to a survey the association did in February, seven said they had been subject to the seizure of a laptop or other electronic device.
Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said in written testimony to the subcommittee that the agency would “protect information that may be discovered during the examination process, as well as private information of a personal nature that is not in violation of any law.” The agency conducts “a regular review and purging of information that is no longer relevant.”
Feingold said the testimony gave “little meaningful detail” about the program. He is considering legislation to prohibit such routine searches of electronic devices without reasonable suspicion.
But Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said officials have to balance individual rights with protecting the nation.
“Terrorists take advantage of this kind of technology,” he said.
Hogan, the freelance journalist, said there was no reason for customs agents to think he was a terrorist. He advised people to take precautions with their laptops when they leave the country.
“I certainly would never take it again,” he said.
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jim.puzzanghera @latimes.com
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a1133204829dc73fb2d0df3df4920a6b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-26-fi-tribune26-story.html | The Times’ downtown building could be sold | The Times’ downtown building could be sold
Cash-strapped Tribune Co. is considering putting two of its signature properties -- the Los Angeles Times’ main office downtown and Tribune Tower in Chicago -- on the block.
Tribune Chief Executive Sam Zell told employees in an e-mail Wednesday that the company had contacted “several of the country’s leading real estate firms” about the Times property and Tribune Tower, the company’s 40-story headquarters in Chicago.
“Both Tribune Tower and Times Mirror Square are iconic structures,” Zell said. “But they are also underutilized, and as employee-owners, it’s in our best interests to maximize the value of all our assets.”
Tribune is considering all options, including a sale, Chief Administrative Officer Gerry Spector said. “We don’t need to be in the heart of Michigan Avenue to run our business.”
Zell, a real estate billionaire, said the company would focus on options that would allow for “some level of ongoing occupancy in both buildings” by The Times and the Chicago Tribune.
The company said in a press release that it intended “to maintain an ongoing ownership position in the Tower and in Times Mirror Square.”
Under Zell, Tribune has focused on so-called tax-efficient transactions, structured so that Tribune retains enough of an ownership stake to avoid triggering the massive capital-gains tax liability that comes with a conventional sale.
That was the approach in the recently announced $650-million sale of its New York newspaper, Newsday, to Cablevision Systems Corp.
The same is expected for the sale of the Chicago Cubs baseball team.
When Zell took control of Tribune last December in an $8.2-billion buyout, he said he didn’t anticipate extensive asset sales beyond the long-planned sale of the Cubs.
But the deterioration of the newspaper business has accelerated faster than predicted by all but the most bearish analysts. Advertising revenue has plunged under pressure from the Internet and the effects of a weakening economy.
Tribune’s most liquid bonds lately have traded at 45 cents on the dollar. According to bond analyst Dave Novosel of Gimme Credit Finance in Chicago, that means that although the market doesn’t consider bankruptcy to be imminent, “things are a bit dicey.” He added that the trading price wasn’t purely reflective of Tribune’s financial straits but also represented investors’ skittishness about corporate bonds in general.
Novosel said that with the cash from the Newsday sale and from the expected sale of the Cubs, Tribune should be able to meet its debt obligations for this year.
“They’re covered for ’08,” he said, “but ’09 is another story.”
The former Times Mirror Square, with 750,000 square feet of usable space, is a hodgepodge of five interconnected structures built between the 1930s and the 1970s.
Newcomers to the square -- a block cater-corner to Los Angeles City Hall and bounded by Broadway and 1st, Spring and 2nd streets -- often lose their way while trying to navigate the complex, which has large areas with no natural lighting.
Real estate experts are hard-pressed to assess the property’s value. Not long ago, the price probably would have been boosted by the planned $3-billion Grand Avenue retail, hotel and residential project on nearby Bunker Hill, but groundbreaking on that project has been delayed at least until next year.
Construction on a large residential and retail complex a few blocks away on Main Street stopped a few weeks ago as the developer expressed concern about the viability of the downtown real estate market.
“It would be difficult to find a buyer” for the Times property, said commercial real estate appraiser David Zoraster of CB Richard Ellis. “I don’t know who would buy it at this point.”
The most valuable pieces of the Times property are the two buildings that front 1st Street, Zoraster said. One, completed in 1935, houses the newspaper’s offices and has an Art Deco lobby that includes a large revolving globe; the other, built in 1973, housed the corporate headquarters of Times Mirror Co., which was acquired by Tribune in 2000.
Land was selling for about $300 per square foot in the area not long ago, but “there has been almost no sales activity downtown in the last six months,” Zoraster said. He declined to estimate what the property might be worth now.
The Times building isn’t an official historic landmark but has been determined to be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, which offers some protection from being razed, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy. “It’s one of the great buildings of L.A. history,” said Linda Dishman, executive director of the conservancy.
Tribune Tower, completed in 1925, was one of the first Chicago skyscrapers built north of the Chicago River. Its neo-Gothic design was chosen from 263 entries in a $100,000 international competition.
The building has 940,000 square feet of usable space and an adjacent parcel of land, about an acre in size, that is used as a surface parking lot.
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thomas.mulligan@latimes.com
roger.vincent@latimes.com
Phil Rosenthal and Robert Manor of the Chicago Tribune contributed to this report.
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d8e1a46fffcd1bcc55123515776af136 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-26-me-pastors26-story.html | Pastor rallies clergy against gay marriage | Pastor rallies clergy against gay marriage
Eight years ago, when an initiative to ban gay marriage was on the California ballot for the first time, Pastor Jim Garlow of the 2,500-member Skyline Church in San Diego County barely mentioned it from his pulpit.
But same-sex marriage wasn’t legal then. This time around, he said, will be different, and he hopes other ministers will agree.
On Wednesday, Garlow took a first step toward organizing clergy in the state, convening a conference call in which more than 1,000 ministers, most from evangelical congregations, discussed tactics for passing a fall ballot initiative that would amend California’s Constitution to ban gay marriage.
The strategy session, which included input from lawyers and political consultants, was the opening of what conservative religious leaders hope will become a massive Christian outpouring of support for the proposed amendment.
The effort will include a 40-day fasting period leading up to election day, along with 100 days of prayer. On the weekend before the election, Garlow told the ministers, the goal would be to fill Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego and other amphitheaters with people praying for a ban on gay marriage.
Opponents of the amendment were quick to downplay the significance of Wednesday’s call to arms.
“There are certainly thousands of people of faith who are supportive of the freedom to marry,” said Kerry Chaplin, the organizing director for California Faith for Equality, a coalition of more than 2,000 faith leaders and congregations supporting same-sex marriage.
Although some religious leaders, particularly Catholics and Mormons, were involved in passing Proposition 22, the 2000 initiative that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman and that was overturned by the state Supreme Court in May, strategists predicted a much greater involvement by evangelical churches in this election.
“We are working with all the churches who are willing to work with us,” said Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for the initiative. “It’s woven together to form what we hope will be the largest grass-roots campaign in California history.”
Organizers said the ministers on the call lead congregations totaling about 1 million people.
The dueling messages of the state’s clergy reflect passionate divisions in many faiths about the question. But in the political arena, there is no question that opponents of same-sex marriage will rely heavily on religious leaders to carry their message about marriage and to mobilize their congregants to vote.
Although pastors cannot urge parishioners from the pulpit to back specific candidates for office, the law does allow advocacy for legislation or initiatives. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony and six Roman Catholic bishops in Southern California have already issued a statement opposing same-sex marriage.
Political analyst Tony Quinn said the involvement of the pastors could be significant, especially because many conservatives are relatively disengaged by the election this year. “This . . . could bring people to the polls that would not otherwise vote. The churches can do that,” he said.
Several ministers said they felt inspired by the coming political campaign.
“Maybe we can have an impact that will actually affect our state, and California affects the whole country,” said Pastor Scott Pearson of the 1st Baptist Church in Taft. He set up a speaker phone in a Sunday school classroom and invited 10 other ministers to listen in.
At times, Pearson said, he feels like his “circle of influence is pretty small.” After all, he said, Taft is “just one little town in the Central Valley.” But the conference call made him see that he could be part of a broad movement.
That is what Garlow and other conference call organizers had hoped would happen. Garlow, who provides radio commentary to 629 stations each day, said he began the call by saying that religious leaders in California need to do more to move the larger culture and to express “repentance” that California has reached a place where “our culture got in such a mess” that gay weddings are happening.
The goal, he said, “is to create a climate, a culture of fasting and praying for our state.”
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jessica.garrison@latimes.com
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6ef91ae3df4c68d65c0ab356a30022dd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-26-sp-nicklaus26-story.html | CONFIDENCE GAME | CONFIDENCE GAME
PERHAPS THE GREATEST GOLF LESSON Jack Grout ever taught me was not something you can find in a book, on a video, in some infomercial, or on the back of a box of the latest and greatest swing aid. In fact, it wasn’t even something born out of the dirt of a practice tee.
It was a lesson that came at the age of 10 and one I find ageless -- something I still reiterate today if asked the one bit of advice I would give the average golfer. It’s about knowing yourself; understanding your golf game; and most important, believing in it, trusting it, and having the confidence in yourself and your game.
I picked up the game of golf at the age of 10, when my father let me caddie for him as he walked the course to rehabilitate an ankle injury. Fortunately for me, that same year Jack Grout came to our home club, Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio. I began as just another kid in Jack’s class, but soon, he was calling me out -- “Jackie Buck” he would say -- to demonstrate to the other students how to hit certain shots.
To have the faith and trust in me to show and help other kids instilled in me a tremendous amount of confidence at a tender age. And that is what Jack Grout did for me my entire career and until the day he sadly passed away in 1989.
Jack had me not only learn the game, but learn my game. He did not teach me to “just do it,” but why I was doing it. He made me use my head, not just my golf swing.
That was the whole idea. When I went out to play golf, I didn’t have to run back to him. He taught me to be independent. That’s how I became a good player.
That’s what I learned -- being able to get on a golf course and learn what my own abilities were, to play within my own abilities, understand my abilities and understand what I could do with them.
Any champion occasionally has to win without their best game, and I have won ugly many times. I did so because I learned how to control what I was doing.
Jack Grout might have been the world’s best golf teacher, but that is not for me to judge. What I do know is that he certainly was a tremendous motivator, with a special knack for teaching me what to do and to do it on my own. I do not think that Jack ever stepped foot on a practice tee at any tournament with me. Not once did I ever call him from a golf tournament to ask him a question. For much of my career, I saw Jack two, three, maybe four times a year, mostly just for refreshers. Then as I got a little older, there were places that Jack went where he was sort of pro emeritus, teacher emeritus, and I took advantage of that and spent time with him. And often, we would spend hours just talking -- not saying one thing about my golf game or golf swing.
What Jack Grout did best was to take interest in me. That’s what a teacher has to do. And that propelled me forward and it’s something that’s lasted my entire golf career.
He taught me a lot more about me than he taught me about golf.
He taught me who I was and what I could do. “Know your game, play within yourself, and only then can you improve.” And I don’t care if you’re a 20-handicapper, if you learn that, you’ll be a better player.
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3e304eec1a8bd1d5286f906aa94720d8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-27-me-arnold27-story.html | Governor criticizes McCain’s oil plan | Governor criticizes McCain’s oil plan
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a veiled swipe at Republican presidential hopeful John McCain on Thursday when he said at a climate conference here that anyone suggesting offshore oil drilling could bring down gas prices was “blowing smoke.”
The remark was also a dig at his host, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who riled environmentalists, tourism promoters and the state’s political leaders last week when he voiced support for McCain’s proposal to lift bans on exploring for oil off the coasts of California, Florida and the Eastern Seaboard.
McCain and Crist, whom the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is rumored to be considering as his running mate, have come in for criticism for backing exploration that many fear could pollute the coastal playgrounds that are vital to tourism-dependent economies.
Crist, who thrilled environmentalists Tuesday with the announcement of a major land purchase to speed restoration of the Everglades, has since modified his stance on offshore drilling to say he would support it only if guarantees were in place that no environmental harm would result.
From his podium at the conference, Schwarzenegger said, “Politicians have been throwing around all kinds of ideas in response to the skyrocketing energy prices, from the rethinking of nuclear power to pushing biofuels and more renewables and ending the ban on offshore drilling. . . . But anyone who tells you this would bring down gas prices any time soon is blowing smoke.”
Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear later contacted The Times and other media to say the governor’s remarks were not aimed at McCain or Crist.
The Austrian-born governor also chastised U.S. energy consumers for lagging behind his state and Europe in using renewable resources and likened the challenge of combating global warming to defeating communism and putting a man on the moon.
Schwarzenegger also touted California’s leading role in the green revolution, repeating pledges to have the state using renewable sources for a third of its electrical generation by 2020 and to have 7 million more hybrid and electric vehicles on the road by then.
The skyrocketing cost of America’s “oil addiction” threatens the nation’s energy security and its image in the world as an innovative leader in science and engineering, he told Crist’s second annual forum aimed at bringing the fight against climate change down to the grass-roots level.
“Working together we can create a comprehensive, innovative energy policy that helps consumers, protects our planet and builds a stronger and more secure America,” Schwarzenegger said. “We can make America No. 1 in fighting global warming.”
He called it “shameful” that the United States gets less than 2% of its energy from renewable sources, compared to 12% in California. Denmark gets 20% of its power from wind and Germany and Brazil lead respectively in the development of solar power and ethanol, the governor noted.
Washington has been “unwilling to hold automakers’ or oil companies’ feet to the fire,” he said, noting that the average passenger vehicle in the U.S. gets less than 25 mpg.
“The Model T did better than that,” Schwarzenegger said. “But since the Model T disappeared, America summoned the political will to put a man on the moon, end legal discrimination and bring down the Berlin Wall.”
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carol.williams@latimes.com
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1fa5460d3b86417b708db9afa9d07848 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-27-me-bus27-story.html | MTA is trying to shed some wait | MTA is trying to shed some wait
Waiting for the bus at Normandie and Slauson avenues late one night, Betrona Casileo was getting nervous.
Thirty minutes. Forty minutes. Still no bus.
“At night, it’s very dangerous,” said Casileo, who is 52 and has been riding Metro buses for 15 years. “I was just hoping the bus would come.”
It did -- eventually.
Casileo isn’t the only frustrated passenger. Metro buses in Los Angeles are on time only 63% of the time, the lowest performance rate among 10 major metropolitan areas, according to a recent survey.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority surveyed transit agencies in nine other regions -- including New York, Chicago and Boston -- and found the average on-time performance of their buses was 79%.
Metro’s on-time performance has continued to decline even as its fleet expanded, according to the survey, conducted in 2007 using data from the previous two years. Since 2005, the MTA has added 53 buses, but its on-time performance has dropped 4 percentage points.
“I’m always waiting. Always,” said Sandra Quintana at a bus stop Wednesday morning at Vermont and Slauson avenues. Quintana, 23 and a lifelong bus rider, said buses usually arrive 10 to 15 minutes late, especially in East Los Angeles.
Metro tracks timeliness at about 20,000 bus stops in Los Angeles, but because on-time performance varies by stop or line, it is unable to determine the average wait time, said Carolyn Flowers, Metro’s chief operations officer.
MTA officials said the decline in on-time performance cannot be attributed to any one factor, but they note that staffing has not kept up with the growth in service.
For a decade beginning in 1996, MTA spent more than $1 billion to buy buses, add service and cap fares under a consent decree to settle a civil rights lawsuit with bus riders. Though Metro has 147 more buses and 1 million more hours of service today than it did in 1996, the number of vehicle operations supervisors has remained almost stagnant, at about 60.
The survey reports that the ratio of supervisors to the number of buses, miles traveled and hours of service are each almost three times greater than those of the average metropolitan area surveyed.
A supervisor in Los Angeles oversees an average of 38.61 buses, nearly 1.4 million revenue vehicle miles and 113,000 service hours per year, whereas supervisors surveyed in the other regions on average each oversee 14.8 buses, 409,000 revenue vehicle miles and 40,000 hours per year.
“What you see over time in the budgets of the MTA has been a real reluctance to add new positions,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks, who sits on Metro’s board of directors. “It got to the point where there was a major efficiency gap, or at least a perception of a gap, without these positions.”
The board voted Thursday to add 10 supervisors to monitor operations and service on the busiest lines with high complaints and low on-time performance. The motion -- brought forward last month by Parks, Long Beach City Councilwoman Bonnie Lowenthal and Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Burke -- is an effort to bring Metro closer to its on-time goal of 70%.
Metro officials say they have not quantified how much the 10 extra supervisors will improve on-time performance, but board members said they’re hopeful bus service and ridership will also improve.
Bus riders make up more than 80% of all Metro boardings, but ridership last month was down 5.37% compared with May 2007. Metro rail ridership, on the other hand, increased 6% in May over the same period last year.
MTA officials say fare increases last year are partly to blame for the decline, but Flowers said the agency is starting to see a recovery. “Since January . . . bus ridership has increased 12%,” she said. “Bus ridership is coming back.”
Still, board members said improving on-time performance is crucial if Metro wants to attract riders. “It doesn’t matter how many buses you have if they’re not running on time,” Lowenthal said. “When people know they can rely on a bus, they’re more likely to use it.”
On-time performance is consistently a top complaint among bus riders, according to MTA reports.
The addition of 10 supervisors would cost $900,000 -- money that MTA officials say will come from reducing the amount of overtime supervisors currently log.
Flowers said the addition would be budget-neutral. She and bus riders acknowledge, however, that improving ridership satisfaction requires more than on-time service and more operations supervision.
More MTA supervisors “could help,” said Elizabeth Medrano, 31, who hops on eight to 12 Metro buses every day. “But what would help more is more money spent on the bus system.”
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joanna.lin@latimes.com
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a266bd60f8d5d18d60bcd2e74d800f6a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-27-me-roadsage27-story.html | MTA takes first step in getting tax hike on ballot | MTA takes first step in getting tax hike on ballot
With gas prices soaring and mass transit ridership on the upswing, local transportation officials Thursday took a key step toward asking voters in November to approve a half-cent sales tax increase to fund at least $30 billion in road and mass transit projects. Here’s a quick guide to what happened -- and what may happen in the months ahead:
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What did the MTA decide?
The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted 9 to 2 to draft a sales tax proposal. It votes on the final ordinance next month.
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So there’s time for the whole thing to fall apart?
Of course. This is Los Angeles County and there’s a ton of politics involved. First and foremost, the state Senate could fail to pass AB 2321, which gives the MTA the right to pursue the sales tax hike. The bill made it through the Assembly in May. It’s also possible that local politicians who serve on the MTA board will disagree on how to divvy up sales tax revenue, resulting in the tax being dropped.
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Who might be opposed?
A coalition of cities in southeast Los Angeles County has said it will likely be against the tax because it doesn’t fund projects in its area.
Even more upset are officials from the San Gabriel Valley. The board Thursday also voted not to put $80 million for the extension of the Gold Line from Pasadena into its long-range plan.
Proponents say they need that money now to seek federal funds to build the project -- and that the board’s action could cost support in their area for the tax.
“To me, the best way to generate goodwill [in the San Gabriel Valley] was to program the $80 million” for the Gold Line, said Democratic Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, whose La Canada Flintridge district includes parts of the western San Gabriel Valley.
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What would the sales tax fund?
The state bill on the sales tax outlines several projects that would get some money, including the Expo Line, a rail or busway along Crenshaw Boulevard, funding for the Gold Line extension and a subway extension, as well as improvements to the 5 Freeway. All that totals about $4 billion. That means it’s up to the MTA to spell out how to spend the rest, leaving board members leery of which projects will get money and when -- assuming, of course, that the sales tax musters two-thirds support among voters.
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With these issues on the table, why did the board vote to draft the sales tax proposal?
Board members said it was the county’s best hope of getting transportation funding now. “I would love if we had a White House investing in public infrastructure, but we’re a nation at war,” said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “The likelihood in the next few years of getting the support [in federal dollars] we need is not likely.”
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steve.hymon@latimes.com
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Steve Hymon writes The Times’ blog about Southern California traffic and transportation in real time. Check it out at latimes.com /bottleneck.
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4ccf837489aabd433eff1299626b7f06 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-27-me-times27-story.html | In L.A.'s nucleus, changing Times | In L.A.'s nucleus, changing Times
There was a time when the Los Angeles Times’ presence in downtown Los Angeles was a symbol of the possibilities of a burgeoning city.
Ten-foot-high murals in the building’s Globe Lobby, commissioned by the Chandlers, touted the role of industry and the newspaper in the life of great cities. “The newspaper is a greater treasure to the people than uncounted millions of gold,” a caption underneath reads. “There is no dimming. No effacement.”
That was 1935 -- at the peak of downtown Los Angeles’ role as the undisputed power center of Southern California. The murals are still there, but today, the mood inside the Globe Lobby is dimmer.
The announcement this week that Tribune Co., which owns The Times, is considering selling the paper’s downtown offices is the latest sign of a decades-long corporate disappearance from the city center. Arco, Standard Oil, First Interstate Bank and many other big corporations that once called downtown home are long gone.
And jokes about the Times building eventually becoming condos -- while unlikely any time soon -- aren’t as preposterous as they might seem.
In the last decade, the city core has shifted, with many people moving into new high-rise condos and luxury lofts in historic buildings.
Nearly 40,000 people now call downtown home. And many of the former headquarters for downtown L.A.'s biggest names -- including Barker Bros., Westinghouse, Standard Oil and Nabisco -- have been converted to serve that new population.
The residential boom has remade downtown L.A. into a hip district. But some urban thinkers say there is something profoundly depressing about the falling fortune of big business being turned into theme and atmosphere for condos.
“In the big sweep of things, this is just part of the dynamism of urbanization and urban life,” said Greg Hise, a historian and USC professor. “That said, people ought to stop and think about what kind of city they aspire to and what would be appropriate symbols of a good and just city.”
When the first piece of the Los Angeles Times’ headquarters, a Gordon B. Kaufmann-designed Art Moderne building, opened in 1935, the 1st and Spring streets location, cater-corner from City Hall, represented the power wielded by the newspaper and the Chandler family that owned it. Harry Chandler, then the president and general manager of Times-Mirror Co., declared the building a “monument to the progress of our city and Southern California.”
But in fact, wrote author Joan Didion in the New Yorker, “a great deal of Los Angeles as it appears today derived from this impulse to improve Chandler property. . . . Union Station and the Los Angeles Civic Center and the curiosity known as Olvera Street are where they are because Harry Chandler wanted to develop the north end of downtown, where the Times building and many other of his downtown holdings lay.”
But downtown began to decline after the suburban boom that followed World War II. For a while, The Times seemed immune, growing into one of the largest and most respected newspapers in the nation.
Over the decades, four more buildings were added to the original Times building. The newest of those buildings, added by architect William L. Pereira in the 1970s, harbors such a deep chasm of public disdain that when the urban website Curbed L.A. hosted its first “Ugliest Building” contest last year, Times Mirror Square came in second.
In the early 1990s, executives at what was then Times Mirror spent two years considering a move out of the downtown headquarters, and were on the verge of moving the company about five blocks to the southwest. But they decided to instead renovate and retrofit the aging complex -- a process that is ongoing.
Portions of the building emptied after Tribune Co. bought the paper in 2000 -- so much so that the complex has become a popular location for filming.
In an e-mail Wednesday to employees, Tribune Chief Executive Sam Zell said that the Times’ headquarters, 750,000 square feet of space, is “underutilized.” He continued that “it’s in our best interests to maximize the value of all our assets.”
That decision struck some developers and observers as a sound business decision.
Carol Schatz, president of the downtown business improvement district, said that in the last decade, “property values [in downtown] have at least doubled.”
“This is not a shocker,” she said. “The only thing that is important to me is that The Times stays downtown.”
A change in the city law allowing adaptive reuse of underutilized buildings launched a conversion craze downtown in 1999. Since then, a number of headquarters buildings have undergone dramatic conversions. The former Herald Examiner newspaper building -- once housing The Times’ arch rival -- is also supposed to be converted into a mix of housing and retail, although a shaky real estate market has delayed that project.
But what might happen to the Times building is a little harder to gauge, said developer Tom Gilmore.
“It is virtually worthless as a piece of real estate, other than the L.A. Times,” Gilmore said. “Maybe in 20 years, when downtown is so overbuilt, and we are really dying for space. But we are still building out buildings in downtown.”
For Hise, newspapers are an important piece of an ongoing civic dialogue but are part of an industry that is in flux.
“This isn’t a shock in some ways,” Hise said. “But it’s worth having a conversation about what an actual physical presence of a newspaper means in a city.”
Author D.J. Waldie agreed, saying the building holds a power that goes beyond the newspaper published there.
“We tend to think of Los Angeles as a place where the past is being constantly erased,” Waldie said. “If it should disappear, its symbolism would be lost to us. Its history would turn into a reference in a book rather than a presence in our lives.”
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cara.dimassa@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Changing use
Here are some former corporate buildings in downtown and vicinity that have been put to new uses:
Standard Oil Co. building: Now the Standard Hotel
Barker Bros. Furniture warehouse: Now Barker Block, a condominium and retail development
Nabisco West Coast headquarters: Now the upscale Biscuit Co. lofts
Herald Examiner newspaper building: Planned for condominiums and stores
Westinghouse building: Now the Little Tokyo Lofts
Mobil building: Now Pegasus lofts
American Cement building: Now lofts
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37d3d8d9c6159d13e6b7863a82074408 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-27-na-millionaires27-story.html | Campaign finance rule on wealth struck down | Campaign finance rule on wealth struck down
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down part of the campaign finance reform law that allowed federal office-seekers running against wealthy opponents to exceed normal contribution limits.
The “millionaire’s amendment” to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 permitted candidates to receive larger campaign contributions when their opponents spent heavily out of their own pockets. The amendment to the law, commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act, was viewed as an attempt to level the playing field for candidates and to prevent personal wealth from becoming a qualification for elected office.
But critics said it was a thinly disguised maneuver to protect entrenched incumbents from upstart and well-to-do challengers.
The court said in a 5-4 ruling that the amendment violated the 1st Amendment because it penalized a candidate who robustly exercised his free-speech rights by spending heavily.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the amendment required “a candidate to choose between the 1st Amendment right to engage in unfettered political speech and subjection to discriminatory fundraising limitations.”
Alito said that by attempting to level the playing field, Congress was in effect attempting to influence voters’ choices.
“Different candidates have different strengths. Some are wealthy; others have wealthy supporters who are willing to make large contributions. Some are celebrities; some have the benefit of a well-known family name,” Alito wrote. “Leveling electoral opportunities means making and implementing judgments about which strengths should be permitted to contribute to the outcome of an election.”
Under the law, he said, those are judgments for voters alone.
The court first ruled in a 1976 case, Buckley vs. Valeo, that spending money to influence elections was a form of constitutionally protected free speech and that individual candidates could give unlimited amounts of money to their own campaign.
But it also appeared to backtrack somewhat from that position in 1990 when it held that states could limit contributions of corporations because of what the majority called “the corrosive and distorting effects” of corporate power on campaigns.
Legal experts said Thursday that by rejecting the idea that Congress could attempt to level the playing field of campaigns, the court cast doubt on the viability of its 1990 ruling, potentially imperiling state and federal limits on corporate and union contributions.
“It is the strongest sign yet that those limits are in serious danger of being struck down,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “This is not a good day for those who believe . . . it should be permissible to limit wealth in the political process so that disparities in wealth don’t translate into disparities in political influence.”
Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by three other justices in dissent, found no problem with the law. “The millionaire’s amendment quiets no speech at all,” Stevens wrote. “It does no more than assist the opponent of a self-funding candidate in his attempt to make his voice heard; this amplification in no way mutes the voice of the millionaire who remains able to speak as loud and as long as he likes in support of his campaign.”
Stevens said the limits were not unlike other spending limits the court had endorsed.
The millionaire’s law, which had been upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington, allowed House candidates whose opponents spent $350,000 or more of their own money to accept triple the usual $2,300-per-donor limit until they had offset the spending disparity.
The law was challenged by New York Democrat Jack Davis, who spent more than $3 million trying to unseat incumbent Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.) in 2004 and 2006. Reynolds, who chose not to solicit the increased contributions, is retiring at the end of this term. Davis has announced plans for a third run at the seat.
Democrat Barack Obama became one of the first beneficiaries of the law in his run for the U.S. Senate in 2004. Obama’s main foe was Blair Hull, a wealthy investor who poured $28 million of his own money into the campaign. Under the campaign finance law, co-written by Obama’s presumptive Republican presidential opponent, Hull’s personal spending allowed Obama to raise money in increments of as much as $12,000 per donor, far above the $2,100 cap then in effect.
Jim Cauley, who was Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign manager, said he thought Obama would have won without the boost from the influx of big money.
In an interview Thursday, he added: “Do I think it helped us? Absolutely.”
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rick.schmitt@latimes.com
Times staff writer Dan Morain contributed to this report.
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4fbc808aa27e00548c0f58c220629d01 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-27-sp-trackchart27-story.html | U.S. track and field Olympic trials day by day | U.S. track and field Olympic trials day by day
The U.S. track and field trials begin today. USA Network and NBC share the television coverage this year, beginning Saturday. But don’t look for it Tuesday and Wednesday, because that’s when the trials take a break. Here are the key events, and athletes to watch.
Today
Women’s 100-meter qualifying and quarterfinals: A remarkably deep field led by Allyson Felix, Marshevet Hooker, Torri Edwards, Carmelita Jeter and Muna Lee.
Women’s 10,000-meter finals: Shalane Flanagan last month set an American record of 30 minutes 34.49 seconds, the fastest time in the world in 2008. Kara Goucher (31:26.48 qualifying time) might challenge her.
Saturday
Men’s 100-meter qualifying and quarterfinals: Athens gold medalist Justin Gatlin, serving a drug ban, had been trying every legal avenue to be allowed to run but was thwarted. Could have turned into a circus.
Women’s 100 meters semifinals and final: Should be some fast times. Athens silver medalist Lauryn Williams looks to move up a step on the medal stand in Beijing.
Women’s heptathlon final events: Little hope of an Olympic medalist emerging here.
Men’s shotput final: Adam Nelson, Christian Cantwell and Reese Hoffa are 1-2-3 in the world this year. One or more could get medal in Beijing.
Sunday
Men’s and women’s 400-meter hurdles finals: Kerron Clement (47.79) and Bershawn Jackson (48.15) have recorded the four fastest times in the world this year. Lashinda Demus has a world-leading 53.99.
Men’s 100-meter final: Who’s the fastest American -- and can he beat Jamaican Usain Bolt’s world-record 9.72?
Men’s pole vault final: Brad Walker set an American record of 19 feet 9 3/4 inches at Hayward Field on June 8. He might have home-pole advantage.
Monday
Men’s and women’s 800-meter finals: Khadevis Robinson of Santa Monica (1:44.27 qualifying mark) is the one to watch among the men. Hazel Clark (1:59.82) is the only U.S. woman to run under two minutes this year.
Men’s 5,000 final: Bernard Lagat and Matt Tegenkamp were ranked in the world’s top 10 for 2007 by Track & Field News, rare for two U.S. men.
Men’s decathlon final events: Bryan Clay of Glendora was the Athens silver medalist.
Thursday
Men’s and women’s 400 meter finals: Athens champ Jeremy Wariner and LaShawn Merritt have six of the world’s top seven times this year. They were 1-2 at the 2007 World Championships. For the women, Sanya Richards (49.27 qualifying time) is favored.
Women’s 3,000-meter steeplechase finals: Prelude to this event’s Olympic debut in Beijing. Lisa Galaviz’s top qualifying mark, 9:28.75, is 17 seconds off the world-leading time this year.
Friday, July 4
Men’s and women’s 200 qualifying: Men’s field is superb with Gay, Walter Dix, Shawn Crawford and Wallace Spearmon. Women should be great too. World leader Porscha Lucas (22.29) is only 20. Bianca Knight, 19, has run 22.43 this season.
Women’s 5,000 final: Jennifer Rhines’ 14:54.29, tops in the U.S. this year, ranks 13th in the world.
Men’s 10,000 final: Athens marathon silver medalist Meb Keflezighi of San Diego didn’t make the marathon team this time around. This is Plan B.
Saturday, July 5
Women’s 100-meter hurdles qualifying and quarterfinals: Like a UCLA-USC dual meet, with Bruins alumnae Michelle Perry, Athens champ Joanna Hayes and Dawn Harper facing Trojans alumnae Ginnie Powell (winner of the last two U.S. outdoor titles) and Candice Davis.
Men’s 110-meter hurdles qualifying and finals: David Oliver has the world’s second-, third-, and fourth-fastest times this season.
Men’s and women’s 200 quarterfinals and semifinals: Some world-class sprinters will be eliminated here.
Sunday, July 6
Women’s pole vault final: There’s Jenn Stuczynski and there’s everyone else. Stuczynski this year became the first American woman to clear 16 feet. The world record is next.
Men’s and women’s 200 finals: Tyson Gay goes for the 100-200 sweep. Felix should do better in the 200 than the 100.
Men’s 110 hurdles final, women’s 100 hurdles final: Two-time hurdles silver medalist Terrence Trammell, 29, could still be a factor in this event. On the women’s side, Damu Cherry, who served a two-year drug ban from 2003 to ’05, has the world’s best time this year, 12.47.
Men’s 1,500 final: Bernard Lagat, twice a 1,500-meter medalist for Kenya, has a chance to medal for the U.S. now.
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1ec686305179468495eeda78356bae15 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-28-fi-oil28-story.html | WHAT IF OIL HITS $200? | WHAT IF OIL HITS $200?
About this series
This is the first in a series of occasional articles looking at how skyrocketing oil prices are transforming lives in Southern California and around the world.
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The more expensive oil gets, the more Katherine Carver’s life shrinks. She’s given up RV trips. She stays home most weekends. She’s scrapped her twice-a-month volunteer stint at a Malibu wildlife refuge -- the trek from her home in Palmdale just got too expensive.
How much higher would fuel prices have to go before she quit her job? Already, the 170-mile round-trip commute to her job with Los Angeles County Child Support Services in Commerce is costing her close to $1,000 a month -- a fifth of her salary. It’s got the 55-year-old thinking about retirement.
“It’s definitely pushing me to that point,” Carver said.
The point could be closer than anyone thinks.
Three months ago, when oil was around $108 a barrel, a few Wall Street analysts began predicting that it could rise to $200. Many observers scoffed at the forecasts as sensational, or motivated by a desire among energy companies and investors to drive prices higher.
But with oil closing above $140 a barrel Friday, more experts are taking those predictions seriously -- and shuddering at the inflation-fueled chaos that $200-a-barrel crude could bring. They foresee fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time.
“You’d have massive changes going on throughout the economy,” said Robert Wescott, president of Keybridge Research, a Washington economic analysis firm. “Some activities are just plain going to be shut down.”
Besides the obvious effect $7-a-gallon gasoline would have on commuters, automakers, airlines, truckers and shipping firms, $200 oil would drive up the price of a broad spectrum of products: Insecticides and hand lotions, cosmetics and food preservatives, shaving cream and rubber cement, plastic bottles and crayons -- all have ingredients derived from oil.
The pain would probably be particularly intense in Southern California, which is known for its long commutes and high cost of living.
“Throughout our history, we have grown on the assumption that energy costs would be low,” said Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman and a current member of the city Planning Commission. “Now that those assumptions are shifting, it changes assumptions about housing, cars and how cities grow.”
Push prices up fast enough, he said, and “it would be the urban-planning equivalent of an earthquake.”
Consumers
With every penny hike in the price of gas costing American consumers about $1 billion a year, sharply higher pump prices would lead to “significant bankruptcies and store closings,” said Scott Hoyt, director of consumer economics at Moody’s Economy.com.
Consumer spending has held up surprisingly well in the face of skyrocketing pump prices -- bolstered in part, perhaps, by federal tax rebates. But the same day the government reported a 0.8% rise in May consumer spending, a research firm said consumer confidence had plunged to its lowest level since 1980 -- hinting at the catastrophic effect another big gas price surge could have on retailers and customers.
“The purchasing power of the American people would be kicked in the teeth so darned hard by $200-a-barrel oil that they won’t have the ability to buy much of anything,” said S. David Freeman, president of the L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners and author of the 2007 book “Winning Our Energy Independence.”
BIGresearch of Worthington, Ohio, said more than half of Californians in a recent survey said they were driving less because of high gas prices. Almost 42% said they had reduced vacation travel and 40% said they were dining out less.
If any retailers would benefit, it would be those on the Internet. In a recent survey by Harris Interactive, one-third of adults said high gas prices had made them more likely to shop online to avoid driving.
Restaurant operators such as Brinker International, which owns the Chili’s and Romano’s Macaroni Grill chains, are suffering and are likely to struggle even more as consumers look for ways to reduce spending. Fast-food chains wouldn’t be immune, experts say, although they might fare better as families downscale their dining choices.
Vehicle sales, too, would probably continue to tank. Sales of new cars, sport utility vehicles and light trucks fell more than 18% in California in the first quarter compared with a year earlier. Although some consumers have been shopping for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, many dealers are demanding premiums for gas-sipping hybrids, wiping out much of the financial advantage of buying one.
Nationwide, $200 oil and $7 gasoline would force Americans to take 10 million vehicles off the roads over the next four years, Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, wrote in a recent report.
As for the state’s beleaguered housing market, prices are falling faster in areas requiring long commutes -- such as Lancaster and Palmdale -- than in neighborhoods closer to job centers.
Sky-high gas prices “would basically reorient society to where proximity would be more valuable,” said Tom Gilligan, finance professor at USC.
Americans may also feel the effects of a rise in energy-related crime. Ads for locking gas caps are becoming more prevalent. Restaurant owners are complaining that thieves are helping themselves to used barrels of cooking oil, which can be home-brewed into biodiesel fuel.
Transportation
Workers stuck with long commutes and gas-guzzling cars would look increasingly to public transit, experts say.
Already Californians’ mobility is being curbed. Traffic on the state’s freeways fell almost 4% in April compared with a year earlier, and ridership on many subway and bus lines operated by the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has risen in recent months.
But a huge influx of riders would strain aspects of the system, MTA says, noting that many buses are overcrowded at rush hour now.
Quickly adding capacity to meet demand from new riders wouldn’t be easy, because new buses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take up to two years to deliver.
Transit advocate Kymberleigh Richards said new riders on popular routes such as Wilshire Boulevard, Vermont Avenue or Sherman Way in the San Fernando Valley “are going to have a bit of a culture shock. It’s a different world to be using public transit when you’re used to being in your own vehicle by yourself.”
Just how many drivers would become public-transit riders if oil surges to $200 a barrel is hard to predict, but there’s a big pool of potential customers. About 87% of Southern Californians commute by car, according to 2005 data from transportation expert Alan Pisarski. That compares with 63% in New York and its environs.
Travelers can also expect much fuller airplanes and much more expensive flights -- when they’re available at all. Delta Air Lines Inc., for example, recently said it was cutting about 13% of its flights from Los Angeles International Airport to save fuel.
It also could mean shifting flights from outlying airports such as Ontario to LAX to cut overhead costs, said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. Carriers probably would also trim flights in highly competitive air corridors such as L.A. to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Even the cost of getting away from it all on Santa Catalina Island would go up. Greg Bombard, president of the Catalina Express ferry service, has trimmed schedules, raised fares and reduced hiring to make up for fuel costs that have risen sevenfold since 2002. Another big increase and he says he’ll have to ask state regulators, who control his rates, to OK another fare hike.
Trade
The fee increases on the ferry would be nothing compared with the added cost of transoceanic shipping if oil goes to $200. Some experts say high energy costs are altering global trade and slowing the pace of globalization.
It takes about 7,000 tons of bunker-fuel to fill the tanks of a 5,000-container cargo ship for a trip from Shanghai to Los Angeles. Over the last year and half, the cost of that fuel has jumped 87% to $552 a ton, according to the World Shipping Council, boosting the cost of a fill-up to more than $3.8 million.
“To put things in perspective, today’s extra shipping cost from East Asia is the equivalent of imposing a 9% tariff on East Asian goods entering North America,” said Rubin of CIBC World Markets. “At $200 per barrel, the tariff equivalent rate will rise to 15%.”
If oil continues to rise from current levels, officials at the Port of Los Angeles believe West Coast ports would gain business because they are 10 to 12 days’ sailing time from Asia, versus the 18-to-20-day route from Asia to the East Coast through the Panama Canal.
But local ports could lose business if shipping costs get so out of hand that companies begin shifting production back to North America from Asia -- something that’s happening in the steel industry, Rubin said.
Local distribution patterns could change too. Stephen Gaddis, chief executive of Pacific Cheese Co., a Hayward, Calif., cheese processing and packaging firm, thinks high fuel prices will push restaurants, retailers and food manufacturers to look for suppliers closer to their operations.
“Local sourcing is ideal. You won’t pay as much for freight, and when you use less fuel it’s better for the environment,” Gaddis said.
Soaring diesel prices will make companies rethink whether they should have large, centralized plants or build smaller ones around the country.
That’s what Pacific Cheese is doing. It’s building a packaging plant in Texas to be closer to one of its larger suppliers and expects to serve its Southwestern clients from there.
In the near future, however, consumers can expect to pay for the higher cost of producing food and moving it around the country, say food executives, farmers and economists. Even having a deep-dish pizza with extra cheese brought to your door costs more now that chains such as Pizza Hut are charging for delivery.
The workplace
Dramatically higher transportation costs would usher in an era of virtual mobility, or zero mobility, for many workers.
“We’re seeing companies go to four-day workweeks, place increased emphasis on working at home, show bigger interest in setting up satellite offices -- anything that gets commute times down and gets people off the road,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in San Jose.
Videoconferencing, touted as “the next big thing” for years, would finally have its day, thanks to improved technology and a desperation to cut corporate travel budgets.
Telecommuting, or working from home, is easier than ever because of the spread of high-speed Internet access, said Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex Inc., a business research firm in New York. In particular, workers in “knowledge” jobs that can be performed with computers and phones would benefit.
But Gilligan of USC noted that lower-income workers tend to be in jobs that don’t favor telecommuting, such as retail and food service.
“These are the same people who are already being creamed by the mortgage crisis,” he said. “The impacts of energy price increases are highly disparate.”
Although white-collar workers may be able to telecommute, they could also take a serious financial hit because soaring energy prices tend to wreak havoc on the stock market. The explosion of 401(k) plans and similar retirement accounts in the last few decades -- and the decline of traditional pensions with guaranteed payouts -- have tied workers’ financial futures more closely to stocks than they were during the 1970s oil shocks. A prolonged Wall Street downturn could mean a no-frills retirement, or none at all.
Upsides
It wouldn’t all be bad, of course. Some industries could boom, providing jobs and tax dollars. California has seen a jump in drilling activity as oil companies try to extract more crude from the state’s fields. Regulators expect a record 4,000 wells to be drilled in the state this year.
“Every rig and every crew that’s available is working right now,” said Hal Bopp, the state’s oil and gas supervisor.
And as rising oil prices make alternative-fuel vehicles more cost-effective, California companies such as Tesla Motors Inc., which recently began production of a $100,000 all-electric sports car, could become important leaders in an emerging industry.
Tourist attractions may also see an upswing in local business as families look for less-expensive vacation alternatives close to home. A recent survey by travel insurer Access America found that 26% of Americans would cut back on recreational travel as a first response to higher gas prices.
In Southern California, with its many natural wonders, theme parks and other attractions, the prospect of a “staycation” may be less disappointing than for a resident of, say, Nebraska. And movies, a staple of the local economy, may prosper as Americans seek escapism and a (relatively) cheap night out.
And spending less time stuck in traffic on the 405? Priceless.
“More carpooling, fewer people on the freeways, more telecommuting -- in many ways, what would happen is what people have been trying to make happen for a long time,” USC’s Gilligan said.
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About this series
Coming next: How the boom in crude prices is bolstering autocratic governments in some oil-rich countries, emboldening them to challenge U.S. objectives and weakening democratic movements.
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martin.zimmerman @latimes.com
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Times staff writers Ken Bensinger, Leslie Earnest, Jerry Hirsch, Peter Pae and Ronald D. White contributed to this report.
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65daa1c363ec4a7768458684a56f6d36 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-28-me-wunderman28-story.html | Watch salesman became upscale timepiece maker | Watch salesman became upscale timepiece maker
Severin Wunderman, the owner of Corum, the Swiss luxury watch manufacturer, who was also an art collector and philanthropist, died Wednesday at his home in Nice, France, his son, Michael, said. He was 69.
Wunderman, who built Gucci Timepieces into a multimillion-dollar business, died after a stroke, according to his son. He owned homes in Southern California, Las Vegas and Europe.
Wunderman began his career in the 1960s as a salesman for Alexis Barthelay, the European watchmaking firm. During a business trip to New York City in the early 1970s he called on Gucci, a company known for luxury accessories. The owner, Aldo Gucci, happened to answer the phone.
The two men met for a drink and Wunderman convinced Gucci to place a watch order worth $250,000. It turned out, however, that Barthelay was not prepared to fill more than a small percentage of the order.
Wunderman then proposed to Gucci that he quit his job and oversee the manufacture of the watches himself. The only problem was that he didn’t have the money to cover the costs.
“The man went into his pocket, took out his checkbook and prepaid the order,” Wunderman recalled of Gucci in a 1986 interview with the Orange County Business Journal. “That’s what put me into business.”
Wunderman established Severin Montres, with a sales office in Irvine, and remained the sole manufacturer and distributor of Gucci watches for more than 25 years. He had worked his way back from a near-devastating childhood.
Wunderman was born in Brussels on Nov. 19, 1938, the son of a Jewish glove manufacturer. When the Nazis invaded Belgium during World War II, his parents paid a Catholic priest to hide him and his two siblings in the countryside.
Severin was placed in a school for blind children where he was the only child with sight. A gentile family took him in, and after the war they did not want to let him go home to his parents.
“My father was one of those people you didn’t mess with,” Wunderman recalled in a 1995 interview with The Times. “He came in, tied everyone up and took me out.”
Wunderman’s mother died when he was about 10, and he moved to Los Angeles, alone, to live with his older sister Bella, who was already settled in the city.
He quit high school, worked in a parking lot at night and managed a string of newspaper delivery boys by day.
His first step into the manufacturing business came when he was in his 20s and made and sold gold chain jewelry. From there he went to work in the watch business.
After establishing Severin Montres, Wunderman opened the Severin Wunderman Museum in the same Irvine building. He filled it with drawings, paintings, tapestries and art objects by the French modern artist Jean Cocteau that he had been collecting since he was 19.
In 1985 he opened the museum to the public. Ten years later, he donated the Cocteau collection to the University of Texas at Austin.
He sold his Gucci watch business in the late 1990s and bought the Switzerland-based Corum company in 2000.
His first major success with Corum was a “bubble” watch with a glass dome over the watch face that Wunderman compared to a submarine hatch.
He went on to create limited-edition watches with whimsical details, including a “Royal Flush” model that featured five playing cards in the same suit and a dollar sign on the second-hand. Another design, “Garden Bird,” included a hummingbird among flowers. He also developed a series of gold and diamond watches.
After suffering a life-threatening case of lung cancer in the 1990s, he established the Severin Wunderman Family Foundation to support medical research on incurable diseases.
In 2005 Wunderman was presented with the French Legion of Honor for his cultural and philanthropic contributions.
Wunderman was married five times. Along with his son, Michael, who is president of Corum, he is survived by another son, Nathan, and daughters Deborah Drucker and Raphaelle Cassens, all of the Los Angeles area; his daughter Elizabeth Wunderman of England; his brother, Max, of Beverly Hills; and four grandchildren.
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mary.rourke@latimes.com
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a12eab271015f1acb5656143a8510541 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-28-na-anthrax28-story.html | Anthrax subject receives payout | Anthrax subject receives payout
The former Army scientist who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings agreed Friday to take $5.82 million from the government to settle his claim that the Justice Department and the FBI invaded his privacy and ruined his career.
Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 54, who was called a “person of interest” in the case by then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft in 2002, said that label and repeated leaks of investigative details to the media damaged his reputation.
For months in the anxious atmosphere after Sept. 11, Hatfill was subjected to 24-hour surveillance and was widely identified as the leading suspect in the nation’s first bioterrorism attack. However, he was never arrested or charged and a federal judge presiding over his lawsuit said recently that there “is not a scintilla of evidence” linking him to the mailings.
Former federal prosecutors knowledgeable about the investigation said the government payout to Hatfill signified that, in all likelihood, he would never be charged.
A spokesman for the Justice Department said the anthrax case “remains among the department’s highest law enforcement priorities.” Brian Roehrkasse also said in a statement that by agreeing to settle the lawsuit, the government “does not admit to any violation of the Privacy Act and continues to deny all liability in connection with Dr. Hatfill’s claims.”
The settlement calls for an immediate $2.82-million payment to Hatfill. Beginning in 2009, the government will pay Hatfill an annuity of $150,000 a year for 20 years, according to court papers.
Hatfill’s lawyer, Thomas C. Connolly, said that his client would have no comment on the settlement. “We took this case to defend very fundamental principles of fairness,” Connolly said.
Another lawyer for Hatfill, Mark A. Grannis, said Friday: “If anybody in the country really knew what it was like to be Steven Hatfill for the past six years, nobody would trade places with him.” Grannis faulted “a handful of credulous reporters,” who he said published or broadcast government leaks of “gossip, speculation and misinformation.”
The lawsuit was filed in August 2003, but U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton delayed permitting Hatfill’s lawyers to question FBI and Justice officials or news reporters for two more years. The government contended that the depositions of agents and FBI leaders could interfere with the investigation.
Connolly and Grannis oversaw depositions that eventually elicited sworn testimony from 37 witnesses, including Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.
Hatfill’s lawyers told Walton at a January hearing that they had identified three officials who allegedly leaked confidential information. The officials -- former U.S. attorney for Washington, Roscoe C. Howard Jr.; his former criminal division chief, Daniel S. Seikaly; and a former FBI spokesman, Edwin Cogswell -- have not spoken publicly on the allegation.
At that hearing, Walton ordered attorneys for the government and for Hatfill to try to settle the case. On Feb. 19, he signaled that he saw the government’s pursuit of Hatfill as questionable. The judge had reviewed four still-secret FBI memos about the status of the anthrax investigation.
“There is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with this,” Walton said.
Hatfill was trained in Zimbabwe as a physician and practiced medicine in South Africa. He later worked at Ft. Detrick, Md., researching how to counter the effects of deadly biological agents. No physical evidence or witnesses ever linked him to anthrax and he long insisted that he had nothing to do with the mailings.
Those mailings -- hand-addressed letters bearing tiny amounts of deadly anthrax powder -- set off new waves of terror in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. The first letter arrived at American Media Inc. in South Florida. About Sept. 18, photo editor Robert Stevens, 63, breathed in spores of the bacterium while examining a letter. He died Oct. 5. Other letters laced with the same strain of anthrax were addressed to others in the media, including two network anchors. Two letters were addressed to U.S. senators. Of the five anthrax-related deaths, two were U.S. Postal Service workers in the Washington area.
Hatfill’s plight recalls the targeting of Richard Jewell, a guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics who alerted police to a suspicious backpack and moved bystanders away. The backpack exploded, killing a woman and injuring more than 100. Jewell was praised; then media accounts described him as “the focus” of the FBI investigation. Another man later confessed. Then-Atty. Gen. Janet Reno apologized to Jewell, who died last year.
Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), whose district includes Princeton, where anthrax spores were recovered from a mailbox, said the government’s payout to Hatfill confirmed that the investigation “was botched from the very beginning.”
“The FBI did a poor job of collecting evidence, and then inappropriately focused on one individual as a suspect for too long, developing an erroneous ‘theory of the case’ that has led to this very expensive dead end,” Holt said in a statement.
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david.willman@latimes.com
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Times researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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f066972206770b6d2ef480ad4d68bc9d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-28-na-birds28-story.html | Surprises in genetic study will shake up birds’ family tree | Surprises in genetic study will shake up birds’ family tree
When a falcon swoops from the sky to seize its prey, no one would mistake the predator for a gaudy parrot.
Yet the secret kinship of falcons and parrots is one of many surprises in a landmark genetic study of 169 bird species published by Field Museum researchers.
One likely consequence of the study in Friday’s edition of the journal Science is a reordering of the field guides that many of America’s 80 million bird-watchers use.
“This is the most important single paper to date on the higher-level relationships of birds,” said Joel Cracraft, curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not part of the study.
Birds’ family tree has long stumped scientists. Many previous studies relied on painstaking comparisons of outward characteristics and behaviors.
Genetic comparisons can tell a deeper story, so the Field Museum launched a five-year effort with seven other institutions to do an unprecedented analysis. They discovered many cases in which seemingly similar birds were merely distant relatives and other birds long assumed to be unrelated turned out to be closely linked.
The analysis showed that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to such other hunters as hawks and eagles. If true, the finding would mean that falcons do not even belong in the scientific order originally named for them.
“It’s kind of crazy to us too,” said Shannon Hackett, a lead author of the study and associate curator of birds at the Field Museum. “People have been studying birds a long time, but now we’re in a time when we should question everything, because for the first time we have the tools to answer these questions.”
The bird project was part of a larger, federally funded effort called Assembling the Tree of Life, which aims to trace the evolutionary origins of all living things.
Using birds to study evolution is nothing new -- the diversity of Galapagos finches helped fuel Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But many details of avian evolution remained a mystery, in part because the animals’ light, hollow bones left few fossils.
Genetic studies can reconstruct evolutionary links by comparing small changes that have accumulated within the genes of different species. But studying birds that way posed a challenge because the major bird groups emerged in quick succession more than 65 million years ago, making their genetic changes harder to decipher.
The new lineage helps show how evolution works, experts said. Although falcons do not appear closely related to hawks, each species developed similarly shaped beaks and talons to hunt prey -- an evolutionary process that biologists call convergence.
Although conclusions like the falcon-parrot link may rattle some bird specialists, Joel Greenberg, an expert bird-watcher and editor of an anthology of Chicago nature writing, said such surprises can deepen the delight of studying birds.
“This may be one more of God’s little jokes,” Greenberg said.
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081499be31927fa7473ffc7a6963ab5c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-28-na-obama28-story.html | Obama is shifting to the center | Obama is shifting to the center
Barack Obama, as he introduces himself to the broader voting public, is emphasizing centrist -- even conservative -- positions on hot-button issues.
In recent weeks, he toughened his stance on Iran and backed an expansion of the government’s wiretapping powers. On Wednesday, he said states should be allowed to execute child rapists. When the Supreme Court the next day struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, he did not complain.
These views would fit many Republican candidates, but they are the recent profile adopted by a man who has been called the most liberal Democrat in the Senate.
In the primary season, candidates’ chief goal is usually to win their party’s most ideologically driven voters; afterward the candidates often adjust their policy stances. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has also changed tack on an array of issues. But Obama has drawn attention for the number of issues on which he has taken a moderate stance in recent days.
“I’ve been struck by the speed and decisiveness of his move to the center,” said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.
At the same time, Obama has proposed a host of government spending initiatives that give Republicans plenty of ammunition to brand him a liberal. And they cite his ranking by National Journal magazine -- called misleading by Obama’s aides -- that identified him as having the most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2007.
But other recent moves by Obama chart a more moderate course.
He disagreed with this week’s Supreme Court decision barring the death penalty for child rape, saying that states should be able to impose such a penalty for “heinous” crimes.
Obama has long supported the death penalty, but he has also expressed doubts about whether it’s an effective deterrent and applied fairly.
Obama’s reaction to another Supreme Court ruling, which struck down a gun ban in Washington, D.C., stood in contrast to that of many local political leaders and was more tempered than that of many liberals. Whereas his hometown mayor, Richard M. Daley of Chicago, and Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton sharply criticized the court decision, Obama was more welcoming. He said the ruling “reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe.”
Meanwhile, after calling the North American Free Trade Agreement a “big mistake” during the primary season and saying it should be renegotiated, Obama has recently toned down his rhetoric and emphasized his record of support for free trade. He also angered many union and liberal activists by naming a chief economic advisor who has extolled the virtues of globalization.
Facing criticism that he may be too willing to negotiate with Iran, Obama in a recent speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee took a tough line on protecting Israel against Iran.
This month, he announced that he would opt out of the public financing system for presidential elections, continuing to raise money from private donors, rather than adhere to the spending limits that come with it. Earlier, he had pledged to take public funds if his GOP opponent did.
And Obama endorsed a compromise wiretapping bill despite stiff opposition from liberal activists. MoveOn.org, the liberal online activist group, asked its members to flood Obama’s campaign office with phone calls and e-mails urging him to support a filibuster of the bill.
The changes carry some risk that Obama will diminish the image he has sought to build as a new type of leader who will change how Washington conducts business. McCain and other Republicans have used his recent policy statements to argue that Obama is a traditional politician, unwilling to take clear stands on tough issues and abandoning his principles when he finds it advantageous.
For example, McCain’s campaign said Obama was unable to give a clear account of whether he viewed the Washington gun ban as constitutional, an issue on which Obama and his campaign have given mixed signals. And when Obama announced that his campaign would not take public funding, McCain’s spokeswoman accused him of failing to stand by his principles.
But Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, said the Illinois senator’s record has been consistent, not tilting to the center for political purposes. “He’s committed to making decisions he thinks are right,” said Burton. “He’ll continue to do that as president.”
Some analysts say the moves amount to smart politics, showing that Obama is not chained to his party’s most devoted liberals. “If Obama doesn’t do what MoveOn wants, it will show some degree of independence,” said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution.
“He’s a good politician. He’s doing all he can to make sure people know he would govern as a post-partisan moderate,” said Matt Bennett, a policy analyst with Third Way, a Democratic centrist think tank.
While Obama is making a play for centrist voters, McCain’s strategy seems more geared to pinning down his party’s conservative base, as he has steadily tacked to the right on a range of issues.
He has abandoned or downplayed views on which his reputation as a maverick are based: his opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts, his liberal approach to handling illegal immigrants and his opposition to offshore oil drilling.
McCain is bringing his campaign agenda in line with party orthodoxy because many conservatives still view him with suspicion due to past departures from core GOP positions. His burden is to mobilize a party that is fractured and seemingly unenthusiastic about its standard-bearer.
Eddie Mahe, a McCain supporter and former GOP official, said that McCain has to position himself for conservatives “in a way that provides them a motivation and incentive to vote.”
Last week, McCain reversed course and announced that he supports offshore oil drilling. On tax policy, McCain has come to support an extension of Bush’s tax cuts. What’s more, he has proposed additional cuts in corporate tax rates and other business breaks.
He has backed away from supporting an immigration plan that conservatives loathed because it offered a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants already in the country.
Despite those adjustments, many in McCain’s party seem lukewarm about his candidacy. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found recently that 45% of those who planned to vote for McCain said they would do so with enthusiasm. By contrast, 81% of Obama voters said they were enthusiastic.
But Mahe said the Arizona senator would pick up support among conservatives as they learn more about Obama’s record. “The best shot they have to motivate the base,” he said, “is to get people to see how liberal he is.”
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janet.hook@latimes.com
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2b32fefb51246ef5665645a4cf5ec3a4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-28-na-scotus28-story.html | Justices’ decision triggers questions | Justices’ decision triggers questions
The Supreme Court’s historic ruling this week that clarified Americans’ right to own a gun for self-defense left a crucial question unanswered, one that will be resolved only after many years and a torrent of litigation, legal experts said Friday.
Is gun ownership a “fundamental right” under the Constitution, or something less? Put simply, is a gun akin to an automobile, a legal but dangerous product that can be strictly regulated by the government? Or is a gun more like a book, both legal and largely off-limits to government regulation?
“There’s a lot that needs to be sorted out. The big question is: Is this like the 1st Amendment and the freedom of speech?” said John Eastman, dean of the Chapman University School of Law in Orange. He once was a clerk on the high court.
2nd Amendment scope
The nature and scope of the 2nd Amendment right will determine whether many gun restrictions are struck down, or only the most extreme measures, like the District of Columbia’s ban on private handguns even in homes.
In the past, the high court has adopted a two-tiered approach when weighing claims. If a law or government regulation conflicts with an individual’s “fundamental right” under the Constitution, the balance weighs in favor of the individual. Since a book is protected by the fundamental right to free speech in the 1st Amendment, no one would think authors in this country need to be licensed and their writings officially inspected by the government.
But if no fundamental right is involved, the court has said, government may insist on strict regulation to protect the public. No one would think it is unconstitutional for the state to require motorists to have a license and insurance, to have their cars inspected, and to obey speed limits.
Gun-rights advocates have long insisted that the 2nd Amendment protects a law-abiding citizen’s fundamental right to have firearms for self-defense, and they won a historic but not total victory this week.
Justice Antonin Scalia said the court would leave it to another day to decide the nature of the right to a gun.
UCLA Law professor Adam Winkler said the court “left the most important question unanswered: What exactly does the 2nd Amendment prohibit? The majority refused to adopt a standard of review for judging future disputes. This is unfortunate, because lower federal courts and state courts should now see a tidal wave of litigation challenging gun-control laws.”
To be sure, Scalia made clear that most restrictions should stand.
“The court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” he wrote in the majority opinion.
The 2nd Amendment right to bear arms is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” he wrote.
But dissenting Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the decision would “encourage legal challenges to gun regulation” and “leave the nation without clear standards for resolving those challenges.”
Breyer added: “And litigation over the course of many years, or the mere specter of such litigation, threatens to leave cities without effective protection against gun violence and accidents during that time,” Breyer said.
Lawyers for the National Rifle Assn. said their first targets would be ordinances in Chicago and San Francisco that restrict homeowners from keeping handguns. They hope that victories in those cases will lay the foundation for challenging other restrictions.
California allows gun owners to carry a concealed weapon if they obtain a permit. NRA attorney Chuck Michel said he expected legal challenges to be filed in Los Angeles and San Francisco because officials there regularly rejected requests for permits.
“Licensing and registration are hot issues,” Michel said. “I don’t think the Supreme Court would strike down licensing entirely. But we will look for an opportunity to challenge a policy that denies concealed-weapons permits.”
Application of gun-permit laws has analogies in the 1st Amendment. For instance, the high court has ruled that cities may require permits for demonstrations and limit them to public parks or other open areas, but that cities generally may not give some groups a permit to demonstrate while denying a permit to another group with a different message.
UCLA’s Winkler expects the high court to uphold reasonable regulations of firearms, even if the justices say the 2nd Amendment is like the 1st Amendment, he said.
“Just as the 1st Amendment does not protect one’s ability to falsely shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, the 2nd Amendment does not protect one’s ability to stroll down Rodeo Drive with a bazooka,” said Winkler, who had filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the District of Columbia’s handgun ban. “A few extreme gun-control laws will be invalidated, but the vast majority of restrictions will survive.”
The dissenting justices did not sound as confident, however. Justices Breyer and John Paul Stevens said the court’s decision could have a broad effect. It “threatens to throw into doubt the constitutionality of gun laws throughout the United States,” Breyer wrote.
Future lawsuits
The justices also barely touched on a threshold issue for future lawsuits.
The decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller did not say the 2nd Amendment applies to states and localities. Washington, D.C., is not a state.
Until the early 20th century, the Bill of Rights was assumed to limit only the federal government, not the states; now the presumption is that the Constitution protects Americans against the government at all levels -- federal, state and local. But the Supreme Court has not said the 2nd Amendment applies to the states.
“That’s the next case to come up, but I think it’s a foregone conclusion” that the 2nd Amendment will extend to state and local laws, said Washington lawyer Alan Morrison, who wrote the District of Columbia’s opening brief defending its law when he was a city attorney.
In the wake of Thursday’s ruling, Morrison said: “The bottom line is, it looks like a full-employment decision for lots of gun lawyers and state, federal and municipal lawyers.”
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david.savage@latimes.com
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793f6637cf9e24c93c67d450fc5ec591 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-28-sci-carroll28-story.html | Studying time’s mysteries, and the multiverse | Studying time’s mysteries, and the multiverse
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.
What’s the problem with time?
The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.
Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.
We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.
What does entropy have to do with all this?
The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.
The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.
You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.
Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?
One way of explaining entropy is to say it’s the number of ways you can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don’t notice the change macroscopically.
If you mix milk into a cup of coffee, the more mixing that occurs, the more disordered the milk molecules become and the more entropy builds.
If all the milk was somehow separated from the coffee, that would be low entropy.
So what’s the problem?
If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that’s a very difficult fact to explain. . . .
There’s no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.
From a layman’s standpoint, it seems perfectly rational that things would start small and grow apart. You’re saying that’s wrong.
Many of my very smart colleagues say exactly the same thing. They say, “Why are you thinking about this? It just makes sense that the early universe was small and low-entropy.”
But I think that is just a prejudice: . . . Because it is like that in our universe, we tend to think it is naturally like that.
I don’t think there is an explanation for that in terms of our current understanding of physics. I’m just saying it’s not a fact that we should take for granted.
So you think the way the universe began is unnatural?
Low-entropy configurations are rare.
If you take a deck of cards and you open it up, it’s true that they’re in order. But if you randomly chose a configuration of a deck of cards it would be very, very unlikely that they would be in perfect order.
That’s exactly low entropy versus high entropy.
The universe is more than what we see?
The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and it’s in perfect order is not because it’s just easy and natural to find it in perfect order, it’s because the deck of cards is not a closed system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory somewhere that arranged it. So I think there is a previous universe somewhere that made us and we came out.
We’re part of a bigger structure.
Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?
Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don’t observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.
I’m not saying this is true; I’m saying this is an idea worth thinking about.
You’re saying that in some universes there could be a person like you drinking coffee, but out of a blue cup rather than a red one.
If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a multiverse, then there’s other places in this larger structure that have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could be pretty similar to what we have here.
How many of them are there? The number could well be infinity. So it is possible that somewhere else in this larger structure that we call the multiverse there are people like us, writing for newspapers like the L.A. Times and thinking about similar questions.
So how does the arrow of time fit into this?
Our experience of time depends upon the growth of entropy. You can’t imagine a person looking around and saying, “Time is flowing in the wrong direction,” because your sense of time is due to entropy increasing. . . . This feeling that we’re moving through time has to do with the fact that as we live, we feed on entropy. . . . Time exists without entropy, but entropy is what gives time its special character.
Entropy gives time its appearance of forward motion?
Yeah, its directionality. The distinction between past and future. If you’re floating in outer space, in a spacesuit, there would be no difference between one direction and another. However, nowhere in the universe would you confuse yesterday and tomorrow. That’s all because of entropy, and that’s the arrow of time.
Does God exist in a multiverse?
I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.
Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”
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john.johnson@latimes.com
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45a69305778ec6af2b7776e9956f035f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-29-bk-stillman29-story.html | How the West was run | How the West was run
DEANNE STILLMAN loves the desert. It is, she writes, “my beat and my passion,” a place where city life fades away, her thoughts vanish and she hears things: “The beating of wings. The scratching of lizard. The crack of tortoise egg. The whisper of stories that want to be told.” Her 2001 book, “Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave,” told one of those stories, of the violent murder of two local girls who had been “sliced up” by a Marine in the desert. In the course of writing that book, a story of slaughter in the high country outside Reno grabbed her attention. It was December 1998; this time there were three murderers, two of them Marines (one stationed at Twentynine Palms), and the victims were wild mustangs, 34 dead in several killing sprees.
Shaken by the similarities between the killings, Stillman wondered why someone would kill the animals that had blazed our trails, fought our wars, served as our loyal partners? Was there something about the slaughter of wild horses that went straight to the heart of who we are as Americans? “With all due respect to our official icon, the eagle, . . . " she writes, “It is really the wild horse, the four-legged with the flying mane and tail, the beautiful, bighearted steed who loves freedom so much that when captured he dies of a broken heart, the ever-defiant mustang that is our true representative, coursing through our blood as he carries the eternal message of America.” She began to wonder about the men who shot them: “Were they modern Ahabs? Or . . . just a bunch of drunks with guns? Or perhaps they were a strange new iteration of the American psycho, or maybe even some full-on combination platter of all of the above.”
These questions led Stillman into an impressively thorough, painstakingly researched investigation of the history of the horse in North America. She began by hiking into a remote canyon in Death Valley, where the climatic conditions have preserved in stone the hoof prints of the modern horse’s most distant ancestors. These small horses had flourished here millions of years ago, until the Ice Age, when horses disappeared from North America, “but not before they had headed north across the Bering land bridge and populated the rest of the world.” Not until the early 1500s did horses return to the continent, when Hernando Cortes brought shiploads of them from Cuba, correctly assuming that they would give him the advantage he needed to conquer the Aztecs.
From the jungles of Central America, horses moved north, carrying Catholic priests and tribal scouts across the Rio Grande and into the wild country of the great Southwest, all the way from Texas into California. Horses broke away from war parties and missions, turned wild, formed bands and flourished in this unfenced, endless land. There were so many horses in the early 1700s that the maps drawn of Texas at the time marked the territory between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River not as a place but as “Vast Herds of Wild Horses,” or simply “Wild Horses.” By the 1840s, Texas ranger John C. Duval reported seeing “a drove of mustangs so large that it took us fully an hour to pass it, although they were traveling at a rapid rate in a direction nearly opposite to ours.”
From the Southwest, Stillman follows the horses onto the Great Plains, where they were stolen, or caught and tamed, by Native Americans, “forming a partnership that seemed as old as forever.” They became the most valued asset in the Indian Wars, during which they were also pressed into service by the U.S. Cavalry. Stillman tracks the famous war horse Comanche from his birth in 1862 in the Texas desert to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where he was found standing silently, riddled with bullets, near his fallen rider and was celebrated as the only surviving member of Custer’s campaign.
SHE TRACKS the horses along the Goodnight-Loving Trail, where they became the cowboy’s hardworking companions on cattle drives; across Utah and Nevada, carrying riders of the Pony Express; and finally into show business. First into Buffalo Bill Cody’s internationally famous traveling show, which turned the gruesome Indian Wars of the Great Plains into a kind of carnival, and eventually to Hollywood, where the first motion picture ever was of a horse running. It was shot with a dozen still cameras firing in sequence, their shutters tripped by the wheels of a sulky pulled by a trotting horse. “Once again,” Stillman writes, “the country embarked on a great transformation, all because of the horse -- which in this case had taken its own picture.”
In devoting 10 years of her life to the writing of “Mustang,” Stillman joins those crusading women -- among them mustang advocate Wild Horse Annie (who said, “A woman can go far with a girdle and a can of hair spray”) -- who believe that one person can effect positive change in the world. Like the best nonfiction writers of our time (Jon Krakauer and Bruce Chatwin come to mind), Stillman’s prose is inviting, her voice authoritative and her vision imaginative and impressively broad. One cannot read “Mustang” in its entirety without realizing that it is possible to look at every single transformative event in North American culture through the lens of equine history -- that there is no way to even consider the history of the American West without first considering the horse.
Perhaps what is most interesting about this intelligent and lovingly assembled account is Stillman’s illumination of the psychology behind our conflicted feelings about the horse. "[T]he horse’s ability to provide flight was universally desired, and nowhere is this desire more pronounced, more extreme, than in America, where escape and the chance to start over is not a pipe dream, but a birthright,” she writes. "[W]e worship cowboys and we’re jacked on freedom and we love moving fast through wide-open space, preferably on a cactus-lined highway in our most iconic car, the Mustang, whose grill features a galloping pony.” The Marines who shot the horses in the desert, Stillman suggests, may have been experiencing feelings akin to those of the protagonist of “Equus,” who falls deeply in love with horses and then, in “an ecstatic frenzy,” blinds six of them: “The horses have roiled the young man, stirred his juices, mirrored his wild side and even stoked it. But they have also seen his shame and must be destroyed.” Perhaps the wild mustang reflects back to us, too keenly, our loss of freedom. "[T]he horse is our great silent witness. . . . [H]e knows too much, and we can’t take it.”
Sentimiento was what the early vaqueros called it when a captured horse died of heartbreak. Despecho meant he had died of nervous rage. For native North Americans, the words “horse” and “power” are nearly synonymous, and for thousands of years people of all cultures have tried to harness that power for their own. What, Stillman’s invaluable history seems to be asking, will it say about us as a culture if we manage to extinguish the mustang’s fire once and for all? *
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0346496d4f3506bc51aebefeaf80ca69 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-29-fg-lax29-story.html | Lacking evidence, Britain to free LAX bomb plot suspect | Lacking evidence, Britain to free LAX bomb plot suspect
British authorities will soon free an accused Algerian leader of Al Qaeda who had been charged as the mastermind of a foiled plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, British officials say.
The recent court order to release the 45-year-old Algerian on bail after seven years in custody comes after authorities freed Abu Qatada, a Jordanian cleric who allegedly was Al Qaeda’s top ideologue in Europe.
British officials refer to the accused Algerian leader as “U” because of a court order to refrain from naming him publicly. American prosecutors identified him in a U.S. indictment in 2001 under an alias, Abu Doha, because his real name remains unknown.
As with Abu Qatada, strict bail conditions will limit the Algerian’s movements and contacts and allow police to monitor him closely, officials said. Nonetheless, the failure to keep the two men behind bars reveals persistent obstacles to fighting Al Qaeda in the Western justice system, anti-terrorism officials and experts say.
The case of the Algerian is alarming, officials and experts say, because investigations by European, U.S. and North African security forces concluded that he was a leader of Al Qaeda plots in the West before the Sept. 11 attacks. His release results from a lack of hard evidence that can be used for prosecution, and from dogged resistance by British judges to deporting suspects to countries with questionable human rights records.
“It’s kind of tragic that after six years we have not been able to find a system for dealing with these individuals,” said Sajjan Gohel of the Asia- Pacific Foundation, a think tank on security issues. “I have heard people from the U.S. argue that this is why they have Guantanamo,” referring to the U.S. military prison in Cuba.
In Britain, on the other hand, there is growing impatience in sectors of government and among the public with extended detentions of suspects without charge.
The Algerian was detained here in February 2001 in a crackdown on militants suspected of plotting an attack in Strasbourg, France. U.S. prosecutors charged him with leading a cell that intended to carry out a bomb attack on LAX just before New Year’s Day 2000.
U.S. Customs inspectors arrested the would-be bomber, an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam, at the Canadian border with a car load of explosives. He was convicted and cooperated with investigators, describing the Algerian as an Al Qaeda chief who oversaw recruiting in Europe and training at a camp in Afghanistan.
But Ressam then refused to testify, forcing prosecutors to drop an extradition request for the alleged mastermind in 2005.
Security officials and defense lawyers are discussing details of bail conditions before the Algerian’s release, which could take place within days, British counter-terrorism officials said last week. He had been held on immigration charges.
British anti-terrorism officials tried to have him deported to Algeria, but the courts blocked that move. The Algerian, Abu Qatada and other foreign terrorism suspects here are in limbo because British judges have ruled that they face a danger of torture, or prosecution based on evidence obtained through torture, if they are deported.
Resentment and distrust of government detention policies came through in a recent published commentary about the case of Abu Qatada.
“The police should have placed him under surveillance until they had accumulated the necessary evidence to charge him with a crime,” wrote Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. “Instead, the government ordered him to be locked up and just threw away the key.”
European investigators retort that Abu Qatada inspired militants, including the Sept. 11 hijackers, while living with his family on welfare checks in a comfortable house in West London.
The prosecution of Abu Qatada was problematic because the Jordanian cleric’s activity was essentially ideological. In contrast, investigators insist, there is little doubt about the top operational role the Algerian suspect played after arriving in Britain in 1996 and requesting asylum on grounds that he faced persecution at home.
During the next five years, the Algerian shuttled between Europe and Afghanistan building the networks, according to a Foreign Office note provided to the Special Immigration Appeals Court last year.
“Senior position in a . . . training camp in Afghanistan,” the note reads. “Direct links to UBL [Osama bin Laden] and other senior AQ figures. Involved in supporting terrorist attacks, including those involved in the planned attack on the Strasbourg Christmas market in 2000, and an earlier plan to attack Los Angeles Airport.”
Ressam, one of four convicted in the LAX case, told investigators that he discussed the plot with Abu Doha, the Algerian, at the camp, according to the U.S. indictment. From London, the Algerian directed Ressam and others in Montreal in setting the plot in motion and planning escape routes to Europe and North Africa, the indictment said.
The Algerian also was implicated in a parallel plot to bomb hotels in Jordan, U.S. officials said at the time.
Despite all the allegations, Western prosecutors do not seem eager to go after him again. Much of the case was built on the statements by Ressam, who stopped cooperating and is serving a 22-year sentence, or on intelligence that cannot be used in court, investigators said.
“Everybody talked about Doha in the networks. He was a point of reference,” said veteran Italian prosecutor Stefano Dambruoso, who investigated the Algerian network and questioned Ressam in U.S. custody. “And the intelligence implicated him. But in terms of evidence, there was not direct proof.”
Public attitudes toward terrorism and the powers of law enforcement have changed as three years have passed without a successful attack in Europe, Dambruoso said.
“What do you prefer, security or freedom?” he said. “In a democracy, you will face this kind of trouble. As time goes by in Europe without an attack, the emphasis on freedom becomes stronger.”
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rotella@latimes.com
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f5ed97e636b7ca5e3add7bfc668d75f1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-29-na-probe29-story.html | How anthrax case stalled | How anthrax case stalled
The federal investigation into the deadly anthrax mailings of late 2001 was undermined by leaks and a premature fixation on a single suspect, according to investigators involved in the case.
More than six years after the mailings, no one has been charged, and the top suspect, former Army scientist Steven J. Hatfill, was all but exonerated Friday when the U.S. Justice Department agreed to pay him $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit.
The anthrax mailings killed five people, crippled mail delivery in some areas and closed a Senate office building for months, heightening anxiety on the heels of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Now, dozens of interviews by the Los Angeles Times and a review of newly available testimony from Hatfill’s lawsuit reveal a flawed investigation marked by abnormal tactics and internal dissent.
Behind the scenes, FBI agents chafed at their supervisors’ obsession with Hatfill, who in 2002 was publicly identified by then-Atty. Gen. John D. Ashcroft as “a person of interest.” The preoccupation with Hatfill persisted for years, long after investigators failed to turn up any evidence linking him to the mailings. Other potential suspects and leads were ignored or given insufficient attention, investigators said.
One official who criticized Ashcroft for singling out Hatfill was rebuked by the FBI director’s top aide.
When Hatfill, now 54, landed a government-funded university job, the Department of Justice forced his dismissal. Ashcroft and FBI officials testified that they knew of no precedent for such intervention.
Investigators also questioned orders from their bosses to share confidential information with political leaders -- a departure from normal procedure. The security of information within the probe was so lax that FBI agents found news helicopters racing them to the scenes of searches. One exasperated agent called the leaks to the media “ridiculous.”
When an official proposed using lie-detector tests to find the source of the leaks, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III dismissed the idea, saying it would be “bad for morale,” according to testimony by one of the lead agents on the case.
The previously undisclosed testimony by agents and their supervisors is from depositions conducted by Hatfill’s lawyers. In his lawsuit, filed in 2003, Hatfill alleged that the FBI and Justice Department violated his privacy and damaged his reputation and prospects for employment.
According to its website, the FBI has “devoted hundreds of thousands of agent-hours to the case,” conducted more than 9,100 interviews, obtained about 6,000 grand jury subpoenas and completed 67 searches.
A federal judge who reviewed details of the anthrax investigation, including still-secret FBI summaries, declared earlier this year: “There is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with this.”
FBI leaders had remained fixated on Hatfill into late 2006, agents said.
“They exhausted a tremendous amount of time and energy on him,” said one of the FBI agents involved with the case who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.
“I’m still convinced that whatever seemed interesting or worth pursuing was just basically nullified in the months or year following when ‘person of interest’ came out about Hatfill,” he said. Other possibilities got short shrift, he said, because of assumptions within the FBI that “sooner or later they’ll have this guy nailed.”
Said another investigator: “Particular management people felt, ‘He is the right guy. If we only put this amount of energy into him, we’ll get to the end of the rainbow.’ Did it take energy away? It had to have. Because you can’t pull up another hundred agents and say, ‘You go work these leads [that] these guys can’t because they’re just focused on Hatfill.’ ”
Mueller testified in a deposition that the probe posed tall obstacles. With no obvious suspect initially, he said, the FBI had to conduct “preliminary initial investigations” of a “universe of individuals” with access to the strain of anthrax used in the attacks. He said he had told aides “to take what steps were necessary to prevent leaks,” which he believed had “undercut” the investigation.
An FBI spokesman, Michael P. Kortan, said Mueller would not comment for this article. The spokesman added that “solving this case is a top priority for the FBI. Our commitment is undiminished.”
A plume of powder
On Oct. 15., 2001, Mueller assigned the anthrax investigation to Van Harp, a 32-year veteran of the FBI. That morning, an aide to the U.S. Senate majority leader, Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.), opened an envelope on Capitol Hill, releasing a plume of powdery material. A photo editor in Florida had died mysteriously from anthrax 10 days earlier.
Harp learned that this investigation would not follow FBI procedures for strict confidentiality. For starters, Mueller instructed him to brief Daschle and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Each had been intended recipients of anthrax letters.
FBI officials wanted to assure the senators that the bureau was “very aggressively investigating the case,” Harp testified. Nevertheless, sharing confidential investigative information was, he said, “an unusual step.”
By the end of October, two Washington-area postal employees had died. In New York, a hospital supply worker also succumbed. On Nov. 21, 2001, the fifth anthrax victim, a woman in Oxford, Conn., died.
Federal investigators began looking into scientists who had worked with biological agents. Hatfill was one of those contacted for an FBI interview. His name also was floated within the gossipy networks of the scientific community. Some academics speculated that the mailings were the work of an American who sent the anthrax to boost research funding.
The FBI organized three teams of specialists, based in Washington, D.C., and in Frederick, Md., near where Hatfill lived and worked. Other agents and postal inspectors were deployed in Florida, New Jersey and elsewhere.
But external pressures were outpacing the investigation.
On Jan. 4, 2002, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof began goading the FBI. “I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall,” he wrote, describing the unnamed suspect as “an American insider, a man working in the military bio-weapons field.”
On May 24, Kristof called for lighting “a fire under the FBI” and described the suspected American insider in more detail. Later, the columnist wrote that he was referring to Hatfill.
Hatfill’s background invited questions.
Raised in central Illinois, he attended college in Kansas before serving in the Army. He earned a medical degree at the University of Zimbabwe and practiced medicine in South Africa. From 1997 to 1999, Hatfill was a virology researcher in the Army’s labs at Ft. Detrick, Md., specializing in ways to prevent or treat infection from such lethal pathogens as the Ebola and Marburg viruses.
In a search of Hatfill’s apartment, investigators found an unpublished novel he had written in which a wheelchair-bound man attacks Congress using plague bacteria.
Yet no physical evidence or witness account emerged to show that Hatfill had ever handled or possessed anthrax or that he had a role in mailing it.
Frustration at the FBI’s lack of progress festered among senators and their staffs, who privately questioned the bureau’s scientific competency and sense of urgency. The nine-story Hart Senate Office Building -- the Capitol Hill address of 50 senators and hundreds of staffers -- remained closed because of anthrax contamination.
FBI case agent Robert Roth testified that he found Daschle’s staff “hostile.” An aide to Leahy peppered the FBI with faxed questions about details of the case.
Meanwhile, Roth and veteran agent Bradley Garrett reached out to Hatfill repeatedly from December 2001 through spring 2002. Hatfill was cooperative throughout, they testified. He told the investigators he would welcome a search of his apartment.
But as Hatfill was signing a search authorization on June 25, 2002, at the FBI office in downtown Frederick, Roth spotted a media helicopter heading “right toward Steve’s house.” Within minutes after Hatfill had signed, droves of Washington- and Baltimore-based camera crews and reporters descended on his apartment.
“How many people knew in advance that you intended to go to talk to Dr. Hatfill and try to get a consent to search?” asked Hatfill’s lawyer, Thomas G. Connolly, during a deposition.
“It was probably several hundred,” Roth replied, including the mayor of Frederick.
Said Garrett: “I wouldn’t have spoken to us after that event.”
Admired investigator
Garrett, then 53, was among the FBI’s most revered investigators. In 1997, he traveled to Pakistan to help apprehend a gunman who had killed two CIA workers outside agency headquarters in Langley, Va. He also obtained a confession from Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Asked by Hatfill’s lawyer if it was “appropriate” to disclose a planned search of a residence, Garrett replied:
“Absolutely not.”
In addition to the risk of “forewarning people you are coming to search,” Garrett testified, “it’s clearly not appropriate or even responsible to do that in reference to the person you are searching. He’s not been charged. He has not gone to court.”
Garrett added, “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that Dr. Hatfill did have something to do with the anthrax case, but he had three other people working with him to do it. You don’t want them to know you are searching his place because then that alters their behavior. They can destroy evidence.”
When the FBI searched Hatfill’s apartment a second time, on Aug. 1, 2002, the media helicopters and the van loads of camera crews were there again.
“Obviously, someone told them we were going to do that search,” Garrett testified.
Roth, who was with Garrett for both searches, said the tip-offs were “just ridiculous.”
At one point, Roth and other FBI officials tried to trace who was accessing the central computer file in which all investigative interviews and other developments were stored. Roth said the file was “an open book,” used by “a huge group of people.”
Someone had leaked the information that the second search of Hatfill’s apartment was made with the authority of a court-issued warrant, which wrongly implied that Hatfill was no longer cooperating.
Mueller resisted when an official recommended a criminal probe of the leaks, with mandatory lie-detector tests for the anthrax investigators, Roth testified. The FBI director, Roth said, raised a hand and said, “I don’t want to do that. . . . It’s bad for morale to go after these people.”
Mueller testified that he did not recall the episode. He said he had backed at least one other leak investigation but did not know if any action was taken.
No charge, but a label
On Aug. 6, 2002, five days after the second, widely televised, search of Hatfill’s apartment, Ashcroft appeared on two network morning programs. On CBS’ “The Early Show,” the attorney general was asked, “Is Dr. Hatfill a suspect?”
Ashcroft replied, “Well, he’s a person of interest.”
Hatfill had not been charged with a crime. But he had a label -- a label that officials used repeatedly. Ashcroft later testified that he did not think it “would cause [Hatfill] stigmatization.”
Others at the FBI were concerned. Harp testified that he had viewed labeling Hatfill as “improper.” Harp kept his misgivings private, but a newly assigned colleague spoke out.
Michael A. Mason, then the FBI’s executive assistant director, told reporters that, without sufficient evidence to charge someone with a crime, “there is absolutely zero value to coming forward with names or definitions of persons of interest.”
Afterward, FBI Deputy Director Bruce J. Gebhardt privately rebuked Mason. Gebhardt said the remarks “did not go over well in the front office,” according to testimony from another senior bureau official.
Despite the scrutiny, Hatfill landed a new job teaching public safety personnel how to respond to acts of terrorism. The $150,000-a-year position, at Louisiana State University, was funded by a grant from the Justice Department.
Arthur Eberhart, an FBI biohazards specialist who helped lead the anthrax investigation, testified that he saw a “conflict” in Hatfill being paid to teach counter-terrorism while “he was a suspect in the case.” Other officials also expressed qualms.
Soon after Hatfill began drawing his paycheck, a Justice Department grants administrator ordered the university to terminate his contract.
Ashcroft and five FBI officials testified that they knew of no other instance in which the government had forced an investigative target out of a nongovernmental job.
Still lacking any proof that he had committed a crime, the government put more pressure on Hatfill: Bloodhounds were brought in to seek any scent of anthrax in Hatfill’s apartment and places he frequented.
On Aug. 12, 2002, Newsweek magazine reported that the dogs “immediately became agitated.” An unnamed law enforcement source was quoted, saying the bloodhounds “went crazy.”
But FBI tests found no traces of anthrax, and investigators concluded that the dogs’ excitement was useless as evidence. Harp and Roscoe C. Howard Jr., then the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., acknowledged in testimony that they had confirmed details about the bloodhounds to Newsweek before the article was published.
In addition to the searches, a caravan of FBI agents photographed and videotaped Hatfill seven days a week for months. An FBI employee drove over Hatfill’s foot, prompting Washington, D.C., police to ticket him for “walking to create a hazard.”
Media coverage of the 24-hour surveillance helped cement Hatfill’s public image as a central figure in the investigation. USA Today reported on May 29, 2003: “FBI officials believe they can’t risk the embarrassment of losing track of Hatfill, even for a few hours, and then being confronted with more anthrax attacks.”
Away from public view, Hatfill’s lawyer had approached the FBI with an alternative: In exchange for ending the bumper-lock chase scenes, Hatfill would surrender his passport, agree to be outfitted with a satellite-guided tracking device and allow an FBI agent to remain with him at all times.
“There were specific reasons that we did not accept that offer, but not because it was judged as insincere,” Roth said.
Probe gets new leader
As the first anniversary of the anthrax mailings passed with the case unsolved, Mueller phased out the soon-to-be-retired Harp by promoting a senior FBI agent from San Diego, Richard L. Lambert, to supervise the investigation.
Lambert also tended the concerns of congressional leaders. He and Mueller met privately with Daschle, Leahy and several Senate staffers. Leahy later told Vermont students in an online discussion that some of the briefings he received “have been highly classified.”
According to Lambert, he and Mueller advised senators and staffers that the information was sensitive and confidential. But he also acknowledged that he erred by revealing Hatfill’s “status in this criminal investigation.”
“It was inappropriate to discuss Steven Hatfill in the context of that meeting,” Lambert testified. “Typically, the FBI does not discuss the identity of any persons concerning an investigation. . . . We typically disclose our facts in a courtroom.”
Lambert described the labeling of Hatfill and the many leaks as potentially harmful to both Hatfill and to the investigation.
Nevertheless, for the next four years Lambert kept FBI and postal investigators focused on Hatfill, according to people familiar with the case.
Some dissatisfied agents sought a review of Lambert by the bureau’s Inspection Division, which evaluates FBI operations. “There were complaints about him,” one agent told The Times. “Did he take energy away from looking at other people? The answer is yes.”
On Aug. 25, 2006, Mueller transferred Lambert off the case, naming him special agent in charge of the FBI field office in Knoxville, Tenn. Results of the Inspection Division’s review of the complaints have not been disclosed, and Lambert declined to be interviewed for this article.
The fixation on Hatfill ran broadly through FBI leadership. Eberhart, the biohazards expert, testified that when he retired in late 2002, “Dr. Hatfill was our main focus.”
Now, many who have been involved with the anthrax case say they fear it will never be solved.
Said Peter Setlow, a University of Connecticut biochemist who has served as a consultant to the FBI:
“They’re not going to ever catch him until somebody confesses on their deathbed or something like that. You’re not going to find a smoking gun.”
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david.willman@latimes.com
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Times researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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1bc3a4f9cc3076e29e8fda4c2441d3e4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-29-sp-dodgers29-story.html | Held hitless, Dodgers still win | Held hitless, Dodgers still win
Jered Weaver and Jose Arredondo pursued history on the wrong night, their combined eight no-hit innings wiped away by the Angels’ own inability to score.
The Angels hit the midway point of the season Saturday night with a cruel reminder of their offensive inadequacies, holding the Dodgers to no hits but dropping the second game of the latest installment of the Freeway Series, 1-0, at Dodger Stadium.
The Dodgers became only the fifth team in the modern era of baseball to win a game without getting a hit. The last team to do it was Cleveland, which was no-hit by Matt Young of Boston for eight innings but won, 2-1, on April 12, 1992.
“This is pretty bizarre,” Dodgers Manager Joe Torre said.
Talk about there being no margin for error.
The difference in the game was a fifth-inning run by Matt Kemp, made entirely possible by Weaver’s inability to pick up a slow-rolling grounder and catcher Jeff Mathis’ errant throw that sailed into center field on a stolen-base attempt.
For his six no-hit innings, Weaver (7-8) was rewarded with a loss. Because the Dodgers didn’t hit in the ninth, he and Arredondo weren’t credited with a no-hitter.
“This is definitely the craziest game,” Angels center fielder Torii Hunter said. “I’ve never been part of a game where you give up no hits and have five hits and you can’t get it done.”
The Angels were blanked for the second night in a row, this time by Chad Billingsley, Jonathan Broxton and Takashi Saito. Billingsley followed up Chan Ho Park’s six scoreless innings Friday night by putting up seven zeros and limiting the Angels to three hits and three walks. He struck out seven.
Billingsley (7-7) helped cut short Weaver’s night, as Manager Mike Scioscia opted to pinch-hit for the right-hander in the seventh with two out and Gary Matthews Jr. at second. Chone Figgins grounded out to short to end the threat.
Asked whether any part of him sympathized with Weaver, Billingsley laughed.
“No,” he said.
He paused, and then continued, “I don’t want to ever experience that.”
The result had no effect on the standings, the Dodgers remaining 2 1/2 games back of first-place Arizona in the National League West and the first-place Angels 3 1/2 ahead of Oakland in the American League West. For the Angels, the loss sealed their first series loss since they were swept by Tampa Bay on May 9-11.
Weaver cruised through the first four innings, encountering trouble in the fifth only when he failed to snag a slow-rolling grounder toward first base hit by Kemp.
With Blake DeWitt at the plate, Kemp bolted for second, taking advantage of Weaver’s slow delivery. Mathis’ throw to second sailed high and into center field, allowing Kemp to take third.
“I knew he had a high leg kick and that I could be aggressive,” Kemp said.
DeWitt said he saw Kemp out of the corner of his eye, adding, “I was taking no matter what.”
DeWitt drove the next pitch to right field and Kemp tagged up and scored.
“Obviously, it stings a little bit, but any time you lose, it hurts,” Weaver said. “I’m sure you guys are going to eat this up more than I am.”
Dodgers right fielder Andre Ethier made a couple of key defensive plays, gunning down Erick Aybar at second base when Aybar was trying to turn a single into a double in the sixth and snagging a hard-hit line drive by Howie Kendrick that was hit to right-center field in the seventh.
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dylan.hernandez@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Four times in major league history, a visiting team’s pitcher(s) have given up no hits but not been credited with a no-hitter because they pitched only eight innings:
June 21, 1890 -- Charles “Silver” King, Chicago (Players League)
lost to Brooklyn, 1-0
July 1, 1990 -- Andy Hawkins,
New York Yankees, lost to Chicago White Sox, 4-0.
April 12, 1992 -- Matt Young, Boston, lost to Cleveland, 2-1.
June 28, 2008 -- Jered Weaver (6) and Jose Arredondo (2), Angels,
lost to Dodgers, 1-0.
Source: Los Angeles Times
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cbd273d424164e2fc86d13742dd88c95 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-30-fi-rhapsody30-story.html | New music store to take on iTunes | New music store to take on iTunes
Rhapsody America, the Web’s top subscription-based music service, plans to open a digital download store today, becoming the latest company to challenge the dominance of Apple Inc.'s iTunes.
Like other recent challengers -- and unlike iTunes -- the Rhapsody MP3 store will feature songs that aren’t constrained by anti-copying measures. The four major record labels will provide Rhapsody such songs, which work on any digital music player and can be copied an unlimited number of times. Apple has such music from only one major label.
The store from Rhapsody America, a joint venture of RealNetworks Inc. and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks, offers another indication that the music industry, in its struggle with Apple over the pricing of music, is cultivating a new breed of Apple competitor.
Rhapsody plans to charge 99 cents for a single and $9.99 for an album, the same pricing as on iTunes.
One of Rhapsody’s selling points, however, is that customers will be able to listen to an entire song before purchasing it. ITunes gives customers a 30-second sample.
Amazon.com Inc. and Napster Inc. both opened digital download stores in the last year, selling music without copyright protections. In the past, the music industry has required digital locks on songs to make it harder for music to be copied and passed around on the Internet.
But consumers have been frustrated with the limitations of those protections, which restrict the number and kinds of computers and devices upon which music can be played.
In May 2007, Apple broke new ground when it began selling music without copyright restrictions from EMI Group. But it hasn’t been able to strike similar agreements with the other three major labels, which are in a struggle with Apple over its resistance to offering variable pricing on music.
With its new store, Rhapsody is now “better positioned to compete with the other stores and with iTunes,” said Susan Kevorkian, program director of consumer markets for research firm IDC.
To promote the launch, Rhapsody is offering a free album to each of the first 100,000 people to create accounts before Friday.
Rhapsody also plans to announce today that it will supply streaming music services and download stores on other Internet sites and services, such as Yahoo Inc., MTV and popular social networking service iLike.
James McQuivey, a media technology analyst with Forrester Research, said Rhapsody offered something different in the digital music marketplace: a chance for users to both stream and buy music.
“ITunes is so big. How do you beat them at their game?” McQuivey said. “From Rhapsody’s perspective, you don’t.”
Rhapsody is trying to create a unique position by fueling music rather than just being a one-stop destination, he said.
In a deal announced last year, Rhapsody will allow Verizon Communications Inc.'s customers who use their phones to listen to music to manage tunes on their computer and load them onto their phones -- something that hasn’t been easy up to this point.
Launched in December 2001, Rhapsody has built a music subscription service, as well as a free Internet radio service that’s available through services such as Comcast Corp.'s Internet access.
Rhapsody offers several services, which the company says together have just less than 3 million subscribers.
The most comprehensive service, Rhapsody to Go, costs $14.99 a month and gives customers unlimited access to a library of 5 million songs that they can listen to on portable devices. But the number of subscribers has been flat, said Anu Kirk, Rhapsody’s general manager of product management.
The service has been hampered for a variety of reasons. It doesn’t work with Apple’s iPod, the most popular digital music player. Critics have debated whether enough people are interested in a subscription service and whether Rhapsody’s subscription price is too high.
Now, Rhapsody subscribers will be able to preview as much music as they want before buying directly from the Rhapsody store. Music shoppers who aren’t subscribers can listen to 25 full songs a month.
“ITunes is like a vending machine,” Kirk said. “I look at Rhapsody as a complete breakfast.”
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michelle.quinn@latimes.com
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a0b3e49851fe07b7986ad313f4ea69a4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-30-he-toxic30-story.html | ‘Cleansing’ comes naturally | ‘Cleansing’ comes naturally
To read the Internet ads, you’d think that our bodies were awash in “toxins” -- usually unspecified -- and that we should therefore go to dramatic lengths, such as “colon cleansing” and chelation, to get rid of all this bad stuff.
Don’t believe it. Or to put it more gently, don’t risk your health or your pocketbook on programs that promise to “detoxify” you -- not without doing your homework first. For starters, ask exactly what these supposed “toxins” are. And think twice -- or 20 times -- before undergoing chelation, a procedure that uses powerful drugs to rid your body of heavy metals, such as mercury and lead.
Some alternative medicine practitioners, such as Dr. Glenn Rothfeld, medical director of WholeHealth New England in Arlington, Mass., believe that cleaning out the colon occasionally may help some people, particularly those with irritable bowel syndrome, “though whether it helps by getting rid of toxins is not clear.”
And there’s some evidence, Rothfeld said, that the digestive tracts of people who eat typical Western diets may move wastes along more slowly than those of people who eat more fiber. In theory, this longer “transit time” could mean that some substances, like nitrosamines, which are found in preserved meats and are carcinogenic in animals, have more time to cause trouble.
But, generally, people don’t need to take dramatic steps to “detoxify” themselves because human bodies have multiple systems for getting rid of wastes: by sweating, exhaling, urinating and defecating. If you really want a “clean” system, eat more fruits and vegetables and less junk food, all of which we’re supposed to do anyway.
One testimonial ad, next to a truly gross picture on www.drnatura.com, reads, “How would you feel if long pieces of old toxin-filled fecal matter were stuck to the inside of your colon for months or even years?” But it’s simply not true that waste material gets stuck indefinitely in the colon -- though the cleansing products themselves can form the gels that look like huge stools.
“I’ve heard my kids say that there’s stuff in the GI [gastrointestinal] tract for seven years,” said Dr. Douglas Pleskow, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “That is the urban legend. In reality, most people clear their GI tract within three days.”
Fuzzy science
The ads for colon cleansing are also remarkably vague about what toxins would be purged with enemas, laxatives or special diets. Author Peter Glickman advocates a raw food diet. Asked what toxins his colon-cleansing dietary regimen “Master Cleanse” gets rid of, Glickman named “metabolic toxins,” parasites and “environmental toxins . . . whatever kinds of stuff we’re breathing in air.”
Wrong, said Dr. Bennett Roth, a gastroenterologist at UCLA. “There is absolutely no science to this whatsoever. There is no such thing as getting rid of quote-unquote ‘toxins.’ The colon was made to carry stool. This is total baloney.”
The content of the intestinal tract is mostly bacteria, which can aid digestion. “An enema or laxative does not get rid of more ‘bad’ versus ‘good’ bacteria,” said Dr. David Heber, director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition. It gets rid of both. “We don’t like the idea of carrying bacteria, so lots of folks want to cleanse. But remember, bacteria can be your friend.”
Moreover, colon cleansing would do no good for environmental pollutants such as PCBs and DDT, which are stored not in the gut but in fat, and therefore can’t be eliminated by colon cleansing, said Dr. Ed Zimney, medical director of Healthtalk.com, a website dedicated to chronic diseases.
(Disclaimer: The writer is the host of a weekly radio show on Healthtalk.com.)
Perhaps most worrisome, colon cleansing can actually be dangerous, because most techniques draw fluid from surrounding tissues into the colon. This disrupts the balance of electrolytes such as sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, magnesium and phosphorus, said Pleskow of Beth Israel. This shift in fluids can lead to dehydration and low blood pressure.
As for chelation, it can be useful to get rid of heavy metals such as lead in people with very high levels in their blood. But chelation can also be dangerous: The chelating drugs can be toxic to the liver and kidneys.
It is inappropriate for people who have near-normal levels of heavy metals to get chelation therapy, said Dr. Rose Goldman, an associate professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Beware of practitioners who use hair samplings to detect multiple heavy metals and elements, Goldman said. “This type of hair sampling is highly inaccurate,” she said. Some practitioners push chelation on people who complain of vague symptoms like fatigue and difficulty concentrating, which could easily be due to problems other than heavy metal poisoning.
Be informed
If you decide on chelation, ask if the physician is board certified by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education or the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Be skeptical about practitioners who say they practice “clinical ecology,” which is not a recognized medical specialty.
And before you jump to chelation, said Dr. Alan Woolf, director of the pediatric environmental health center at Children’s Hospital Boston, make sure the environment is as free as possible of the contaminant in question, such as lead, so you don’t recontaminate yourself. And try conservative treatments first, such as adding calcium, zinc and iron to the diet because these minerals can block the body’s absorption of lead.
Before you fall prey to the country’s rampant toxic phobia, take a moment to ponder the whole notion of detoxification. And remember, your body has an extraordinary ability to cleanse itself.
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health@latimes.com
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a8d70dcd1592ea23486333732b895a52 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-30-me-ucla30-story.html | A seamless move for hospital | A seamless move for hospital
UCLA Medical Center’s new hospital admitted its first patients Sunday after successfully moving patients across the street from its old facility in a delicate, tightly scheduled operation.
The transfer occurred even as new mothers delivered their babies and doctors performed organ transplants. The 335 patients were moved at the rate of one every two minutes.
The move capped years of planning that began after the 1994 Northridge earthquake badly damaged the old site.
“I found it a very emotional experience to actually see the patients moved,” said Gerald S. Levey, dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine, adding that some staffers wept. “It’s wonderful to finally see the new hospital filled with people.”
Some of the most acutely ill patients were transferred in mobile intensive-care units. About 2,100 staffers and 30 ambulances participated. Traffic on Westwood Boulevard was stopped during the transfer, which began at 5 a.m. and ended at noon.
“It’s just like going into a big sporting event,” Levey said. “You think you are prepared, but you never know.”
The facility opened after significant delays, with its cost growing from $597.7 million to $829.3 million. The building has been praised for its humane environment.
The design by I.M. Pei and his son, C.C. “Didi” Pei, “is not one of Pei’s greatest works,” former Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff said, but given its constraints, “the project is a masterful piece of light, nature, and scale -- one where architecture can function as an integral tool in the healing of the human psyche.”
Officials have said it should be able to withstand an 8.0 magnitude earthquake.
The complex is home to the Ronald Reagan Medical Center, the Mattel Children’s Hospital and the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital. It replaces a labyrinth-like complex that has 3.1 million square feet and 27 miles of corridors.
“We’ve built a hospital that is for the patients and for their families,” Levey said. “We wanted to emphasize light and spaciousness.”
Patient rooms at the new hospital are singles; the old site had many doubles.
“It’s really, really nice,” said Lisa Beck, who was lying in a chair next to her 11-year-old daughter, Miranda, a patient at the new hospital. “The rooms are really nice, just spacious . . . I love the windows.”
Miranda was moved to the new structure shortly after 7 a.m. Her mother said the transition was seamless and on time. When she walked into the new children’s ward, Miranda said, her first reaction was: “Wow.”
“They have a lot of games,” Miranda said, her attention drifting to a flat-screen television next to her bed that was playing the movie “Enchanted.” “When you step into it, you can look up at the ceiling and the constellations are in blue.”
The ceiling Miranda described was in the rotunda entrance to the children’s playrooms. The new hospital has a terrace for young patients to play on and small electric cars for them to ride. The first game played was on a Nintendo Wii video game system.
Two floors down, 36-year-old Wally Wu was awaiting a heart transplant. He said the hospital was especially nice for his wife, who often stays with him in the room.
“It pulls out to a double,” Wu said of a daybed next to his room’s window.
Other amenities include hotel-style room service, with meals carried to each room by waiters wearing bow ties. Hospital directors also said they had state-of-the-art medical technology, including top-notch imaging machines.
At midafternoon Sunday, the hospital’s first baby arrived. Weighing in at 6 pounds, 8 ounces, Antonio Ronald Morales was born at 2:28 p.m. to Antonio and Nancy Morales of Los Angeles.
Levey said the Peis had designed the hospital to last 100 years. “With any luck, it will support us for even another century after that,” he said.
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ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com
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garrett.therolf@latimes.com
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29e71f5c5ff8fa51d41dae57a4a1dc50 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-30-sp-dodrep30-story.html | Pierre to get MRI exam on hurt knee | Pierre to get MRI exam on hurt knee
Juan Pierre didn’t travel with the Dodgers to Houston on Sunday, remaining in Los Angeles to undergo an MRI exam today to determine the extent of damage to the left knee that he hurt in the sixth inning of a 1-0 loss to the Angels.
A decision of whether to put Pierre on the ever-growing disabled list will remain on hold until team physician Dr. Neal ElAttrache diagnoses the injury, but Manager Joe Torre said, “Obviously, for him to come out of a ballgame, it’s more than just a bruise, you would think.”
Pierre, who has never been on the disabled list in nine major-league seasons, declined to comment through a team spokesperson.
The Dodgers’ leadoff hitter was injured on a head-first dive into second base for his 35th steal of the season, as shortstop Erick Aybar fell on his left leg while trying to retrieve a ball thrown to him by catcher Mike Napoli that caromed a few feet away. Pierre was able to limp off the field without any help.
Torre said Pierre tried to talk him into leaving him in the contest.
Delwyn Young probably will replace Pierre in the lineup today when the Dodgers open a four-game series in Houston, with utility infielder Luis Maza serving as the emergency fourth outfielder. Torre said that if Pierre has to be moved to the disabled list, he probably would be replaced on the active roster by Jason Repko of triple-A Las Vegas.
Sunday morning, Torre called Pierre his everyday left fielder, saying he would continue to be a constant in the lineup even when Andruw Jones made his expected return for the start of the second half of the season. At the time, Torre said that Jones would start in center field and that Andre Ethier and Matt Kemp would split time in right.
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Jones’ surgery
Torre said that he encouraged Jones to undergo surgery on his knee last month largely because he thought the center fielder would benefit psychologically from the time off.
Jones, who signed a two-year, $36-million contract last winter, was hitting .165 when he was hurt.
“I asked him what his plan was,” Torre said. “He said he planned to have it operated on after the season was over. I said, ‘If you’re going to get it operated on anyway and the only reason you’re not doing it is because you don’t want to leave the team at this point in time, it may be a good time to just move aside and try to get everything straightened out in your mind and physically.”
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Reshuffling the rotation
If Brad Penny emerges from a shortened simulated game Tuesday without any problems, he will be activated from the disabled list Saturday to make a start in San Francisco.
Penny would take the place of Chan Ho Park in the six-man rotation that the Dodgers will use up to the All-Star break. Park, who lowered his earned-run average to 2.52 in a win over the Angels on Friday, will be available for long relief duty Tuesday and Wednesday in Houston.
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Short hops
Hiroki Kuroda didn’t experience any unexpected discomfort after his three innings of simulation Saturday and will start Wednesday in Houston as scheduled. . . . Jeff Pentland, who was fired as the hitting coach in Seattle, was hired as a hitting instructor for triple-A Las Vegas.
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dylan.hernandez@latimes.com
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a3c6a7fc2126a3fe38600176d3c62d48 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-01-et-collarbow1-story.html | ‘Collar and Bow’ -- and then a suit | ‘Collar and Bow’ -- and then a suit
“Collar and Bow,” a 65-foot-tall sculpture of men’s formalwear accessories, was supposed to go up in 2004 to provide a jaunty greeting outside Walt Disney Concert Hall. Today it rests in pieces behind a tomblike warehouse in Irvine.
Blackbirds are the main audience for at least $3.8 million worth of work by Pop Art eminences Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The birds flit and twitter in eucalyptus trees behind a fence that separates the sculptural fragments from an equipment yard at Irvine’s Public Works Department.
Meanwhile, the aborted sculpture’s economic debris is being sorted out across the corner from Disney Hall at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. The Los Angeles Music Center, which hired Oldenburg and Van Bruggen, is suing the married couple, along with fabricators and engineers who tried to assemble their work, in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The damages, Music Center attorney David Lira said this week, come to more than $6 million, including payments for the sculpture, additional money for consultants and $600,000 that the Music Center plowed fruitlessly into reinforcing the sidewalk in front of the Frank Gehry-designed hall at 1st Street and Grand Avenue so the ground could support the heavy steel objects that never arrived.
The suit charges that when the final delivery deadline of Aug. 1, 2006, passed -- two years after the original date -- fabricators still had not solved technical problems that the Music Center said involved the white wing collar accompanying a giant black bow tie. In addition, “portions of the sculpture that were allegedly completed were literally falling apart” as surface skins came loose from underlying bones.
Oldenburg and Van Bruggen have festooned public places around the world with offbeat, brightly colored, gargantuan representations of everyday objects, including the massive binoculars that form the facade of the Gehry-designed Chiat/Day building in Venice; a sculpture owned by L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art that is a mammoth hybrid of a Viking ship and a double-bladed pocketknife plus corkscrew; and “Cupid’s Span,” a bow and arrow planted in a park with a view of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
But Lira says the artists and their technical collaborators struck out on “Collar and Bow.”
The sculpture was conceived a decade before Disney Hall’s 2003 opening. Oldenburg and Van Bruggen had been toying with the idea of a giant bow tie, and their friend Gehry thought that a swanky collar and tie, looking as if they had been tossed on the sidewalk by some colossus, would sound a playfully artful keynote for concertgoers and passersby.
The architect suggested increasing the sculptors’ initial 35-foot-high design to 65 feet. In May 2003, the Music Center contracted with Oldenburg and Van Bruggen’s company, Storebridge, to create “Collar and Bow” for $2.2 million and deliver it by Aug. 15, 2004. Donations of $1.85 million from Music Center patrons Richard and Geri Brawerman and $1 million from the J. Paul Getty Trust were expected to cover the cost.
“This is the most complicated work we have done, in detail, engineering and form,” Van Bruggen said in a 2004 interview. In fact, technical difficulties arose, and the Music Center granted a two-year extension and authorized spending an additional $1.6 million.
As the second deadline neared, Gehry and Stephen D. Rountree, the Music Center president, said problems with connections between sections of the giant white collar had not been solved. Rountree said fixing those would cost millions of dollars that the Music Center could not afford. Gehry vowed to help raise the money, saying, “I am laying my body on the tracks for this piece.”
A little more than six months later, in February 2007, the Music Center took the unusual step of suing the high-profile artists it had commissioned.
“It came to a point where the [Music Center] was like, ‘Hey, we’ve done everything we could. They’re not going to be able to deliver the sculpture,’ ” Lira said. With attempts at mediation and a negotiated settlement having failed thus far, he expects several months of depositions to be followed by a jury trial scheduled for Oct. 14.
Although the case will involve evidence on why the sculpture has failed, Lira said he doesn’t expect the project’s artistic and technical characteristics to be deciding factors: “My case will be a lot simpler: ‘Look, we paid over $6 million for a sculpture, and they never delivered it.’ ”
The suit accuses Oldenburg and Van Bruggen of negligence, breach of contract and unjust enrichment and adds an allegation of fraud against Carlson & Co., the San Fernando art fabrication company that has teamed up with the New York-based sculptors on other works and also built the Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog” on display at the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum.
Other defendants are Englekirk & Sabol, Los Angeles consulting structural engineers, and Santa Ana-based Westerly Marine, a custom boat builder that, according to its website, was hired to help produce the collar.
Englekirk & Sabol says in a cross-complaint that it was working for the artists, who are responsible for any damages. The firm says in court papers that Westerly Marine also has a cross-complaint.
The suit alleges that Carlson & Co. hid “the true extent of the problems,” prompting the Music Center to unknowingly waste money on a flawed project. It also says the company improperly used funds for purposes other than creating “Collar and Bow.”
Carlson’s lawyer, Laurence Lubka, said Friday that the fabricators’ contract was with the artists and not the Music Center, and “it’s silly to think anything was being hidden from them.”
The sculpture was “within spitting distance” of being successfully completed when Carlson’s involvement ended in 2005, Lubka said. “This thing as designed, as fabricated, is fundamentally a workable sculpture.”
It’s unclear when the pieces migrated from Carlson’s quarters to the Irvine warehouse complex of DisplayWorks, which designs and builds trade show exhibits.
Lubka said additional pieces have been built since Carlson’s work ended.
Oldenburg and Van Bruggen are not conceding failure, said one of their attorneys, Bruce Wessel. He said they recently asked Buro Happold, an international engineering firm, to submit a proposal. Subsequently, the firm said that for $350,000, it would evaluate the sculpture, suggest fixes and estimate what those repairs would cost. The artists wanted all parties to the suit to split the $350,000 and pledged $70,000 themselves.
“There was no money forthcoming from anyone else,” Wessel said. He would not comment on whether the artists’ defense will include an argument that “Collar and Bow” is salvageable.
The suit is proceeding at a difficult time for Oldenburg, 79, and Van Bruggen, 65. The Times of London reported in September that cancer that Van Bruggen had battled for six years had spread to her bones. She told the newspaper that “a lot of superficial things have dropped away from my life, but my creativity and my work with Claes remain central.”
Carey Ascenzo, manager of Oldenburg and Van Bruggen’s New York studio, said by e-mail Thursday that the artists would not be able to comment on the “Collar and Bow” suit because Van Bruggen recently had major surgery.
“They’re an incredible team,” said Peter Carlson, the art fabricator whose company is a defendant in the Music Center’s suit. “To have to go through this [court] process at this stage of their career is too bad.”
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mike.boehm@latimes.com
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df0fa73ac84df3ba47f900f1bac8ed54 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-01-fg-chemical1-story.html | Maliki criticizes delay in executions | Maliki criticizes delay in executions
Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s office lashed out Friday at the Iraqi presidential council for refusing to approve the executions of two of the three men sentenced to hang for the genocidal campaign against Iraq’s ethnic Kurdish minority during Saddam Hussein’s rule.
The public dispute highlighted the persistent rancor between Iraq’s major ethnic and religious factions, which continues to paralyze the highest levels of government nearly five years after Hussein’s fall.
Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, has pressed for speedy executions for the three, who were convicted in June of genocide and other crimes for their roles in a late-1980s military crackdown known as the Anfal, or “spoils of war,” campaign, which killed as many as 180,000 Kurds.
Earlier Friday, senior government aides said the three-member presidency council, which consists of President Jalal Talabani and two vice presidents, had signed off on the execution of Hussein’s cousin Ali Hassan Majid, who became known as “Chemical Ali” for ordering the use of poison gas against villages said to be harboring Kurdish guerrillas. The council’s decision was the last legal obstacle to carrying out the sentence, which must be done within 30 days.
But an aide said Vice President Tariq Hashimi, who, like the defendants, is a Sunni Arab, would not endorse the executions of the two military leaders who helped carry out the deadly attacks: Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai, a former defense minister, and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, the former deputy head of army operations.
Execution orders require the signatures of all three members of the presidency council under Iraqi law. Talabani, a Kurd who opposes the death penalty on principle, has given Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, a Shiite, authority to sign on his behalf.
Many Sunnis regard Tai and Mohammed as military professionals who were only following orders, and Hashimi has argued that their lives should be spared.
Sensing an opportunity to encourage reconciliation, Talabani has also urged clemency for Tai, who is said to have had contact with the Iraqi opposition before the war and surrendered voluntarily to U.S. forces in 2003.
Iraq’s two main Shiite parties, however, are opposed to commuting Tai’s sentence because of his role in the brutal suppression of a 1991 Shiite uprising at the end of the Persian Gulf War.
Maliki’s spokesman, Ali Dabbagh, said Friday that the presidency council had no legal authority to hold up the executions by refusing to endorse the decision of the Iraqi High Tribunal, which was upheld by an appeals court in September.
“Their death sentence was issued as one court order for three persons together, so it is incorrect to separate their verdicts and treat them differently,” Dabbagh said in an angry phone call. “Especially in such cases, the presidential council cannot pardon or reduce their sentence.”
The judiciary system has been unable to resolve the deadlock.
A Justice Ministry council ruled in October that the presidential council could not block the court order. But if an execution order is not signed by all three members of the council, the defendant’s sentence remains in legal limbo.
Such disputes have frozen progress in Iraq’s government, which is under pressure to match recent gains on the security front with steps to ease tensions between major ethnic and religious groups.
The split decision on the executions came days after the council failed to approve a law considered key to reconciliation that would have outlined the distribution of power among different levels of government and paved the way to provincial elections.
In Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish enclave, many rejoiced Friday at the news that Majid would soon hang.
Shereen Mahmoud has been in mourning since the day six of her relatives were killed when Iraqi airplanes dumped mustard and nerve gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja. She vowed Friday to discard her black clothes and start wearing colors again the day the sentence was carried out.
“I was feeling very sad when I heard that Ali Majid and Sultan Hashim would not be hanged,” said the woman, reached by telephone. “But today, when I heard about the approval, I decided to go to . . . Halabja cemetery and stand in front of my family’s graves and shout as loud as I can that Ali Hassan Majid will hang.”
But there was also widespread bitterness that the other execution orders had not been approved. Sirwan Ghareeb, a journalist in Sulaymaniya, said it was “a mistake for the future to forgive the crimes committed against our people.”
Many in Halabja want the execution to be carried out in the town, where about 5,000 people were gassed to death. But others in the Kurdish north said they just wanted justice to be done and did not want it to appear like revenge.
“What is important is to execute Chemical Ali, to see and hear him vanishing from life,” said Nisreen Kareem, an employee of the Sulaymaniya municipality.
“I don’t want him to be executed in Kurdistan. Iraq is for everyone; he should be executed in Baghdad since it’s Iraq’s capital.”
The three men remain in American custody. The U.S. military said it had received no immediate request to hand Majid over to the Iraqi government, which would be a sign that his execution was imminent.
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alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
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Times staff writers Tina Susman and Caesar Ahmed in Baghdad and special correspondent Asso Ahmed in Sulaymaniya contributed to this report.
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6e2f73fb8e1b8a3839aa000b111c1b65 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-01-oe-daum1-story.html | Booming sense of pride | Booming sense of pride
I’m not going to pretend I knew what Michelle Obama meant when, at a rally in Milwaukee, she said that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” She later said she meant she was proud of people “rolling up their sleeves” and “trying to figure this out,” which I take to mean she wasn’t so sure either.
The comment itself, of course, was woefully misguided, though, in my view, more for its vagueness and carelessness than for what it did or did not reveal about Obama’s national loyalty. What interested me more was what the ensuing brouhaha revealed about “pride” as both a word and a concept. As the lyrics to most country songs will attest, having “pride in your country” can be as easy as buying a new truck or as harrowing as serving in war. Given the range of options, how could Obama not have accessed this oh-so-accessible feeling in the 26 years she’s been an adult?
Maybe she suspects that pride, like stereo equipment or C-pluses in college, has become too cheap for its own good. After all, we seem to be patting ourselves on the back for achievements that, in a society like ours, should simply be expected. We are “proud of our country” when, for example, citizens join together to pile sandbags against flood waters or house their neighbors after a fire. But isn’t that just part of basic human decency? The preoccupation with shallow expressions of pride bears an unnerving resemblance to the parental overreaction to the cries of a spoiled child who has been praised for every little thing.
Maybe -- just maybe -- it has something to do with the baby boomers. By sheer force of numbers and the dumb luck of being teenagers or young adults during the most influential period in modern American history, the boomers, regardless of their political leanings, managed to convince themselves and everyone else that they not only dominate the culture, they are the culture. As a result, feeling pride in your country became unnervingly indistinguishable from feeling pride in yourself. The lesson: Patriotism can be as simple as taking a glimpse in the mirror.
There are plenty of reasons people like Barack and Michelle Obama might not define pride in quite those terms -- class background and race (and critical thinking skills) among them -- and therefore maybe their view of pride differs. A subtler yet more salient reason may have to do with how old they are. Though the Obamas may technically be baby boomers (Barack was born in 1961; Michelle was born in 1964, which is generally considered the cutoff), they are too young to occupy the same psychological sphere as bona fide boomers like Bill and Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush.
Whereas those folks were in their early 20s during the Summer of Love, Michelle Obama was just 3 years old. During the sexual revolution, both Obamas were pre-pubescent. During much of the Wall Street boom of the 1980s, they were students. By the time they married in 1992, AIDS had reduced the concept of free love to a misnomer of lethal proportions. This is hardly the boomer narrative.
Writing in the Atlantic magazine in December, Andrew Sullivan suggested that Barack Obama, “simply by virtue of when he was born,” is the best hope for uniting a country that remains obsessed with the cultural and political fissures that took root in the 1960s. I would take that a step further. The world views of Barack and Michelle Obama are more than just the result of not being baby boomers, they’re the result of not being raised by boomers either.
Obama may be quoted in Sullivan’s article as saying, “When I think of baby boomers, I think of my mother’s generation,” but he’s a bit off. His mother was born in 1942. As groovy as she may have been, she was not, in a strict sense, a boomer. And guess what? It shows. As highly as Obama appears to think of himself, he’s too earnest and industrious to fairly be called entitled. That word better suits many of his boomer counterparts -- and, one day, their praise-addicted children.
Michelle Obama’s mother, for her part, is 70 years old. And although it’s easy to imagine her cringing at her daughter’s lead-footed comment about pride, it’s just as easy to imagine that she might have had an indirect hand in it. We know that Michelle Obama was raised with high expectations and grew into a high-achieving woman who makes formidable demands on herself and others. And while that’s due in large part to the opportunities afforded by her country, I’d surmise it also has something to do with her rigorous standards for pride itself.
Being proud, after all, is not a substitute for having high standards, but the natural result of meeting or exceeding them. It’s a strategy that works for nations as well as people.
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mdaum@latimescolumnists.com
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c577228315739b9f598d986757f15998 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-02-fg-holocaust2-story.html | Israeli word choice provides fodder | Israeli word choice provides fodder
The Hebrew word shoah, or holocaust, is not used casually in Israeli society. Occasionally, it is employed to denote a massive disaster.
This weekend, though, Arab politicians and international pro-Palestinian activists, seizing on a comment by an Israeli minister, are calling the bloody Israeli incursion in the Gaza Strip a holocaust.
In what may prove to be a significant miscalculation, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai on Friday used the term in warning of more military action in Gaza.
By allowing constant rocket barrages from Gaza on nearby Israeli cities, the Palestinians, Vilnai said, were “bringing upon themselves a greater shoah because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate, whether in airstrikes or on the ground.”
As the three-day death toll in Gaza climbed toward triple digits, senior Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal accused Israel of “implementing a real holocaust against the Palestinian people for the past 60 years. What is happening today in Gaza is a new holocaust.”
The nongovernmental Palestinian Information Center issued a statement calling Vilnai’s words “the first indirect admission by an Israeli official that what Israel is conducting against the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a holocaust, albeit a slow-motion one.”
Given the Arab reaction and the rising Palestinian death toll, Vilnai’s use of the word is proving controversial within Israel as well.
As one Israeli commentator put it on a weblog: “This is a disastrous case of the foot-in-mouth disease, all too common among the contemporary breed of Israeli politicians. Terrible timing, too.”
Vilnai’s aides released a statement saying the former career army officer had only meant to imply a disaster. Others defended him as a victim of sloppy out-of-context translation.
Tom Gross, a media affairs columnist for the conservative National Review Online, said there was a major difference between “a shoah” and “THE shoah.”
“It is like confusing a ‘white house’ with ‘The White House,’ ” Gross wrote.
At the very least, Vilnai’s comment has opened a new front in the Middle East rhetorical war, with critics of Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories apparently seeing it as license to use the word at will.
Critics have compared the Israeli government to the Nazis and termed the barrier being built through the West Bank an “apartheid wall.” But they generally avoided invoking the word “holocaust” in describing the plight of the Palestinians.
But Saturday, even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a bitter rival of the Islamic movement Hamas, called the Israeli incursion into Hamas-run Gaza “more than a holocaust.”
In Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mahdi Akef issued a statement condemning the Gaza operation and adding, “I will quote the Israeli Defense minister as describing it as a holocaust.”
Mashaal, the senior Hamas leader, used the term multiple times while speaking to reporters from Damascus, Syria, where he lives in exile. He accused Israel of exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to “blackmail the world” and justify its actions in the Palestinian territories.
“Israel wants to exaggerate the Holocaust when it comes to numbers and make from it a tragedy such that no other can have their own tragedy,” he said. “The Palestinian people are the victims, and Israel is the hangman and killer.”
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ashraf.khalil@latimes.com
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d8634880e5ae22cdb4d5cdd4dea4e731 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-03-fg-annefrank3-story.html | Madrid musical treats Anne Frank seriously | Madrid musical treats Anne Frank seriously
Presenting, “Anne Frank, the Musical.”
Now, before you start humming “Springtime for Hitler,” the producers of a new Anne Frank musical here want you to know that they are serious. They are offering a rendition of the popular, tragic story of a Jewish girl and her diary during the Holocaust that they say is respectful, inspirational and educational.
And -- surprise! -- controversial.
Even before the premiere last week, uneasy voices were raised about whether committing such a heart-wrenching tale to music was a good idea. Octogenarian Buddy Elias, one of Anne Frank’s last surviving relatives and head of a Swiss-based foundation that controls rights to the diary, protested the project.
The suffering of the Holocaust was not an appropriate subject for entertainment he said in several statements to the media.
But the writers, actors and director behind the Spanish-language, $4.5-million production of “The Diary of Anne Frank: A Song to Life” (“El Diario de Ana Frank: Un Canto a la Vida”) have worked hard to dispel any notion of trivialization or irreverence.
“This is one more way to talk about the Holocaust, to remind people of something they must know about and remember,” executive director Rafael Alvero said in an interview. The message is especially urgent in these “scrambled times” of xenophobia and intolerance, he said.
Alvero, a veteran of Spanish theater and cinema production, including a dramatization of the works of slain poet Federico Garcia Lorca, said he got the idea for “A Song to Life” when he visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the museum that enshrines the canal-front building where the Frank family hid from the Nazis for two years.
Anne, her parents and her sister, Margot, were eventually betrayed and taken to Nazi camps. Anne died of typhus at the in 1945 at the age of 15. The diary she kept while in hiding is one of the most-read accounts of the Holocaust and has been made into a (nonmusical) play and movie.
On his visit to the Frank house, Alvero had in tow his own 13-year-old child, and he came to understand the complexity of the story, he said. There was something universal, he concluded, about the flights of fantasy and spurts of rebellion of a young girl, even when juxtaposed with some of the most terrible passages of human history. He eventually approached the Anne Frank foundation that controls the Amsterdam museum, which is a separate organization from that led by Buddy Elias, and pitched the idea for a musical.
That visit was in 1998; it took a decade for Alvero to persuade the foundation to agree to the project.
“There was skepticism at first,” he said. “There was a belief that this kind of entertainment was lightweight. I convinced them that it didn’t have to be that way.”
He pointed to other musical adaptations with serious themes, including “Cabaret” and “Miss Saigon,” as examples.
Once on board, Alvero said, the foundation became an ad hoc sounding board and has been asked to approve the script and other details of the production.
“They did not have to set out guidelines,” Alvero said. “I knew from the first moment that there had to be a rigorous respect for the material.”
Because the script does not quote directly from the diary, there were no copyright issues and no way for any objectors, such as Elias, to take legal action to stop the show.
Journalists were given a preview of the production. It may be jarring to see a group of people you know are doomed, wearing large yellow stars on their chests, merrily singing “Happy Birthday” to Anne. But overall, the script and music do not seem overly incongruous and certainly not offensive.
If anything, the play is uneven. In portions it is moving and dramatic; at other times, it drags. Or, as critic Leopoldo Alas, writing in Spain’s El Mundo newspaper, put it: The play “has achieved a balanced dignity, in exchange for a certain, inevitable monotony.”
Most of the drama takes place in a two-story cubicle representation of the secret annex where the Franks hid along with another couple and their son, who eventually became Anne’s love interest. In this version, “Kitty,” the imaginary confidant whom Anne writes to in her diary, becomes a fairy-godmother-type character who chats and sings as Anne recounts her girlish thoughts or complains about her parents, as any teen would.
The characters chafe at their confinement and despair for their survival. A neighbor occasionally brings them food. Every so often Nazi soldiers in jackboots march noisily across the stage to remind the audience of the historical context. One soldier guides a large German shepherd tethered by a leather leash for added menace.
The songs, primarily by Jose Luis Tierno, hit and miss. Especially memorable is Anne’s belting-out of a piece called “Radio Querida” (“Dear Radio”), which speaks of the lifeline that an old radio is for the trapped families:
Dear radio, voice of hope.
Today your sound makes me tremble.
Your voice alone shortens the distance
Of the dream of being free that you cause to be reborn.
I always say what I feel; this is the custom I want to maintain.
I am tired of being enclosed,
I would like to be a sea gull, to fly away and not return. . . .
And to feel I will never die.
The role of Anne is played by a Cuban-born girl from Miami, Isabella Castillo, soon to be 14. Her voice is powerful and passionate. Castillo won the part over 150 girls who auditioned, that group having been culled from a much larger one of hundreds drawn by an Internet search.
The first half of the play, under the direction of Daniel Garcia Chavez, takes a long time to establish the stifling claustrophobia of the families’ confinement. The second act picks up the pace and ratchets up the intensity through the discovery and deportation of the Franks.
Performances of “A Song to Life” are scheduled to run at Madrid’s Haagen-Dazs Calderon theater for the next year. Free matinees have been booked for school groups, Alvero said. And special previews for local Jewish groups have won praise, he said.
Casa Sefarad, a Jewish cultural institution in Madrid, is promoting the play on its website, a sign of approval.
If the play is successful, Alvero said, he hopes to take it on the road, to other parts of Europe and Latin America, and possibly the United States.
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wilkinson@latimes.com
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8e1f272d8bf0abe59c4e51febd92c2c2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-03-sp-bbnotes3-story.html | Fielder upset with pay | Fielder upset with pay
Prince Fielder is frustrated about his contract.
The Milwaukee Brewers renewed the slugger’s contract for $670,000 on Sunday after he finished third in the National League’s most valuable player voting last season.
“I’m not happy about it at all,” Fielder said. “The fact I’ve had to be renewed two years in a row, I’m not happy about it because there’s a lot of guys who have the same amount of time that I do who have done a lot less and are getting paid a lot more. But my time is going to come. It’s going to come quick too.”
The first baseman, who made $415,000 last season, will be eligible for arbitration after this season.
General Manager Doug Melvin said he thinks the 23-year-old Fielder is making more money than any player not eligible for arbitration who doesn’t have a multiyear contract. The Brewers base their offers to young players on performance benchmarks, not what other teams have offered players in similar situations.
“We view our system as more than a fair system,” Melvin said.
Melvin said Fielder hadn’t talked to him directly about his frustration.
“You have to respect their scale,” Fielder said. “But like I said, I’m not happy about it. But I’m going to do my job this year.”
Fielder led the NL with a franchise-best 50 home runs last year and had 119 runs batted in. Left fielder Ryan Braun, the NL rookie of the year last season, also had his contract renewed for $455,000.
The Brewers also agreed to a one-year deal with second baseman Rickie Weeks, who will make $1,057,000 in his third full season.
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The Florida Marlins renewed shortstop Hanley Ramirez’s contract at $439,000. He made $402,000 in 2007 when he hit .332 with 29 home runs, 81 RBIs and 51 stolen bases.
“That’s OK,” Ramirez said. “Whatever they think I deserve. I don’t care.”
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Atlanta Braves pitcher Mike Hampton, who hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2005 because of multiple shoulder and elbow injuries, gave up one hit in two innings in an exhibition against Houston.
“I still have a ways to go,” he said. “My arm feels great but my legs aren’t all there yet.”
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Chicago Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano will miss up to five days after he broke his right middle finger during fly ball drills. . . . Troy Patton ended his side session after throwing only 10 pitches, a setback that forced the Baltimore Orioles to schedule another examination on the left-hander’s ailing shoulder.
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244b6a3398820c48263c91e65e79712b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-04-et-amsterdam4-story.html | He’s seen it all, but we haven’t | He’s seen it all, but we haven’t
I want to like “New Amsterdam,” I do, I do, I do. The idea of a homicide detective who is really a Dutch colonist/soldier granted immortality by the witchy native girl whose life he saved in 1642? Catnip to a history-geek girl with a predilection for brooding, troubled men and novels in which Sherlock Holmes runs into Sigmund Freud or Edgar Allan Poe. (Do you hear me, fellow devotees of “House,” “Life” and “In Treatment”?)
Oh, the wisdom such a man would have, the issues he would face -- loss, loneliness, a real New Yorker’s outrage over the dandification of Times Square. The artists he could have met, the opening nights, the ballgames, the insight into historical events he would have because he was actually there at the time. With a pilot directed by Lasse Halstrom (“Chocolat,” “The Cider House Rules”), such a man, such a concept seem ripe with delicious possibility.
The show, unfortunately, is not. Played out as a cop procedural, it has a predictable narrative structure that at times resembles nothing so much as a prison. Perhaps frightened by the wackiness of a 366-year-old cop, the writers have dressed him up in cliches. John Amsterdam (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is the best cop in the department, a maverick, an iconoclast, a lone wolf. Or so he tells his new partner Eva Marquez (Zuleikha Robinson), whom he doesn’t expect to stick around any longer than any of the previous 157 partners he’s had.
But Eva is one tough cookie (not to mention Latina, which seems to be the current choice for partners of maverick cops -- see also “Life”). She will not be scared off by Amsterdam’s sudden mysterious silences, off-hours naked swims or even his almost photographic resemblance to that guy in the really old painting. When a young woman is found dead, Eva goes by the book and Amsterdam goes off the grid. You know the drill. It is not the most interesting case on record -- Angela Lansbury would have solved it in 2 1/2 minutes -- but at least Amsterdam is able to show off his special knowledge of New York and his relationship with its history, which at least promises greater things in future episodes. Oh, and in a very clever plot twist, he makes “antique” furniture in his spare time, just to keep the cash flow healthy.
No, it’s not the by-the-numbers procedural or the so-familiar odd couple as cop partners that keep “New Amsterdam” from achieving greatness, or even pretty-goodness. It’s the love story.
As we discover way too early on, Amsterdam has been granted immortality for a purpose -- he must find his one true love. Only she can make his heart whole enough to hold an expiration date. It’s an alarming notion -- true love’s kiss as the seal o’ doom -- but as Amsterdam makes irritatingly clear from the get-go, immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be.
For hundreds of years he has been searching for her, only to find her minutes into the pilot. Which is kind of a drag, considering we just met the guy -- now we’re supposed to be rooting for his death? Fortunately, he doesn’t actually find her, he senses her -- by having what appears to be a heart attack -- in the middle of a crowded subway.
So now we have a 366-year-old homicide detective who makes furniture and is desperately seeking his one true love who will make him mortal.
I don’t know what the writers were thinking -- that women wouldn’t watch without an immediate romantic angle? -- but this is what I would call a Season 3 development. Or at least Episode 3. The whole true love thing should not be approached until all the dramatic possibility of a cop who might just know what happened to the lost settlement of Roanoke has been a bit more properly explored, if not wrung dry. Throwing it in the pilot just muddies the waters -- what kind of a crazy show is this anyway, you find yourself wondering, and not in a good way. The pilot, and I fear the show, is trying to be so many things it winds up being . . . nothing.
Also, for the record, not even the girliest of geek girls wants the tough guy maverick cop to start out seeking his own true love. That’s just wrong -- I mean, he hasn’t even met us yet.
The second episode is a bit more reassuring. Amsterdam’s relationship with best friend and trusted secret keeper Omar (Stephen Henderson) is explained most satisfactorily, and as we see our hero’s past lives, and heartbreaks, we understand his quest for mortality a bit more.
So there is hope, albeit it slender, that Amsterdam can get that crazy dame off his mind for a bit and do what 366-year-old Dutch cops do best -- whatever the heck that is.
mary.mcnamara @latimes.com
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‘New Amsterdam’
Where: Fox
When: 9 tonight; 9 p.m.Thursday; regular time will be 9 p.m. Mondays
Rating: TV-14-LSV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for coarse language, sex and violence)
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5c44ba1e482285ddbef1289b4fc0613f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-04-et-polartists4-story.html | Arts of the campaign trail | Arts of the campaign trail
When it comes to campaign themes, the arts can’t compete with healthcare reform, national security, the sluggish economy -- just about anything you might name.
But this presidential primary season, people who work at the crossroads of politics and culture say the arts have attained a higher profile than usual -- and the push for an arts agenda has established a foothold in the campaign landscape.
Linda Frye Burnham, well known in Los Angeles arts circles for starting High Performance magazine and co-founding Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, began hearing in January about Barack Obama’s support for the arts.
Along with thousands of other arts figures, she received an e-mail detailing how Obama would increase support for the National Endowment for the Arts, embrace arts education, strengthen cultural diplomacy, advocate an artist-friendly tax law and propose an Artist Corps to send young artists to teach in low-income areas.
In Ohio, meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign worked to arrange a gathering at which her advisors hoped to win arts-interested voters with her commitment to the same ideas. Mike Huckabee has promised that should he be elected, he’d follow through on his devotion to arts education, especially. And last March, John McCain answered a New Hampshire theater manager who said he hoped the senator would support the arts by sending the man a personal check for $500.
The statements and promises, as it turns out, reflect an initiative called ArtsVote2008 mounted by the political arm of a group called Americans for the Arts, or AFTA.
In advance of the Iowa caucuses, ArtsVote gave all the candidates then running a 10-point plan for the arts in public life. No. 1 stresses NEA grants to the sorts of local arts agencies and groups that AFTA represents. No. 6 urges candidates to enhance healthcare coverage for arts groups and artists. (The complete text is available at www.americansforarts.org.) ArtsVote then urged the candidates to address these points in public.
Such political pressure “is pretty common among other advocacy centers, but for the arts it is somewhat new,” says Rindy O’Brien, director of the American Arts Alliance, which represents opera, ballet and orchestra groups in Washington. “I come out of the environmental realm, and they would do a lot of that electoral work -- and Planned Parenthood does -- but, for the arts, you haven’t seen it.”
One reason it’s visible now is a matter of resources. In 2002, AFTA received a $127-million gift from Ruth Lilly, heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune.
The money, given in annual installments and spread across the group’s political, educational and service activities, lifted its yearly budget to $14 million from about $8 million. And those extra millions helped give clout to ArtsVote, a part of AFTA’s political arm, the Arts Action Fund.
With its 10-point plan in place, ArtsVote tracked candidates’ responses by giving a $40,000 grant to a group called New Hampshire Citizens for the Arts so it could hire Suzanne Delle Harrison, who runs a theater in the state. She, in turn, put candidates and their staffs on the record by asking them about their views before the state’s primaries. On the ArtsVote website are both the campaigns’ arts statements and a diary of Harrison’s lobbying adventure:
The diary alludes, for example, to a lecture Huckabee gave ArtsVote volunteers that Harrison described in an interview as a “fascinating” evangelistic interpretation of human creativity as a conduit for the creative role of God.
Beyond his $500 gift, McCain doesn’t appear in the log. His silence, arts advocates say, is already framing a clear difference on public financing for the arts between whichever Democrat runs and the Republican front-runner. “It would be a stark contrast, especially since Sen. McCain hasn’t responded in any way about supporting the arts,” says Narric Rome, director of federal affairs for the Arts Action Fund.
An issue of particular interest on the ArtsVote agenda is arts education, which, arts advocates say, became a casualty of the test-driven No Child Left Behind Act.
Obama, Clinton and Huckabee all extol exposing students to the arts. Speaking before the Virginia primary, Obama declared: “I want our students learning art and music and science and poetry and all the things that make education worthwhile.”
Pollsters have not attempted to measure the power of a national arts vote, and it’s hard to know how such stands will sway the public.
But the Arts Education Partnership, a coalition of 140 organizations, recently commissioned a poll of 1,000 likely voters from Lake Research, a Democratic polling firm. It showed that 57% of the respondents would more likely vote for a candidate who supported the development of the imagination in schools.
The poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, also found that 57% of voters would be less likely to pick a candidate who voted to cut funding for arts education.
Current and former Clinton and Obama campaign staffers speak of the candidates’ self-driven support for the arts. But they also credit former Americans for the Arts officials and members of other arts organizations for helping AFTA develop its 10-point plan. O’Brien of the American Arts Alliance says it was consulted. And Rachel Lyons, the Clinton campaign’s deputy political director in New Hampshire, is a former director of the American Arts Alliance, which ArtsVote’s Harrison believes won her a particularly “open and knowledgeable” hearing with the campaign.
Last spring, a key Arts Action Fund official gave an extensive briefing calling for more funding for arts education and its other priorities to the Obama campaign’s Arts Policy Committee, a growing volunteer group of arts professionals, researchers and artists that both considers arts policy and works politically.
In addition, novelist Michael Chabon has written a statement of principles for the campaign called “Thoughts on the Importance of the Arts to Our Society”.
Clinton advisors, for their part, speak of the ArtsVote proposals as one of several influences. The Clinton campaign exchanged e-mails with Rome about arranging the arts gathering in Ohio.
According to Clinton officials, the campaign has no arts policy committee but instead has opted for what domestic policy advisor Catherine Brown calls “a more organic approach” of reaching out to “Hillary Clinton’s many friends who know about her passion for the arts.”
Overall, the Democrats’ formal responses to ArtsVote are similar in how they parallel the ArtsVote priorities.
The Clinton campaign has outlined nothing comparable to Obama’s Artist Corps, but it has proposed a Putting Arts in Reach initiative, which would “offset the cost of musical instruments, art supplies, drama equipment, and other things used in arts education for children from low-income communities.”
Will such words actually produce programs?
Says Burnham: “I’ve lived long enough to know that platforms mean relatively little when people get in there and find out what is going on. They give a sense of whether the candidate gets it or not -- the value of the arts to the American public. I know that Americans for the Arts will keep rattling their cage for change, whether it is Obama or Hillary.
“What I wonder is what would happen if McCain got in and Huckabee were vice president. What would happen to the arts then? I think about that a lot.”
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bc96b9b480572567310dc90d3b0425f9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-04-fi-allbiz4-story.html | Singapore Air to offer roomier Pacific flights | Singapore Air to offer roomier Pacific flights
Flights with all-business-class seats popular for trips across the Atlantic will finally fly across the Pacific.
Today, Singapore Airlines is expected to announce plans to add daily business-class-only flights in May to the carrier’s namesake city from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, followed by service from Los Angeles International Airport in September.
Both flights are the world’s longest, with the Newark route the farthest in distance at 10,357 miles and the LAX service the most enduring at nearly 19 hours.
The round-trip fare from LAX is expected to be about $8,000.
The flights, which will have 100 business-class seats, would be the first of their kind for transpacific travel and follow a growing list of carriers offering all-business-class service across the Atlantic.
Some aviation analysts said few Asian carriers were likely to follow the airline, though Singapore Airlines has long been known for setting trends. It was the first to fly the world’s largest passenger jet, the Airbus 380, and it often tops surveys as the best airline in the world.
Analysts said few airlines have planes with the size and range of Singapore’s Airbus 340-500, and the industry is worried about a slowing global economy that could crimp corporate travel.
“I think other airlines would like to if they could, but most don’t have the plane, and we’re coming into the economy that they don’t have an answer to,” said Joe Brancatelli, publisher of a website for business travelers called Joe Sent Me.
The move comes as growth in air travel appears to be slowing in most parts of the world except for Asia.
Last week the International Air Transport Assn. reported that international passenger traffic grew 4.3% in January, down from 6.7% in December and 7.4% for all of last year.
“Asia outside of Japan is looking strong, even as the U.S. economy weakens,” said Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of the industry trade group. Overall, he said, the “sharp shift in demand growth patterns makes it clear that the U.S. credit crunch is negatively impacting air travel.”
But Singapore Airlines executives said that at the same time, demand from corporate travelers remained robust, particularly from those in the finance, technology and oil industries.
The nonstop flight from LAX to Singapore is highly popular among travelers on oil-related business who are connecting through LAX from Houston.
“Most days we have a wait list” for business-class seats,” said James Boyd, spokesman for Singapore Airlines. “There is simply more demand than supply in both LAX and Newark.”
To start the service, Singapore Airlines, one of the world’s largest airlines serving Asia, said it would reconfigure five of its Airbus 340-500 long-haul planes with 100 business-class seats that can fold out to form beds.
The planes are currently outfitted with 181 business and “premium” economy seats.
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peter.pae@latimes.com
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022eccd7e8bbb10b7d9a3e00c32bfbbb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-04-me-author4-story.html | Memoir a fake, author says | Memoir a fake, author says
The gripping memoir of “Margaret B. Jones” received critical raves. It turns out it should have been reviewed as fiction.
The author of “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed autobiography about growing up among gangbangers in South Los Angeles, acknowledged Monday that she made up everything in her just-published book.
“Jones” is actually Margaret Seltzer. Instead of being a half-white, half-Native American who grew up in a foster home and once sold drugs for the Bloods street gang, she is a white woman who was raised with her biological family in Sherman Oaks and graduated from Campbell Hall, an exclusive private school in the San Fernando Valley.
Her admission that she is a fake came in a tearful mea culpa to the New York Times, which last week published a profile of Seltzer using her pseudonym. It was accompanied by a photograph of the 33-year-old and her 8-year-old daughter in Eugene, Ore., where they now live.
Seltzer was unmasked when her sister Cyndi Hoffman, 47, saw the newspaper’s profile and notified the memoir’s publisher, Riverhead Books, that Seltzer’s story was untrue.
Riverhead announced Monday that it had withdrawn “Love and Consequences” and canceled a book tour that was supposed to have started yesterday in Eugene.
Seltzer could not be reached at her home for comment late Monday.
In a brief telephone interview, Seltzer’s mother said her daughter was very upset and contrite about the fabrication, but had been advised by her editor not to speak further about it for the moment.
“I think she got caught up in the facts of the story she was trying to write,” Gay Seltzer said. “She’s always been an activist and she tried to draw on the immediacy of the situation and became caught up in the persona of the narrator. She’s very sorry and very upset.”
Gay Seltzer of Sherman Oaks said she had been aware of her daughter’s book, but had not read it or known that it was a purportedly personal account of gang life.
She confirmed that Hoffman had revealed the hoax.
Margaret Seltzer’s literary agent, Faye Bender, declined to comment.
“I’m so sorry, I can’t be a part of it. I’m running out” the door, she said.
But Sarah McGrath, Seltzer’s editor at Riverhead, told the New York Times on Monday that the publishing house was stunned by the disclosure.
“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or heat and we completely bought into that,” McGrath told the newspaper.
McGrath, whom the paper identified as the daughter of former New York Times book review editor and current writer-at-large Charles McGrath, characterized the deception as “a huge personal betrayal” and “a professional one.”
“Love and Consequences” drew admiring reviews from critics. Los Angeles Times book reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds on Feb. 10 cited “her loyalty to the language, the sense of community, the tight bonds she formed with her gang.”
The review told of how “at 5, Margaret B. Jones, part white, part Native American, was taken from her suburban Southern California home after she came to school bleeding from what the teachers and social workers assumed was a sexual assault. She spent three years in foster care before landing with ‘Big Mom,’ a hard-working black woman raising four grandchildren in South-Central Los Angeles. It didn’t take Jones long to fall in with the Bloods, the dominant gang in her neighborhood.”
The reviewer told of how the book described “Jones” selling drugs at age 12 because she was “eager to earn my own money toward the flame-red Nike Cortez with fat laces that everyone else wore, but even more excited to prove myself worthy of wearing the affiliated color and moving up the ranks.”
Seltzer told the New York Times that although the personal story told in the book was fabricated, other details were based on friends’ real experiences. She insisted to the paper that she wrote the book at a Starbucks coffeehouse in South L.A.
“I just felt there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it,” she said.
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bob.pool@latimes.com
rebecca.trounson@latimes.com
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7ff2b2779eee71c0638d65105d8713b8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-04-na-bill4-story.html | Bill focuses like a laser on Hillary’s future, his legacy | Bill focuses like a laser on Hillary’s future, his legacy
Bill Clinton, elegantly attired in a black suit and eye-popping orange tie, stood in the bed of a pickup on a brisk Dallas morning addressing a sparse crowd the other day.
There was no hint of desperation, no sign that his wife’s campaign is in disarray after 11 straight losses or any acknowledgment that he may have hobbled her campaign back in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where he tossed around phrases like “fairy tale,” compared Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson, then feigned shock that anyone took offense and blamed the media for stirring up trouble.
Instead, there was a tight focus on the only goal right now that matters: making sure Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Democratic presidential nominee. To that end, he has campaigned like a maniac, trying to make up for what he may have helped lose. In the last week, he has pinged from Texas to Ohio (and once to Rhode Island), stopping five to seven times a day, addressing groups that range from a few dozen to several thousand.
This may be Clinton’s last hurrah, his last chance to bend the will of the American people his way. If his wife doesn’t win decisively in either Texas or Ohio today, dreams of a second Clinton presidency will probably evaporate. There will be no debate over what to call the first male presidential spouse -- first gentleman? first laddie? -- nor a way to prove that the relative peace and prosperity of his White House years were no historical fluke.
Though his legacy is on the line too, he is all about Hillary.
Before, his voice was calm and measured. But now there’s a slightly more insistent pitch to it, maybe because he is spending so much time at outdoor venues, which are easy to book on the fly, but where he is sometimes forced to talk over traffic, passing trains and the wind.
The crowds, especially on weekday mornings, can be painfully small. “I’ve been going around, trying to do almost neighborhood events for a specific reason,” he explained to a gathering in Dallas. “I want to talk to people in smaller groups about their future.”
He has honed a stump speech that, in one instance last Tuesday in that small Dallas park, lasted a mere 12 minutes. That has got to be some kind of record for the famously voluble Southerner. These days, he pretty much avoids the media, though he did give a short interview last Tuesday to the student newspaper at the University of Texas here. (No news ensued.)
Clinton is using everything he can muster -- including restraint -- to help his wife win. He is playing nice for the most part, even complimenting Obama, though not to excess. “Most people who are going to vote actually like both these candidates, we know that,” he said last Tuesday in Fort Worth. “And we know that we are going to break a glass ceiling one way or the other. I think that’s a good thing.”
He often adds that he thinks it would be nice to have a Latino president, an Asian American president or a Native American president. By the end of one long day last week, he was adding “Arab American president” and “Jewish president” to the list. This followed an appearance in a Vietnamese and Chinese neighborhood of Dallas where the local official who introduced Clinton began by asking members of various ethnic groups to raise their hands, then, urged on by some in the crowd, ended by asking for a show of hands from “the white male community.”
Someone who works with Clinton lightheartedly compared this more disciplined version of him to James Bond’s antagonist from the 1999 movie “The World Is Not Enough.” The character, Renard, has a bullet in his head that cannot be removed, and as it edges closer to his cerebral cortex, he becomes more focused, more dangerous and completely unstoppable. (Until, at any rate, the handsome hero finishes him off. But that was not part of the analogy.)
Clinton now methodically makes his case for his wife on the issues: She is best suited to fix the economy, to effect universal healthcare, to improve education, to be commander in chief. He fills in a little of her background -- focusing on the work she did in the 1970s, when she spent time in Texas registering Latino voters and the work she did for the Children’s Defense Fund after law school instead of taking a high-paying corporate job.
(In that sense, her early years are becoming almost indistinguishable from Obama’s. Obama’s wife, Michelle, often talks about how he chose community service over a high-paying corporate job after law school too.)
The ever-present subtext of Clinton’s speech is, in fact, a running response to the political threat posed by Obama-mania, though he rarely utters the Illinois senator’s name. “I do not believe that we should eliminate from the presidency people who have done good work in their lives,” he will say. “I do not believe there is a conflict between experience and change.”
In one 32-minute speech, he used the word “change” 19 times. The New York senator is “a proven change agent.” She represents “change you can count on.”
Only occasionally does he let his legendary peevishness show.
“I know I get steamed when they say bad things about her,” he said at one stop. And he will drop a sarcasm bomb once or twice in every speech, usually on what he sees as the false choice between change and experience, the running theme of the Democratic contest: “If the past is irrelevant,” he said, “why not get rid of history classes in schools?” (On campuses, this is a sure-fire applause line.)
At an evening appearance at a park in Forth Worth -- Clinton becomes more animated the later it gets -- he mocked Obama’s message: “I didn’t get my hands dirty making all those good things happen in the ‘90s.” (In the World According to Bill, there were no sex scandals in the ‘90s, no political scandals, no bitter partisanship and certainly no impeachment. It was all good.)
The man who was often lampooned as the feelingest president is now counseling voters to disregard their feelings, particularly the kind of wishful sentiments that Obama has inspired among supporters.
“Don’t think about how you want to feel during the campaign,” Clinton said. “Don’t think about how you want to feel on election day.” And: “This is not a choice between experience and change. This is a choice between the feeling of change and the fact of change.”
One thing about Clinton that hasn’t changed: He is still a profligate waster of other people’s time. He was famously behind schedule as president, and often runs more than an hour late on the campaign trail. But crowds don’t seem to mind. And they find him an effective voice for his wife.
“I thought he was great,” said Emily Whitley, 18, a University of Texas freshman who enjoyed hearing Clinton talk about Hillary’s early years as an activist. “In some ways, he speaks better for her than she does for herself. It’s easier for him to brag on her.”
Before Clinton arrived, Jonathan Gifford, 35, a mortgage professional, stood at the edge of the crowd that filled the plaza in front of UT’s bell tower.
“I love Bill! I keep telling my parents that the Clintons are my Kennedys,” said Gifford, who does not hold out much hope that Sen. Clinton will win the nomination, but recalls the Clinton years with Camelot-like nostalgia.
“What is it they say?” asked Gifford. “Bill lied, but no one died.”
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robin.abcarian@latimes.com
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377b2f2a8255df9952fee592e70d65cc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-05-oe-rutten5-story.html | The lure of made-up memoirs | The lure of made-up memoirs
Tuesday’s revelation that a critically acclaimed memoir of gang life in South Los Angeles was an elaborate hoax raises troubling questions about the economics of American publishing, about our collective deference to victims and about the paucity of real literature based on our most urgent urban experiences.
“Love and Consequences” was published last week to favorable reviews. Its author, Margaret B. Jones, was purported to be a young woman of mixed Caucasian and Native American ancestry who grew up in the care of an African American foster mother in South L.A. Jones wrote of how her black foster brothers joined the Bloods street gang at 11 and 13 and described how one was shot dead by the rival Crips in front of her foster home. Jones recounted her own activities as a drug courier for the Bloods, how she received her first gun as a 14th birthday present and, most chillingly, how she used her first substantial drug profits to buy a burial plot.
It’s pretty gripping stuff. Earlier this week, however, the New York Times revealed that Jones is, in fact, Margaret Seltzer, a 33-year-old white woman and creative writing student who grew up in Sherman Oaks and attended Campbell Hall, an exclusive private Episcopal school in the Valley.
Seltzer/Jones’ fraud is bound to evoke memories of James Frey’s notoriously concocted memoir of drug addiction and imprisonment, “A Million Little Pieces,” which chat diva Oprah Winfrey turned into a national bestseller. And it comes just days after Misha Defonseca, author of “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” admitted that her bestselling book about her childhood also was fabricated. We easily could expand the list, but the question is: Why all this fraud now?
One reason has to do with public taste. In the United States and, increasingly, in parts of Western Europe, the only unchallenged moral authority has become that of victims. This should not be read as an expression of sympathy toward the injured; instead, it’s really an extension of the culture of narcissism’s influence into the world of letters. It’s a view that asserts that only those who have experienced pain or torment have a right speak of it, though others may participate vicariously through their eyes. Hence our insatiable desire for tell-all memoirs of every savage and degrading form of abuse -- as long as the account comes directly from those who suffered it.
Publishers are only too glad to serve that appetite, but they do so at a time when their own economics make them particularly vulnerable to fraud. No nonfiction publisher can afford serious fact-checking anymore; most do none at all. At the same time, they know that the TV and radio promotion critical to creating bestsellers demands authors “with a story to tell.” How many talk shows would have booked Seltzer/Jones if she had forthrightly admitted she was a white writer of imaginative fiction with a social conscience that impelled her to write about gang life in South Los Angeles?
It’s interesting too that we in Los Angeles have been here before -- though the fallout this time seems likely to provoke far more moralizing and far less soul-searching. In 1983, a previously unknown twentysomething Chicano writer named Danny Santiago published “Famous All Over Town,” a first-person account of growing up in the gang culture of East L.A. The book inspired a popular rock song of the same name and won prestigious literary awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and from PEN.
A year later, the writer John Gregory Dunne revealed in a piece simultaneously published in the New York Review of Books and The Times’ Opinion section that Danny Santiago, in fact, was a creation of a 73-year-old former screenwriter and onetime Communist Party member named Dan James, whose credits included Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.” James had been suffering from writers’ block ever since he’d been blacklisted. As Danny Santiago, he’d found a voice to write about the years of experience he’d gained doing social work in East L.A.
The reaction to this revelation couldn’t be more different from what Seltzer/Jones is experiencing. Dunne regarded “Famous All Over Town” as “a significant work of urban literature.” Joyce Carol Oates mused that for James, “the cultivation of a pseudonym is not so very different from the cultivation in vivo of the narrative voice that sustains any work of words, making it unique and inimitable.”
Sixteen years later, the eminent historian of the West, Patricia Nelson Limerick, came back to James’ book in an essay published in her collection, “Something In the Soil.” Limerick wrote that our literary judgments remain hostage to the ideology of authenticity, leaving “white Americans indifferent to, ignorant of, or even bored by the dilemmas faced by nonwhites. Whatever else Dan James signifies, he signifies a response to ethnicity that is radically different from that chilling lack of empathy.”
Whether Seltzer/Jones’ book deserves that sort of searching reconsideration probably is a moot question. The disappointed voyeur is an unforgiving reader -- and when it comes to the urban torment that fired the imaginations of Danny Santiago and Margaret B. Jones, we’ve become increasingly a nation of spectators.
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0073c4481fac048d066416cbef91a536 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-06-et-lang6-story.html | So much talent, so much to learn | So much talent, so much to learn
Lang Lang’s reputation as an exceptional and irrepressible showman has traveled far and wide. At 25, the Chinese pianist is already so popular that his record label, Deutsche Grammophon, markets him as a kind of Pavarotti of the piano. His latest disc, “The Magic of Lang Lang,” is a meaningless mishmash of sometimes nauseatingly overplayed excerpts from all over the place and concludes with a collaboration with Andrea Bocelli.
Yet a recording issued a few months earlier of two Beethoven concertos, accompanied by Christoph Eschenbach leading the Orchestre de Paris, is serious and very fine. And two years ago, Lang Lang was an exacting and exciting soloist in Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Tuesday night, he returned to Walt Disney Concert Hall for a recital. The place was, inevitably, packed. The audience was antsy, wanting fireworks, and Lang Lang eventually delivered. First, though, he had to prove he was a poet.
He is a poet. But he is an immature poet with a nuclear arsenal, and that makes him a very dangerous poet. The nuclear part of the weaponry is a killer technique. The threat is in the delivery system. He has the charisma to hold an audience in his power. Responsibility, though, is another matter.
The first half of Tuesday’s recital was refined, elegant and verged on the eloquent. It began with Mozart’s B-flat Sonata, K. 333, played with delicacy. Then Schumann’s large Fantasy in C brought out ardor. In both pieces, Lang Lang skimmed the surface. But the surfaces he created were flawless. Not every lake is best appreciated by jumping in.
In a tone sweet and pretty, a young pianist sang Mozart’s praises. His interpretation was chaste. Phrases rounded out just as they should. Melodies hung in the air nicely. Scale passages were smooth, even delicate.
Schumann received the benefit of a monster technique. The rolling bass lines, the trills, the intricate syncopations all sounded natural and alluring. The march movement had irresistible momentum. Lang Lang was loud, triumphant, and he was soft, floating pianissimos. His body, arm and torso as elastic as his phrasing. Still, for better and worse, this was a Fantasy all in the fingers.
After intermission came the fun, piled on gradually. In five traditional Chinese works, an impressionistic moon was reflected on a lake, a dance number was given a tango twist, happy holidays were indicated by a spray of zillions of notes. Granados’ “Los Requiebros” (Flatteries) was a Spanish dance that sounded not all that far from China.
Then, for no apparent reason, Lang Lang turned to Liszt’s transcription of the “Liebestod” from “Tristan and Isolde,” and “The Magic of Lang Lang” made sense.
In the program notes, Orrin Howard remarked that Liszt’s version is entirely respectful of its Wagnerian source, “an unadorned realization from piano of the orchestral/vocal original.” Lang Lang did the adorning.
As the evening progressed, he had become more and more animated on his bench, swooning for the reflected moon, dancing along, best as he could on his bench, with the dances. For the “Liebestod,” he became transfixed. He was singer and orchestra. Isolde’s melody -- sung as she is about to leave her body to be with her dead Tristan, love transcending all -- hovered in space surrounded by swirling accompaniment. Like a storyteller of genius, Lang Lang cast a spell, and an otherwise noisy audience sat enthralled.
Then, Liszt’s Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody and the circus act: the Lang Lang many had come for. His body was in constant motion. He flew across the keys. He was pianist/acrobat. The performance seemed superhuman and was, of course, thrilling. It was also a disgrace. The soul was eliminated from music in which there is a great deal.
Lang Lang has inherited Liberace’s curse. Once the audience knows what he can do, he must give it what it wants. And each time, he must outdo himself. In the single encore, Chopin’s Etude, Opus 10, No. 3, he outdid himself.
Lang Lang is probably the great pianist of his generation. But I’m afraid his career is not turning out to be an easy one.
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mark.swed@latimes.com
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e0c5b3175724e8b5cfca53d827c0a348 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-06-fi-tanker6-story.html | Air Force contract under fire after U.S.-French bid wins | Air Force contract under fire after U.S.-French bid wins
Members of a House subcommittee grilled Air Force officials today over the surprise decision to award a $40-billion aircraft contract to Northrop Grumman Corp. and European partner Airbus, with lawmakers arguing the decision would send coveted jobs overseas.
Sue C. Payton, assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, told the panel that the Northrop-Airbus aerial refueling tanker proposal provided a better “overall value” than that of rival Boeing Co.
But several lawmakers angrily argued that U.S. weapons systems should be made by American companies. Airbus is based in Toulouse, France.
“All the major parts of this plane will be built in Europe,” Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) said while pointing at Payton. “There’s going to be very little added to that in the United States. I just think this is totally unfair, and I hope we can do the right thing, which is to build this with an American company with American workers.”
Northrop, which is based in Century City, said shortly after the hearing that in fact 60% of the parts for the plane would be made by U.S. companies and that it would be assembled in Mobile, Ala.
The congressional backlash to Friday’s contract announcement was expected.
Payton said that while she understood the committee’s concerns, the Buy American Act doesn’t allow the Air Force to consider job creation among criteria used in evaluating bids.
“I wish I could reward someone I like,” Payton told the committee. “But according to law, these things can’t enter into the decisions made in acquisitions.”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a Pentagon news conference Wednesday that the contract was awarded based on rules created by Congress. “And if there’s a desire to change the rules of the game in terms of how these competitions are carried out, then clearly the Congress can do that through statute,” he said.
Payton said she could not discuss specifics of the Air Force’s decision until executives of Chicago-based Boeing were briefed on why the contract was awarded to the Northrop-Airbus consortium. The briefing is expected to take place Friday, with a follow-up meeting with Northrop expected next week.
After that second briefing, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, said Air Force representatives would be called back for a closed-door meeting with the panel in which details could be discussed.
Boeing’s top executive for its defense business said during a New York analysts’ conference Wednesday that the company remained firm in its belief that its proposal, a version of the Boeing 767 jetliner, was superior to the Northrop-Airbus entry, a modified Airbus A330 passenger plane.
“We offered an airplane that was more cost-effective, we offered an airplane that met the requirements better than the competition, and of lower risk,” said James Albaugh, president of Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems unit.
But he added that Boeing would formally protest the decision only “in the event that we think there is an irregularity in the proposal phase.”
Lt. Gen. John Hudson told the subcommittee that the Northrop-Airbus entry was rated better on nine key performance measures used by the Air Force.
Dicks, however, accused the Air Force of using “bait-and-switch” tactics in the bidding process. Dicks said Boeing executives told him that they learned the Air Force preferred a larger aircraft only after it was too late to alter their bid.
Northrop, however, disputed that account. “Throughout the process, both competitors in the KC-45A acquisition hailed the Air Force for conducting a fair and open competition,” the company said in a statement.
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ben.dubose@latimes.com
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Times staff writers Peter Pae in Los Angeles and Julian E. Barnes in Washington contributed to this report.
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ca25995a94cf03b61cd9e60c9b66754c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-06-me-mayors6-story.html | Truckers’ status is a hitch in port plan | Truckers’ status is a hitch in port plan
The mayors of Los Angeles and Long Beach have spent nearly a year marching in lock-step, crafting a groundbreaking $1.6-billion plan for removing nearly 17,000 exhaust-spewing diesel trucks from the nation’s two busiest harbors.
With remarkable ease, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster spurred their respective ports to pass initiatives that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: first a ban on older trucks moving through the ports; then a $35 fee on each cargo container to pay for newer, cleaner trucks.
But last month, Foster broke ranks with Villaraigosa by rejecting the plan’s final piece, a proposal backed by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to require independent truck drivers at the Long Beach harbor to be employees of trucking companies, a move that would make it easier for them to organize.
Foster’s decision drew an outcry from the region’s labor leaders and environmentalists, who have joined forces in the truck campaign. That, in turn, has thrown the two mayors’ views into stark relief.
On one side is Villaraigosa, who grew up in Los Angeles and entered public life as a union activist. On the other is Foster, who spent his childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., and worked for years in the management ranks of Southern California Edison, ending up as the utility’s president.
Villaraigosa and his allies argue that truck drivers, most of whom are now independent contractors, need to be well paid in order to take care of the new trucks that the ports plan to help them buy. On the other side, Foster and his supporters say the union-backed provision will attract lawsuits and be difficult to defend in court, delaying the clean-air plan by two to three years -- or killing it altogether.
The fight has quickly made Long Beach, a community once known as Iowa by the Sea, a target of big-city politics, L.A. style.
Since last month’s vote by the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners against that provision, a coalition of unions and clean-air advocates has bought at least five full-page, color advertisements denouncing Foster in the Long Beach Press-Telegram. With encouragement from Villaraigosa, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who represents the neighboring Port of Los Angeles, has been pressing Long Beach to reverse itself.
Two weeks ago, the Teamsters got tougher, urging the California Transportation Commission to deny Long Beach as much as $550 million earmarked for such projects as the repair of the aging Gerald Desmond Bridge. Teamsters legislative representative Barry Broad said state transportation money should continue flowing to Los Angeles, which is expected to approve the employee provision.
“We’re optimistic that the Port of Los Angeles will move forward with a rational plan,” Broad said. “Meanwhile, it’s going to be pandemonium and anarchy in Long Beach.”
The Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners is expected to begin reviewing options at a meeting tonight.
Each mayor insists that he has the right strategy for cleaning up the port complex, considered the largest stationary source of air pollution in Southern California. But the disagreement has left some industry leaders wondering whether politics will prove the undoing of the clean-air plan, which was supposed to ban every port truck built before 2007 by Jan. 1, 2012.
“This is something that has national implications beyond the harbor,” said lobbyist Barna Szabo, who has a client that just received $737,000 from the ports to buy trucks fueled by liquid natural gas. “So I think the schedule will be lost. The clarity will be lost. I’m just not sure where it’s going to go, and it’s a darn shame.”
The mayors’ two distinct styles were on display last week at a conference attended by shipping industry leaders, alternative fuel makers and advocacy groups. Villaraigosa, who typically shows up late to public appearances, threw the conference an hour behind schedule by the time he finished his luncheon address, which called for truck drivers to receive better wages and benefits.
“These truckers [are] working jobs that most of us -- and I’m looking at all of you in your suits and ties, you’re doing very well -- that most of us would never accept,” he told the crowd. “These are jobs that are dirty. They are jobs that don’t provide healthcare. These are independent contractors who could never afford to do what we need to do to retrofit our [truck] engines.”
A day later, Foster made a more punctual appearance, staying 20 minutes after his speech to greet a group of admirers. Chewing gum as he spoke, Foster talked of children getting sick from diesel exhaust and warned that the union-backed measure would be a distraction from the goal of rapidly cleaning the air.
“We cannot wait, and I’m not going to stand around and see kids in Long Beach continue to contract asthma, continue to have truncated lung development . . . or continue to miss school,” he told the crowd.
Because he has been so vocal on the clean-truck program, Foster has borne the brunt of the criticism since the five-member Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners voted to allow trucking firms to continue using independent owner-operators.
Moments after that vote, one Villaraigosa ally declared that the region’s environmental and labor groups would sever their ties to Foster forever, dooming his political future.
“He’s done,” declared Jonathan Parfrey, who heads Green L.A, a coalition devoted to shaping and promoting Villaraigosa’s environmental agenda.
Foster refused to back down, saying that until this fight, he has had good relations with the region’s labor unions.
“My job is not to promote their interests. My job is not to promote corporate interests. My job is the public interest, and I take that seriously,” he said. “So the end result is, if this happens to be the only office I ever hold and the only term I ever serve, I’m comfortable with that.”
The Teamsters-backed provision is favored by an array of clean-air advocates, public health groups and a dozen unions, as well as the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, an ally of Villaraigosa. But it is opposed by business leaders, particularly the American Trucking Assn.
Despite the acrimony, environmentalists and business leaders agree on one thing: Neither can imagine the side-by-side ports having separate systems for regulating truck drivers. To David Pettit, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the boundary between Los Angeles and Long Beach means little when it comes to air pollution.
“In practical terms, this is one big port, and the best way to clean it up is for the ports to act as one,” he said.
A trucking industry representative agreed but warned that his organization would sue Los Angeles if it followed through with Villaraigosa’s plans for requiring that truck drivers be employees.
“The mayor’s biggest problem is he has good intentions, but they are not legal,” said Curtis Whalen, executive director of the intermodal motor carriers conference of the American Trucking Assn.
The political elites in Los Angeles and Long Beach have a web of relationships that go well beyond the one-year alliance between Foster and Villaraigosa. Foster was Hahn’s boss at Edison a decade ago, before she became a city councilwoman. Long Beach Harbor Commission President Mario Cordero has a daughter, Celine Cordero, working for Villaraigosa.
The coalition pushing the truck plan is based at the office of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a labor advocacy group whose executive director, Madeline Janis, is a high-profile Villaraigosa appointee at the Community Redevelopment Agency.
Janis’ organization has been a major Los Angeles player in battles over raising the wages of hotel workers near Los Angeles International Airport and a recent push for hospital expansion in the San Fernando Valley. The group is so focused on the truck campaign that it registered two of its employees as lobbyists. And on the day of the vote in Long Beach, it sent Foster an extensive public records request demanding copies of all correspondence between him and two dozen business entities.
The truck fight has exposed other differences between Long Beach and the nation’s second-largest city. Villaraigosa, a national political figure, met personally with Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. in November 2006 to discuss the truck proposal. Foster, 61, heard from the union’s West Coast representatives.
Villaraigosa also has not hesitated to raise huge campaign contributions from groups with a stake in the clean-truck plan. He secured $500,000, the largest donation of the campaign for the ballot measure known as Proposition S, from Change to Win, a labor coalition pushing the truck plan. Among the unions in that group is the Teamsters.
Villaraigosa said last week that he still believed the Teamsters-backed proposal would ensure that truck drivers maintain the new alternative-fuel trucks. And although his close allies have made Foster a target, Villaraigosa said he planned to keep working with Long Beach.
“I don’t see this as a divorce in any way,” he said. “We’re taking a different path.”
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david.zahniser@latimes.com
louis.sahagun@latimes.com
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e53a0c7f145c666d401669c4c315efbd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-07-fg-bout7-story.html | Long-sought global arms dealer arrested | Long-sought global arms dealer arrested
The long hunt for a man regarded as one of the world’s most notorious arms dealers climaxed Thursday in Bangkok, Thailand, where an eight-month sting operation by a team of U.S. agents led to the capture and arrest of Russian businessman Viktor Bout during an alleged attempt to supply Colombian rebels with weapons and explosives.
Bout was taken into custody by Thai police at a luxury hotel in Bangkok, where, U.S. officials said, he was waiting to complete a weapons deal in which he expected to earn as much as $15 million for delivering surface-to-air missiles, attack helicopters and other weaponry.
U.S. authorities said they would move quickly to secure Bout’s extradition. But his controversial role in supplying the American military effort in Iraq and possible Russian interest in returning him to Moscow could complicate efforts to put him on trial in New York, said former officials who had pursued him in recent years.
Bout was targeted in a high-stakes inquiry led by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents who used informants to lure an associate of the Russian to a flurry of meetings on Caribbean islands and in Copenhagen and Bucharest, Romania, federal investigators said. The pursuit concluded Thursday morning when Bout was baited into appearing at the Sofitel Silom hotel in Bangkok.
Bout’s enterprises have been linked to the arming of warlords and dictators in Africa, fanning the flames of civil wars throughout the 1990s.
Authorities allege that his companies helped arm the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks, and sold them a dozen cargo planes. Then he managed to switch sides, they say, aiding U.S. military reconstruction efforts in Iraq by staffing hundreds of supply flights to Baghdad.
Despite an indictment by Belgian authorities and investigations by American officials and United Nations arms experts, Bout has repeatedly eluded manhunts while building a global arms and air transport empire that stretched from Moscow to the Dallas suburbs.
Michael J. Garcia, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Thursday in unsealing a criminal complaint against Bout and an alleged accomplice that American officials would press for Bout’s extradition. Bout faces charges of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
The arrest of Bout, known among his pursuers as “the merchant of death,” is a milestone in the halting efforts by U.S., U.N. and other international authorities to stem the global arms trade and pursue suspected transnational criminals. His arrest “marks the end of the reign of one of the world’s most wanted arms traffickers,” Garcia said.
But Bout’s role in aiding the Bush administration’s reconstruction effort in Iraq poses thorny hurdles to any effort to construct a legal case against him. A public trial, which would most likely be held in the federal courthouse in Manhattan, could lead to uncomfortable revelations for the administration about Bout’s business relationships with U.S. military agencies and private contractors.
“An American trial would be interesting because a lot of the Bush engagement with Bout will come out,” said Witney Schneidman, a former assistant secretary of State who pressed for foreign support in pursuing Bout at the end of the Clinton administration.
The U.S. extradition push may be rivaled by a similar request by the Russian government. A Russian news agency reported Thursday that government officials in Moscow were mulling over their own extradition request. Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, said: “These reports are in the Russian media, but I don’t have official confirmation. I won’t speculate.”
Lee S. Wolosky, a former National Security Council deputy who led the effort against Bout for the Clinton and Bush administrations, warned that Bout “really needs to come into U.S. custody quickly. Otherwise, there’s ample opportunity for others to mess around.”
Bout has long been protected by the Kremlin administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bout was indicted by a Belgian court on massive money-laundering charges in 2002, and a worldwide notice for his arrest was circulated by Interpol. But Russia, which is an Interpol member, declined to turn Bout over to Belgium, citing constitutional protections and casting doubt on the evidence against him.
Videos and photographs taken Thursday in a Bangkok police holding area showed a stocky, rumpled Bout in an orange prison-issue jumpsuit, glowering and manacled as he was questioned by authorities. A U.S. official involved in the operation said Bout had said almost nothing since his arrest Thursday morning.
“He’s as close-mouthed as he is in the pictures,” the official said.
According to a 14-page criminal complaint and accounts provided by several U.S. officials on condition of anonymity because the case is still unfolding, Bout was captured by a strike force of federal narcotics agents experienced in targeting international fugitives. The team was aided by Treasury officials and U.S. intelligence, the officials said.
The team first targeted Andrew Smulian, a Bout associate who was arrested along with the Russian on Thursday. According to an affidavit filed by DEA Special Agent Robert Zachariasiewicz, Smulian was approached in mid-2007 by a confidential informant working for the U.S. Smulian had previously aided Bout in making airdrops of armaments over the volatile Russian republic of Chechnya, the official said.
The informant and a second undercover operative began a series of meetings with Smulian that led from the Caribbean island of Curacao to elsewhere in the Netherlands Antilles and early this year to Copenhagen and Bucharest.
Conversations were intercepted and recorded by American and Romanian authorities. By late January, Bout was on the phone with Smulian, cinching final arrangements, according to the affidavit.
At one point, it said, Bout promised to show up for a Romanian meeting. “100 percent, 100 percent sure!” he promised Smulian. “Wait for me max 10 days. I am there.”
But Bout did not turn up until he was assured by one of the DEA informants that an official from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia known as El Comandante had approved a $5-million payment for covert airdrops of the weaponry, the affidavit said. The cache was to include 100 armor-piercing Igla surface-to-air missiles of Bulgarian origin, it said.
Bout, who is reported to be 41, had a meteoric rise in the international air cargo trade. He built a private air force of more than 60 planes, most of them durable Russian aircraft, and set up hubs in the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Belgium and several Eastern European countries.
U.N. investigators linked his organization to several African civil wars of the 1990s, during which they say it provided arms to warlords in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire.
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stephen.braun@latimes.com
judy.pasternak@latimes.com
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cbcab30b97613c30434c27ae85b3b199 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-07-me-slide7-story.html | Sepulveda is blocked by slide | Sepulveda is blocked by slide
A landslide in the Westwood area closed portions of Sepulveda Boulevard through Thursday evening’s commute and knocked out power to about 1,800 homes and buildings in Brentwood and Bel-Air, authorities said.
The roadway was reopened and power restored to all customers by 10 p.m., according to Los Angeles Fire and Department of Water and Power officials.
The slide began when a hillside backyard sheared away Thursday morning in the 300 block of South Thurston Avenue and continued to slide throughout the afternoon. Mud and debris piled as high as 6 feet in places as city officials waited for engineers and geologists to determine if it was safe to begin clearing the roadway.
Mud flowing from the hill’s collapse pushed vegetation, including eucalyptus and pepper trees, about 100 feet down Sepulveda Boulevard.
Debris spread across two northbound lanes and past the center divider, blocking a portion of southbound traffic, said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey.
Officials warned that the closure of Sepulveda between Sunset and Wilshire boulevards would probably cause “significant delays” for those planning to attend the UCLA-Stanford basketball game at 8 p.m. Sepulveda is a major thoroughfare in the Westwood area, and the game at Pauley Pavilion was expected to draw more than 12,000 people, according to campus officials. Extra traffic control officers were to be positioned at key intersections to facilitate flow, according to university spokesman Phil Hampton.
The first sign of trouble came about 7 a.m. when commuters near Montana Avenue and Sepulveda Boulevard reported arcing power lines that set nearby eucalyptus trees on fire, Humphrey said. The arcing indicated shifting earth, and the landslide began shortly after firefighters arrived, he said.
By afternoon, officials red-tagged the home directly above the slide area, declaring it unsafe and off-limits. In addition, two nearby homes were yellow-tagged, or declared partially off-limits, according to Bob Steinbach, assistant bureau chief for the city’s Department of Building and Safety.
“It’s crazy. All of a sudden the lights were on and then the lights were off. I walked into the kitchen to make the kids’ lunches but there was no power,” said Stephanie Dubinsky, who lives a block from the slide. “It’s a little scary because we have friends who live down there.”
The collapse of the hill sent a large tree tumbling onto Sepulveda Boulevard, which was closed between Sunset and Wilshire because of “pavement disruption” due to the landslide, Humphrey said.
Authorities on the scene initially said a water main break appeared to have contributed to the collapse, although Humphrey cautioned that “the cause will probably not be known for quite some time.” After an initial investigation, DWP crews found no problem with the water system.
“It becomes in many ways a case of the chicken and the egg,” Humphrey said.
“There was water and mud, there were water lines ruptured, but the question remains: Did the water lines rupture because of the landslide? Or did the landslide occur because the water lines ruptured?”
Thursday’s cleanup was expected to take hours because pipes and power lines had to be repaired, in addition to removal of vegetation and mud, officials said.
It took roughly seven hours to remove the debris.
Last month, a similar incident occurred at a hilltop home in Encino, which split in two and threatened to slide into neighboring houses.
The home has since been demolished and a geology firm is doing a study to determine the cause of that slide, according to Steinbach.
Another question officials are working to answer is where the landslide occurred: on a homeowner’s property line, city property, DWP property or elsewhere.
“We don’t know where the property line ends and where the landslide began,” Humphrey said.
“And that will become highly contested.”
Although power remained out to many area homes and businesses well into the afternoon, DWP officials said they had restored service by 9 a.m. to the nearby Getty Center, which is within sight of the slide area, as well as nine other industrial and commercial customers.
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tami.abdollah@latimes.com
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ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com
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bbced49e2fddc5b4a867823c411c3b89 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-07-me-tollroad7-story.html | Tollway veto may affect other projects | Tollway veto may affect other projects
The apparent demise of a toll road through San Onofre State Beach could have a domino effect on funding for other Southern California transportation projects, a regional planning authority said this week.
A letter sent to Orange County transportation planners by the Southern California Assn. of Governments warns that if the Foothill South tollway is not built, another project must be substituted in SCAG’s Regional Transportation Plan. Otherwise, the region runs the risk of violating federal emissions standards and losing funding, because projects not included in the plan are ineligible for state and federal dollars.
The region’s freeways are the nation’s most congested, and its air quality is among the worst. The 16-mile turnpike that would have cut through San Onofre State Beach was designated as a transportation control measure because it would have promoted carpool use and provided emission credits, said Hasan Ikhrata, SCAG’s executive director.
So when the state Coastal Commission vetoed the toll road last month, it quite possibly threw the entire transportation plan for the region into disarray -- and potentially put the South Coast Air Basin in violation of the federal Clean Air Act.
Under federal law, SCAG must develop plans for transportation, air quality, aviation and housing in a sprawling region that covers Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial counties.
Art Leahy, Orange County Transportation Authority chief executive, said the tollway is in the regional plan “and it’s not coming out. Our agency is on record as supporting it.”
Although the issue of air quality is very important, Leahy characterized the debate as a “potential problem,” not an “imminent” one.
Hypothetically, if the toll road were dropped from the regional plan, it could affect projects in other counties. Finding an alternative project would not be limited to Orange County but within the region, Leahy said.
Richard Dixon, a Lake Forest councilman who serves as SCAG’s vice president, expressed concern over whether a substitute project could be found in time or at all -- though Ikhrata downplayed any time restriction.
“We’re saying right now it’s a caution, a warning,” Ikhrata said. “We’re not in any way, shape or form saying we’re out of conformity.”
Because the tollway veto has been appealed, SCAG is waiting on the toll road agency to say that the San Onofre extension is out of the plan. “If it’s out, then we will have to do substitution and figure out what to do,” Ikhrata said.
The Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency has no intention of withdrawing the California 241 extension from the transportation plan, said spokeswoman Jennifer Seaton. The Coastal Commission’s decision is on appeal and planning has not stopped, she added.
Environmentalists argue that the state’s rejection should have prompted transportation officials to remove the toll road from the regional plan.
“This project has been determined to have violated state environmental law, and it can’t remain in the transportation plan. The region has to move forward and amend the plan,” said Michael Fitts, an attorney with the Endangered Habitats League, which protested the tollway at the Coastal Commission meeting.
Estimated to cost at least $875 million to build, Foothill South would have run 16 miles from Oso Parkway in Rancho Santa Margarita to Interstate 5 at Basilone Road south of San Clemente and would have been the final link in Orange County’s network of toll roads.
Dixon, who supports building the tollway, has echoed SCAG’s warnings to other transportation officials. No other project in the county “would give us the same air quality credits as we get for the toll road,” he said.
But some supporters of the toll road disagree.
Denis Bilodeau, a traffic engineering consultant and councilman in Orange, which supports the toll road, said planners could widen Interstate 5 in southern Orange County, increase Amtrak or Metrolink service, and widen roads that parallel I-5.
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david.reyes@latimes.com
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d7dcc0f740ba7da78c5af56d71ee36ae | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-08-et-book8-story.html | Our sexual fantasyland | Our sexual fantasyland
There’s something about reading nearly 500 pages of sexual fantasy that throws the doors of perception a bit off their hinges. Just knowing that 90% of humanity is out there running some kind of porn film in their heads, makes the lunch crowd at, say, a Fuddrucker’s more interesting to observe. Does that waitress serving chili fries dream of being wrapped in cellophane and spanked? Does the busboy want to be licked by Keanu Reeves? Does that businessman chipmunking on his Blackberry dream of being cavity searched by terrorists?
After reading Brett Kahr’s “Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head?,” you wonder.
Kahr, a Freudian psychotherapist with more than 20 years in the field, sensed there was therapeutic gold in the undulating hills of our erotic imaginings. His interest is far from prurient; he suspects that fantasies don’t exist purely for recreational purposes, that they are in fact “psychological fingerprints” that can help us unravel the mystery of our deepest, darkest selves. "[O]ur sexual fantasies remain, by and large, an unprocessed, unsynthesized area of the mind, crying out for explanation,” he writes.
Inspired by the psychological insights of Sigmund Freud, the methodological rigor of Alfred Kinsey and the writings of Nancy Friday on female sexuality, Kahr launched a research project to “answer some basic questions,” chief among them, “Do our fantasies represent just a bit of private fun, or do they have more profound implications for how we lead our lives?”
Thus began the British Sexual Fantasy Research Project, culling statistical data from a combined group of 20,153 British and American adults and conducting exhaustive, five-hour interviews with several hundred subjects beginning in 2003.
This monumental undertaking offers, for the first time, an anecdotal adjunct to help understand sexual activity itself. Discreet, methodical and clearly sensitive, Kahr approaches interviews less like a Sherlock Holmes and more of a Dr. Watson, asking questions and listening with his “third ear” (the one that hears not only what the subject is saying, but what he isn’t saying) and being careful not to jump to conclusions. The book provides a nice insight into the point of view of the therapist, who approaches “each fantasy rather like a giant jigsaw puzzle or mystery story. At the end of the analysis, every piece must fit in order that we may gain a clear picture of the contents of the mind of the fantasist.” Kahr notes that Freudian therapists believe that sexual fantasies “developed as both a means of gratifying wishes and of conquering intrusive memories of early traumatic experiences.” In other words, we use fantasy to turn that which haunts us into something we have psychic mastery over, or as Kahr calls it, “equilibration of the self.”
This is all very interesting and highly worthwhile, but for the, er, layperson, the best parts of this book are the sexy parts. Kahr has done a great job of culling and organizing his respondents’ fantasies, which are repeated verbatim, often to unintentional comedic effect. Grouped into such categories as “Bisexual Fantasies” and “Fantasies of Celebrities,” the narratives flow with blunt, artless logic. Some fantasies are related in coy shorthand; others are elaborate, describing antics in language that would make sex writer Susie Bright blush.
“On first reading,” Kahr warns, “many people become either sexually aroused by the private fantasies of others or embarrassed by them.” Indeed. The erotic reveries are also shocking, boring and, most surprisingly, hilarious.
There’s the woman who wants to be squeezed between Serena Williams’ thighs, and the guy who fantasizes about watching an episode of “Lost” with a girl, then duct-taping her to a countertop so he can “change her views forever about how many orgasms are acceptable in an evening’s encounter.” Senior citizen “Isadora” has been fantasizing about Gregory Peck for decades: “Gregory is the mainstay of my fantasy. Yummy. I think he is dead now.” Then there’s “Berger,” who thinks Seth Green and Topher Grace “would be one hot man-on-man action.”
“Sancho” fantasizes about a week in Las Vegas with a harem: “All of the showgirls are tall and beautiful and their job is to be nice to me all week -- laugh at my jokes, tell me what a great guy I am, massage my neck, dance with me at nightclubs, etc. -- and, of course, have sex with me and with each other like crazed weasels in every possible position in the Kama Sutra.”
Many of the choicest fantasies are so laden with coprolalia (“dirty talk”), they cannot be reprinted in a family newspaper, but they amply illustrate the quirky spectrum of human sexuality, which appears also to include a large subset of people who are turned on by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Of course, there’s a dark side to all this. The book has many accounts of people who are so damaged that their fantasy lives drip with cruel sadism or heart-wrenching masochism. Most of their erotic reveries are what Kahr calls “the ordinary sadism of everyday life,” and for the most part these people are harmless. But he encountered enough disturbing material to ask himself: "[S]hould these individuals be tolerated, or should they be treated?” He admits to not having a clear answer, though he is sure that his interviews are not the appropriate basis for therapeutic intervention.
For most of us, sexual fantasy is a pretty healthy indulgence, allowing us to find an outlet for desire, and turn past trauma into a source of pleasure, rather than pain. But there is a prescriptive element to “Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head?”. Fantasy research may prove useful in a diagnostic-predictive manner to protect society from dangerous sexual predators.
Another practical application, Kahr suggests, is using fantasies to match up potential dating partners. As he points out, they “may prove to be much more pertinent to compatibility than whether one enjoys films, eating out, and country walks.” Now there’s something to fantasize about.
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Erika Schickel is the author of “You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom.”
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e94b0cd1ec287a2966c073a0fc51ec6f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-08-fg-darfur8-story.html | Olympics near, China bends on Darfur issue | Olympics near, China bends on Darfur issue
When filmmaker Steven Spielberg announced last month that he was withdrawing as an artistic advisor to the 2008 Olympics over violence in Darfur, the reaction in Beijing was righteous indignation.
Organizers accused him of violating the Olympic spirit by injecting politics into the Games, while the state-run media unleashed a torrent of insults, calling him naive, vain and childish.
Now China is taking a new tack.
After its initial outburst, the Foreign Ministry has launched something of a charm offensive to convince the international community that it does indeed care about human rights. In recent weeks, Beijing has been pushing the Sudanese government to accept a peacekeeping force in its troubled Darfur region. A senior Chinese diplomat who had just returned from a trip to Sudan was trotted out Friday for a rare briefing with foreign correspondents on China’s role in Sudan.
“We are using our relationship with the Sudanese government to exert leverage,” said Liu Guijin at the briefing. “China has done many positive things which have been recognized by the international community.”
The 62-year-old diplomat, one of the most seasoned Africa hands in the Chinese diplomatic corps, conveyed the same message in a recent swing through London and Paris on his way home from Sudan. His job appears partly to be damage control as human rights advocates around the world threaten to organize a boycott of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing because of China’s close ties with the Sudanese government.
China’s relationship with Sudan as that country deals with the Darfur crisis is being keenly watched as a test case of how China handles itself on the world stage, especially with regard to human rights.
“I think the Chinese, as they become a great power, are realizing that foreign policy is not simply about economics, but about world leadership. There is a gradual evolution as they step into that role,” said Andrew S. Natsios, a Georgetown University professor who until recently was President Bush’s special envoy on Darfur.
Natsios said the Chinese had been unfairly criticized over Darfur when in fact they have been active behind the scenes in getting the Sudanese government to make concessions.
“The Chinese don’t go on moral crusades the way America does. But when you engage with them in a rational, reasonable way, they can be very helpful,” Natsios said.
Despite China’s efforts to defuse the crisis, the criticism is likely to continue in the run-up to the Olympics, which are set to begin Aug. 8.
“These Olympics are a geopolitical debutante ball for China. They are to highlight China’s ascension onto the stage of world power, and that makes it quite reasonable for human rights advocates to highlight what they are doing around the world,” Allyn Brooks-LaSure, spokesman for the Washington-based organization Save Darfur, said in a telephone interview Friday.
China developed a close relationship with Sudan in the 1990s, buying up to two-thirds of its oil output. Since 2003, when fighting broke out in Darfur, China has used its U.N. Security Council presence to block tougher sanctions against Sudan and has ignored an arms embargo. Weapons sold by China are believed to have ended up in the hands of government-backed militias that have been terrorizing villagers in Darfur.
In May, Liu was appointed special envoy on the Darfur issue. He has since made four trips to Sudan, and met with various principals in the conflict.
Armed with a dossier of reports, Liu reeled off China’s accomplishments at the 70-minute briefing Friday for the foreign media. He said a team of 140 engineers had dug wells and built infrastructure for refugees in Darfur. He cited studies showing that the United States sells far more weapons to developing countries, although he did not dispute that China continues to supply arms to the Sudanese government.
Asked whether “genocide” was occurring in Darfur, Liu responded, “I don’t like to debate with people what words should be used to describe what has happened, which has caused the displacement of millions of people and cost tens of thousands of lives.”
He also said that rebel groups should be held as responsible as the Sudanese government for the violence and that the international community should pressure them as well to accept a cease-fire.
In his travels, Liu has met with human rights groups, and he spent an hour with Spielberg in September.
“I respect Mr. Spielberg as an individual. He was very polite and appreciative of what I was talking about,” Liu said. “Later, when he resigned, it was a very big surprise to me.”
In his resignation statement, Spielberg said, “While China’s representatives have conveyed to me that they are working to end the terrible tragedy in Darfur, the grim realities of the suffering continue unabated.”
His resignation coincided with an open letter signed by dozens of prominent politicians, artists, writers and athletes urging China to do more on Darfur. The signatories included eight Nobel Peace Prize winners.
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barbara.demick@latimes.com
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58aedfb77605e30fd5f62ecff05737c1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-08-me-loyaltyoath8-story.html | Instructor fired over loyalty oath reinstated | Instructor fired over loyalty oath reinstated
A Quaker math instructor who was fired by Cal State East Bay after she refused on religious grounds to sign a state loyalty oath has been reinstated, university officials said Friday.
Marianne Kearney-Brown, a pacifist, was concerned that signing the oath to “support and defend” the California and U.S. constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” could commit her to take up arms. She was fired Feb. 28 after she inserted the word “nonviolently” before “support and defend” and signed that version.
The university, averting a showdown over religious freedom, agreed to rehire Kearney-Brown after the office of state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown helped draft a statement declaring that the oath does not commit employees to bear arms in the country’s defense.
Kearney-Brown, 50, said she was relieved that the issue was resolved and excited to return next week to teaching her class in remedial math. “I just want to teach kids who hate math,” she said. “That’s all I want to do.”
The idea that someone could be fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath came as a surprise to many Californians who were unaware that public employees are still required to sign it. The pledge was added to the state Constitution in 1952 at the height of anti-Communist hysteria and has remained a prerequisite for public employment ever since. All state, city, county, public school, community college and public university employees are required to sign the 86-word oath. Noncitizens are exempt.
Typically, new employees sign it as a matter of routine along with a stack of other required employment documents. Some public employees say they don’t recall signing it.
“A lot of people are saying it’s not a big deal, but I just couldn’t do it,” Kearney-Brown said. “Is the country safer because people sign it without thinking about it?”
The firing of Kearney-Brown, who also is a graduate student at the campus, brought widespread criticism from faculty members, students, Quakers and civil-liberties advocates. Some faculty members began circulating a petition objecting to it. The United Auto Workers, which represents teaching assistants, pursued a grievance on Kearney-Brown’s behalf.
“People were outraged,” said Henry Reichman, a Cal State East Bay history professor and chairman of the Academic Senate. “I was very vocal on the campus that this was an outrageous thing.”
Reichman said that he did not fault campus administrators for the firing and that they were put in an awkward position because of the constitutional requirement that every employee sign the oath.
“It’s an anachronism,” he said. “It’s left over from the McCarthy era. I would like to see the Legislature repeal this -- although on the priority list of civil liberties issues in the country, there are a lot of things that are a lot higher.”
Kearney-Brown, who began teaching high school math in 1994, said she had been allowed to add the word “nonviolently” when she signed the oath on earlier occasions.
She was hired at Cal State East Bay in January to teach remedial math and received a stellar job evaluation before her dismissal.
After Kearney-Brown added “nonviolently” to the oath, university officials sternly told her that it was “impermissible” to modify the pledge.
Kearney-Brown accused the university of turning the matter of the oath into a “meaningless formality.”
“It bothers me that no one took me or my religious concerns seriously,” she wrote in a letter to CSU legal counsel Eunice Chan.
The university invited Kearney-Brown to write an explanation of her views that could be included in her personnel file -- as long as her statement did not negate the oath.
Instead, she asked the university to give her a statement declaring that signing the oath would not require her to take up arms.
“I do support the Constitution,” she said before she was rehired. “I value and honor it. To be honest, I feel like I am defending it by doing this.”
After Kearney-Brown filed the grievance over her firing, the university consulted with the attorney general’s office and produced the kind of document she had requested.
“You should know that signing the oath does not carry with it any obligation or requirement that public employees bear arms or otherwise engage in violence,” read the unsigned statement. “This has been confirmed by both the United States Supreme Court . . . and the California attorney general’s office.”
With that document stapled to the oath, Kearney-Brown signed it.
Clara Potes-Fellow, a spokeswoman for the 23-campus Cal State system, said it had not changed its position by rehiring Kearney-Brown and the university was pleased by the final result.
“This is the best of all outcomes,” Potes-Fellow said. “We are delighted that finally this was resolved.”
Kearney-Brown, though happy to be going back to work, said she remains disappointed by the university’s handling of the matter. “Here was an issue of religious freedom and they weren’t defending the Constitution,” she said.
Her ordeal behind her, she said she still views the loyalty oath as a useless requirement.
“The way it’s laid out, a noncitizen member of Al Qaeda could work for the university but not a citizen Quaker,” she said. “Why not an oath that says, ‘I will respect every student,’ or ‘I will vote in every election.’ Something that makes sense.”
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richard.paddock@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The loyalty oath
From Article XX of the California Constitution:
“I, ______, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”
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933217e4c8a8e3087359230b65665266 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-08-me-oxnard8-story.html | A deadly clash of emotions | A deadly clash of emotions
For teens living in a shelter for abused and neglected children, school can provide a daily dose of normalcy, a place to fit in, a chance to be just another kid.
It didn’t turn out that way for Lawrence King.
According to the few students who befriended him, Larry, 15 years old and openly gay, found no refuge from his tormentors at E.O. Green Junior High School.
Not in the classroom, the quad, the cafeteria. Not from the day he enrolled at the Oxnard school until the moment he was shot to death in a computer lab, just after Larry’s usual morning van ride from the shelter a town away.
The 14-year-old accused of killing him, Brandon McInerney, had his own troubled home life when he was younger, with his parents accusing each other of drug addiction and physical assaults, court records show. The year before Brandon was born, his father allegedly shot the boy’s mother in the arm, shattering her elbow, the records say.
Now, as the Feb. 12 killing continues to draw attention from around the world, students, parents and others wonder if red flags in the boys’ circumstances and backgrounds had been missed and whether more could have been done to avert the tragedy.
“The question needs to be answered,” said Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn, whose district includes E.O. Green. “It really bothers me a lot.”
The anti-gay taunts and slurs that Larry endured from his male peers apparently had been constant, as routine for him as math lessons and recess bells. The stinging words were isolating. As grieving friend Melissa Reza, 15, put it, Larry lived much of his life “toward the side. . . . He was always toward the side.”
She and others recall that the name-calling began long before he told his small circle of confidants that he was gay, before problems at home made him a ward of the court, and before he summoned the courage to further assert his sexual orientation by wearing makeup and girl’s boots with his school uniform.
His friends say the verbal cruelty persisted for months, and grew worse after the slightly built Larry pushed back by “flirting” with some of his mockers. One of them was Brandon, who seethed over it, the friends say.
Brandon has been charged as an adult with premeditated murder and a hate crime, and he is being held in juvenile hall.
Childhood turmoil
For about a decade, the household of William and Kendra McInerney, Brandon’s parents, had been in turmoil. The 1993 shooting led to William McInerney’s conviction of discharging a firearm and a 120-day jail sentence, court records state.
Kendra McInerney claimed in divorce documents that a previous husband had used methamphetamine and beaten her. She has two sons from that relationship.
William McInerney was addicted to prescription drugs, Kendra said in a court declaration. She said he repeatedly choked her on one occasion, when Brandon was 6. The father was sentenced, after that incident, to 10 days in jail for battery.
The couple obtained restraining orders against each other after they separated in 2000. William McInerney, then employed as a finance manager for a motorcycle and watercraft store, depicted his wife in court records as a slave to meth, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. He said that she had tried to run her car into his while he was driving with Brandon.
The mother’s home was the neighborhood “drug house,” with people passed out in the front room, he alleged in a 2001 court declaration. He also said that his wife “backhanded” Brandon and scratched the boy’s chest. In 2003, the year after they divorced, Kendra McInerney pleaded no contest to being under the influence of a narcotic and was ordered into a treatment program.
In court papers, William McInerney contended that he had contacted Child Protective Services at least five times on behalf of Brandon and his two half-brothers between August 2000 and February 2001 but that “no action” was taken. That could not be confirmed, in part because of privacy laws.
After his parents broke up, Brandon bounced between their homes in Oxnard before settling several years ago at his father’s residence near E.O. Green, records indicate. Prosecutors say the handgun allegedly used to kill Larry came from the McInerney house.
William and Kendra McInerney declined to be interviewed. Brandon’s attorney also declined to comment.
There is no known record that Brandon had been exposed to any trauma at home after 2003. Even if social workers had been alerted to the earlier incidents, it is uncertain that they would have had the legal grounds to remove him from his parents, experts say.
They point out that the goal of the child welfare system is to keep minors with the family.
“If there is not an imminent risk to the safety of the child at that time, we cannot remove the child from the home,” said Pam Grothe, senior manager for Ventura County’s children and family services agency. “It is a very high threshold.”
But Flynn said the agency should disclose whether it investigated the McInerney household and, if so, what action it took. “The kid should have been removed, probably, from the home,” the supervisor said. “This needs to be exposed.”
Elizabeth Cauffman, a UC Irvine psychology professor who specializes in psychopathy and juvenile justice, said that leaving children with families afflicted by violence can cause damage years down the road.
“It’s called the cycle of violence,” said Cauffman, who was speaking generally, not about the McInerney case. “When you witness violence as a child, you go on to solve your problems with violence.”
Friends and adult acquaintances say they are still struggling to make sense of the crime Brandon is charged with, especially given the cold-blooded nature of the killing: two shots to the head, in an attack carried out at 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, in a room full of youngsters unpacking their books and calculators.
Some students say Brandon, tall and strong for his age, was one of the “cool” kids and could be unfriendly. “If you weren’t part of that group, it was like you didn’t exist,” said Erin Mings, 12. “He was a real jerk.”
But others say he was mostly even-tempered and devoted to his studies and athletics. He seemed to be on a quest for discipline and role models, spending much of his free time in martial arts training and the Young Marines, an education and service program that stresses character building.
“I’ve seen kids and I’ve thought, ‘God, I hope he doesn’t grow up and mug me someday,’ ” said Brandon’s martial arts instructor, Dana Charvet, who had just finished a class at his storefront studio in Port Hueneme. “Brandon was not one of those kids. With him, it was always, ‘Yes, sir. No, sir.’ ”
But Charvet said Brandon had difficulties at school. The instructor said the boy had asked him months ago how he should deal with “some guys who were messing with him.” Brandon offered no details and never mentioned Larry, Charvet said. “I said, ‘Tell your dad or talk to the principal,’ ” Charvet related.
Earlier this year, some of Brandon’s classmates say, Larry began “hitting” on him and remarking for all to hear that he thought Brandon was “cute.” Other boys then ribbed Brandon by saying he must be gay himself.
Brandon dismissed Larry with an obscenity, the students say, but it didn’t stop there. They say the kid wearing eye shadow had gotten under the skin of the Young Marine.
Michael Sweeney, an eighth-grader at E.O. Green, picked up on the whispering that followed -- the rumors that were so extreme, so out there, that they had to be bogus.
“Brandon told this one girl that he was going to kill Larry,” Michael said. “She didn’t tell the principal. I didn’t, either, after I heard about it. I thought it was a joke.”
Larry was shot the next day.
‘Left out’
Lawrence Fobes King was born on Jan. 13, 1993, at Ventura County Medical Center. He was adopted by Gregory and Dawn King and had three brothers and a sister.
His parents declined to speak for this article. The family has established a website in his memory, with a photo gallery that shows a sweet-faced Larry throughout his childhood -- on his first plane ride, getting a haircut, dressed as the Great Pumpkin for Halloween. Hundreds of sympathetic comments have been posted.
There is little of his parents on the website, which says that a memorial fund for Larry has been set up by his younger brother.
Larry had been removed from his home at some point in the last six months or so, friends and others say. Citing privacy laws, county officials have not disclosed the reasons for his placement at Casa Pacifica in Camarillo.
His friends say he rarely spoke about his family and would appear uncomfortable when others talked about theirs. “Every time somebody would say something about their family, he would get this weird look in his eye, like he was being left out,” said Melissa Reza, who met Larry during the last school year.
She said Larry would not tell her why he was living at Casa Pacifica and would “put his head down and look sad” when she asked. “He said he had fun there, but it never really felt like home,” she added.
Judy Webber, who heads Ventura County’s children and family services agency, said the shelter is typically used as temporary quarters while social workers try to either reunite children with their families, arrange for them to live with other relatives or find them a foster home.
Webber said social workers and the shelter staff -- Casa Pacifica is a private nonprofit that the county contracts with -- keep an ear tuned for any distress at school, but the system isn’t foolproof. “Sometimes things happen at school that we don’t know about,” she said.
Larry’s friends offer differing accounts of whether he had complained to teachers about the taunting. Some say he had decided not to report it, fearing that he would be branded a “rat” and suffer the consequences.
“They used to bug him a lot, pick on him -- ‘Hey you, gay kid, you want to wear lipstick?’ ” said Vanessa Ramirez, 15, of Larry’s belittlers. “He’d start crying. . . . He didn’t want to tell the teachers because they’d start picking on him more.”
But 13-year-old Mark Reyes said Larry did go to teachers for help. “You’d hear, ‘Faggot! Hey, faggot!’ ” Mark said. “That was happening in every class. A lot of teachers knew stuff was going on. . . . I guess they just didn’t want to be involved.”
Not so, said Jerry Dannenberg, superintendent of the Hueneme School District. The E.O. Green staff did come to Larry’s aid, including shortly before he was killed, after they had learned of an altercation between him and Brandon.
“They had been doing a lot of counseling and a lot of work with him,” Dannenberg said of Larry. “There have been a number of different people working with the young men, but I can’t go into specifics about what was going on.”
Larry had searched elsewhere for a safe harbor. After he landed at Casa Pacifica, he joined a youth group sponsored by the nonprofit Ventura County Rainbow Alliance, which offers social services to the gay community.
Alliance Executive Director Jay Smith would not reveal what Larry had talked about during the group’s Friday night meetings. But Smith said that no teenager should have to wake up in a shelter knowing the school day ahead would bring a fresh heap of rejection and scorn. “Not having a mom or dad to run to. . . . I can’t imagine what that is like,” he said. “His life was tough.”
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paul.pringle@latimes.com
catherine.saillant@latimes.com
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a8daa821e5282905a09cd24390ba46af | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-09-adfg-portugal9-story.html | Documentary desanitizes Portugal’s past | Documentary desanitizes Portugal’s past
The heads of enemy soldiers impaled on roadside trees. Hundreds of prisoners tortured, killed and dumped in mass graves. Napalm dropped on jungles where guerrillas sheltered, and grass-hut villages torched with cigarette lighters.
These gruesome acts were carried out in Portugal’s name two generations ago during its colonial wars in Africa. But for most Portuguese, the events aren’t history -- they’re news.
A groundbreaking series aired by public broadcaster Radiotelevisao Portuguesa is confronting Portugal with unsettling aspects of its recent history that for decades have been shrouded in silence. The series has become a top-rated prime-time program and the most-watched documentary in years, regularly drawing more than 1 million viewers in a country of 10.6 million.
“People had spoken very little about what happened,” said Joaquim Furtado, the Portuguese journalist who created the series. “The effect, I think, has been positive. People won’t be able to see things in simplistic terms now.”
Portugal isn’t the only European country being forced to address unpalatable aspects of its colonial legacy.
Three years ago, Belgium was shocked by a documentary portraying King Leopold II’s brutal 19th century exploitation of what was once the Belgian Congo.
In 2002, France had to revisit one of the darkest moments of its recent past when a Paris court convicted an aging French general for “complicity in justifying war crimes,” in connection with his bestselling book about atrocities during a seven-year war that ended with Algeria’s independence in 1962.
Portugal’s wars against independence fighters in its 500-year-old African empire erupted in 1961 in Angola. In surprise attacks, rebels butchered Portuguese settlers, including women and children, on remote Angolan plantations. In revenge, Portuguese militias and troops carried out a vicious campaign of repression, despite pressure from the United States and United Nations to pull out of Africa.
Filmmaker Furtado, a well-known journalist with an almost 40-year career, spent more than six years digging up hundreds of hours of film footage and masses of photographs, some never seen in public. He also gathered accounts from war veterans on both sides, many of whom hadn’t spoken out before.
In the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, the documentary has been greeted with quiet satisfaction but no calls for an official apology or compensation.
“No one is going to react angrily to the film because it shows the past, not the present. The past is the past, the present is the present,” said Custodio Rafael, a journalist with Radio Mozambique.
For Africans, the Portuguese atrocities have long been a matter of historical fact. But in Portugal, it has taken this documentary to explode the nation’s myths about its colonial rule, which ended in 1974.
Antonio Salazar’s dictatorship, established in the 1930s, kept Portugal in the dark about what was happening thousands of miles away on another continent. His censors killed unfavorable newspaper articles, and state media encouraged the war effort with reports of heroic deeds against insurgents.
Within a year, the Angolan rebellion subsided. But parallel wars broke out in Mozambique and another Portuguese African colony, Guinea-Bissau.
Salazar, mindful that the African colonies enriched his nation and lent it a Cold War stature beyond its size, waged a propaganda battle that included the unremitting government slogan “Angola e nossa!” -- Angola is ours! -- that was even broadcast over loudspeakers at packed beaches.
Salazar, a flinty and unbending leader, changed the designation of the colonies to “overseas territories” and depicted their peoples as Portuguese who were treated as equals and were eager to remain under Lisbon’s wing.
Ask Portuguese today about their colonial administration and they will insist it was benign, so radio phone-in shows are abuzz over the newly revealed facts.
Luis Quintais, an anthropologist at Portugal’s Coimbra University who has written a book about the African conflicts, says they have “been immersed in a huge silence,” while Portuguese history is rendered as the chronicle of a small, gentle country bullied by bigger European powers.
“We think of our colonization as having been soft, or mild, compared to other countries. But it wasn’t, it was just the same,” Quintais said. “We like to portray ourselves as victims, not victimizers.”
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AP Writer Emmanuel Camillo contributed to this report from Maputo, Mozambique.
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bd5899bd50f33575767381435ef5e396 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-09-bk-martinez9-story.html | Reality bites back | Reality bites back
JUST when you thought it was safe to go back to the bookstore, there’s a brand-new entry in the memoir-that-turns-out-to-be-fiction sweepstakes: “Love and Consequences” by the author formerly known as Margaret B. Jones, whose real name is Margaret Seltzer. Published to gushing reviews, the book has been recalled by its publisher, Riverhead, in the wake of revelations that “Margaret,” rendered by Seltzer as a half-white, half-Native American woman raised in a series of foster homes in hard South-Central Los Angeles neighborhoods, is purely the invention of the real-life author, who is white and grew up middle class in Sherman Oaks.
Seltzer has much in common with the growing literary liar’s club that includes writers of both fiction and nonfiction. James Frey is, of course, the best known of these authors, having been excoriated by Oprah Winfrey before an audience of millions for having made up many of the shocking details in his addiction-and-recovery memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.” There’s also Laura Albert, who posed as the “autobiographical novelist” (and street hustling drug addict) JT LeRoy, and has remained completely unapologetic about the deception. And let’s not forget the lesser-known but equally troubling case of “Nasdijj,” the “Navajo” author of “The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams,” the heartbreaking tale of his son’s death due to fetal alcohol syndrome; Tim Barrus, the actual author, is white, and the child is a fictional character.
Much like Barrus/Nasdijj, Seltzer imagined a harrowing world that ultimately revolved solely around her and, crucially, projected her own psychodrama onto a geography of radical difference, exchanging white for black, the middle class for the ‘hood. In other words, she wrote herself “authentically” in an unintentional parody of liberal sympathy for the suffering subjects of the ghetto.
It is easy to lambaste these writers for their egregious crimes of appropriation, but the ethical responsibility goes beyond them to the publishing industry, and ultimately to the readers who hunger for precisely these kinds of stories. In telling language, Sarah McGrath, Seltzer’s editor at Riverhead, told the New York Times of "[feeling] such sympathy for [Seltzer] and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light.”
Such sentiments also suffuse the critical praise heaped on the book before Seltzer’s deception was exposed (by her own sister after she read a profile about Seltzer in the New York Times). It was often riddled with cliches. Michiko Kakutani, for instance, closed her New York Times review by declaring: “With this remarkable book [Seltzer] has borne witness to the life in the ‘hood that she escaped, conveying not just the terrible violence and hatred of that world, but also the love and friendship that sustained her on those mean streets.”
This discourse locks representations of South-Central and places like it into a crude essentialism. (It is black, it is poor, it is “gang-ridden” and “drug infested.”) Ironically, the “intimate portrait” actually increases the social distance between the well-intentioned reader on the outside and the ghetto subject. And that’s precisely the point, because the audience for this kind of tale is not in the ghetto but in middle-class neighborhoods far removed from it. The story sells only because of the vast gulf between “us” and “them.”
All this occurs at a moment when Americans demand “authenticity” above all else. In electoral politics, candidates are “for real” or they are not. In film, we want digital special effects to make the bloody mess ever more “realistic.” On TV, we watch more “reality"-based shows than dramas. It is our obsession in literature, as well. The American novel is still steeped in realism and our appetite for the memoir -- first-person writing from “experience” -- appears insatiable, scandals notwithstanding.
It seems clear enough that only a society as distrusting as we are would be so obsessed with “keepin’ it real” -- from Watergate to WMD-gate, there’s a Big Lie for every generation of Americans alive today.
The irony is that the more we insist on the “real,” the more elusive it becomes, the more twisted the fictions and phantasms that reside not just in the minds of a few authors but in our collective pop psyche.
As a result, both the autobiographical novel and the memoir (which is often praised for reading like great literature, “like a novel”) are suffering a crisis of authority: They both lie, even as they reach for the most “real” of representations. In the end it seems as if the only thing that’s “real” is the black hole between them, that place we cannot approach because it would mean a whole other kind of reckoning as readers and as a society.
Perhaps the greatest lie, then, has nothing to do with whether characters and narratives can be “fact-checked” (as the chorus demands every time one of these scandals comes to light), but with the age-old American emphasis on the first-person singular, on stories that ultimately reinforce notions of radical individualism. Can the self really heal itself? Can we really come to self-understanding without an encounter with the other? In many ways, that’s what authors like Seltzer -- not to mention Frey, Albert and Barrus -- actually seem to be yearning for, a radical leap across the difference that divides us.
Unfortunately, they have made such a jump only in their imaginations.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
ON THE WEB: Taking on the fake-memoir flap are Denise Hamilton, Samantha Dunn and Rita Williams (excerpts below). The full essays are at latimes.com/books.
The depressingly familiar story about Valley girl Margaret Seltzer faking her memoir as a dope-dealing, mixed-race drug courier growing up in South Los Angeles sent me running to the bookshelf for an antidote: a novel that is as true and haunting as Seltzer’s book is false. I’m talking about Jervey Tervalon’s 1994 L.A. novel “Understand This,” which follows eight teens struggling to stay alive amid drugs, gangs and violence -- and the high school teacher who encourages them.
-- Denise Hamilton
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While all literature ultimately serves the same purposes, each form -- be it fiction, playwriting, poetry and, yes, memoir -- makes different demands. And memoir is meant to be demanding, growing from what is at its root a contemplative tradition. St. Augustine’s “Confessions” was not the first autobiographical account ever written, but it did define the memoir -- examining the paradoxes of personality, the rough edges where we don’t make sense, least of all to ourselves.
-- Samantha Dunn
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The Freys and the Seltzers have it backward. They expect respect, fame and dough for sharing their fantasies. Their hunger drives them to lie to themselves first. How else to explain these undoubtedly intelligent writers who mount the high wire in our 24/7 media environment? Do they genuinely believe that in this day of YouTube and the SmokingGun.com their fibs won’t be outed with the click of a mouse or a whisper from a witness inclined to reveal the real deal?
-- Rita Williams
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56324be16ffddcf62628624dda2ba233 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-09-fg-deaths9-story.html | U.S. role in Philippine raid questioned | U.S. role in Philippine raid questioned
In a hut on stilts with paper-thin walls of bamboo strips, an off-duty Philippine soldier was asleep alongside four members of his family when the crackle of assault rifle fire and shudder of grenade blasts awakened them early last month.
Within minutes, Cpl. Ibnun Wahid, 35, was dead, along with seven other villagers, including two children, age 4 and 9, two teenagers and two women, one of them pregnant. All were shot at close range, witnesses said in interviews and sworn affidavits gathered by the provincial governor’s staff to support expected criminal charges.
Like many on Sulu island, provincial Gov. Abdusakur Tan believes the dead were victims of coldblooded killings by government troops. The independent Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines has called for charges to be filed against troops and officers involved in gathering intelligence for and planning the operation, as well those directly responsible for the deaths.
Gen. Ruben Rafael, commander of Philippine troops on the island, also known as Jolo, said in an interview that a U.S. military spy plane circling high above this seaside village provided the intelligence that led to the Feb. 4 assault. He said the crew of the P-3 Orion turboprop, loaded with a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, pinpointed the village as a stronghold and arms depot for the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement. Government soldiers were ambushed in the area in August, Rafael said.
“The intelligence was very excellent because they have identified the houses, the men with the guns and all the armed men who were occupying these houses,” the general said. Rafael said the U.S. military also warned his troops during a firefight that dozens of militants were approaching to counterattack -- information he said was also gathered from the spy plane.
“Because of that, we had to fly our choppers and they were able to prevent these people from reinforcing” insurgents already in the village, the general said. “So that was very crucial support given to us by the U.S.”
Maj. Eric Walker, commander of U.S. forces on the island, declined an interview request, and the U.S. military spokesman for the region referred questions to the U.S. Embassy in Manila.
Without specifically confirming any flights over Ipil, U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Karen Schinnerer said that “an aerial reconnaissance vehicle” gathered intelligence over Sulu “at the request of, and in coordination with,” Philippine forces.
No witnesses have said there were U.S. forces on the ground when the killings occurred, and Schinnerer said that none were. She also said that intelligence gathering does not violate a prohibition against U.S. forces engaging in combat here.
The human rights commission report recommending criminal and administrative proceedings against troops and officers involved in the operation was written before a Times reporter informed the panel of Rafael’s account of U.S. surveillance. The commission gets its mandate from the Philippine Constitution.
Asked whether the U.S. military would assist Philippine authorities in any prosecution arising from the assault, Schinnerer said, “It would be inappropriate to speculate on what remains a hypothetical situation.” But, she added, “as a general rule, the U.S. would provide such support to the [Philippine government] if asked.”
Under the Philippine Constitution, the hundreds of U.S. military advisors in the southern Philippines are not allowed to engage in combat while helping train local forces in the hunt for militants with Abu Sayyaf and the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiah. Both groups are allied with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.
The guerrilla force that Rafael said the Orion spotted would have been unusually large for Sulu. No insurgents were captured, wounded or killed approaching the village, according to the military’s accounts. A small arms cache, including a .45-caliber handgun, an M-16 assault rifle and some rifle grenades were seized in the raid, Rafael said.
Two soldiers were killed and five wounded in the Ipil operation, statistics the army cites as proof of a battle with militants. Villagers contend that the soldiers were killed in their own crossfire. Commission investigators found that was a possibility, but suggested Wahid may have opened fire on the troops as they swarmed around his house.
The Philippine military said an internal investigation had cleared its troops of any wrongdoing, which many here see as a whitewash.
While condemning the findings, attorney Jose Manuel Mamauag, regional director of the Commission on Human Rights, said he was glad the military had issued its conclusions, allowing the commission to take the next step.
“Definitely, we will file charges against the soldiers,” Mamauag said.
Sulu Gov. Tan, taking a rare stand against the powerful military, has directed provincial officials and police to build a separate criminal case against as yet unidentified soldiers and commanders involved in the Ipil assault.
Counterinsurgency missions on Sulu have been held up as a model in the battle against militants because a combination of aid programs and military force has brought relative peace to the island. But insurgents are staging a comeback, and clashes have escalated over the last year.
With kidnappings and decapitations fairly common, tourists rarely risk coming anymore. Yet anger and suspicion toward Philippine forces and U.S. advisors also run deep here, even though, Rafael said, U.S. aid for projects including new schools, roads and drainage is expected to total more than $12 million over the next 18 months.
Ipil is a small village on Sulu’s southern shore, accessible only by water. Most of its people earn a meager living farming seaweed that yields agar, used as a laxative as well as a gelatin substitute and thickener for soups, desserts and pharmaceuticals.
The Philippine military says a dense network of seaside mangroves here are prime Abu Sayyaf turf and that the assault, which included U.S.-trained Special Forces, was an effort to rout them. Since the troops didn’t identify themselves, Wahid, a former rebel who joined the army as part of a 1996 peace pact, feared they were bandits or insurgents, relatives said.
He drew his licensed .45-caliber handgun from its holster and went out on the rickety bamboo porch, ready to defend his family, which insists he did not fire it. When he saw fellow soldiers, he put the gun down, raised his hands and shouted, “Papa Alpha, Papa Alpha,” signaling he was in the Philippine army, said his wife, Rawina Lahim Wahid, 24.
Within minutes, Wahid, his wife and parents, and 9-year-old nephew, Nurjimer Lahim, were ordered to lie face-down on the white sand, according to his widow and parents, Udam Lahim, 70, and Andiyang Lahing, 65.
Soldiers tied Wahid’s hands behind his back. Then one leveled an assault rifle at his head, and pulled the trigger, his widow said. The weapon jammed. The soldier recocked the M-16 and fired a bullet into Wahid’s head, said family members, who were later released.
On the other side of the small, southern Philippine village, 17 members of three families were fleeing the gunfire in a long canoe. They headed straight toward a blocking unit of Philippine soldiers on the edge of a thick mangrove swamp.
From a few yards away, the soldiers opened fire, and kept shooting, ignoring the screaming villagers’ pleas, witnesses said.
“It was not an accident,” said Saida Failan, 21, whose 4-year-old daughter, Marisa, was shot dead. “We were shouting, ‘Stop firing, we are civilians!’ and children were crying.”
When the shooting stopped, six people in the boat were dead. Villagers also found the body of a local councilor, Eldisim Lahim, shot dead outside his home.
Soon after sunrise, Philippine troops prepared to move the bodies by boat, but Rawina Wahid refused to let them take her husband’s corpse without her. “I was afraid they were going to throw him in the ocean, so there would be no evidence,” she said.
She said she joined them and was taken to a naval vessel offshore, which she was unable to identify. Rafael said it was a Philippine military “support ship.”
As she stepped onto the boat, she said, she saw four foreign men in American camouflage fatigues, each armed with an assault rifle, standing next to a second deck railing.
“They were smiling,” she said. “They were happy.”
She said she had no way of knowing what the men, who she assumed were Americans, were doing on the ship, or whether they were aware of the horrors she and her neighbors had suffered.
“That’s not important, as long as justice is done,” she said.
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paul.watson@latimes.com
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b628b4dd75e97923d69d2758750156ba | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-09-me-mother9-story.html | Returning home to a tragedy | Returning home to a tragedy
Army Sgt. Anita Shaw spent endless hours worrying about her teenage son while she served in Iraq.
She worried about his learning to drive without her, then maybe having a car accident. She worried about his not seeing a doctor if he needed to, or forgetting to go to the dentist. She worried about his having trouble in school.
But even in her darkest moments, she never worried about him being slain.
Her son, Jamiel Shaw Jr., 17, was killed last Sunday when two men in a car pulled up next to him, asked if he belonged to a gang, then shot him when he didn’t answer. He was three houses from home in the Mid-City area of Los Angeles.
Police said Jamiel was not affiliated with a gang. He was a high school football star who hoped to earn a college scholarship and become a sports agent, family members said.
Shaw learned of her son’s death when her commander called her into his office to break the news.
“Your son Jamal has been killed,” he said, mispronouncing the boy’s name.
Shaw said that allowed her room for denial.
“He said his name wrong,” she said. “I thought maybe it wasn’t him.”
On the 14-hour flight back to Los Angeles via Kuwait and Atlanta, she told herself the horrible news wasn’t true, that she simply was on her way “home to see my baby.” And she thought about her son.
When Jamiel was born, his mother was determined to do things right.
“It was my first-born,” she said. “I wanted to do it all.”
Shaw insisted on a natural birth, breast-fed her son and used cloth diapers. When Jamiel started eating solid foods, she cooked fresh peas and carrots and mashed them up so he wouldn’t be exposed to processed food.
When Jamiel was 5, Shaw, who had served in the California Army National Guard for about 10 years, enlisted in the Army full time. She had been looking for work without success.
“I couldn’t get a job,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a welfare mama, getting $400 a month and $200 in food stamps. It was a conscious choice I made. I knew joining the military [that] there would be sacrifices.”
At first, Jamiel stayed with his mother at Ft. Hood in Texas. It was a good place for families. The base would be shut down for family days and carnivals, she said, adding, “It was nice, spending time with your family.”
But after second grade, Jamiel asked to live with his father in California.
Shaw agreed, and she began taking long weekends to see Jamiel and his younger brother, Thomas, now 9. She spent her leave time at their L.A. home and felt that she was doing what was best for her boys.
In the years before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said, “People weren’t getting deployed,” she said. “I was like, OK I don’t have anything to worry about.”
Then came the wars. Shaw was sent to northern Iraq in September 2004. Jamiel, then 14, didn’t want her to go. He was angry and distant when she left, she said.
But Shaw believed she would be safe. As a unit supply sergeant, she said, her primary job was to “take care of the commander’s pocketbook.” Shaw said she felt lucky to have a supervisor who never asked her to travel off the base on convoys, something Jamiel feared.
Over the phone, he repeatedly warned her: “Don’t do anything crazy. Try not to go on any convoys. Protect yourself.”
In 2005, when her first deployment ended, Shaw was shipped to Vilseck, Germany. Jamiel told his mother he was afraid of flying, so he didn’t visit her there.
But she was pleased that he seemed to be in the middle of a triumphant run at Los Angeles High School, where he played football, competed in track and had many friends.
In August, Shaw was sent back to Iraq. Before leaving, she spent a month in Los Angeles with her sons, taking care of routine things: making dentist appointments, driving them to school, picking them up, scheduling annual portraits at Sears, attending track meets.
The day she left, she rushed to Thomas’ elementary school in the early morning to make sure he had the right supplies. When she came back, Jamiel was leaving for school and she was late for her flight.
“He kissed me goodbye and hugged me,” she said.
The last time Shaw spoke to her son was just before Valentine’s Day. She asked how he was spending his monthly allowance and told him to make sure to buy a Valentine’s Day gift for Thomas.
“I was so busy, I didn’t get to send him anything,” she said. “I told him, you’re too old for mommy to send you anything for Valentine’s Day, but Thomas is not. He’s probably gonna need Valentine’s Day cards to pass out at school; make sure you get him those.”
Shaw, a tall, imposing woman with shoulder-length black hair and soft, brown eyes, smiled broadly as she talked about Jamiel, about how he loved to ride the ponies at Griffith Park when he was a boy and how, as he grew older, all the girls loved him.
But when she talked about the men who killed Jamiel, the smile vanished.
“I’m angry. I’m mad,” she said. “At Jamiel’s school, they were talking about how another child not too long ago lost his life. How many kids have to lose their life?”
Shaw wondered aloud if there is a difference between the war she’s fighting in the Middle East and the one Americans face at home.
“The only thing is we don’t have sand and dirt flying all around,” she said. “But we have the bullets.”
She paused, then continued: “I don’t know if I can say this with me being in the military, but we need to be cleaning up the streets of the United States instead of cleaning up Iraq.”
Shaw checked herself. “I better stop,” she said.
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paloma.esquivel@latimes.com
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1f8bae2e23b034e4981d5945615b19ce | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-09-re-hotprop9-story.html | Tick, tick, tick, tick, vamoose | Tick, tick, tick, tick, vamoose
12:15-1:15: She buys.
1:15-8:30: She moves and rents it out.
8:30-11:15: She tries to sell.
11:15: In this market, we may need to tune in next season to see what happens.
Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays computer whiz Chloe O’Brian opposite Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer on Fox’s “24,” bought a remodeled two-bedroom, 800-square-foot Venice bungalow in 2005 for $899,000. She then moved to be closer to the Valley studios and leased the bungalow to Mia Kirsch- ner, who played Mandy in seven episodes of “24.” After Kirschner moved out in January, Rajskub put the place on the market for $1.4 million.
Before Rajskub bought it, the bungalow had been turned into a contemporary-style home with 2 1/2 bathrooms and a shower with mosaic tiles. Natural hues of gray, white and black were used to create a serene environment. The house also has a detached recreation room with a half-bath.
Rajskub, 36, appeared in the movies “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Legally Blonde 2" and “Dude, Where’s My Car?” Kirschner, 33, starred in the 2004 season of “The L Word,” Showtime series about a group of lesbian friends. Robin Walpert of Sotheby’s International Realty, Santa Monica, has the listing.
Sunset Strip crib for his turntables
Mixmaster Mike, a 37-year-old turntablist and resident DJ with the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, has purchased a home in the Sunset Strip area for $990,000.
Mike, whose real name is Michael Schwartz, bought a Country French-style home with three bedrooms and 1 3/4 bathrooms in slightly more than 2,000 square feet. The house, built in 1930, has a wraparound porch, gardens and park-like grounds.
Mike has worked on such albums with the Beastie Boys as “To the 5 Boroughs” (2004).
Kevin and Jovana Keyser had the listing at Sotheby’s International Realty, Sunset. Lori King from Ramsey Shilling, Toluca Lake, represented Mixmaster Mike.
In-house frocks and garage rock
Here is a new use for an old house, albeit a fine old house, a classic John Woolf abode built in 1926. The home, in the Sunset Strip area, was purchased by a musician and a New York socialite for close to $3 million.
The socialite, Stacey Bendet, is also designer-owner of the women’s clothing boutique Alice & Olivia, with stores in Manhattan and L.A.
Bendet, in her late 20s, plans to use the house as a style salon for celebrities -- a place to show her new lines, have fittings and host parties.
Moby, the musician, expects to turn the garage/guesthouse into a recording studio with 14-foot ceilings.
He is a business associate of Bendet’s. She became engaged on Valentine’s Day to Eric Eisner, son of former Disney honcho Michael Eisner. The wedding is set for next summer in Aspen, Colo. Bendet, based in New York, says she is moving to L.A. “in phases.”
The house has three bedrooms and 3 1/2 bathrooms in about 3,000 square feet. It has formal living and dining rooms with wood-paneled ceilings, Palladian columns, parquet floors, a media room/den with built-in bookcases, an eat-in kitchen, city views, a gated motorcourt, pool, pergola, two-car garage and adjacent guesthouse.
Brent Watson of Coldwell Banker Previews in Beverly Hills had the listing; Branden Williams and Rayni Romito of Nourmand & Associates, Beverly Hills, represented the buyers.
She hopes her loft’s a great catch
Alicia Piazza, wife of former longtime Dodgers catcher Mike Piazza, has listed a loft she owns in downtown Long Beach at $689,000.
The 1995 Playboy Playmate, who says she is “just a girl from Long Beach,” put the loft -- which she owned before her marriage to Piazza -- on the market while she is settling into a new Miami Beach-area home she and her husband bought earlier this year for $10 million.
The loft, in the Walker Building in Long Beach, has 1,228 square feet of living space, a private master sleeping area, 14-foot ceilings, one-car subterranean parking and western exposure with sunset views over the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the Vincent Thomas Bridge.
The building was constructed in 1929 and was redeveloped as residential units in 2002.
Dominic Tucci has the listing at Doma Properties, Long Beach.
ruth.ryon@latimes.com
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cc135c34754a5b9ef6aed6bc60f778cc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-10-fi-wikipedia10-story.html | Wikipedia’s tin-cup approach wears thin | Wikipedia’s tin-cup approach wears thin
The new headquarters of one of the world’s most popular websites is 3,000 square feet of rented space furnished with desks and chairs bought on the cheap from EBay and Craigslist.
A sheet of printer paper taped to the door says the office belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the online almanac of anything and everything that users want to chronicle, from Thomas Aquinas to Zorba the Greek.
With about 300 million page views a day, the site by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn’t. Wikipedia’s business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often.
When it comes to money, “we are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be,” Executive Director Sue Gardner said as she swept up Styrofoam packing nuts in the office, the foundation’s home since it relocated in January from St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s time for us to grow up a little bit.”
Growing up can be hard to do.
Wikipedia, the “encyclopedia anyone can edit,” is stuck in a weird Internet time warp, part grass-roots labor of love, part runaway success.
A global democracy beloved by high school term paper writers and run largely by volunteers, the site is controlled for now by people who seem to view revenue with suspicion and worry that too much money -- maybe even just a little money -- would defile and possibly ruin the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the written word.
“Imagine if the other top 10 websites in the world, like Yahoo or Google, tried to run their budgets by asking for donations from 14-year olds,” said Chad Horohoe, a 19-year-old college student in Richmond, Va., who was until recently a Wikipedia site administrator, one of the 1,500 or so people authorized to delete pages or block users from making changes to articles. “It isn’t sustainable.”
Looking at it one way, it’s cheap to run Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation’s other endeavors, which include an online compendium of quotations and a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus. The annual budget is $4.6 million, more than half of it dedicated to 300 computer servers and other equipment. On the other hand, the foundation has a tough time raising a few million dollars. The last fundraising campaign featured a video of co-founder Jimmy Wales literally wringing his hands in desperation.
The 45,000 or so individuals who contribute annually give an average of $33 each, so campaigns, which are conducted online, raise only about one-third of what’s needed.
For the rest, foundation directors have to hit up outside donors, such as Stephen J. Luczo of Seagate Technology and U2’s Bono.
Recent money-making proposals include a Wikipedia television game show, a Wikipedia board game and Wikipedia T-shirts. Gardner said that a board game might by OK but that a game show would be problematic, because game shows are competitive and Wikipedia is collaborative.
How about selling advertising space like most big-time websites do? Don’t go there unless you want to start a Wikipedian riot. Some members of the foundation’s board of trustees and most of the site’s editors and contributing writers zealously oppose advertising.
After a staff member in 2002 raised the possibility in the Wikipedia community, a facet of the Spanish-language branch quit and created the forever ad-free Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Espanol. Its founders said that advertising “implied the existence of a commercialization of the selfless work of volunteers.”
Ads would be “threatening to Wikipedia’s neutrality,” said Michael Bimmler, a 16-year-old high school student who has been a contributor for more than four years and is president of the foundation’s Swiss chapter. Readers would be suspicious about articles if ads were near them, he said, and would wonder why certain articles were longer than others. Besides, he added, ads are ugly.
The debate over Wikipedia’s future took a tabloid turn last week when gossip sites started buzzing over allegations by former Wikipedian Danny Wool, who recently launched Veripedia, which says it authenticates Wikipedia articles. Wool posted on his blog claims that co-founder Wales had, among other things, been imprudent with Wikipedia funds, asking the foundation to pay for visits to massage parlors and other non-Wikipedia-related activities.
As those allegedly scandalous tidbits zoomed around the Internet, the website Antisocialmedia.net (which says it is in the business of “exposing user-generated discontent”) got the attention of the blogosphere when it posted a rant about Wales supposedly having fiddled with one Wikipedia article on behalf of a girlfriend before he broke up with her and doctoring another in exchange for a $5,000 donation. Tech industry gossip site Valleywag got involved by posting what appeared to be instant message exchanges between Wales and the ex-girlfriend, political commentator Rachel Mardsen, who put some of his clothes up for sale on EBay.
Wales and Wikimedia said he had never misused foundation funds, and Wales posted a statement online saying that he cared deeply about Wikipedia’s integrity and would never abuse it. Gardner said in a statement that Wales “has consistently put the foundation’s interests ahead of his own.”
In San Francisco, Gardner said that she wasn’t planning wholesale changes as executive director, and that her first task was to “fix the basics and get the house in order.”
Gardner, a petite woman with black hair and a tattoo of a black widow spider on her wrist, joined Wikipedia nine months ago after leaving Canadian Broadcasting Co., where she oversaw the introduction of advertising on its website. She said she didn’t foresee a time when Wikipedia would go that route, though she added that she should never say never.
So far, Gardner has hired a staff lawyer, an accountant and a head of business development. She has created a travel policy, reimbursement policy and code of conduct for employees and instituted criminal background checks for potential hires (Wikimedia got unwanted publicity after a technology site revealed in December that the foundation’s chief operating officer until July had been convicted of theft, drunk driving and fleeing a car accident before being hired.)
Now comes the hard part: money.
The foundation makes some -- less than 2% of its budget -- from ways other than flat out asking for it, Gardner said. For instance, it licenses the Wikipedia logo to companies such as Nokia, which used it to advertise a new phone, and it charges websites such as Answers.com for real-time feeds with page updates.
“The most difficult issue for a nonprofit is always how to raise money in ways which are consistent with the mission,” Gardner said, “and don’t distract too much from the mission-related work.”
In the early days, funding wasn’t a problem. Wales helped launched Wikipedia in 2001 with money he made through Bomis Inc., a Web portal known for directing users to pictures of women and celebrities, clothed and unclothed. By February 2004, the English-language Wikipedia had nearly 250,000 alphabetized articles. Today the English version has more than 2 million articles.
Global interest in the volume of information -- and the fact that it’s free -- helped the site grow from the 100th most visited in 2005 to the ninth most visited now, according to Web-traffic tracker Alexa.
Decisions, financial and otherwise, are made by the Wikimedia Foundation board, whose seven directors include Wales, a French plant geneticist, a classical bassoonist studying law in Virginia and an Italian computer programmer. Most board members are nominated and elected, via e-mail debate and balloting, by Wikipedia editors and contributors.
As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. “Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years,” said Nathan Awrich, a 26-year-old Wikipedia editor from Vermont who supports advertising.
Outsiders find it hard to see how the site can avoid selling ad space.
“They either have to charge people or run ads, or both,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in consumer behavior online.
E-mail traffic among Wikipedia contributors shed light on the depth of financing anxiety and the details that cause angst. One worried about the tax implications of the site accepting more than $200 from any individual. Another complained about a proposal to give T-shirts to donors. Wrote one person: “All of this fundraising talk is very nice and dandy, but it sounds like plans for the local glee club, not an international foundation.”
Foundation Director Erik Moeller said the foundation had to be “very, very careful with the kinds of deals we want to make” to sustain itself.
“We don’t want to endanger the mission by entering into deals that would conflict with it,” said Moeller, a German technology writer who was elected to the foundation board in 2006 and named director last year.
Some people have abandoned Wikipedia for Wikipedia-like companies and organizations, including Citizendium and Veripedia, and speak of joining Google’s yet-to-be-launched “knol” project. Co-founder Wales started a for-profit that operates a Google-like search engine and allows users to write Wikipedia-like articles. Wales’ site, called Wikia, runs ads.
Wales said that the free culture movement, as it’s called, has to think creatively if it wants to keep spreading information to computers around the world.
“There are some real problems with a nonprofit structure,” he said. “One of the basic problems is funding: We can get enough money to survive but don’t really have the funding to push forward or innovate.”
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alana.semuels@latimes.com
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d98f636f7a1a1928c0e13cc1be8f2d26 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-10-me-conference10-story.html | Strife and solutions at school conferences | Strife and solutions at school conferences
Sixth-grade teacher Deidre Sexton watched in disbelief as a student was struck by his mother during a parent-teacher conference. Steve Klein recalled a mother who threatened to pull her ninth-grade son out of school and have him sell fruit on the freeway. Other teachers recount the times parents have tried to bully and intimidate them.
Parent-teacher conferences are a time-honored school tradition, but for many teachers they are also trying, emotionally wrought encounters. These days, the sessions are taking on a new look as schools contend with assertive or no-show parents as well as higher academic stakes that can cause tensions.
Some teachers are providing soft lighting and candles to set a friendly atmosphere. Students are being invited to lead sessions, in part to keep the adults in check. And some schools are offering child-care services to encourage participation.
Not even mood lighting, however, can keep some of the meetings from becoming heated.
Retired teacher Kristine Valentine recounted a session at Budlong Elementary School, south of Exposition Park, at which a woman, defensive about her son’s poor classwork, refused to sit, towering over Valentine in an apparent attempt to put her at a psychological disadvantage.
When Klein taught at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles, the mother of the ninth-grader was so fed up after hearing repeatedly of the teenager’s disruptive exploits that she asked Klein not to call her anymore for conferences.
The relationship between parents and teachers has often been somewhat tenuous. But many educators say that today’s so-called helicopter parents are not partners as much as hovering, overly protective defenders of their children. Parents, in turn, say many schools overemphasize test scores rather than the abilities of individual students. And some worry about college admissions, which have become increasingly competitive and anxiety-inducing.
Myra McGovern, a spokeswoman for the National Assn. of Independent Schools, said schools -- and by extension teachers -- had been caught up in a societal shift of lagging respect for institutions generally. She hears repeated anecdotes from teachers, especially at private schools, who say that, even in the classroom, they are expected to respond immediately to telephone calls or e-mails from parents seeking impromptu conversations.
“The parents feel like they know their child best, and they are their advocates,” McGovern said. “Whereas in the past the parents may have sided with the teacher, now that’s less likely. Of course, the kids can manipulate that.”
Scott Mandel, who teaches at Pacoima Middle School, said concern about manipulation is one reason he always has the student attend the conference.
“Otherwise these students can play one against the other,” Mandel said. “Students are very smart, very good at this, and it’s easy to make up stories.”
Mandel, who recently published “The Parent-Teacher Partnership: How to Work Together for Student Achievement,” said parent-teacher conferences were crucial, noting that one provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act school reform law called for more parental involvement.
“If you as a parent don’t respect your teacher, you should probably be at another school,” he said. “Teachers in turn need to respect parents as a consumer. It’s like a doctor and patient who work together for the health of the body.”
Christy Flynn, a fifth-grade teacher who is also a moderator at the website www.atozteacherstuff.com, plays soft music in the background (the songs of Harry Connick and Josh Groban are popular), lights a candle and sets out peppermints and chocolates for parents at her Louisiana grade school.
“When I have parents dealing with not-so-great news or more difficult issues, it does seem to take the wind out of their sails a bit,” Flynn said.
The Children’s School, a private campus in Stamford, Conn., produces a 15-minute DVD for each student, showing the child engaged in lessons and group activities. The DVDs are provided to parents and discussed at conferences.
But by all accounts, nothing quite prepares new teachers for the events, and some parents try to take advantage.
“I’ve been teaching 18 years now, and it’s easier,” said Sexton, who teaches in Hancock Park. “When you’re younger and starting off, some parents feel like they can say more things to you. You have a kid who’s struggling and they’ll say well, he was a good student before he came to your class. But then you pull out the folder with the child’s history and they’re thrown for a loss.”
With sometimes more than 20 parents to see, she can devote no more than 10 minutes to each conference and often tries to continue discussions via telephone or e-mail. Some of Sexton’s students have tutors who are sent to conferences in lieu of parents -- which “works fine with me,” Sexton said, adding that tutors sometimes ask better questions because they know the educational requirements.
The most surprising reaction at a conference, Sexton said, was the woman who hit her son, a child with special needs. The teacher speculated that the mother had grown frustrated with the boy’s slow progress.
There are also poignant miscommunications, like the time Jo Ann Sayers, who worked in the Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District, met the mother of a fourth-grader. The boy apparently was running a racket in which he convinced his classmates that if they didn’t hand over their lunch money in exchange for his protection, they’d be beaten up. At the first parent-teacher conference, the 10-year-old boy offered to translate for his Pacific Islander mother, who apparently didn’t have a clue about his behavior.
“Remembering the directive to say something positive to begin a conference,” Sayers said, she started to say that the boy was good at sports. But before she got to the words “at sports,” the mother jumped up and hugged her son, thinking Sayers was praising the boy for being good.
“I just sat there in a state of shock,” Sayers said.
Sayers noted, though, that the boy’s behavior changed for the better after that. “Maybe more children need to hear that they are good.”
Many teachers say the emphasis on good grades and high test scores causes some parents to be more demanding.
“Understandably, they want the highest grade possible to get into a ‘good’ college,” said Odell Mack, who teaches at Palisades Charter High School in Pacific Palisades. Some parents have tried to intimidate him by claiming they want to have a conference and instead hauling him in front of the principal.
“It never ceases to amaze me how some parents want to tell teachers what they don’t think they should be doing, what they should be doing, what should not be included in the course, what the grading scale should be -- basically how we should do our jobs.”
Despite the obstacles, most teachers say conferences are valuable.
On a recent morning at the Sequoyah School, an independent kindergarten-through-eighth-grade progressive campus in Pasadena, 7-year-old Ava led the conference for her parents, Juliana and Patrick Ferry, and teacher Jeff Radt.
She showed them her workbook and the reading and math problems she had been working on; talked about a favorite book, “Little House on the Prairie”; and said she wanted to do better in math and Spanish.
Her father, a teacher at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada Flintridge, told Radt how much he liked the student-led conference, which Sequoyah initiated this year.
“The relationship shouldn’t be adversarial,” said Juliana Ferry. “I’ve known parents at other schools who feel the need to defend their child. But not here. It’s more of a collaboration.”
Ultimately, said Gretchen Kempf, who teaches at the private Campbell Hall in North Hollywood, teachers and parents must accept that they are working for the same goals.
“Kids need to know they are not in it by themselves, that we all have strengths and weaknesses and that they’re not alone,” Kempf said. “Whether we have 20 minutes or five, it helps to build a relationship.”
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c arla.rivera@latimes.com
For more on schools, from inside and outside the classroom, go to www.latimes.com/the homeroom.
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3b5df9558ab74321811898cc74aa3a88 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-10-me-gang10-story.html | Politics clouds anti-gang fight | Politics clouds anti-gang fight
As a wave of high-profile gang shootings continues to rattle parts of Los Angeles, city leaders are locked in a turf battle of their own over who should control gang-prevention programs and the millions of dollars to pay for them.
Each side blames the other for waging the kind of political infighting that for years has hamstrung the city’s ability to combat some of the nation’s worst youth violence.
Some leaders fear the impasse will only raise public doubt about City Hall’s ability to rise above territorial squabbles and act responsibly.
“We have to get through the political battles for the good of the city,” said Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who is promoting a $30-million parcel tax for the November city ballot to fund new gang-prevention programs.
The current friction involves Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs a committee on gangs, and City Controller Laura Chick. Cardenas is fighting a plan by Chick to shift gang-prevention services, now under council control, to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office.
Chick made her recommendation in a report last month that criticized the city for scattering a jumble of services across more than a dozen departments and spending millions of dollars on programs that have proved ineffective in turning youths away from gangs.
Since then, she and Cardenas have accused each other of delaying, with their feud spilling into public view two weeks ago during an appearance on the radio program “Which Way, L.A?” and continuing in statements issued by their offices.
Chick, a former council member and City Hall fixture for 15 years, criticized Cardenas for “stonewalling” her report.
Cardenas, a former state assemblyman who has made himself an authority on juvenile justice, responded that he needed time to digest her findings ahead of a Friday hearing of his Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development.
“Dysfunctional politics is taking over here, which is ironic because [my report] talks about how we need to take politics out of it,” Chick said in an interview last week. “This is about turf.”
Cardenas said that he agreed with Chick on the need to consolidate gang-prevention programs but that handing control to Villaraigosa would undermine that effort.
He said Chick, the city’s fiscal watchdog, lacks the authority to adequately audit gang services in the mayor’s office -- a point she disputes.
“Laura Chick is trying to create this frenzied atmosphere,” said Cardenas, who described her report as a rehash of a gang study from 2007. “I refuse to be manipulated in that fashion. I would be ashamed of myself if I allowed anybody to move on policy for all the wrong reasons.”
Similar fights in years past have constrained efforts to promote effective anti-gang programs.
Then-Mayor Richard Riordan sparred with the City Council nearly a decade ago over his desire to rein in Los Angeles’ controversial L.A. Bridges program, which doles out millions of dollars to groups that provide youth mentoring, street-level interventions and after-school programs.
The council defied Riordan and voted to continue Bridges’ funding despite an audit by then-Controller Rick Tuttle that found Bridges was so poorly run that it should be shut down and overhauled.
As the latest funding feud unfolds, some wonder whether officials have lost sight of the pressing nature of the violence, which has left more than a dozen people dead or injured over the last 2 1/2 weeks in South Los Angeles, Glassell Park and Echo Park.
“I say to them -- because they have the potential to be great leaders -- ‘Just get it done,’ ” said Connie Rice, a co-director of the Advancement Project, a public policy group.
In a city-sponsored report released 14 months ago, the organization called for a massive overhaul of the city’s approach to gang violence, including the creation of a department of neighborhood safety run by a “high-powered, politically skilled” gang czar who would recast the city’s many anti-gang programs.
“The time for studying this is over,” Rice said.
Some at City Hall criticize Cardenas for trying to maintain his powerful hold on gang services at the expense of moving forward aggressively, saying his committee has not done enough to advance the city’s response to youth violence. Those critics say that Cardenas has had trouble getting members of his own gang committee to show up at meetings.
Cardenas said he has labored to ensure that the city spends its money on programs that make a difference. He pointed out how his committee recently produced a new “model” to redefine gang intervention work, a step that will allow the city to create clearer guidelines for programs seeking money. That process alone took months.
But some elected leaders want swifter action.
Council members Wendy Greuel and Hahn called last month for the council to advance Chick’s recommendation of consolidating programs in one office that reports to Villaraigosa.
Under their proposals, the controller would perform fiscal and performance audits every six months -- a step that could require a voter-approved change to the City Charter.
“This is a crisis,” Greuel said. “We have to move quickly. Politics have to be put aside for us to address the issue of gang violence in Los Angeles.”
Yet even as the Greuel-Hahn plan advances, Villaraigosa and his aides have sent mixed signals about whether they want the responsibility and whether the consolidation would face new organizational challenges, according to people involved in the matter.
The mayor launched an anti-gang strategy in his office last year -- hiring a gang czar to coordinate the city’s many programs and targeting police and prevention resources at eight gang-reduction zones.
Cardenas said he and Villaraigosa have spoken about an alternative to Chick’s plan that would create a high-level group in City Hall to oversee program management.
Villaraigosa did not offer details about his plans, but said: “I expect we’ll be moving ahead very soon.”
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duke.helfand@latimes.com
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39ebd68a6ee6e82e117214fbf8adddb0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-10-na-intel10-story.html | Verdict mixed on Iraq claims | Verdict mixed on Iraq claims
After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration’s claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.
The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.
But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.
The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.
Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional official familiar with the document said: “The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be happy.”
The report helps culminate a series of investigations that the committee has carried out in connection with the war in Iraq. The “statements report” was stalled repeatedly, in part because of the complexity of the task but also because of partisan disagreements among senators.
The findings are likely to be a source of political discomfort for the White House by reviving the controversy over the Bush administration’s case for war. That issue has largely faded from view on Capitol Hill at a time when the White House is sparring with Congress over other intelligence-related issues: CIA interrogation tactics and the scope of the government’s wiretapping authority.
The report could also become political fodder for the presidential race, which has focused on the differing positions of the remaining candidates on the decision to invade Iraq.
Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee had initially pushed for the report to focus not only on the prewar claims of the Bush administration but also on statements made by members of Congress, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who is vying for her party’s presidential nomination.
“The statements report is clearly the most political of all the reports the committee has done,” said a senior committee aide. “It’s inherently problematic to try to climb inside the heads [of policymakers] and know what they knew at the time.”
Officials said the report is divided into categories that focus on prewar claims about Iraq’s alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, as well as its supposed ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Each section includes a catalog of as many as 20 prewar claims, as well as a summary conclusion on whether the assertions were generally warranted.
“The whole purpose of this exercise is to answer questions about whether the administration was honest in its use of intelligence when it made the case for war,” said a senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In many cases, statements that were later proven wrong -- such as President Bush’s assertion in September 2002 that Iraq “possesses biological and chemical weapons” -- were largely in line with U.S. intelligence assessments at the time.
Prewar assertions about Iraq’s nuclear program were more problematic because they were supported by some intelligence assessments but not others.
“They were substantiated,” a congressional official said, “but didn’t convey the disagreements within the intelligence community.”
In August 2002, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that “Saddam [Hussein] has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” But by that time, the State Department’s intelligence bureau was challenging the assumption that Iraq’s nuclear program had been reactivated.
White House suggestions that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda were at odds with intelligence assessments that voiced skepticism about such a relationship.
The report marks the culmination of a multipart investigation that the committee launched in February 2004. The only remaining task is an investigation into the activities of a Pentagon office led by Douglas J. Feith, then undersecretary of Defense for policy and one of the architects of the Iraq war.
Congressional officials said the panel is nearing completion of a report on that subject that will focus largely on a secret post-Sept. 11 meeting between two Defense Department officials who worked for Feith and an Iranian exile, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who had been a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and was regarded by the CIA as unreliable.
The report focusing on the Bush administration’s prewar statements is set to be delivered to members of the committee this week, officials said. But it could be weeks away from public release because members may push for changes, and much of the material cited in the report has yet to be approved for declassification by U.S. intelligence officials.
Dissatisfied with the scope of the report, Republicans on the panel are expected to attach a section outlining their objections and calling attention to prewar claims by prominent Democrats, including Clinton.
In an October 2002 speech on the Senate floor, Clinton said that if left unchecked, Hussein “will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”
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greg.miller@latimes.com
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d78bbcdb339ba60f3e603eeb204395ee | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-10-na-lottery10-story.html | In Oregon, healthcare for the lucky | In Oregon, healthcare for the lucky
Tens of thousands of Oregonians queued up quickly for a chance at the state’s latest lottery, but this one is no game.
Officials began drawing names last week for a chance at some rare openings in the state’s healthcare plan.
Announced in February, the lottery drew 91,675 hopefuls in 30 days. The winners will receive a postcard notifying them that they can apply for the Oregon Health Plan.
Like millions of people across the country, cash-strapped Oregonians bypass doctors, forgo prescription drugs and neglect basic healthcare when they can’t afford health insurance. The state’s Department of Human Services says at least 600,000 Oregonians live day to day without health insurance.
For some, life or death could hinge on the outcome of the unique insurance lottery.
Budget limitations capped the Oregon Health Plan standard benefit package in mid-2004. Now the plan has room for a few thousand people. The lottery winners will be the first new applicants since the cap was imposed.
Oregon’s standard plan covers physician services, prescription drugs, mental health and chemical dependency services, emergency medical services, and limited dental, hospital and vision benefits. Premiums range from zero to $20.
When it was fully funded, it was considered a trailblazing program. In 1996, the benefit package enrolled five times as many people as are enrolled today, and only 10.7% of Oregon’s population lacked insurance, compared with about 16% today.
Long odds of winning the healthcare lottery didn’t deter Judith Padgett, a 55-year-old resident of Keizer, a suburb of Salem, the capital. She can’t afford healthcare, avoids doctors, and goes without prescription drugs because they’re too expensive. She is banking on the state-sponsored insurance lottery.
“I’m just hoping that I’m lucky,” Padgett said. “I really do need it.”
Padgett has a rare blood disorder that has killed relatives, she said, but cannot afford healthcare on her $500 monthly stipend in an Easter Seals job retraining program.
Healthcare advocates and policymakers can recite story after story of low-income adults who don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid. Every day they see uninsured elderly, working-poor and young people trying to make ends meet with two or three low-wage jobs.
Oregon’s largest newspaper, the Oregonian, called the lottery a “jarring reminder of just how broken the U.S. healthcare system really is.”
A Department of Human Services computer in Salem is randomly picking about 3,000 people from among those who snagged reservations by the March 1 deadline.
The department will distribute more applications in coming months.
The exact enrollment figures for the program are determined by a monthly average during a two-year budget period.
Nearly 18,000 people are currently enrolled.
Anticipating demand, the department established 200 lottery sign-up sites. In February, people flocked to county health departments, hospitals, tribal health clinics and community health centers to register.
“To think that that many people signed up is unbelievable,” said Ellen Pinney, director of Oregon Health Action Campaign, a nonprofit consumer healthcare advocacy group.
The overwhelming response, she said, should “show our lawmakers the incredible need that is out there.”
Pinney acknowledged that some people considered a lottery an “absolutely ridiculous” way to make healthcare decisions. “But what is any other state doing to give access to at least some of the uninsured?” she asked.
Said Karen House, manager of self-sufficiency medical programs at the Department of Human Services: “We have a huge need.”
Oregon studied a variety of ways to allocate scarce insurance resources. It opted for random selection because that seemed the most fair, “particularly knowing we would not have funds to cover everyone,” House said.
The department secured federal approval to use the lottery process.
Federal law bans discrimination, and lotteries don’t discriminate, she said.
Meanwhile, elected officials in Oregon don’t intend to hold an annual lottery. In September, Democratic Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski appointed the Oregon Health Fund Board to advise next year’s legislative session on better ways to address healthcare access and coverage.
“We are looking at a number of other reform approaches,” said Barney Speight, director of the board. “With so much uncertainty over what will happen at the federal level, the state is reviewing what choices we have.”
Oregon’s healthcare system will come under scrutiny again within days with the release of a report called “Dying for Coverage” by Families USA, a national nonprofit group for healthcare consumers. The report focuses on Oregon but also attempts to estimate on a state-by-state basis how many people die because they lack health insurance.
Families USA says its research builds on two previous studies on lack of insurance as a cause of death.
In 2000, an Institute of Medicine study said 18,000 adults nationwide died because they did not have health insurance.
A 2006 Urban Institute study put the number at 22,000 adults.
“It shows how dysfunctional our system is,” said Alwyn Cassil, director of public affairs for the Center for Studying Health System Change, a health policy research group. “To get healthcare coverage, you have to win the lottery.”
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stuart.glascock@latimes.com
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dce83b686cef61454d7b5175024fd0f0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-10-oe-costanza10-story.html | Going downhill | Going downhill
The news media and the government are fixated on the fact that the U.S. economy may be headed into a recession -- defined as two or more successive quarters of declining gross domestic product. The situation is actually much worse. By some measures of economic performance, the United States has been in a recession since 1975 -- a recession in quality of life, or well-being.
How can this be? One first needs to understand what GDP measures to see why it is not an appropriate gauge of our national well-being.
GDP measures the total market value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given period. But it includes only those goods and services traded for money. It also adds everything together, without discerning desirable, well-being-enhancing economic activity from undesirable, well-being-reducing activity. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because someone has to clean it up, but it obviously detracts from well-being. More crime, more sickness, more war, more pollution, more fires, storms and pestilence are all potentially positives for the GDP because they can spur an increase in economic activity.
GDP also ignores activity that may enhance well-being but is outside the market. The unpaid work of parents caring for their children at home doesn’t show up in GDP, but if they decide to work outside the home and pay for child care, GDP suddenly increases. And even though $1 in income means a lot more to the poor than to the rich, GDP takes no account of income distribution.
In short, GDP was never intended to be a measure of citizens’ welfare -- and it functions poorly as such. Yet it is used as a surrogate appraisal of national well-being in far too many circumstances.
The shortcomings of GDP are well known, and several researchers have proposed alternatives that address them, including William Nordhaus’ and James Tobin’s Measure of Economic Welfare, developed in 1972; Herman Daly’s and John Cobb’s Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, developed in 1989; and the Redefining Progress think tank’s more recent variation, the Genuine Progress Indicator. Although these alternatives -- which, like GDP, are measured in monetary terms -- are not perfect and need more research and refinement, they are much better approximations to a measure of true national well-being.
The formula for calculating GPI, for instance, starts with personal consumption expenditures, a major component of GDP, but makes several crucial adjustments. First, it accounts for income distribution. It then adds positive contributions that GDP ignores, such as the value of household and volunteer work. Finally, it subtracts things that are well-being-reducing, such as the loss of leisure time and the costs of crime, commuting and pollution.
While the U.S. GDP has steadily increased since 1950 (with the occasional recession), GPI peaked about 1975 and has been relatively flat or declining ever since. That’s consistent with life-satisfaction surveys, which also show flat or dropping scores over the last several decades.
This is a very different picture of the economy from the one we normally read about, and it requires different policy responses. We are now in a period of what Daly -- a former World Bank economist now at the University of Maryland -- has called “uneconomic growth,” in which further growth in economic activity (that is, GDP) is actually reducing national well-being.
How can we get out of this 33-year downturn in quality of life? Several policies have been suggested that might be thought of as a national quality-of-life stimulus package.
To start, the U.S. needs to make national well-being -- not increased GDP -- its primary policy goal, funding efforts to better measure and report it. There’s already been some movement in this direction around the world. Bhutan, for example, recently made “gross national happiness” its explicit policy goal. Canada is developing an Index of Well-being, and the Australian Treasury considers increasing “real well-being,” rather than mere GDP, its primary goal.
Once Americans’ well-being becomes the basis for measuring our success, other reforms should follow. We should tax bads (carbon emissions, depletion of natural resources) rather than goods (labor, savings, investment). We should recognize the negative effects of growing income disparities and take steps to address them.
International trade also will have to be reformed so that environmental protection, labor rights and democratic self-determination are not subjugated to the blind pursuit of increased GDP.
But the most important step may be the first one: Recognizing that the U.S. is mired in a 33-year-old quality-of- life recession and that our continued national focus on growing GDP is blinding us to the way out.
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25b10d857bb7cf432111c71d3853b4f8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-11-fg-pakistan11-story.html | Pair of bombings kill 15 in Pakistan | Pair of bombings kill 15 in Pakistan
Two bombs exploded here early today, killing at least 12 people at an office of the federal police and three at a house in an upscale residential district, authorities said.
The Federal Investigation Agency building was devastated by a bomb planted near an elevator, said Mirza Mohammed Yasin, an FIA official in the capital, Islamabad.
“The building is badly damaged. Fire is raging,” witness Tariq Saeed said by telephone outside the agency. “Bodies are being taken out of the building.”
State-run Pakistan Television said several people were taken to the hospital.
Private TV footage showed the badly damaged facade of a multiple-story concrete building, with rubble scattered across an intersection. Flames shot up from the wreckage, and several cars were damaged.
An ambulance weaved through a crowd of hundreds of bystanders -- some with torn clothes, others with minor wounds -- stumbling away from the blast scene.
Mohammed Afzal, a Lahore police official, said it was not immediately clear whose house was bombed about six miles from the police agency.
Dawn News television quoted an officer as saying that two suicide bombers drove a pickup to the house and detonated explosives. It said two of the dead were children of a gardener, but the report could not immediately be confirmed.
More than 500 people have been killed in Pakistan in bombings that intensified after troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in July.
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ad9f23445f8803d33d5019d32e5dccc7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-11-fg-post11-story.html | Pain in the Royal Mail | Pain in the Royal Mail
These days, villagers who want to send a letter can go onto the Royal Mail’s website, print out postage, and place the envelope in their delivery box out on the road. But that would be missing the point entirely.
Here on the endless North Yorkshire moors, where the wind is ubiquitous, the trees are sporadic and the cottages are often low and lonely, mailing a letter often means a trek up the muddy farm track, skirting the sloe-eyed sheep, then down past the 12th century stone church and into the narrow post office doorway.
Inside, the morning chill surrenders to the orange-bright electric radiator in the hearth. Postmaster Sonia Leeming is laying down a plate of hot lavender scones, pretending to ignore Andy Elliott from down the road, who leans on the counter with an envelope of his new photographs of the local foxhunt and the steam train at Pickering.
By the time you’ve arrived, you’ve forgotten what you came for.
“Na then,” Elliott will be saying.
“Third time he’s been here t’day,” Leeming announces, shaking her head. “And he ha’n’t bought a thing.”
In all of England, there is little so central to village life as the rural post office: The cheerful corner shop stuffed to the brim behind its battered oak counter with tidy rolls of stamps, express mail folders, and jars of gumdrops and homemade jelly. It is, aside from the pub of course, the principal destination for just about everyone just about every day, even if it’s for just about nothing.
It is a landmark one imagines has changed little since Henry VIII first established the “Master of the Posts” in 1516. The outposts serve as an enduring symbol of the Royal Mail’s commitment to deliver 98% of all first-class letters within a single day and the neighborly, if eccentric, character of the English village.
In Britain, only the foolhardy or those with major transactions venture into the long lines of the central urban post offices. Even in London, most people visit the postal counter at their local mini-mart, where dropping off a parcel can be greeted with an inquiry about the recipient’s birthday, and a Cadbury chocolate bar can be purchased for the walk home.
Charm, however, has its limits. Post Office Ltd., the government-owned company that runs Britain’s 14,376 post offices, says it is hemorrhaging $5.8 million a week, in large part thanks to the sprawling network of tiny outlets in just about every village and neighborhood across the country.
After a year of warnings, studies and anguished debate, the government has announced final plans for closing 2,500 post offices by the end of the year, a great many of them in rural outposts with little else but the post office to define themselves as a proper village.
The proposal has unleashed turmoil across the country. A petition in opposition, with more than 4 million names, is thought to be the largest handed to a British prime minister in peacetime.
To no avail. Last month, authorities identified for closure 47 post offices here in North and East Yorkshire, where villages tucked in the moors and dales are sometimes so remote that getting to the next post office can mean a drive of 10 miles. Worse, many towns fear the small convenience shops whose anchors have always been the postal counters will be bled dry when that revenue runs out, leaving locals with neither services nor a place to catch up with the neighbors.
“There’s a lot of older people round about. How will they get on?” Audrey Pounder, a longtime North Yorkshire resident, said over tea and toasted biscuits one recent afternoon at the Hawnby post office, which faces closure in the next few months.
“Well, they don’t care, do they?” said Darren Leeming, who runs the outlet with his wife.
The Leemings have offered to forgo the $88-a-week payment they receive from the government and run the post office for free as a means of keeping their shop open. That was rejected, as was their plea to continue offering a series of services hitherto available at most post offices: cash withdrawals from pension and welfare allotments, pay-as-you-go cellphone recharging, and collection of outbound mail. Allowing them to do it, authorities said, would divert business from postal outlets in neighboring towns that must boost their revenue to avoid closures down the road.
The problem, government officials say, is the same one that besets postal services across the globe: more e-mails, fewer letters; tough competition from private delivery services; stamps for sale online and at supermarkets; direct deposit of pension checks, which used to be handed out at the post office.
The number of customers using the post offices throughout Britain has dropped by 4 million in the last two years.
“The bottom line is there are too many post offices open, and to maintain a sustainable future, these closures are one of the steps we’ve had to take, difficult as it is to some of our customers,” said Nick Martens, a spokesman for the Royal Mail.
“Everyone probably wants their little rural post office to stay open. But they don’t always use it, I’m afraid. Some of those smaller offices have as little as a dozen customers a week going in.”
Hawnby is a village of 60 souls embedded in the Hambledon Hills, with an additional 200 or so spread out on the rolling moorlands around it. Verdant, sheep-dotted valleys give way to the kind of bleak, boggy grasslands that inspired “Wuthering Heights” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
When the fog crawls out of the valley bottoms and seeps across the moors, leaving only a few inches illuminated in front of a car’s headlights down the lonely roads, the cheery tea room at the post office fills with villagers and hikers. The Leemings bring in pots of Yorkshire tea, scones and buttery bacon sandwiches. They are reputed to serve the best bread and butter pudding north of Watford, about 180 miles to the south.
Buying the 150-year-old post office was an “Under the Tuscan Sun” dream for both of them, Sonia Leeming said, when they held down jobs in the city of Leeds but yearned to move to the country to raise their two young sons.
The post office, like most of the rest of Hawnby, is part of the land holdings of the eighth earl of Mexborough. The Leemings put down their entire $40,000 in savings to buy the business in 2001 and have had a steady stream of customers since -- especially in summer, when flocks of tourists hiking the moors stop in for tea and newspapers.
Sheep farmers use the post office regularly to register their new lambs and apply for European Union subsidies. One family in town runs a mail-order cushion business out of the post office; another one, a vintage jewelry operation. Hawnby is the main postal outlet for the nearby inn, riding school, boarding kennel, gliding club and real estate office.
To supplement their income, Darren Leeming repairs tractors, and the couple sells groceries, homemade jams and locally made rare-breed pig sausages out of the post office.
The steady crop of postal customers at the Hawnby counter belies any notion that rural post offices are withering, the Leemings say, and without theirs, they are not sure they will be able to keep the store and tearoom open.
“How much more can we go through?” Darren Leeming said. “We’ve had foot-and-mouth disease. We had the floods two years ago: Three road bridges washed away; I had a cow floating down the street off my front step. It seems like you get through one thing, and then there’s another one.”
Under the closure plan, the government says, 95% of all rural residents will still have a post office within three miles; though in Hawnby, the next closest is six miles away; and a few others could be even farther for far-flung farmers. Authorities say residents can phone in for home postal service delivery, but many people doubt it will be worth much, since remote farmsteads can’t even now get mail delivered past a box near the main road.
Elliott, the photographer, has popped in at Hawnby “for a chuckle,” to learn whether anything has happened since the last time he appeared, two hours earlier.
“When I go for walks, this gives me a focal point, a sense of purpose, a place to go,” Elliott said.
“It’s all very short-sighted of the government. It’s punishing the countryside for something the countryside hasn’t done. It’s splitting England into two, rural and urban, and I think it’s ruining the social life of people who use this place as a place to know one another,” he said.
Sonia Leeming nods approvingly. “Coopa tea?” she says.
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kim.murphy@latimes.com
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1ece7f6e3b7868c1868e753ffa3bbc9c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-11-fi-hulu11-story.html | Hulu gets ready to launch | Hulu gets ready to launch
Hulu, the closely watched joint venture of News Corp. and NBC Universal, makes its public debut Wednesday, making available legally and for free one of the most expansive collections of television shows on the Internet.
The online video service, which has been in test mode since October, launches with more than 250 television series, including current shows such as “The Office” and “The Simpsons” and classics such as “Arrested Development” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Hulu also provides 100 free, feature-length films, including “The Big Lebowski,” “Me, Myself & Irene” and “Some Like It Hot,” along with short video clips from 150 television series including “Saturday Night Live” and “In Living Color.”
The videos can be watched on Hulu.com as well as on online hangouts where people already congregate and watch video, including America Online, Comcast’s Fancast.com, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo.
“Not only have they marshaled so much content, they’re going to distribute through all their partners,” said James McQuivey of Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. “That’s always been the master stroke for Hulu. . . . They’re going to put this content on the most popular destinations on the Web.”
Hulu seeks to satiate the growing appetite for online video. More than half of all Americans -- and about four out of five U.S. Internet users -- watch online video at least once a month, according to a February report from research firm EMarketer Inc. One in four had viewed full-length television episodes within the last three months, according to Nielsen Media Research.
“Two years ago, this didn’t exist in terms of content providers putting their stuff in an online environment,” Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar said. Hulu has been growing by word of mouth, even though the service has been available until now by invitation only. In the last 30 days, Kilar said its audience had swelled to more than 5 million viewers, as people posted Hulu’s video clips on 5,000 websites. In addition to providing TV content from its joint venture partners, Hulu will have 12,000 videos from more than 50 content providers including Warner Bros. Television Group, Lions Gate, the National Basketball Assn. and the National Hockey League.
Kilar said Hulu gave advertisers such as Best Buy, Chili’s, Intel and Nissan a way to follow TV audiences online. Hulu developed new ways for advertisers to reach audiences, allowing viewers to choose which ad they’d like to see -- the promotion for a sports car, say, or a minivan. Another approach permits Hollywood studios to sponsor a show, letting viewers watch a movie trailer before the start of a TV program in lieu of commercials.
“We were sold out of inventory during the private beta period,” Kilar said. “Everybody re-upped.”
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dawn.chmielewski@latimes.com
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1ea86f80039e68f8e9fd1bd3b4edd3c3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-11-fi-tanker11-story.html | Boeing to challenge Air Force decision on tanker contract | Boeing to challenge Air Force decision on tanker contract
Escalating the fight over the biggest defense contract in years, Boeing Co. said Monday that it intended to challenge the Pentagon’s decision to place an aircraft order potentially worth $40 billion with the consortium of Northrop Grumman Corp. and European aircraft maker Airbus.
Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, plans to file a formal protest today challenging what is likely to be the nation’s last big new defense contract for at least a decade.
“Our team has taken a very close look at the tanker decision and found serious flaws in the process that we believe warrant appeal,” said Boeing Chief Executive James McNerney. “This is an extraordinary step rarely taken by our company, and one we take very seriously.”
Culminating an intense competition whose outcome has riled “buy American” proponents, the Air Force on Feb. 29 chose the Northrop-Airbus proposal over Boeing’s. The planned fleet of 179 new aerial refueling tankers will replace KC-135 tankers that were built in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.
The Air Force has not yet publicly detailed how it made its decision, but executives of Century City-based Northrop said they were told in a briefing Monday that their entry proved to be “more advantageous” than Boeing’s offer in four of the five key categories. Those included cost, the company’s past performance with other defense contracts and the mission capability of the aircraft.
The surprise decision has prompted a flurry of outcries, particularly from lawmakers representing states with big Boeing payrolls. They argue that the contract will send U.S. jobs overseas and hurt the nation’s defense industry.
The winning tanker entry is based on the twin-engine A330 passenger jet that was developed in France by Airbus, a subsidiary of European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co. A330s are built in Toulouse, France, but the Northrop-Airbus team plans to assemble the tanker versions, to be known as the KC-45A, in Mobile, Ala.
Northrop shot back Monday at Boeing’s decision to appeal the contract award, saying that its tanker was just as “American” as it rival’s proposal, which would have been built at Boeing facilities in Everett, Wash., and Wichita, Kan.
Northrop spokesman Randy Belote said that Northrop’s tanker program would create 48,000 jobs, a vast majority of them in the U.S.
The new estimate would be nearly double the initial projections of 25,000 made two years ago before the competition began. Northrop’s latest figures would top Boeing’s projections that its tanker, based on the 767 jetliner, would have created 45,000 jobs.
Belote said the new estimates were based on revised data from its suppliers, about 230 of which are U.S.-based, and new Department of Labor figures. As such, its tanker program would create 14,000 direct jobs and 34,000 indirect ones, which include such jobs as janitors and truck drivers.
Boeing’s decision to challenge the award comes as Congress prepares to hold hearings on the issue. Pentagon officials are expected to be grilled over the next several days, with some lawmakers considering whether to try to block funding for the planes.
A pivotal meeting is scheduled this morning when a powerful House Defense subcommittee is expected to get a detailed but confidential briefing from Air Force officials on how they settled on the Northrop-Airbus plane.
The meeting’s outcome could portend how Congress is likely to address the outcries over the use of a plane developed by a French company.
In a phone interview Monday, Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), one of the chief critics of the contract award to the Northrop-Airbus team, said that in addition to demanding an explanation he would “tell them what they did was not right.”
Dicks said he intended to press the Pentagon to not only overturn the decision but award the contract to Boeing, adding, “Americans want to see this built by Boeing, and that’s the right answer.”
But longtime congressional observers said other lawmakers would be hard pressed to go along with Dicks.
“Unless they find new compelling evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong in the way the contractor was chosen, it’ll be very difficult for Congress to take drastic action,” said Keith Ashdown, a policy researcher for nonpartisan government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The decision to protest came just three days after the Air Force, in a confidential briefing, provided Chicago-based Boeing a detailed explanation of how the tanker decision was reached.
Based on that meeting, Boeing CEO McNerney said the company continued to believe that it submitted the “most capable, low risk” proposal. Boeing said it would provide additional details of its case in conjunction with the protest filing today.
The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has 100 days to review Boeing’s protest and decide whether to dismiss or uphold it. If Boeing’s challenge is upheld, the GAO could require the Air Force to stage another competition.
Air Force officials were not immediately available for comment, but Air Force spokesman Geoff Morrell said early Monday that “we believe this to have been a fair and transparent competition.”
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peter.pae@latimes.com
Times staff writer Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.
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ecd55fdcf4da9e6823679d02f10be48d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-11-fi-ucla11-story.html | UCLA experts don’t buy recession | UCLA experts don’t buy recession
Brushing aside conventional wisdom, UCLA economists say California and the nation will survive the housing slump and job losses without plunging into recession -- although it will still be miserable for many Americans.
“We are holding firm: no recession this time,” UCLA Anderson Forecast Director Edward Leamer said in a report being released today.
Industrial production growth remains strong, the quarterly report notes, and consumer spending on big-ticket items such as refrigerators is expected to keep climbing -- albeit by just 0.3% this year, from 5% at the end of 2007.
Housing remains the big drag on the economy, UCLA analysts say. But they say the rising tide of foreclosures is related more to falling prices and escalating interest rates than to job losses, which triggered previous spikes in foreclosures.
People “are walking away from their homes in droves not because they lost their jobs but because home prices are falling,” Leamer said.
Many prominent economists and institutions, including Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, have already declared the economy to be in recession. That is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product.
UCLA predicts that GDP will dip by 0.4% in the second quarter of this year, but then rebound. Anderson expects GDP to be growing at 2.5% by the end of this year.
In staking out the contrarian position, Leamer noted that UCLA bucked other forecasters in 2001 by correctly predicting that year’s recession.
“We got it right, and we stood alone back then,” he said. In jest, he added later that he had “submitted my resignation letter, in the event I am wrong.”
Whether truly in recession or not, Leamer said the economy would be sputtering. It remains so fragile that “if there is a quick halt to consumer spending, we will for sure have a recession in 2008,” he added.
“The question is whether [2008] will be disappointing or horrible; our forecast is disappointing,” he said in an interview.
The Anderson forecasters contend that the economy has been wounded mainly by the collapse of residential real estate. The number of jobs overall will continue to increase, but not at a pace fast enough to employ the growing numbers of people seeking work.
National unemployment will peak at 5.6% at the beginning of 2009, according to the forecast, from 4.8% currently.
“In a recession, jobs are easy to lose and hard to find. This time there are not a lot of layoffs, so jobs aren’t easy to lose, but they are hard to find,” Leamer said.
So far, most of the jobs lost in California and the nation have been in construction and financial services, but those losses are small compared with the severe manufacturing job losses in the recessions of 1990 and 2001.
After the 2001 recession, 358,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in California, UCLA economist Ryan Ratcliff noted. By comparison, the state has shed 55,000 financial sector and 106,000 construction jobs since 2007.
“They’re just not the same scope as the previous decline in manufacturing,” Ratcliff said.
The Los Angeles area will continue to see job losses more than offset by the addition of new jobs, though the increase in jobs will not keep up with the growing number of job-seekers here.
Still, Los Angeles, Orange County and the San Francisco Bay Area are among the growth areas in the state that UCLA economist Jerry Nickelsburg said “might be growing slower, but they are not running out of gas.”
Statewide unemployment will peak at the end of 2008, and will decline slightly in 2009, but will remain close to 6% until 2010 -- when it will fall to 5.5%, UCLA predicts.
Unlike past recessions, the economy will not show dramatic improvements after this period of sluggishness, Leamer predicted.
“In the past 10 years, the U.S. economy has had two locomotives,” Leamer said. One was the high-tech stock bubble of the late 1990s, the next was the run-up in housing.
“Looking to the future, there isn’t another locomotive. There is still not a reason for great optimism,” he said.
Home prices will also be slow to bounce back, and the UCLA forecasters do not predict when the housing market will recover.
Even though the Federal Reserve has cut its benchmark lending rate, mortgage interest rates have not fallen dramatically, said one of the Anderson Forecast authors, David Shulman. “The consumer has yet to benefit from the rate cuts,” he said.
It could be months before the accuracy of UCLA’s forecast is known. The National Bureau of Economic Research, a private association of leading economists, makes the formal determination of a recession.
The bureau defines recession more broadly than two negative quarters of GDP. It says a recession is “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months” evident in GDP, income, employment, production and consumption.
The bureau’s Business Cycle Dating Committee typically declares recessions six months to 18 months after the beginning of a downturn. The committee meets irregularly, generally convening when a downturn is clear.
The bureau last determined a recession at the end of 2001, which it said lasted eight months.
UCLA’s Anderson Forecast had said in April of that year that there was a 90% chance the economy was in recession, an assessment disputed by other economists.
Stanford University economist Robert Hall, who chairs the committee, said in an interview Friday that the measures it used in its decisions “have not declined nearly enough” to declare a recession.
“That’s exactly our view,” Leamer said.
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peter.hong@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
What others say
The UCLA Anderson Forecast says the economy will avoid recession. Here’s what other prominent observers have said on the topic.
Warren E. Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: “By any common-sense definition, we are in a recession.”
Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury secretary: “We are facing the most serious combination of macroeconomic and financial stresses that the U.S. has faced in a generation -- and possibly, much longer than that.”
Jack Welch, former General Electric Co. CEO: “If I had to bet a dollar or two, I’d bet we’ll have a positive GDP in the first quarter, and the second quarter. But it certainly is a slowdown of enormous proportions from what we were experiencing.”
Donald H. Straszheim, vice chairman of Roth Capital Partners: “It’s clear to me that the U.S. economy is in a recession.”
David Rosenberg, Merrill Lynch economist: “According to our analysis, this [recession] isn’t even a forecast anymore, but is a present-day reality.”
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Research by Scott Wilson
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de8da410a6b9eeec6983cee82a00fcfa | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-11-me-owens11-story.html | Full stream ahead for Lower Owens | Full stream ahead for Lower Owens
As blizzards whipped across nearby High Sierra peaks, ecologist William Platts lifted off in a helicopter here and headed north, about 1,000 feet above a river that looked as if it were throwing a tantrum.
Beneath him, the squiggle of green was overflowing its banks, inundating a patchwork of oxbows, marshlands, forests and sagebrush. Culverts were nearly filled to capacity, and mats of dislodged tules and muck hurtled down the river.
“I really like what I see down there,” the 80-year-old Platts told the chopper pilot through the headphone radio. “But we’ll need three or four more seasonal pulses to kick-start this ecosystem into gear.”
The Lower Owens River has flooded for millenniums, but this flood was man-made, part of the most ambitious river restoration project in the West. The river mostly disappeared when the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened in 1913, but 15 months ago engineers began redirecting some aqueduct water into the channel.
The flood should flush the recently revived river of a century’s worth of cattle waste and debris, add topsoil to its flood plain and spur an awakening of riparian rhythms without harming fish populations. Eventually, a canopy forest will grow along the 62-mile river, and Inyo County officials hope the waterway will support a thriving recreation industry.
But whether the project achieves that potential will depend on three river bosses who rarely agree: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Inyo County and environmentalists whose lawsuit led to a judicial order that launched the 77,657-acre project as mediation for environmental damage from DWP pumps sucking out groundwater.
Some suggest that the effort also might be affected by drought conditions, which could reduce interest in the project that runs on 55,000 cubic feet of Sierra snowmelt a year.
“If there was not enough water to go around and people were suffering, this project would be the first thing to go,” said project consultant Mark Hill, who helped develop the plan along with Platts. “It’s sacrosanct now and under a court order. But no one should think it’s set in stone. It’s not.”
Early signs, however, are hopeful. With Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s support, the DWP has pledged stewardship of the river that until December 2006 existed as a nearly dry riverbed. A few spring-fed ponds sustained fish and beavers, but the channel was mostly choked by weeds and trampled by cattle.
Now, after a year of steady flows, it has become a sinuous oasis fringed with tules, wild rose, grass and sage. By last June, groundwater had recharged and risen faster than scientists had anticipated, and some desert shrubs had died off, making way for stream-side species. Fish -- liberated from their ponds -- were already spreading throughout the river.
Beginning next year, the Lower Owens will be flooded each spring to carry cottonwood and willow seeds along for the ride. The seeds will lodge in sandbars and terraces enriched by decomposing tules and tree leaves. By late next year, ecologists expect to see foot-tall saplings along the river’s edge.
In the meantime, wildlife is moving back into the river more quickly than expected. Bobcats are its top predators, and rough-legged hawks patrol the sky. Elk and deer drink from the stream amid the din of croaking tree frogs.
On a recent weekday, biologists watched a great blue heron take flight with a brown trout in its beak. Nearby, wood ducks and rare swans glided over a patch of coffee-colored water.
Still, the rehabilitated Lower Owens ecosystem is far from balanced. It could take 15 to 20 years before the $39-million project can be declared a success -- or a failure.
The work of gathering data on wildlife, foliage and water flows has barely begun, and one of the best ways to monitor the river’s progress is by kayak.
Digging deep with his paddle at a bend in the river on a recent weekday, Hill said: “We have to be patient and work on ecological time, not political time. Some people expect to see significant change overnight. That’s not going to happen.
“Our biggest obstacles,” the consultant added, “are lawyers and amateurs.”
Things were particularly tense a week before the DWP began increasing river flows Feb. 14 to rates as high as 220 cubic feet per second.
Warnings that rising water could flood local roads -- including all-important U.S. 395 -- and destroy cattle forage triggered unease among ranchers and elected officials in financially strapped rural Inyo County. Some vowed to seek financial compensation from the DWP.
The fears were understandable because the river has offered up surprises. Normally, the water flows at 40 cubic feet per second -- about the speed of an easy stroll -- and scientists predicted it would run 2 to 4 feet deep. Instead, the current began digging out portions of riverbed 6 to 10 feet deep.
But the pulses of water pushed through the thirsty sprawl of high desert 200 miles north of Los Angeles without incident.
“Looks like it’s going to work,” third-generation cattle rancher Mark Johns, 57, said as a nearby team of ecologists recorded the depth, temperature and oxygen levels of a stretch flowing through acreage he has leased from the DWP since 1967.
“If my grandfather was still around, he’d stomp on his hat and run everyone out of here,” Johns said. “Personally, I think it’s a good project. Probably.”
Ranchers and DWP officials warily watched the man-made flooding, and separately, Sierra Club and Audubon Society activists chronicled the flood with flyovers in airplanes and stream-side inspections.
During his recent helicopter flight over the Lower Owens, ecologist Platts surveyed the miles of glistening flood plain below with a satisfied smile.
“It will be some time before the river can sustain commercial enterprises like fishing, hiking, kayaking and bird-watching concessions,” he said from the cockpit. “But average Joes like us can still have a wonderful time just as it is.”
About a week after Platts’ flight, DWP officials began slowing the flow to its usual speed, and the river has started returning to its banks. The Lower Owens River is again a collection of lazy loops and squishy meadows, flanked by the High Sierra on the west and the White and Inyo mountains on the east.
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louis.sahagun@latimes.com
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On latimes.com
A river’s rehabilitation
More photographs of the rejuvenated Lower Owens can be seen at
latimes.com/owens
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ccbdc0a5284090c4acb7056c9e37607b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-11-oe-goldberg11-story.html | The patriot gap | The patriot gap
‘Unity is the great need of the hour. ... Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country. I’m not talking about a budget deficit. ... I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”
So quoth Barack Obama in Atlanta on Jan. 20, but it might as well have been last week, so central is unity to his presidential campaign. And then there’s Michelle Obama. “We have lost the understanding that, in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another,” the would-be first lady told a rally last month. “That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done.”
What is fascinating here is not the sentiment, but what’s missing from it. The P-word.
To invoke patriotism seriously is to brand yourself either an old fogy or a right-wing bully. If Obama spoke about patriotism with the sort of passion he expends on unity, many would take him for some sort of demagogue.
But what on Earth could he mean by unity other than a kind of patriotic esprit de corps for the good of his country? Indeed, patriotism is far, far preferable to mere unity. (Mafia syndicates and terrorist cells are unified, after all.) Patriotism is a species of unity that has some moral and philosophical substance to it. In America, patriotism -- as opposed to, say, nationalism -- is a love for a creed, a dedication to what is best about the “American way.” Nationalism, a romantic sensibility, says “my country is always right.” Patriots hope that their nation will make the right choice.
If you read the speeches of leading Democrats before the Vietnam War, it’s amazing how comfortable they were with patriotic rhetoric. “Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country,” stands foursquare against so much of our entitlement culture.
Vietnam, of course, changed that. “The tragedy of the left,” wrote Todd Gitlin in his 2006 book, “Intellectuals and the Flag,” “is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide.”
Suicide might be strong, but the left certainly amputated itself from full-throated patriotic sentiment. Most Democrats speak mellifluously about unity but get tongue-tied or sound as if they’re just delivering words plucked from a political consultant’s memo when they turn to patriotism. (Virginia Sen. Jim Webb being a major exception.) Sen. John Kerry, who made his name vilifying the Vietnam War, suddenly wanted patriotic credit for the same service when he ran for president in 2004. His line at the Democratic convention -- “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty” -- was cringe-inducing. The words came out as ironic, almost kitschy. The message seemed to be, “I can play this game better than that chickenhawk, George W. Bush.”
When Democrats do speak of patriotism, it is usually as a means of finding fault with Republicans, corporations or America itself. Hence the irony that questioning the patriotism of liberals is a grievous sin, but doing likewise to conservatives is fine. That’s how then-candidate Howard Dean could with a straight face insist that then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft “is no patriot. He’s a direct descendant of Joseph McCarthy.”
Indeed, the one area in which Obama explicitly invokes patriotism is in the realm of economics. He proposes a Patriot Corporation Act that would punish corporations that legally avoid U.S. taxes. (“Now here is a Patriot Act everyone can get behind,” gushed the Nation’s William Greider.)
Meanwhile, Michelle Obama famously declared last month that her husband’s candidacy elicited pride in her country for the first time in her adult life. I like to think that’s not really what she meant, but it’s a sign of how ill-equipped she and so many others are on the left when it comes to discussing such issues.
And it’s a crying shame, despite the fact that the Democrats’ rhetorical disadvantage is a huge boon for the Republicans. One cannot credibly talk of love of country while simultaneously dodging the word and concept of patriotism. And, I would argue, one cannot sufficiently love one’s country if you are afraid to say so out loud. Better that our politics be an argument about why and how we should love our country, not about whether some do and some don’t.
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jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com
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32a02179d7996ae4c3a8664f207656d1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-12-ed-home12-story.html | Learning power | Learning power
There is plenty to debate about home schooling, but a new court ruling managed to avoid all reasonable disagreements and instead used a single example of possible child abuse to throw the book at tens of thousands of home schoolers throughout California.
The 2nd District Court of Appeal was asked to require the parents of eight children to send them to a regular public or private school, where their welfare could be monitored. A lower court had ruled that the parents had a constitutional right to home school their children.
The appellate court correctly ruled that no such right exists. Further, it noted that the state Education Code appears to express distaste for home schooling by requiring children to attend a public or private school or to be taught at home by a credentialed tutor. Without a teaching credential, the court ruled, the parents could not educate their children.
What the justices ignored is that, for decades, even the giant bureaucracy of the California Department of Education has allowed parents to teach at home if they file an affidavit stating that they operate a small private school. Private school teachers do not need a credential to instruct a class of 20 or 30 students. Why should parents need one to teach a few children at home?
Public and private schools have developed programs to help home schoolers, employing credentialed teachers to provide curricula, materials and advice. “Homeschooling is a wonderful way to individualize your child’s learning,” reads the website of one such program offered by the Orange County Department of Education. Yet the panel tossed out this option as well.
There are rare cases of parents who use home schooling to hide abuse or neglect. Far more common are the stories of responsible parents providing a good education. A home- schooled teenager wrote the bestseller “Eragon,” something a public school homework load alone wouldn’t have allowed.
The court’s overreaching decision failed to address the main point of the case. A parental teaching credential would in no way reduce the need, if there is one, for these children to be more closely monitored. Credentialed teachers can also be bad parents, or, for that matter, bad teachers.
That said, compulsory education is a basic of modern society, and it should be enforced. It’s time for the Legislature to formally recognize home schooling as an education option and to impose reasonable regulations -- such as a yearly lesson plan or portfolio of student work -- that encourage these schools’ individuality and ensure that children aren’t home all day watching reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
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5ed613518eccca5d17bf059b9384b243 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-12-me-homeschool12-story.html | No ban on home schooling | No ban on home schooling
Countering a potentially precedent-setting appeals court decision that bars parents from educating their children at home if they lack teaching credentials, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell on Tuesday affirmed families’ right to home school.
“There’s no cause for alarm,” he said Tuesday.
“I want to assure parents that chose to home school that California Department of Education policy will not change in any way as a result of this ruling,” he said in a written statement. “Parents still have the right to home school in our state.”
O’Connell’s statements stem from a Feb. 28 ruling by the 2nd District Court of Appeal that said parents must have a teaching credential to home school their children. The decision has not yet gone into effect and it is unlikely to be enforced pending appeals to the state Supreme Court by attorneys representing Phillip and Mary Long, the Lynwood couple at the center of the case, and others.
The state Department of Education now allows home schooling as long as parents file paperwork with the state establishing themselves as private schools, hire credentialed tutors or enroll their children in independent study programs run by charter or private schools or public school districts while still teaching at home.
The education department does little to enforce those provisions and insists that it is the local school districts’ responsibility. In addition, state education officials acknowledge that some parents home school their children without the knowledge of any educational entity.
O’Connell repeatedly refused Tuesday to rule out requiring parents to enroll their children in a formal program.
Once news of the court ruling became public, politicians, evangelists and others began weighing in. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it “outrageous” and pledged to overturn it legislatively if the state Supreme Court fails to act.
On Monday, Assemblyman Joel Anderson (R-San Diego) introduced a resolution acknowledging the long history of home school in California and urging the state Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.
Anderson and his wife, Kate, home schooled their three children, including their eldest, Mary, who was recently accepted to the U.S. Air Force Academy.
“Exhibit one on the success of home schooling has been demonstrated by my own family,” Anderson said in a written statement.
“Our hope is that the Supreme Court continues to allow other California children to continue to benefit from being educated at home.”
Home schooling supporters cheered O’Connell’s statement and Anderson’s resolution, saying that it would help allay fears among the concerned parents of as many as 166,000 students in California.
“It’s wonderful, and it makes me feel better,” said Loren Mavromati, a Redondo Beach mother who home schooled her three children and serves as president of the California Homeschool Network. O’Connell “has made a public statement and school districts work for him and won’t go against that.”
But home school supporters added that the ruling must be overturned so it doesn’t have precedent value.
“That is absolutely good to hear, but it doesn’t fix the court decision,” said Susan Beatty, co-founder of the Christian Home Educators Assn. of California. “That is still an issue that must be rectified.”
O’Connell drew some ire from home schooling parents by urging them to become involved with some formal program, such as an independent study program at a public, charter or private school, so they are familiar with state standards, SAT test dates and financial aid deadlines.
“I’ve always encouraged these families who, for whatever reason choose this approach to educate these students, to remain involved and engaged. I want these students to be prepared for this new economy,” he said.
Students involved in formal programs have a greater chance of success, he said.
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seema.mehta@latimes.com
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f507569b4c0c396b664380b34a0dcee1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-12-na-mining12-story.html | Mining claims rise near Western cities | Mining claims rise near Western cities
Propelled by soaring prices for gold, copper, uranium and other metals, new mining claims on federal land are surging near heavily populated areas in the West, according to an analysis of federal records.
More than 16,000 such claims have been staked in the last five years, including nearly 1,700 in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, said a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.
The new activity brings the total of active claims within five miles of Western population centers to nearly 51,600, the report said. The total number of mining claims has doubled in the last five years, from 207,540 in 2003 to 414,228 in January 2008.
Mining claims on Western federal land are governed by a law passed in 1872 and signed by President Grant. But since then, the frontier has given way to suburbs, resorts and retirement communities, and the law provides little recourse for local, state or tribal governments if they object to the encroachment of an industry that could bring open pits, acid drainage, and pollution of water and air close to their borders.
“The growing West is on a collision course with a global land rush for minerals,” said Dusty Horwitt, senior public lands analyst for the environmental group.
Mining accounts for more Superfund toxic cleanup sites than any other industry and requires vast amounts of water for the processing of metal ore at a time when water shortages are plaguing the West.
The National Mining Assn. estimates that fewer than 5% of claims are actually developed into mining operations. Still, the prospect of mines in proximity to settled communities “is a concern,” said Bill Wicker, the Democratic spokesman for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The issue is expected to be “part of the larger debate” about reform of the mining law, Wicker said. The House passed a revised mining law in November that expands federal agencies’ authority to reject claims, and the committee has been holding hearings for a Senate version likely to be introduced this spring.
Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Assn., calls the cry for reform “disingenuous.”
“There’s nowhere in the world that mining has so many restrictions as in the U.S.,” Popovich said. “Do the green activists want to degrade the environment elsewhere so they can preserve ski lodges here?”
He added that many American communities may welcome new mining and the jobs that the industry would bring.
Arizona, Utah and Nevada have the most claims near residential centers, the report said. Las Vegas and the Phoenix-Mesa region each have more than 5,000 claims within five miles. The greatest increase in claim staking has come in Utah and Colorado, where “a substantial portion” of the new activity is intended for uranium mining, in response to growing demand for nuclear power, the report said. Uranium presents special hazards because it is radioactive in addition to being a toxic heavy metal.
The original 1872 law was designed to encourage fortune-seekers to move West. “Well, now they have,” noted Jane Danowitz, director of the Pew Campaign for Responsible Mining, “and now the mining claims are literally swallowing up the West.”
In California, active mining claims have increased by almost 20%. Millions of Californians in 293 cities or towns are within five miles of the current crop of mining claims.
The report’s maps show 290 claims in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area, mostly in the Angeles National Forest. Mining claims within five miles of Big Bear Lake or Big Bear City increased from 270 in 2003 to 491 in 2008.
The claims are held by a mix of mining operators and speculators. One company, A-Able Plumbing Inc., holds 237 claims in California, with 176 of those in San Bernardino County, Horwitt said.
More than 1,000 claims have been staked in the Sierra foothills east of Bakersfield and almost 500 in metropolitan Sacramento, including historic mining areas that have become high-tech employment centers.
“It only takes a handful of claims turning into mines to turn into a huge problem for a community,” Horwitt said, citing the experience of Crested Butte, a Colorado ski resort 230 miles southwest of Denver that is surrounded by federal land.
Crested Butte officials are concerned about a proposed molybdenum mine in the Gunnison National Forest just above their town. Mayor Alan Bernholtz testified to the Senate energy committee in January that the tourism industry would suffer and that the watershed from which the town draws its drinking supplies would be affected. Under the mining law, the Forest Service is not allowed to deny a claim on such grounds.
The federal government has a few ways to keep a claim from becoming a mine. For one, the U.S. can buy out a claim-holder. In 1996, Horwitt said, the government spent $65 million to prevent development of mining claims near Yellowstone National Park. Or the validity of a claim can be challenged, an expensive and time-consuming process.
In rare instances, the secretary of the Interior can void the claim. Three days before George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, President Clinton’s Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, denied a California claim because it was on property considered sacred by the Quechan tribe. Babbitt’s replacement, Gale Norton, rescinded the denial by the end of that year.
“State, local and tribal governments must be given a much larger role in the determination as to whether mining development can proceed,” Bernholtz told the committee.
“We’re not saying there shouldn’t be mining,” Horwitt said. “We’re just saying there should be protection for those that don’t want it.”
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judy.pasternak@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Increased California claims
Communities in California with the largest increases in mining claims on federal land from 2003 to 2008:
*--* -- Claims Claims Name in 2003 in 2008 Increase Apple Valley 356 489 133 Big Bear Lake 107 222 115 Big Bear City 163 269 106 Keeler 28 125 97 Victorville 106 191 85 Lake Isabella 35 118 83 French Gulch 126 196 70 Lewiston 131 195 64 Bodfish 42 105 63 Markleeville 107 161 54 *--*
Source: Environmental Working Group
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5fca4184914b1e0aba47d0dd2047c9cd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-12-na-nurse12-story.html | Nurse accused of spreading hepatitis C at military hospital | Nurse accused of spreading hepatitis C at military hospital
A nurse anesthetist at a Texas military hospital may have infected up to 15 patients with a potentially fatal strain of hepatitis C by stealing drugs meant for his patients and “knowingly” passing on his own infection, according to civil and criminal court filings and the report of a federal agency.
According to Daniel Henry, one of the alleged victims, Jon Dale Jones injected drugs meant for Henry into himself and then infected Henry with hepatitis by injecting him with the same needle.
In an indictment made public early this week, federal prosecutors in El Paso said Jones secretly and improperly obtained access to a powerful painkilling drug, fentanyl, earmarked for three patients about to undergo surgery at William Beaumont Army Medical Center and, as a result, infected those patients with hepatitis C, an infectious disease that can lead to liver failure and cancer. The indictment does not address the method of transmission.
The nine-count indictment charges Jones, 45, with assault “resulting in serious bodily injury” and with obtaining a controlled substance “by fraud, deception and subterfuge.”
Records filed in a series of civil lawsuits and reviewed by The Times show that an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that an additional 12 patients were infected in the same way and by the same person. Federal officials later added another victim to the list, an infant who they said was apparently infected in utero, according to court filings. All were members of the military or among immediate family.
The indictment charges that Jones “obtained possession of keys from subordinate employees” to access the drugs, which were kept in locked containers and later administered to the victims.
Jones’ lawyer, James Darnell, said his client would plead not guilty to the charges. Darnell also said he had information showing that the CDC report was incorrect and that his client was not responsible for infecting all the patients cited.
Civil court documents identified another victim as Matthew Vane, a student at West Point and the son of Michael Vane, then-commanding general at Ft. Bliss, where Beaumont is located. The three victims in the federal indictment, identified only by their initials, were infected between Aug. 6 and Oct. 12, 2004.
The indictment comes after a more than two-year investigation by the FBI.
According to the civil court records, Jones was sent to Beaumont in 2004, where he worked under two private contractors, Spectrum Healthcare Services of Tennessee and a joint venture of Columbia Healthcare and the Arora Group, both based in Maryland. The two entities are among the largest contractors providing medical professionals to the military healthcare system, receiving payments totaling more than $400 million over the last six years.
Jones was arraigned Monday in Miami. Records show he holds valid nursing licenses in Virginia, Hawaii, the District of Columbia and Florida, where officials said he has been working in an unnamed hospital. There is no record of Jones being cited or sanctioned by any of the state boards.
Tracy Young, vice president for Team Health, which owns Spectrum, said the certified nurse anesthetist worked only briefly as an independent contractor for a Spectrum subsidiary before he was tested for hepatitis.
After his stint with Spectrum, records show, Jones remained at Beaumont and was engaged by Columbia-Arora, which took over the Beaumont contract on Oct. 1, 2004. Officials of the company did not respond to a request for comment. Columbia-Arora and Spectrum have denied any responsibility for the infections.
One of the alleged victims was Henry, who underwent surgery at Beaumont on Oct. 12, 2004.
Henry, 72, said in a telephone interview that he had gone to Beaumont for throat surgery.
Henry said that after the surgery Jones came in and gave him an injection.
“I asked him what he was doing, and he said he had to replace the needle. He must have put the needle in his arm before he put it in mine,” Henry said.
About a week later, Henry said, he started turning orange and went back to his doctor.
“Sure enough, I had hepatitis,” he said, adding that the infection further complicated his other ailments, including diabetes and congestive heart failure.
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wally.roche@latimes.com
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35361d739e72179e9d61e56f2200e7b5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-12-na-scandal12-story.html | Wife puts troubling face on the Spitzer scandal | Wife puts troubling face on the Spitzer scandal
It was the way she stood there, enduring.
Silda Wall Spitzer did not say a word as her husband, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, brusquely apologized to his family and the public after he was allegedly caught on a wiretap doing business with a high-priced prostitution ring. Her face was drawn. But she took her husband’s hand as they left the room.
This scandal has many salacious details, but it was the image of Silda Wall Spitzer at her man’s side that dominated conversations across the country Tuesday.
That moment of public humiliation stayed with people -- men and women, Democrats and Republicans. At a beauty salon in Brooklyn Heights, at the Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in midtown Atlanta, at a Denver office building, at a bar in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the same questions came up:
How could she?
Why did she?
Haven’t we seen this play one too many times?
Why do we go through this ritual of public shame and repentance, with the political wife standing mutely before the TV cameras as her husband admits his sexual indiscretion?
“I find it nauseating . . . phony and awful,” said Leah Schanzer, 38, a doctoral student who stopped for coffee at a Starbucks in New York City. She gave an exaggerated shudder.
“It makes it seem like she’s Susie Homemaker,” said her friend Leslie Heller, 47. “She shouldn’t be standing there, next to him.”
As attorney general and -- for a little over a year -- governor, Spitzer set himself up as a crusader, bent on exposing unethical behavior. The allegation that the Democrat frequented an international call-girl ring has proved an irresistible twist.
“The story is juicy because of the sex, but it’s really about betraying the trust that you hold,” said Roz Perlmuth, 66, a retired teacher from Palm Desert, Calif.
Newspaper websites have been swamped with thousands of comments on the case; gleeful barbs are being tossed around the blogosphere.
But to many -- especially women -- the tawdry details added up to more than another generic scandal. When they looked at Silda Wall Spitzer’s weary face, it felt personal.
“She should’ve said, ‘This is your fight. This is your battle. You stand there and get yourself out of it,’ ” said Linda Walters, 61. The Denver resident said she divorced her own cheating spouse.
In the Seattle airport, traveler Jim Thorpe said he had not cared a bit about Spitzer’s sexual proclivities -- until he saw a clip of the one-minute apology. “The only disgusting part is the consultant who advised him to trot out his wife by his side,” said Thorpe, 53.
“I’d have paraded in front of the microphone with a knife,” said Cassandra Horton, 43, who works at an escrow firm in Phoenix.
Easier said than done, said Kathleen B. Jones, a professor emeritus of women’s studies at San Diego State University.
“ ‘I am woman. Hear me rage.’ That’s easy to write on a blog. . . . But if I’m in that situation, do I really want to add to my humiliation in that very public moment?” Jones asked. “What choice does she have?”
Standing with a disgraced husband may be seen as “one last spousal duty” in a political marriage, said Tobe Berkovitz, of Boston University’s College of Communication. After years of making compromises and sacrifices to advance a spouse’s career, “people just sort of do it,” Berkovitz said.
They may want to put up a united front for the children. They may be so stunned they can’t think through other options. “I don’t think most people have the fortitude to do otherwise,” Berkovitz said.
The Spitzer apology followed the script established by New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey, who declared himself “a gay American” with his wife smiling at his side; Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who brought his wife with him on TV as he tried to explain away suggestive e-mails to his chief of staff; Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, who admitted to “very serious sin” after his phone number was found in a madam’s little black book; and Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, whose wife hid her face behind oversized sunglasses as he spoke of his arrest for soliciting sex from an undercover officer in an airport men’s bathroom.
“That’s what politicians’ wives do,” said Sherman Smith, 53, an accountant in Atlanta. “It’s about wealth and power. She loses too if she abandons him.”
Above all, the Spitzer scandal drew comparisons to President Clinton’s affair with intern Monica S. Lewinsky -- and the way his wife stood by his side.
Hillary Rodham Clinton is now a senator from New York and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, leading right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh to conclude that “these [scandals] can be resume enhancements in the Democrat Party.”
Late-night comics made much of the parallels between Spitzer and Clinton, even though the former president was not engaged in illegal prostitution. From Jay Leno: “This means that Hillary Clinton is now the second-angriest wife in the state of New York.”
From David Letterman’s top-ten list of Eliot Spitzer excuses: “I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago.”
In conversations, many casual observers struck a more muted tone.
In Atlanta, Cicely Garrett and Tyeise Huntley said people should not presume to judge Silda Wall Spitzer.
“People get upset when these politicians drag out their wives, but it would look worse for her if she didn’t do it,” said Garrett, 28, a nonprofit manager. “Can you imagine if she got all belligerent and went on Maury Povich’s show and got out all her dirty laundry?”
“Her being there makes me more sympathetic to the situation,” said Huntley, 27, a sales representative. “You just think, ‘Man, if that was my husband. . . . ‘ “
“Still, I don’t know if I’d go in front of the media and hold his hand,” Garrett said.
“I probably would,” Huntley said. “Then I’d close the door and have a real conversation.”
“The whole thing is a charade,” Garrett said, laughing.
Huntley nodded. “Those wives know the show before they get into it.”
Silda Wall Spitzer -- whose first name is derived from a Germanic word meaning “armed female warrior” -- has often expressed ambivalence about her role as a political spouse.
Educated at an all-women Baptist college in North Carolina, she went on to Harvard Law School and built a career as a top corporate attorney. She married for the first time while in law school, but that union lasted less than a month. In 1987, she married Spitzer, also a Harvard Law graduate (and heir to a real-estate fortune). They have three teenage daughters.
Silda Wall Spitzer left the workforce when her husband decided to run for attorney general. “It was, for me, a very difficult decision,” she told the New York Observer in 2006.
In an interview last year with the magazine 02138 -- for an article entitled “Power Couples” -- she laughed at a question about whether she and her husband spent much private time together. “It’s hard to say that we do,” she replied.
Feminist writer Linda R. Hirshman has written harshly about “opt-out women,” her term for well-educated, successful professionals who quit jobs to advance their husbands’ careers. To her, that’s a risky and degrading choice.
“These women always look like deer caught in the headlights,” Hirshman said. “They were dependent on men to be their booster rockets, and now you see them starting on a downward trajectory.”
Just look, she said, at the pain on Silda Wall Spitzer’s face.
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louise.roug@latimes.com
jenny.jarvie@latimes.com
stephanie.simon@latimes.com
Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein and Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Los Angeles, Nicholas Riccardi in Phoenix, Stuart Glascock in Seattle and DeeDee Correll in Denver contributed to this report.
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b82c3b15db0545435bbe13cf0567f522 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-13-et-snl13-story.html | ‘SNL’ aims to razz evenly | ‘SNL’ aims to razz evenly
NEW YORK -- For three decades, “Saturday Night Live” has prided itself on skewering politicians of all stripes with equal zeal, from Chevy Chase’s clumsy Gerald Ford to Darrell Hammond’s sighing Al Gore.
Executive producer Lorne Michaels has long maintained that the show risks its comedy credentials if it appears partisan. So he is troubled by the recent chatter that the venerable late-night program has exhibited a pro-Hillary Clinton bent.
“That’s a major concern,” Michaels said. “I can assure you that there’s no agenda, that there’s only a reaction to what’s going in the world.”
Since returning to the air in late February after a hiatus forced by the writers strike, the NBC comedy showcase has zoomed back into the political zeitgeist.
When media toughened its coverage of Sen. Barack Obama after a “SNL” sketch portrayed the press as fawning over him, analysts credited the show in part for the shift. (Obama even joked that he was going to call Michaels to complain.)
A series of other bits in recent weeks have contributed to the perception that the program is trying to sway public opinion toward Clinton. Guest host Tina Fey gave a shout-out to the New York senator, saying women like her “get stuff done.” The candidate herself made a lighthearted appearance the following week, appearing in a matching brown tweed suit with cast member Amy Poehler, who plays Clinton on the show.
Two days later, Clinton performed strongly in the Ohio and Texas primaries.
Seth Meyers, one of show’s three head writers, said he was amused by suggestions that “Saturday Night Live” changed the momentum of the race.
“We don’t quite feel we’ve affected it as much as people want to give us credit for,” he said.
“The show happens too quickly for any of us to have an agenda,” added Meyers, who donated $1,000 to Obama in January. “And our egos as comedy writers are too big to ever let our own political loyalties get in the way of a joke. So we aim for whatever is the richest to be satirized on any given week.”
Michaels, a political independent who donated to both Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd and to Republican Sen. John McCain last year, said the personal politics of the show’s 23 writers don’t influence its content. “I really don’t believe anyone walking around up there thinks, ‘What can we do for Hillary right now?’ ” he said.
In fact, the show’s mantra is that it’s against “whoever is winning,” said Poehler.
“There is a certain amount of being able to poke fun at everyone equally that’s kind of nice,” she added. “And so I think that anything more than that would be giving us too much responsibility and making us seem much smarter than we actually are.”
The renewed focus on the 32-year-old program and the discussion of whether it has shaped the presidential race has helped lift its ratings. In its first two shows back on the air since the strike, “Saturday Night Live” averaged 6.8 million viewers, compared with its pre-strike average of 5.8 million viewers.
“We’re hoping for a dead tie in the delegates so it, like, goes on for another year,” Meyers joked. “They have to postpone the general election.”
But the scrutiny has also forced the late-night institution to contemplate whether it has a responsibility to provide equal doses of satire in a tightly fought race.
Michaels believes one of the factors fueling the perception that “SNL” has a bias toward Clinton may be Poehler herself, who plays the New York senator as a woman laboring valiantly to ignore the jibes sent her way.
“People can confuse the charm of the character with the person,” he said.
For her part, Poehler noted that “people forget that we did two full years of kind of slamming her in a lot of stuff.”
“I’ve certainly done her in other situations before on the show in not so flattering ways,” she said. “I think there’s been a history of different takes on her.”
Still, the show’s writers were divided when Clinton’s campaign called and said that the candidate was interested in making an appearance on the show March 2, right before the Ohio and Texas primaries.
“Some people thought it wasn’t a good idea,” Michaels said. “Would it appear partisan?”
In the end, he felt it was only fair, since Obama had been on the program in November. But he added that “we were very clear that she was doing something that would be written for her and that it was not a campaign appearance in any sense.”
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the candidate is not concerned that his rival is getting a lift from “SNL.”
“Frankly, Barack Obama knows he’s good enough, smart enough and, gosh darn it, he’s won more states, more votes and more delegates, and that’s what probably matters more anyway,” he quipped, a la Stuart Smalley.
For the most part, the writers said they believe the show’s balance is apparent over time, although the program did consciously try to spoof Clinton last week. Playing off her ominous “3 a.m.” ad that suggested Obama lacked the experience to handle a crisis, the piece showed stark black-and-white photos of a panicked President Obama calling Clinton at home for help.
“If anything, it was sympathetic toward Obama,” Michaels said, though he admitted not everyone saw it that way.
This Saturday’s program, hosted by actor Jonah Hill, will likely include more sketches about the 2008 race, although Meyers noted “that the governor of New York will probably take it worse than either of the candidates.”
“I also promise that by the end of the campaign,” he added, “both candidates will feel that we’ve portrayed them unfairly.”
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matea.gold@latimes.com
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4c4bc5dcc8d04d7f5544f46fcf819334 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-13-et-spitzertv13-story.html | Scandal is a perfect news storm | Scandal is a perfect news storm
They may be a journalist’s five favorite words: Governor linked to prostitution ring. Now that’s a TV crawl promising a very good week for everyone (except, of course, for the governor’s family). The politician and the call girl. It’s like a Broadway musical starring Nathan Lane -- everyone’s talking about it.
So when the news broke in the New York Times on Monday that Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been caught ordering out from Emperors’ Club VIP escort services, that sound you heard was the collective chortling of every reporter in America.
From morning to night, anchors and pundits filled MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and even the networks, barely able to keep a straight face while solemnly reporting that Spitzer, the self-described Mr. Clean who made a name for himself taking on corruption, was really Client 9, caught in a high-priced call-girl sting.
Oh, the joy of seeing his blank-faced, prim-mouthed apology -- while the buzz of his cellphone, set on vibrate because, you know, he was going on TV, all but drowned out his words. (Who was calling, do you think? His mother? Charlie Sheen?)
On Wednesday, there he was resigning, possibly in the same suit, with the same strange lack of emotion and nary a glance for his wife, though apparently he left the phone backstage.
No worries about Spitzer just being a regular guy who had made a mistake -- suddenly he was Central Casting for Unscrupulous Politician.
As details emerged -- the payment amounts, the problematic money transfer, the possibly “not safe” nature of the services Spitzer requested, the description of his escort, that she went to D.C. from New York (What? There are no hookers in Washington? When did that happen?) -- the excitement turned to glee.
As Spitzer announced his resignation, it became the perfect news storm. No untimely death, no one mewling about alcohol or painkiller-addiction issues, no need to worry about any talk of gender double-standards. (She was a prostitute! Just doin’ her job!)
Just a good, old-fashioned gotcha, with the opportunity to talk about sex and still look professional. What exactly does 5 1/2 Gs get you these days? How often does a political reporter get to look into such things? Not often enough, I can tell you.
Suddenly TV was on Spitzer alert. All the late-night hosts had a field day, and Heidi Fleiss showed up with bed hair on “Nightline,” offering wisdom and shilling for the Bunny Ranch, which was disturbing to say the least.
Oh, some bleeding hearts and daytime talk-show hosts tried to soften up the story with the philandering angle. (Really, it is like the scandal was invented by Joy Behar and the gals at “The View,” isn’t it?)
And it’s true, poor old Silda had to assume the position -- standing stony-faced beside an American flag as her rotten skunk of a husband apologized and then resigned. (Why do those poor women always have to stand beside a flag? Is it supposed to make them feel patriotic somehow, like they’re providing some service for the country?) But philandering politicians are a dime a dozen -- hey, we’ve got one as mayor! -- and those stories too often involve messy things like emotions and real people.
This one’s so much more clear-cut, so much more businesslike, so much more, well, hilarious. Here’s a governor who ran wiretaps getting caught . . . on a wiretap. (And mere moments after the finale of “The Wire,” in which such a thing would totally happen. Coincidence?)
So Spitzer’s not only a degenerate, he’s a stupid degenerate. Will these guys never learn? At this point, I think we are safe in assuming that every politician cheats; otherwise why would these men think they’re going to get away with it?
Still, he is the governor of New York, so you’d think he’d at least remember the lessons of “The Godfather: Part II.” “The last thing I remember, she was laughing,” says a dazed politico as he is led away from a dead prostitute and into lifelong debt to Michael Corleone.
You see how much fun this is, and no one has to feel guilty, or even partisan. Forget Sen. Barack Obama and his message of hope; nothing unites the nation like a good, clean political scandal. Oh, and Spitzer was a superdelegate! Just when CNN was trying to explain who those people are. See, it just keeps getting better and better. . . .
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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com
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67bb42d140d2b54ae41d75a4432a6ad2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-13-hm-choy13-story.html | Not a scrap of gingham | Not a scrap of gingham
BEFORE construction had wrapped on Vanessa Choy and Andrew Wong’s house in Studio City, the rumors had started swirling. The couple were building a halfway house for addicts, passersby speculated. The home was some sort of mean joke on the neighborhood, others feared. One woman screamed from the middle of the street: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
The consternation didn’t seem rooted in the size or scale of the house, but by its style. After all, here in the middle of metropolitan Los Angeles, who would build a farmhouse?
The answer is two resolutely modern architects who gave up their Hong Kong practice to be in L.A., and anyone surprised by their house’s facade might be even more intrigued by the compelling juxtapositions inside. The urbane sensibility of Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs, a glossy grand piano and the sleek Poggenpohl kitchen is balanced by a purposefully unfinished plywood staircase, unpainted structural beams and other elements that give the space some charming country grit. The resulting home feels apropos of its city -- conscious of style but in a laid-back way, with a penchant to defy convention. Choy, who was trained here at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, says the house may take a classic American form and its designers may be of Asian descent, but its spirit is distinctly European.
“We always think Italians live an elegant lifestyle, but in a very casual way,” says Choy, whose stint at SCI-Arc included a class trip to document Hadrian’s Villa outside Rome, where simple tasks such as setting the dinner table became an exercise in design inspiration. “Everything in the routine of daily life was about being creative; it was about looking with fresh eyes.”
Which, fittingly, is a fine way of describing her house.
CHOY met her futurehusband when he was working on his thesis at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In 1992, they won a competition to design a cinema complex in Hong Kong, and during the next 10 years they built a successful practice designing cinemas as well as high-end retail stores in that city.
“Hong Kong is a special place,” Choy says. “It’s very Westernized, very cosmopolitan. However, it’s China.”
Thoughts of moving back to the States grew stronger as their family grew. First came Georgia, now 9, named after Georgia O’Keeffe, then Jasper, 7, named after Jasper Johns. For their 5-year-old, the couple had considered names of philosophers. “But they’re all horrible,” Choy says with a laugh. “We said, ‘Hmm. Jillian. That sounds good.’ ”
In December 2003, the family moved to Los Angeles.
“Here I really feel carefree,” Choy says. “You can be yourself. There’s no one to judge. I have a lot of arguments with my friends. They think I’m crazy to feel this way. But that’s how I feel.”
After two years of fruitless house-hunting in Brentwood and Westwood, the couple changed tactics and bought a 12,000-square-foot lot adjacent to Wong’s parents’ house in Studio City.
They quickly developed the general footprint of their future house: an L-shape wrapped around a rectangular swimming pool, with living spaces on the first floor and bedrooms on the second.
“We could either make it a flat-roof modern box, which would have been beautiful as well, or try to blend with the neighborhood,” says Choy, who put her career on hold to oversee construction. “We chose the latter.”
Look up and down the street, and one sees an amalgam of traditions: Spanish-style stuccoes, white picket fences, faux shutters with an Old West look. Choy and Wong focused on the roof lines and saw nothing but gables.
“So, naturally, a barn,” Choy says of their conclusion. “A modern barn would be the right thing. It will fit in.”
In her book “The Farmhouse: New Inspiration for the Classic American Home,” Minneapolis architect Jean Rehkamp Larson notes that the defining aesthetic elements of this type of house echo contemporary design: crisp lines, a formal sense of order and symmetry, restraint in decoration. Farmhouses reflect a way of living that is elegant in its simplicity, sophisticated yet functional, she says.
“There’s a simplicity of construction that’s true to its function and form,” Wong adds. “On the other side of the coin, there’s a figurative quality too.”
But the neighbors? They weren’t so convinced. “My husband is a diplomat,” Choy says. “He took them on and explained, ‘We’re not done yet. We haven’t finished construction. We haven’t even started landscaping. So reserve your judgment.”
Vindication didn’t come till last fall, when construction was completed and Halloween trick-or-treating gave neighbors another reason to stop by. “At least 100 people must have come through,” Choy says, “and all of a sudden they are like best friends.”
INSIDE, visitors find plenty of clever surprises, many related to the push-pull between the refined and the rustic, the formal and the casual.
The contrasts start in the entry hall, where spotlights along the floor lend a bit of Hollywood-style glitz offset by the down-home touches: board-and-batten siding on the walls and ceiling beams that had been painted white but, at the architects’ direction, were later stripped bare, adding warmth to the white-on-white color scheme.
Determined to stay on budget (please see related story), the couple considered various approaches for completing their half-finished stairwell before deciding they liked it the way it was: unadorned and a bit raw, with an honesty about the materials at hand. Walk up the steps of construction-grade plywood -- not the usual pretty maple of modern home tours -- and one is reminded of just how functional this house is.
Take the kitchen, the heart of the ground floor. Here, vast Fleetwood sliding glass doors lead to patios on opposite sides of the room, filling the space with natural light and fresh air.
“We are very lazy,” Choy says. “Unless something is right there, we won’t use it. If we want the poolside to be a place where we eat, it better be right next to the kitchen.”
Also next to the kitchen: a family room and homework station for the children. The rest of the first floor is composed of a dining room, a living room and a home office, all with views of the pool or the front yard, a low-water garden with ornamental grasses and flowering rosemary under a towering pine.
That connection to the landscape is ever-present. Climb the stairs to the second floor, and a landing looks out to a palo verde tree, aglow in the afternoon sun and perfectly framed by a window above the front door.
Down a hallway in the master bedroom, a traditional Western bed has been replaced by a raised platform with floor mats, the low-lying furniture in stark contrast to the soaring ceiling. The three children share two rooms, leaving the fourth bedroom -- a second master suite with its own fireplace and deck -- for Choy’s parents, when they visit from Hong Kong.
The house’s footprint covers only a quarter of the lot, but the two stories boost the living space to 6,200 square feet. To reduce energy consumption, the house is divided into four ventilation zones. “During the whole summer there was only one week when we needed to turn on the air conditioning,” Choy says. Even then, they needed the AC in just one zone of the house. Much of the credit for the structure’s energy efficiency goes to the cement board siding, which not only achieves the farmhouse look but also provides added insulation.
Perhaps most impressively, the house defies the notion that a pared-down modern style is inherently at odds with family living. In her first week in the finished house, Choy turned around to see her three kids tootling around the polished concrete floor -- one on a tricycle, one on roller skates and one on a scooter. “It just works,” she says with a shrug.
She points to the pool. “We even added that shallow end so we don’t have to swim all the time,” Choy says, laughing with a hint of embarrassment. “We can just sit and drink.”
Outside, the sun is lowering on the horizon. The front of the house takes on a golden glow, and vertical boards cast lengthening shadows -- widening stripes that punctuate the farmhouse vibe.
Spindly branches of the palo verde throw their own winter silhouette on the garage.
Dog walkers saunter past. Kids on bikes speed by. Chatting moms push baby strollers. Nobody seems to fuss over the farmhouse on the corner.
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craig.nakano@latimes.com
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Begin text of infobox
Seven cost-cutters
Vanessa Choy and Andrew Wong’s house is loaded with features: Poliform closets, a Lutron lighting system, a Russound indoor-outdoor audio system, radiant floor heating in the bathrooms, Poggenpohl kitchen cabinets and Sub-Zero, Gaggenau and Miele appliances. Yet Choy says the home was built for “significantly less” than $200 a square foot. “A sophisticated, intelligent client willing to pay an architect well enough can save so much money,” says Choy, who oversaw construction. “They will work hard to make the client’s investment pay off.” Seven ways the couple stretched their budget:
1. Wood from the previous house at the site was saved to construct a rustic, weathered garden wall.
2. Rather than toss two-by-fours left over from construction or resell them at a loss, the couple made a patio table.
3. Old kitchen cabinets were repurposed as curios.
4. An old kitchen countertop was reborn as a long dining surface, installed atop sturdy folding tables.
5. Instead of buying an expensive vanity for the kids’ bathroom, the couple repurposed a modern console purchased at a Crate & Barrel Outlet for less than $100.
6. Vintage plastic chairs that add a pop of color on a stairway landing were scored for $11 apiece at a Culver City vintage shop’s going-out-of-business sale. Joe Colombo patio chairs also were bought for a song at the same store.
7. Rather than shop for garden sculpture, Choy and Wong fashioned their own -- a piece that evokes Georgia O’Keeffe’s famed cow skull set atop scraps of industrial metal.
-- Craig Nakano
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f0dc0e30e8bdfe249e1fcc068635200b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-13-me-burger13-story.html | In-N-Out not living up to its name | In-N-Out not living up to its name
Their beef isn’t with the burger.
Merchants near some Southern California In-N-Out Burger restaurants say their gripe is with growing traffic jams at drive-through lanes that are keeping customers from getting in and out of their stores.
Long lines of idling cars whose occupants are waiting for made-to-order double-doubles, fries and chocolate shakes sometimes spill into streets and block driveways and alleys, according to owners of adjacent businesses.
The traffic crunch has sent executives of the Irvine-based chain on a crash program to open new outlets to relieve pressure on existing In-N-Outs. The chain is also expanding its corps of young red-apron-clad workers with hand-held terminals outside to speed up drive-through lines.
“We try really hard to be good neighbors and not block people’s driveways,” said Carl Van Fleet, In-N-Out Burger’s vice president of planning and development. “Long after stores were built we’ve gone back and spent heavily to improve our capacity and order-taking ability.”
Unlike most fast-food burger joints, In-N-Out doesn’t put its meat on the grill until customers place their order.
Fans of In-N-Out say that freshness is one of the draws of the drive-through.
But neighbors’ complaints are starting to pile up like the stack of beef patties and cheese slices on the famed In-N-Out “4x4" burger.
“The drive-through line is so long some days that it blocks our parking lot in the rear of our store,” said Kitty Chu, manager of a Quizno’s Subs shop next to an In-N-Out on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Canoga Park. “We’ve lost a lot of customers because they can’t get in. Our UPS driver can’t even make deliveries during the noon rush.”
The Canoga Park In-N-Out -- which opened last year in what had been a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop -- offers inside seating as well as drive-through service. The closest parking for dine-in patrons is in a small lot in front of Chu’s shop, however.
A few miles away, at an In-N-Out in Woodland Hills, the drive-through line often spills out of the driveway and onto Ventura Boulevard. At busy times, waiting customers sometimes block the entrances to the 23-store Winnetka Square shopping center next door.
“They overflow into the street and into traffic-flow lanes,” said Celso Acebal, a Pepsi driver making a delivery to the shopping center. “Those people are stubborn too. They won’t move. They don’t want to give up their spot in line.”
Mike Curtis, an employee of the center’s Wish Us Well medical supply shop has a front-row view of the congestion from his storefront window.
“It affects our customers. A lot of them are elderly and they get flustered when they can’t pull in or they can’t get out of the parking lot because the exit is blocked,” Curtis said.
In-N-Out drive-through customers line their cars up the middle of a Blockbuster store’s parking lot on Venice Boulevard in West Los Angeles.
“They don’t affect our sales, but they affect our customers’ attitude,” said video rental cashier Sergio Flores. “They can’t get in to park. If they are able to park, they may not be able to back out and leave.”
He and his co-workers have seen the drive-through backup “so long that it takes 30 or 45 minutes to get through the line,” Flores said.
The In-N-Out line sometimes overflows the video store’s lot and continues for half a block along Venice Boulevard.
“I guess people really love to eat there,” said Blockbuster customer Danielle Michail, a Culver City homemaker. “But it is intimidating to everybody who wants to come here for a video. You can’t get in or out of a parking place here.”
One of those most angry about the drive-through line congestion is Arcadia bagel bakery owner Michael Goldstein. He has sicced police on drive-through motorists who block his parking lot entrance and threatened to sue In-N-Out for interference with his business.
“After 15 years of being nice I’m determined to end it,” Goldstein said of the lines of waiting cars that sometimes seal off both the entrance and exit to his Santa Anita Avenue parking lot.
In-N-Out officials have erected signs asking customers not to “block our neighbor’s driveways” and attempted to keep Goldstein’s entryway clear. “But then they get a new manager or district manager and it gets bad again,” he said.
Goldstein has demanded that Arcadia police ticket drive-through customers waiting next to the red-painted curb in front of his shop. “It’s illegal to stop next to a red curb,” he said.
Arcadia Police Lt. Paul Foley said several citations have been issued. But, he said, “we can’t write tickets because someone is sitting in their car waiting to turn into a driveway.”
City traffic engineers are now studying the lane-striping in the vicinity of the In-N-Out, Foley said. Pavement in front of Goldstein’s two driveways might be painted with “Do Not Block Driveway” markings, he said.
“I have to say In-N-Out has been very conscious of its neighbors,” Foley added. “I’ve seen In-N-Out employees policing Mr. Goldstein’s parking lot to pick up trash after they’ve closed. They try to address problems.”
In-N-Out’s Van Fleet said his company “truly hopes that all the businesses around us are successful.”
He denies that company drive-throughs have been built so customers have to line up on public streets.
“We don’t design stores to have cars stack on the street. And we never did,” he said.
In 1986 the chain stopped building its signature two-lane burger stands that have no interior seating. But, he added, “the older locations are much more busy than they were 30 years ago.”
The Arcadia outlet opened about 25 years ago, Van Fleet said. The West Los Angeles restaurant is about 20 years old, and the Woodland Hills store is 32.
In-N-Out has been on a building binge, in part to relieve pressure on the older outlets. It now has 213 restaurants.
Newer In-N-Outs, such as those in Porter Ranch and Culver City, have long drive-through lanes.
In places such as West Los Angeles, however, finding the acre of developable land that new In-N-Outs need is difficult, Van Fleet said. That is why the former Krispy Kreme store in Canoga Park was turned into an In-N-Out last year.
“We knew the lines were getting long at Woodland Hills. We were trying for years to find a suitable location nearby. We’d love to have a bigger parking lot in Canoga Park, but there were no one-acre lots available.”
The Canoga Park outlet “has significantly knocked down” traffic flow at the Woodland Hills restaurant, he said.
Next in line, though, is a fix to the drive-through problem in Canoga Park, he said.
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bob.pool@latimes.com
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cd42ba56cf66e3a098583962d391f224 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-13-me-cruel13-story.html | Feds’ actions ‘beyond cruel’ | Feds’ actions ‘beyond cruel’
In a stinging ruling, a Los Angeles federal judge said immigration officials’ alleged decision to withhold a critical medical test and other treatment from a detainee who later died of cancer was “beyond cruel and unusual” punishment.
The decision from U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson allows the family of Francisco Castaneda to seek financial damages from the government.
Castaneda, who suffered from penile cancer, died Feb. 16. Before his release from custody last year, the government had refused for 11 months to authorize a biopsy for a growing lesion, even though voluminous government records showed that several doctors said the test was urgently needed, given Castaneda’s condition and a family history of cancer, Pregerson said.
But rather than test and treat Castaneda, government officials told him to be patient and prescribed antihistamines, ibuprofen and extra boxer shorts, the judge wrote in a decision released late Tuesday. In summary, the judge wrote, the care provided to Castaneda “can be characterized by one word: nothing.”
Pregerson blasted public health officials’ “attempt to sidestep responsibility for what appears to be . . . one of the most, if not the most, egregious” violations of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment that “the court has ever encountered.”
At this stage of the proceedings, “the only question is whether” the plaintiffs’ allegations, if true, show that government officials “were deliberately indifferent to his condition. The court finds that they do,” Pregerson said.
“Everyone knows that cancer is often deadly. Everyone knows that early diagnosis and treatment often saves lives,” the judge wrote. The government’s own records, he emphasized, “bespeak of conduct that transcends negligence by miles. It bespeaks of conduct that, if true, should be taught to every law student as conduct for which the moniker ‘cruel’ is inadequate,” Pregerson concluded in permitting the case to move forward.
Conal Doyle, an Oakland attorney who is co-counsel for Castaneda’s family members, said the Salvadoran immigrant spent eight months in custody on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with intent to sell, then was transferred to immigration custody because he did not have legal residency.
He first informed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement medical staff at the San Diego Correctional Facility on March 27, 2006, that “a lesion on his penis was becoming painful and growing,” the judge wrote. The next day, a physician assistant at the facility examined Castaneda and issued a treatment plan calling for a consultation with a urologist “ASAP” and a request for a biopsy, according to government records cited by the judge.
Over the next 11 months, several doctors, with increasing urgency, made the same recommendations. For example, after conducting an examination June 7, 2006, Dr. John Wilkinson, an oncologist, wrote a report saying he strongly agreed that Castaneda had an urgent need for a biopsy and an assessment by a urologist because he might have “penile cancer. . . . In this extremely delicate area . . . there can be considerable morbidity from even benign lesions which are not promptly treated.”
That same day, Pregerson said, Dr. Esther Hui of the Division of Immigration Health Services acknowledged Castaneda’s condition but said the government would not admit him to a hospital because her agency considered a biopsy “an elective outpatient procedure.”
Pregerson, who became a federal judge in 1996, said evidence presented by the plaintiffs suggested that Hui, one of the defendants, characterized the surgery as elective so the federal government would not to have to provide or pay for it.
In February 2007, after the American Civil Liberties Union intervened, a biopsy was finally scheduled. A few days before the procedure, however, Castaneda was abruptly released, the judge wrote. He went to the emergency room of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and was diagnosed with metastatic squamous cell carcinoma. His penis was eventually amputated, and chemotherapy ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Four months before he died, Castaneda testified at a hearing held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law, as his teenage daughter listened.
“Mr. Castaneda’s case was just outrageous,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), chairwoman of the subcommittee, said in an interview Tuesday.
Lofgren said one of the things she found most troubling was that “bureaucrats” at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington have the power to overrule recommendations of doctors who have actually seen the medical problems of detainees. “That is a recipe for disaster,” she said.
Lori Haley, an ICE spokeswoman from Laguna Niguel, said in an e-mail that she could not comment on the Castaneda case but that the agency spent nearly $100 million on medical, dental and psychiatric care for detainees in fiscal 2007.
The government had argued that its employees were immune from this lawsuit. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office said the Justice Department might appeal Pregerson’s ruling.
Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on medical care at immigration detention facilities that said officials at some of the sites “cited difficulties in obtaining approval for outside medical and mental health care as . . . presenting problems in caring for detainees.”
Doyle said Castaneda’s death “would have been prevented by the exercise of basic human decency.”
Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said the decision was legally significant and factually compelling. “This was not a detainee with a hangnail,” she said. “You should not have to have your penis fall off to get medical treatment from the government.”
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henry.weinstein@latimes.com
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2e1cf4b5dfb08006b1e86eaf9f0ef138 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-13-me-principal13-story.html | L.A. educator in sex case faced earlier investigation | L.A. educator in sex case faced earlier investigation
Los Angeles school officials transferred an assistant principal to a Watts middle school just months after he had been removed from a previous school where he was investigated for allegedly having sex with an underage student and pulling a gun on her stepfather.
Last week, the assistant principal, Steve Thomas Rooney, 39, allegedly molested a student at the new campus, Markham Middle School. He was arrested and charged with five counts of forcible lewd acts on a child, stemming from allegations that he sexually assaulted the 13-year-old girl March 1 and at least one other occasion.
Los Angeles Unified School District officials declined to comment Wednesday about how Rooney had been reassigned to Markham last fall, saying they are conducting an internal investigation and citing a policy barring them from speaking publicly about cases under those circumstances.
District policy requires officials to conduct their own investigation into employee misconduct regardless of whether the allegations result in criminal charges. Officials would not say Wednesday whether such an inquiry occurred in the earlier case.
Parents, students and district employees said they were outraged that, given his history, Rooney had been allowed to continue working with children.
“The district could have prevented all this,” said Elvette Hodge, father of a seventh-grader at Markham and a member of the school site council. “My daughter said to me, ‘How can they put teachers like this in school and expect students to do better?’ ”
Reaction was similar at Fremont High School, where Rooney previously worked as an assistant principal.
“I can’t believe he was put in another school,” said Jenna Washington, Fremont’s magnet coordinator. “It was hard enough for us at Fremont. In South Los Angeles, the district knows a lot of parents are not going to complain. They wouldn’t have placed him in a West Los Angeles school or a Valley school. Or they’d have parents out there picketing.”
School board member Richard Vladovic, whose district includes Markham, said that he had not been briefed about Rooney’s case but that the district’s response should not depend solely on whether law enforcement pursues a case.
“Just because police didn’t prosecute doesn’t mean an employee’s actions didn’t violate trust or professional standards. We could still take action,” he said in an interview Wednesday. Vladovic, who was both a principal and senior district administrator before retiring, added that in such a case, “I would go after a person literally and try to fire him.”
Los Angeles Police Department officials acknowledged this week that Rooney had been investigated on suspicion of statutory rape of a 17-year-old student in 2007, more than a year before the molestation of the 13-year-old allegedly occurred.
The earlier case, they said, came to light after Rooney and the girl’s stepfather got into an argument in January 2007 and the stepfather alleged that Rooney pulled a gun. Rooney was briefly arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, but LAPD investigators were unable to prove the allegation, and he was released with no charges filed, police said.
The investigation, however, did uncover evidence that Rooney had been having a sexual relationship with the stepdaughter for about a year before the argument. But since the girl would not cooperate with the investigation, and her 18th birthday passed before it was concluded, charges were not filed in that case either, according to a search warrant. (Details of the warrant were first reported by KTTV Channel 11).
After the arrest in the gun case, L.A. Unified officials transferred Rooney to a “non-school” setting. When it became clear he would not be prosecuted, they sent him to Markham.
L.A. Unified spokeswoman Susan Cox said this week that the district is conducting an internal investigation into its actions surrounding Rooney.
She declined, however, to describe those actions in detail. Cox would not comment, for example, on whether L.A. Unified performed its own probe of the allegations against Rooney or on what basis he had been reassigned to Markham.
In general, when school employees are arrested, district officials wait until the criminal inquiry is completed before conducting their own, they said.
In the interim, they said, employees under a cloud can be suspended or transferred to a district office where there are no students. Rooney was not suspended. Instead, he served six months in an office job before his reassignment to Markham.
Rooney, 39, was hired in 2000 as a teacher at Peary Middle School, an L.A. Unified campus in Gardena. He then taught at Foshay Learning Center, before becoming an assistant principal at Fremont High, both in South L.A.
According to a search warrant affidavit filed in connection with his arrest, Rooney was working at Fremont on Jan. 1, 2007, the day he drove with the 17-year-old Foshay student to the home of her stepfather and confronted the man about his treatment of her.
According to the court document, Rooney allegedly pulled a black steel revolver from his pants during the argument. However, investigators later received conflicting accounts from witnesses, including the stepdaughter, who insisted Rooney had brandished only a flashlight, according to a search warrant. Prosecutors declined to file charges.
But while questioning family members about the confrontation, detectives began to suspect that Rooney’s relationship with the girl was not just that of teacher and student, according to a search warrant.
A subsequent search of his downtown apartment produced photos of the girl, including one Rooney had kept in a book on his nightstand, and a pair of girls’ tennis shoes. Inside his computer was a folder called “My Baby” with photos of the girl, according to the documents. The girl later said she had a yearlong sexual relationship with Rooney. She refused to testify, police said in a search warrant.
A high-level LAPD official who declined to be identified said Wednesday that school district officials had been briefed by police about their findings after the investigation was complete. The district would not comment.
Since Rooney’s arrest on the molestation charge, the LAPD has reopened its inquiry into his prior activities, said Capt. Fabian Lizzaraga, head of the Juvenile Division.
“There may be additional victims out there, and we are appealing for anyone to come forward,” Lizzaraga said. He would not elaborate.
Rooney is being held in lieu of $1-million bail. He could not be reached for comment.
Several former colleagues spoke well of Rooney, saying they had seen no improprieties.
“I was on the committee that hired him” at Fremont, said the school’s union chapter chairman Mathew Taylor. “He was a dean at Foshay, and we weren’t made aware of his troubles. Overall they found him to be a really good guy.” Except for a temper that could cause problems, Taylor said, “I found him to be a good guy too.”
The accusations against Rooney have focused new scrutiny on the district’s practice of requiring campuses to take teachers and administrators not of their choosing, so-called must-place employees. Critics say the worst-performing schools often end up with employees who are ineffective or worse.
Markham had been required to take Rooney to fill an interim opening created when an administrator went on leave, sources said. Markham administrators told investigators they did not know of Rooney’s history at the time.
At Tuesday’s school board meeting, an advocate for a parent group chastised officials.
“The parents are really tired of must-place personnel,” said Kelly Kane of the Parents Union. “We no longer want the garbage to be dumped there. They trusted him because you placed him there.”
A Fremont junior, who declined to give her name, said, “If this was a private school or somewhere else in the district, where people really care, then I don’t think this would have happened.”
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richard.winton@latimes.com
andrew.blankstein@latimes.com
howard.blume@latimes.com
Times staff writers Francisco Vara-Orta and Jill Leovy contributed to this report.
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2d19d8cdbe5ccbfee0b9ad71093faa9a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-13-na-epa13-story.html | Waxman accuses EPA of shirking its duty | Waxman accuses EPA of shirking its duty
Federal regulators have stopped work on a proposal to further limit carbon dioxide emissions, the chairman of a key congressional committee charged Wednesday, stepping up a battle with the Bush administration over whether it has moved aggressively enough to combat global warming.
House and Senate committees have been investigating the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to deny California permission to implement its own regulations to limit vehicle emissions.
But Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) on Wednesday expanded that probe to look at the administration’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision last April that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, were subject to federal regulation.
“It appears that EPA’s efforts to regulate CO2 emissions have been effectively halted,” Waxman wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson, “which would appear to be a violation of the Supreme Court’s directive and an abdication of your responsibility to protect health and the environment from dangerous emissions of CO2.”
Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said EPA staff members had told his committee they drafted a proposed regulation of about 300 pages that would achieve emission reductions equal to a fleet fuel-economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2018, stricter than the standards enacted last year of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.
EPA staff assigned to draft regulations to limit carbon dioxide emissions from new vehicles have since “ceased their efforts” and have been “awaiting direction” since December, Waxman said.
That is when the EPA forwarded the proposed regulation to the Department of Transportation and sent to the White House its official finding that carbon dioxide must be regulated.
Waxman asked Johnson to explain the delay and provide copies of communications between his agency and the White House on the issue. “The senior EPA officials who spoke with the committee did not know what transpired inside the White House . . . or what directions the White House may have given you,” Waxman wrote Johnson.
The EPA had no immediate response.
Johnson is set to appear today before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The chairman, Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), has asked Johnson for documents on his agency’s proposed regulation of emissions.
But Johnson has declined to provide them, saying that they are a draft and that their release “could have a detrimental impact on the agency’s deliberative process in the development of any regulatory action.”
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richard.simon@latimes.com
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6de132c6ee430c983f73e5ef4fae25d8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-14-et-games14-story.html | Back to the sawing board | Back to the sawing board
If you are in the market for unspeakable horror but wouldn’t be caught dead slinking into “Saw IV,” Michael Haneke is definitely the go-to guy for you. “Funny Games,” his latest postmodern smackdown, is about a happy middle-class couple and their young son whose summer cottage is invaded by a pair of psychos. The night I saw the film, the audience had a look of expectant dread as the house lights lowered. The look said, “Are you tough enough to take it?”
“Funny Games” is actually a shot-for-shot remake of Haneke’s 1997 German-language original, a movie I thought I had seen the last of. But like a recurring plague, “Funny Games” is baaack -- in English this time, and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. It takes a special arrogance to remake one’s own movie frame by frame. Was the original so perfect?
Haneke has stated that he redid “Funny Games” to make it more accessible to Americans as a reaction to Hollywood movie violence and the way “American cinema toys with human beings.” Look who’s talking. When it comes to toying with audiences (or gullible cineastes), Haneke is peerless. All directors, of course, manipulate their viewers, but few are as fetishistic about it as Haneke. Every sequence, every shot in “Funny Games” is another coil in his mousetrap.
Ann (Watts), George (Roth) and Georgie (Devon Gearhart) are introduced as a model middle-class family. They have a blissful sunniness. Then two blondish young men in shorts and matching white shirts, one calling himself Paul (Michael Pitt), the other Peter (Brady Corbet), insinuate themselves into the lakefront cottage and proceed to methodically maim and torture everybody.
Why? When George, writhing in pain, pops the question, Paul replies, “Why not?” Haneke is not a big one for answers. (In “Cache,” his highly touted art-house creepfest, we never really find out who sent that bookish bourgeois couple all those tapes and nasty drawings.) Haneke systematically dismantles any psychosocial explanations for the boys’ blood lust. Paul offers up for the family a checklist of convenient interpretations -- all lies: Peter is white trash, gay, a drug addict, a criminal, incestuous, his father was an alcoholic. My favorite of Paul’s fibs: “He’s jaded and disgusted by the emptiness of existence.”
In a generous mood, one could argue that Haneke is going for a truer portrait of violence by relinquishing the usual freaky Freudian, society-made-me-do-it baggage. But his solution is also a cop-out. He is saying that the causes of violence, at bottom, are not only unknowable but not worth knowing.
If the mayhem in “Funny Games” is so true-to-life, why doesn’t Haneke infuse his killers with the same human understanding that he provides their victims? Watts and Roth, after all, are certainly encouraged to make us feel their characters’ pain, and the little boy’s fright is traumatizing.
The answer, I think, is that Haneke sees Peter and Paul as both less and more than human. Either way, they’re unreal -- monstrous symbols of, yes, “the emptiness of existence.” They are as depraved as Freddy Krueger, with better hair and with somewhat better manners. (Maybe in the third go-round, Haneke can pit his Manichaean Beavis and Butt-head against Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh. I’d pay to see that.)
Despite Haneke’s high-toned talk in interviews about deconstructing violence in “Funny Games,” or about how the media has desensitized us from “reality,” what really gets his goat is the bourgeoise. In his view, their love of art, opera and books, their taste for golf and fine wine, has insulated them from their basest and most authentic selves. In film after film, Haneke flays the middle class without ever actually acknowledging that he is doing so. The worst violence in his new movie is mostly off camera, but the humiliations Ann and George undergo are luridly exposed. These people must suffer for their comforts.
Haneke is undeniably gifted but he’s also a scourge who plays both sides of the ideological fence. He covets the dignity of Ann and George while merrily obliterating them. He implicates us as voyeurs -- accomplices -- in his bloody postmodern prank; at the same time, he has no qualms about parading Watts in her bra and panties. No doubt some will see her get-up as totemic or anomic or whatever.
In the end, the difference between “Funny Games” and Hollywood schlock horror may only be a matter of breeding. “Funny Games” is “Saw IV” with a PhD.
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“Funny Games.” MPAA rating: R for terror, violence and some language. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes. In limited release.
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ee064085dc546c023ff65a216aaa8052 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-14-fg-pollute14-story.html | Thou shalt honor thy Mother Earth | Thou shalt honor thy Mother Earth
A Vatican keen to show its green side has added pollution to the realm of “new sins” that today’s Catholics must confront and avoid.
In this age of expanding globalization, the Vatican is telling followers that sin is not just an individual act but can also be a transgression against the larger community.
An offense against God, said senior Vatican official Msgr. Gianfranco Girotti, “is not only stealing or coveting another man’s wife, it is also destroying the environment.”
Polluting was just one of several sins Girotti decried as products of modern circumstances that must be addressed urgently. Others include gene manipulation (such as cloning or stem cell research), drug abuse and becoming too wealthy, as well as practices more routinely condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, such as abortion.
Girotti is with the Apostolic Penitentiary, the church office that deals with sins and penance. He spoke in an interview last weekend with l’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, after a symposium for priests on how to stop the decline in confessions among Catholics.
Under Catholic teaching, a believer atones for his or her sins by confessing to a priest and receiving absolution from him.
“If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has an impact and resonance that is above all social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization,” Girotti said.
“In effect, attention to sin is a more urgent task today, precisely because its consequences are more abundant and more destructive.”
The mention of the environment reflects growing interest by Pope Benedict XVI in saving the planet. Last summer, officials announced the installation of 1,000 solar panels in the Paul VI Audience Hall, the main auditorium in Vatican City. The city-state has joined a reforestation program to offset its carbon emissions. And at a youth festival with the pope last year, participants were given prayer books made with recycled paper.
“Before it’s too late,” Benedict told the gathering of several hundred thousand people, “we need to make courageous choices that will re-create a strong alliance between man and Earth.
“We need a decisive ‘yes’ to care for creation and a strong commitment to reverse those trends that risk making the situation of decay irreversible,” he added.
He has repeated the theme in major speeches and homilies.
The Catholic Church is not alone in giving new attention to degradations of the planet and other environmental trouble. The Southern Baptist Convention this month announced plans to fight global warming, and the California diocese of the Episcopal Church recently appointed its first canon for environmental ministry.
For the Vatican, going green is a relatively new phenomenon. Church hierarchy had been divided, and many priests saw ecology as a concern of rich, developed countries, not the poor regions of the world. But scarcity of resources and natural disasters are hurting the poor, others have pointed out, making care for the environment a moral responsibility for all the faithful.
Girotti’s discussion of “new sins” (though many were not exactly new) was also an attempt to appeal to the modern Catholic and show the relevance of church teachings and guidance in the globalized world.
“The Vatican’s intent seemed to be less about adding to the traditional ‘deadly’ sins [lust, anger, sloth, pride, avarice, gluttony, envy] than reminding the world that sin has a social dimension and that participation in institutions that themselves sin is an important point upon which believers needed to reflect,” Father James Martin, acting publisher of the Jesuit magazine America, said in a blog he operates.
“In other words, if you work for a company that pollutes the environment, you have something more important to consider for Lent than whether or not to give up chocolate.”
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wilkinson@latimes.com
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5053faa610231fb1eaf40e680168a4fe | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-14-fi-homes14-story.html | Southland home prices tumble fast | Southland home prices tumble fast
Southern California home prices are now 19% below their peak last year, and the surprisingly rapid decline is leading experts to predict that the housing slump will be worse than initially thought -- surpassing the severe downturn of the 1990s.
Home values also plunged 19% during the last real estate bust, but that was over a six-year period ending in 1997. Prices have now fallen just as much in less than a year.
That trend is causing analysts to rethink their previous forecasts.
Delores A. Conway, director of USC’s Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast, last fall predicted a 15% decline in home values. But now, “20% to 25% looks more likely,” she says, “and that’s not to say we won’t see 30%.”
Los Angeles economist Christopher Thornberg is even more bearish. He projects that home values will sink 40% from their peaks reached last year, double his previous estimate.
“It’s the speed of the decline,” said Thornberg, of Beacon Economics, a consulting firm.
Betty Palacios has no doubt that the slump is worse than originally thought. She’s trying to sell her Upland condo for $140,000 -- or close to 40% less than what similar units in her complex were selling for two years ago.
Palacios, 46, said she had received only one offer, for $90,000.
“I’m keeping my fingers crossed” for a higher bid, said Palacios, who has already dropped her asking price once. “It’s all I can do now.”
Palacios has owned her condo since 1991 but still expects to take a loss because of home equity loans and refinancings over the years.
Billie Tircuit, 26, has already taken a hit. She bought a house in Altadena two years ago with 100% financing at the urging of her husband, a mortgage broker, she said. His income vanished with the housing crash, and the couple soon could not make their payments.
Tircuit split with her husband and unloaded the house last month for $455,000 -- a 22% loss and less than what she owed on the property.
With the falling prices putting many more homeowners “upside down” -- that is, owing more on their homes than they are worth -- analysts expect foreclosures to continue to escalate as homeowners abandon their properties. That could further weaken the market as lenders sell these foreclosed homes at discount prices.
Property records show that foreclosures are growing as a proportion of the home sales market. About one-third of Southern California homes sold in February had been foreclosed since January 2007, up from 3.5% of sales a year earlier, according to La Jolla-based research firm DataQuick Information Systems.
DataQuick said the median price for a Southern California home last month was $408,000, down 17.6% from a year earlier and 19.2%, on average, from peaks reached last year. The median price is the price at which half of all homes sold for more and half for less.
The number of homes sold in the six-county region in February -- 10,777 -- was the second-lowest monthly total since DataQuick began tracking sales in 1988. The record low came in January, when just 9,983 homes changed hands.
Continuing a trend, the sharpest price declines have come in outlying areas “where prices got pumped up artificially with the sort of crazy loans that no longer exist,” said Marshall Prentice, DataQuick’s president.
Home values in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, for example, plunged by about 21% last month compared with year-earlier figures. Losses were less dramatic in Los Angeles and Orange counties, which dropped by 13% and 16%, respectively.
Cal Poly Pomona real estate finance professor Michael T. Carney had predicted last year that home prices in Southern California would fall at least 15%. Now, “it’s going to be more than 20%,” he said. “We don’t appear to be leveling out.”
USC’s Conway said one reason for the sharper-than-expected declines is that loan defaults caused more trouble than many had anticipated, causing investors to lose their appetite for pools of these loans bundled into securities.
Now, “there is a shortage of investors to back mortgages. The market has seized,” she said. That means mortgages for would-be home buyers are harder to obtain and usually come at higher interest rates, she said.
Before home values plummeted, of course, many people benefited from a dramatic run-up in prices.
Home values in Southern California multiplied 3 1/2 times from 1997 to 2007, peaking at the median price of $505,000, according to DataQuick.
Because prices rose over such a long period of time, it will also take a long time for the market to correct, said Tom Davidoff, a real estate expert at UC Berkeley’s business school.
“Prices rose more dramatically in real terms, and the 10 years of annual returns was unprecedented,” he said.
Davidoff didn’t hazard a guess on how long prices would fall, but he said that affluent areas -- where prices have not fallen as sharply -- would eventually feel the pain as well.
The higher end of the market has seen only modest price declines in large part because most longtime homeowners in these areas have plenty of equity and aren’t under financial pressure to sell, Davidoff said.
So they are sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the market to turn around before they plant “For Sale” signs in their frontyards.
But eventually, more and more homeowners in these areas will choose to sell, deciding they no longer want to defer plans such as retirement or a move to another region.
“They’re going to start selling, and prices will get to their true market level,” Davidoff said.
The fact that relatively few homes in affluent areas are being put on the market or sold could also overstate the price declines so far, cautions Edward E. Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast.
Leamer notes that DataQuick’s numbers are heavily weighted with sales of low-priced homes, many of them foreclosures.
He thinks a better gauge of the downturn may be the Case-Shiller index, which compares a home’s most recent sale to its previous sale and, unlike DataQuick, does not include newly constructed homes.
That index shows home prices in Los Angeles and Orange counties are 15% below their peak.
Leamer, however, also believes that things will get worse -- with home values declining 20% to 25% from peak levels.
For Billie Tircuit, the real estate crash has been painful but also an instructive lesson in practical economics.
“We had no business buying that house,” she said, “but everybody was buying a house, and the loans were there.
“Don’t get caught in the hype. It bit me hard.”
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peter.hong@latimes.com
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58ee79090845ed9f12ff1b038d24cb0f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-15-me-baker15-story.html | Pianist wrote music for holiday song | Pianist wrote music for holiday song
Gloria Shayne Baker, who co-wrote the modern-day classic Christmas carol “Do You Hear What I Hear?” with her then-husband Noel Regney, has died. She was 84.
Baker died March 6 at her home in Stamford, Conn., of lung cancer that had metastasized, her daughter, Gabrielle Regney, said.
A pianist whose forte was popular music, Baker usually wrote the lyrics and Regney composed the music for their collaborations. But the roles were reversed for the Christmas tune they wrote in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, when the U.S. and Soviet Union were locked in a confrontation over the Soviets’ placement of ballistic missiles in Cuba.
Inspired by the sight of infants in strollers on the streets of New York City, Regney opened the song with the words, “Said the night wind to the little lamb, ‘Do you see what I see?’ ” and included the line, “Pray for peace, people everywhere.”
“Noel wrote a beautiful song,” Baker told an interviewer years later, “and I wrote the music. We couldn’t sing it, though. . . . Our little song broke us up. You must realize there was a threat of nuclear war at the time.”
The song was first recorded by the Harry Simeone Chorale and sold more than a quarter-million copies upon its release just after Thanksgiving 1962. The next year Bing Crosby made it an international hit. The song has been recorded hundreds of times since then in nearly every conceivable musical style.
Baker wrote many songs on her own, most notably “Goodbye Cruel World,” a hit for James Darren in 1961.
Among the songs she and Regney wrote together are “Rain Rain Go Away,” recorded by Bobby Vinton, and “Sweet Little Darlin’,” sung by Jo Stafford. Baker also collaborated with Jerry Keller on “Almost There,” which was recorded by Andy Williams, and with Mary Candy and Eddie Deane on “The Men in My Little Girl’s Life,” performed by talk show host Mike Douglas.
Born Gloria Adele Shain in Brookline, Mass., on Sept. 4, 1923, she began playing piano as a child and accompanied pupils who were taking singing lessons from her mother.
After studying piano at Boston University, she moved to New York City in the 1940s and began playing piano before live audiences and for demo recordings. She also arranged music for such composers as Irving Berlin and Stephen Sondheim. She changed the spelling of her last name for professional reasons.
While playing piano at a New York City hotel in 1951, she met Regney, a Frenchman who had recently immigrated to the United States. They soon married and began working together.
They divorced in 1973, and she married William Baker two years later. He died in 2001, and Regney died in 2002.
In addition to her daughter, Baker is survived by son Paul Regney, a grandson, four stepchildren, 10 step-grandchildren, a brother and two sisters.
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claire.noland@latimes.com
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d3d898571e6ea17e871b69cbbeb56126 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-15-me-britney15-story.html | Hospital to punish snooping on Spears | Hospital to punish snooping on Spears
UCLA Medical Center is taking steps to fire at least 13 employees and has suspended at least six others for snooping in the confidential medical records of pop star Britney Spears during her recent hospitalization in its psychiatric unit, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.
In addition, six physicians face discipline for peeking at her computerized records, the person said.
Questioned about the breaches, officials acknowledged that it was not the first time UCLA had disciplined workers for looking at Spears’ records. Several were caught prying into records after Spears gave birth to her first son, Sean Preston, in September 2005 at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, officials said. Some were fired.
“It’s not only surprising, it’s very frustrating and it’s very disappointing,” said Jeri Simpson, the Santa Monica hospital’s director of human resources, who handled the discipline in the first instance.
“I feel like we do everything that we possibly can to ensure the privacy of our patients and I know we feel horrible that it happened again.”
Simpson said UCLA treats celebrities “all the time and you never hear about this.”
“I don’t know what it is about this particular person, I don’t know what it is about her,” she added, referring to Spears.
Hoping to head off such problems, UCLA officials sent a memo the morning Spears was hospitalized Jan. 31, reminding employees that they were not allowed to peruse records unless directly caring for a patient. Spears, 26, was not specifically mentioned.
“Each member of our workforce, which includes our physicians, faculty, employees, volunteers and students, is responsible to ensure that medical information is only accessed as required for treatment, for facilitating payment of a claim or for supporting our healthcare operations,” chief compliance and privacy officer Carole A. Klove wrote in an e-mail to all employees.
“Please remember that any unauthorized access by a workforce member will be subject to disciplinary action, which could include termination.”
Such prying is also considered a violation of state and federal laws governing medical privacy. The laws allow for fines of up to $250,000, although such penalties are uncommon. Under different laws, separate fines are allowed if patients are receiving treatment for mental illness or substance abuse.
The state Department of Public Health said late Friday that it had opened an investigation of the hospital.
Klove declined to discuss specifics of the most recent incidents, citing privacy protections for patients and workers. But she did say the hospital began taking disciplinary actions immediately upon discovering each breach.
“Right from the minute she came in, audits were continually being done,” she said. “We watch this all the time. We have people dedicated to looking at records to monitor access.”
When employees look at a patient’s records electronically, they leave an electronic trail. “We advise all of our workforce that their password is their PIN for lack of a better analogy, and it is their signature,” Klove said. When it is used, the systems track which screens they view and for how long.
Those with access to clinical records include healthcare workers and others -- such as billing and admitting staffers -- who need such information to perform their jobs, she said. Housekeepers, for instance, would not have access.
Klove said that all workers must sign statements pledging to adhere to confidentiality rules when they are hired. The hospital is now considering having them sign such statements annually.
Most employees who looked up Spears’ data during her most recent hospital stay were unable to review her psychiatric records. The neuropsychiatric hospital, in which Spears was a patient, has tight record security and blocks access to all but those with appropriate credentials.
Instead, what the disciplined employees found were non-psychiatric records from her previous treatment at UCLA, a source familiar with the matter said.
Medical and nonmedical employees are set to be disciplined, although no doctors were targeted for firing, the person said. There is no evidence that any employee leaked information to the media or sold it -- something that hospitals in a celebrity culture have reason to fear.
Nicole Moore, whose union represents three of the non-physician workers involved, said she is trying to determine whether the discipline was administered fairly. Workers are entitled to contest their proposed termination before it becomes final.
“We believe that the university has a responsibility to their patients but also their employees to administer fair and consistent discipline to everybody, regardless of their position, whether it’s a doctor who violated it or a certified nursing assistant,” said Moore, lead organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 3299 at UCLA.
Klove said doctors are overseen differently than other employees. By law, they report to a medical staff governing body, which has the authority to limit, suspend or revoke their practice privileges.
In January, Spears was admitted to UCLA under Section 5150 of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code, which allows patients to be held against their will for up to 72 hours for evaluation if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others. Her hold was extended and she was released Feb. 6.
Snooping has landed hospital staffers in trouble around the country.
In October, Palisades Medical Center in New Jersey suspended more than two dozen employees without pay for accessing George Clooney’s medical records after he was injured in a motorcycle accident.
Also last year, Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside fired nine people, including nurses, secretaries and technicians, for attempting to take pictures of a patient and circulate images of an X-ray.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which has also treated Spears, said its electronic medical records of high-profile patients are flagged so that access is “highly restricted.”
Even so, employees can be -- and have been -- terminated just for attempting to access those records. Hospital spokesman Richard Elbaum said three or four workers are terminated each year for trying to look at records of high-profile patients.
Lois Richardson of the California Hospital Assn. said hospitals do “everything they possibly can” to educate workers about patient confidentiality.
“People still gossip,” she said. “They’re nosy; they’re curious. They want to be able to tell their friends, ‘I saw Britney’s records.’ Their friends are asking. That’s just how people are.”
When discipline is imposed, maybe employees will think twice the next time, she said. “Maybe they won’t peek as often.”
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charles.ornstein@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Medical snoops
Instances in which hospital workers were disciplined for inappropriately looking at patients’ records:
September 2004: Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York suspended 17 workers for trying to access the medical records of former President Clinton, who had undergone heart surgery there.
July 2005: Kootenai Medical Center in Idaho disciplined four workers for looking at the medical records of an 8-year-old girl, Shasta Groene, who was admitted after she was found with a man who later pleaded guilty to murdering members of her family
September 2006: New York City Health and Hospitals Corp. said it would suspend 39 workers without pay for looking at the records of a 7-year-old girl whose death from beatings led to major changes in the city’s child welfare system.
May 2007: Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside fired nine workers and suspended another for attempting to take a photo of a patient in a psychiatric unit, looking at another patient’s X-ray or failing to report the breaches.
July 2007: Park Nicollet Clinic in Minnesota said it had suspended more than 100 workers that year, mostly for looking into electronic records of relatives or friends.
October 2007: Palisades Medical Center in New Jersey suspended 27 workers for a month without pay for looking at the medical records of actor George Clooney, who was injured in a motorcycle accident.
March 2008: UCLA Medical Center takes steps to fire 13 workers and suspend six others for snooping in Britney Spears’ medical records. Six doctors also face discipline.
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Source: Times research
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9b82edf3210f5a960e0124b2f5422666 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-15-me-parsons15-story.html | Supervisor Norby’s humanity is showing | Supervisor Norby’s humanity is showing
Being “Client 9" is surely more exotic than being “Supervisor 4,” but that doesn’t make Chris Norby any less human than former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. To the contrary, the Orange County supervisor from the 4th District seems all too human, something he quickly acknowledges -- although not nearly in as much detail as I was hoping.
I was out of town when the story broke a week ago that Norby admitted he’d wrongly used campaign funds to pay for a week’s lodging in a Fullerton hotel last August. He did it while in the throes of marital trouble, but he made the mistake of describing it on his financial disclosure forms as a week spent in the “study of homeless and motel families.”
That’s the kind of official breach that should move any self-respecting newspaper columnist to foam at the mouth in indignation or righteous anger. The nerve! The arrogance!
And yet, I can’t do it.
Rather than wanting to hammer him, I wonder if a hug isn’t what he needs. I feel like buying him dinner and letting him do all the talking.
I know he’s got things on his mind. His third marriage is unraveling. That alone would be enough to undo a man; one failed attempt was enough for me.
So he checked out of his home last summer and, according to reports, spent a few days sleeping in his office. Then it was on to the Fullerton bed and breakfast, including an evening on which he found himself snoozing on the lawn outside the old county courthouse. He’d been reading a magazine and heading for the gym and it was a hot day, he says. Sheriff’s deputies awakened him.
You may find that disquieting. I find it poignant.
As for the disclosure form, he blew it. He has paid back the $340 for the room.
Fraud?
How about a troubled man crying out for help. A man who needs to fix something that’s broken.
They don’t keep records on this sort of thing, but I’m guessing Norby is the first county supervisor in history to have fallen asleep on the courthouse lawn.
Oh, the humanity of it.
That’s why I just can’t pile on. Norby sounds like the guy at the end of every bar in America, telling his troubles to the stranger next to him. Life is tough, being married is tough, a guy needs some time to sort things out.
I called Norby to see if I could be that man. I made it clear I wasn’t going to bust his chops over the disclosure form. I even told him I liked his style in public life, if only for the quirky sensibility he brings to certain moments. I even applauded his short-lived suggestion in 2004 to rename John Wayne Airport as “The O.C. Airport-John Wayne Field” to capitalize on the county’s growing national name recognition.
He didn’t feel like sharing.
When I asked if he wanted to tell me about his life, he declined. “Do you want to tell me about yours?” he said.
Uh, absolutely not. Although now I’m thinking that if I’d opened up, maybe he would too.
“Everybody’s got their challenges,” he said. “All lives are a work in progress.”
Amen, brother.
He wasn’t the least bit unpleasant in rebuffing me, but quickly changed the subject to a conference he’s moderating today at the Sheraton Anaheim Hotel on the effects on residents and county government when public entities claim private homes to make way for retail interests.
If that’s how he takes his mind off his troubles. . . .
Norby is still married, but divorce papers have been filed. That kind of stuff is never fun.
I asked him if he minded the flurry of gossip that had swirled around him in recent months.
“I’m flattered that people think I’m important enough to gossip about and care about,” he said.
He was trying to appear chipper and to give me a decent quote, but he wasn’t fooling me.
What I heard in his voice was a guy who needs a pal.
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.
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92f86904d3ee4f5f35380a90749c05dd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-16-ca-moon16-story.html | Tracking both sides of the split migrant family story | Tracking both sides of the split migrant family story
To all the people who think that the illegal immigration debate is about electronic fences, NAFTA, Lou Dobbs and such, director Patricia Riggen and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos offer a polite but emphatic rebuttal.
Immigration, say the women, is about survival. It’s about learning to be invisible. It’s about families. It’s about love.
That, Riggen says, was the insight she uncovered while leafing through Villalobos’ screenplay for “Under the Same Moon” (La Misma Luna), a Spanish-language drama about a Mexican mother who comes to work in Los Angeles, leaving behind her young son across the border.
The U.S.-Mexican production, which will open on more than 200 screens in Los Angeles and other cities on Wednesday, is the first Latino-centered movie that Fox Searchlight has distributed, reflecting the major studios’ interest in tapping into a rapidly growing market. It stars Kate del Castillo as the mother, Rosario; Adrian Alonso as her son, Carlitos; and an eclectic supporting cast that includes America Ferrera of “Ugly Betty” as a child smuggler and the norteno supergroup Los Tigres del Norte as themselves.
But several of the film’s most memorable characters are nameless illegal immigrants shown struggling to reach el norte or, once there, struggling to make ends meet financially and not be sent back to Mexico. Reading over the script during pre-production, Riggen “suddenly discovered that all these characters have one thing in common.”
“All these people risked their lives crossing the border, leaving everything behind, for love,” says Riggen, who was born and raised in Guadalajara, studied film at Columbia University and has lived in Los Angeles for the last several years. “For love of their families who they’re going to go reach, for love of their families who they leave behind and send money to. But it always has to do with love and family.”
A hot-button issue
Standing ovations at Rome and Toronto film festivals, along with mostly praise from critics, have greeted the movie so far. A “timely and energetic crowd-pleaser” was the Miami Herald’s verdict, and the Hollywood Reporter opined that the film “overcomes its narrative shortcomings with a surfeit of heart.”
Sweet-natured but tough-minded, “Under the Same Moon” arrives in theaters at a time when politicians, pundits and the public are engaging in (mainly) verbal slugfests over immigration, a recurrent hot-button issue in American history. But although Villalobos deliberately wove migrant-related themes into her screenplay, she agrees with Riggen that the movie is more of a personal than a political statement.
Specifically, Villalobos says, she wanted to explore the theme of abandoned children, a subject that became painfully real to her when her parents split up when she was 3 years old. For the next eight years she shuttled from Durango to Mexico City before settling with her mother in Utah when she was 11. She was the only Mexican in her new American school, and barely spoke a word of English.
“As an adult, there have been a lot of issues in my life as a result of feeling this kind of abandonment twice from both parents,” Villalobos says. “And so that is actually what I wanted to explore, that sometimes parents feel like they’re making the best decision for their children, and it may not necessarily be the case. So whether it’s in the arms of strangers that happened during World War II, or whether it’s through Operation Peter Pan, which is also what happened with a lot of the children -- 14,000 children -- in Cuba, or whether it’s through these mothers and fathers that because of circumstances, financial circumstances, have to come and live in this country, these kids are left behind.”
Villalobos wrote the first draft of the screenplay seven years ago, then shelved it while turning her attention to writing for television shows, including the animated Nickelodeon program “Go, Diego, Go!” along with other projects. Only years later did she realize that setting the story against the background of illegal immigration would allow her to “introduce the public to all of these people that are working in this country and see them as human beings instead of an issue.”
Like Villalobos, the young hero of “Under the Same Moon,” Carlitos, finds a way to push back against his parents’ desertion. Tired of waiting for his absent mother to return to Mexico, he pays a pair of child smugglers to stow him away in their van and sneak him into the United States.
Once across the border, he falls in with a wild mix of humanity that includes many Mexican illegal immigrants, all struggling to keep their heads down and earn a few dollars washing dishes or picking tomatoes while steering clear of INS agents. All that Carlitos has to guide him in his search for Rosario is his mind’s-eye vision of the Boyle Heights street corner -- marked by a brightly colored mural -- where his mother has been placing her long-distance calls to Mexico.
A perilous journey
Though “Under the Same Moon” is suitable for children, it doesn’t shy from depicting the occasionally brutal obstacles that many poor, desperate Mexicans face in coming to look for work in the United States: dangerous river crossings, police raids and so on. Riggen brought a practiced social observer’s eye to “Under the Same Moon”: Her 2004 documentary “Family Portrait,” which won the Jury Prize for short filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival, was a nuanced look at the hardships of a poor Harlem family that legendary photographer Gordon Parks had profiled for Life magazine in 1968.
Riggen says that she tried to make her feature film debut “very realistic” but not necessarily bleak. “Under the Same Moon” shows some of the best and worst that people on both sides of the border are capable of, and nearly every character’s motives are portrayed with understanding and compassion.
“I believe in goodness, I believe in humankind,” Riggen says, “which I think makes me a little bit different than most of my colleague filmmakers in Mexico lately, which are usually seeing very obscure portraits of reality, very dark, the dark side of human beings. I didn’t think this movie was like that at all. But of course we’re not making a Disneyland film either. We’re talking about a very important and cruel subject.”
The key to making that cruel subject mesh with a heart-tugging family drama is Alonso’s astonishingly assured performance. Riggen decided to audition the boy, who was turning 12 and had appeared in Luis Mandoki’s “Innocent Voices” and played Joaquin in “The Legend of Zorro” with Antonio Banderas, after reading an interview he did with a Mexican magazine. She says that she cast him on the strength of his improvisational ability and his ease in handling vigorous exchanges with adult actors.
“This story was waiting for Adrian Alonso to be the right age to play the role,” Villalobos says. “Because it is so difficult to find children not only that can act but can carry a movie. This kid is in this movie 90% of the film.”
Shot mostly in and around Mexico City, on a budget of less than $2 million, the movie is one of only a handful of commercial films that have attempted to offer a transnational perspective on Mexican-American life. Funded in part by Mexico’s national film commission, its performers include the well-known Mexican actors Eugenio Derbez and Carmen Salinas, as well as the voice of the popular L.A. radio show host Renan Almendarez Coello, better known as El Cucuy.
A marketing challenge
In one of the more head-scratching paradoxes of film marketing, Spanish-language movies tend to do badly with U.S. Latino audiences. Many industry followers believe this is because several acclaimed Spanish-language movies have been targeted not at Latinos but at the urban art-house crowd. Also, some argue that the term “Latino” is far too broad and generic a category to encompass U.S. immigrants whose heritage may be Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Mexican or Central or South American.
“The size of the audience makes it an appealing target, and yet we’ve seen a lot of films come and go without reaching that target,” says Nancy Utley, Fox Searchlight’s chief operating officer. “I feel like some of the films were more artistic in nature and not mainstream, and others of them were trying to be pan-Latin and were not targeted enough at one of the Latin American groups.”
Villalobos and Riggen say that the success of “Ugly Betty” and the “George Lopez” sitcom proves that there’s a large potential audience for Latino-centric films and TV shows -- provided they’re well-told stories with broad appeal. “I think we have to stop thinking about making Latino films and make good movies,” Riggen says.
As for the thornier social issues that “Under the Same Moon” raises, the women suggest there’s an urgent need to move the discussion on illegal immigration beyond talk-radio ranting.
A number of critically favored films in recent years, including “Maria Full of Grace,” “Quinceanera” and “Real Women Have Curves,” have probed deeper into the nuances and challenges facing Mexican and Central and South American immigrants and their next-generation children.
“I think that the issue is being hijacked by a very small group of people,” says Villalobos. “There are polls that are done on a regular basis about how Americans actually feel about the illegal immigrant issue. And most of the polls show that 60% to 65% of Americans believe that there should be a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.”
Now that she’s living and working in Los Angeles, Riggen says she has realized there’s a deep bond between the two countries and cultures. Like the bond between Rosario and her son, it’s one that no mere wall can easily separate.
“I came to L.A. and I was very surprised and impressed by the fact that there is like an entire Mexican alternative city in the city,” she says. “It’s like two cities in one.”
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reed.johnson@latimes.com
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97f71307f6f89ce8e4fb82b34a3d473d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-16-fi-bread16-story.html | Our daily bread? It costs more | Our daily bread? It costs more
When a French-style patisserie opened on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles six years ago, owner Julien Bohbot thought the competition for his small Delice Bakery would come from the other kosher bakeries down the street.
But now Bohbot is competing with bakers from Paris and Pretoria -- all in search of flour. Short supplies have raised the price of wheat worldwide and sparked protests over the cost of tortillas in Mexico and pasta in Italy. In the United States, it’s raised the cost of such basic goods as bread, cereal and pizza.
The latest statistics from the federal government have given Bohbot more reason to worry. The price of bakery and cereal products rose 1.8% in February, the largest monthly increase since January 1975. Overall, the cost of eating at home has risen more than 5% so far this year, the fastest rate since 1990.
Mike Celeste, a San Dimas financial advisor, has experienced the increase firsthand. Since October, the price of the two-loaf bag of sourdough bread he frequently buys at Sam’s Club has jumped 28% to $4.06. Celeste said the warehouse chain also raised the price of the fresh pizza he likes by 90 cents, to $8.87.
The price of white bread has risen 19% in the Western U.S. since June, according to the government.
The plight facing small bread makers like Bohbot -- and much larger businesses such as Sara Lee Corp. -- prompted the American Bakers Assn. to hold a protest march in Washington, D.C., last week.
“It is crucial that the White House, our elected representatives and the Department of Agriculture hear firsthand how bakers . . . are struggling with current market conditions,” said Robb MacKie, chief executive of the trade group. “Wheat markets -- and commodity markets in general -- are behaving in ways that we have not seen before. We believe that extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures.”
As the bakers were marching, wheat hit a record price of $12.70 a bushel Wednesday. It fell back to $11.60 by Friday but still stands 31% above where it started the year.
A series of wheat crop failures abroad, combined with the U.S. dollar being at historic lows against the Euro and other currencies, has forced Bohbot and other bakers to compete with the rest of the globe for grain -- even what’s grown in the United States.
World demand for the staple has sent the price of the 50-pound bags of flour Bohbot uses for his baguettes and marzipan cakes soaring to $27, up from $12 a year ago.
To cover the increase, Bohbot has doubled the price of his loss-leading baguettes to $1.98 and pushed the cost of his breads up a buck to $5.50.
Bohbot said it’s only going to get worse. His supplier will be increasing the price of flour “to $30 next week and said it could be $60 in a few months.”
Big companies are pushing their prices up too. Three times in the last year, baking giant Sara Lee raised what it charges supermarkets for its bread and bagels -- an average increase of 25 cents per product.
Pizza makers also are struggling with higher flour prices.
“We are really nervous. What happens if we have to charge $14 or $15 for a pizza that we sell for $9.95 now?” said David Sanfield, co-owner of Pitfire Pizza Co., a chain of three Los Angeles restaurants that buys more than 7,000 pounds of flour a month.
Some bakers want the government to create a strategic reserve of wheat, similar to the emergency oil supply it keeps on hand.
On Wednesday, MacKie, the head of the bakers’ association, called for a reduction in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to plant ground cover instead of wheat or other crops -- thus improving water quality, controlling soil erosion and creating habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife.
He believes such a move could free up as much as 7 million acres for planting wheat and other food crops. MacKie also wants the government to waive penalties for farmers seeking early release from the program, which typically locks up land for 10 to 15 years.
The trade group also said the government needs to better balance the use of farmland between food and fuel needs. On land previously used for wheat and other food crops, farmers are rushing to plant corn to be refined into ethanol.
Bohbot, the Pico Boulevard baker, also wants the government to step in. He said he doesn’t understand why the U.S. continues to allow wheat exports at a time when supplies are so short here. Other nations, including Argentina, Russia and China, have slapped new restrictions and tariffs on exports of wheat and other grains in an attempt to protect their domestic supplies.
For now, there’s not much that bakeries can do about the soaring cost of wheat, said Chris Hurt, a Purdue University agricultural economist. They are small players, used to purchasing supplies as they use them, and they don’t have the clout or economic sophistication to compete with the giant foreign buyers and market speculators that are outbidding domestic users of American grain.
Wheat exports are 32% higher than one year ago, 33% of the U.S. soybean crop will be shipped abroad and corn exports this year are on pace to rise by 15% and break the 1979-80 record of 2.4 billion bushels, Hurt said.
Normally, people start to cut back on items when prices soar. But bread and wheat products are such basic foodstuffs that few consumers are doing that at this point, Hurt said. “It has to get to a critical level before we see a change in consumption. There are not a lot of good substitutes for bread.”
Still, companies like Pitfire and Delice are particularly vulnerable because they sell upscale products in an economy where there are lower-priced options, such as supermarket brands and Domino’s Pizza.
They also won’t get any relief soon from the foreign buyers purchasing American wheat, because the dollar’s low value blunts a large part of the price increase experienced domestically. Right now, for example, $11-a-bushel wheat in the Midwest is equivalent to something in the range of $8.25 overseas, Hurt said.
That’s showing up in orders for the 2008-09 U.S. wheat crop, said Joe Sowers, senior market analyst with U.S. Wheat Associates, a farm trade group. Foreign nations have already placed orders for 2 million metric tons of wheat, almost 10 times the advance purchase of a year ago.
“Japan, the Philippines, South Africa and a lot of other countries don’t want to get left behind,” Sowers said.
“We are at the bottom of the wheat bin.”
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jerry.hirsch@latimes.com
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54c746560669ca78df19939615bafed1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-16-me-clark16-story.html | Caltech English professor, campus wit | Caltech English professor, campus wit
J. Kent Clark, a longtime Caltech English literature professor, biographer and novelist whose musical comedies for and about the Pasadena campus helped prize-winning scientists and studious undergraduates take a lighthearted view of their follies and foibles, has died. He was 90.
Clark died of heart failure March 6 at a retirement home in Pasadena, said his son, Don.
An advocate of Shakespeare, Swift and Milton on a campus more inclined to revere Einstein, Newton and Hawking, Clark called himself the “commissar of culture,” who was devoted to changing Caltech undergraduates’ reputation as “trolls,” the campus vernacular for slide-rule-toting nerds.
As unofficial culture czar at the prestigious center of science learning, Clark, a specialist in 17th century English literature and politics, oversaw programming at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium and other campus venues. He also organized exhibitions and established an artist-in-residence program.
But the extracurricular activity he was most famous for during his four decades on the faculty -- from 1947 to 1986 -- was writing, producing and directing satirical musical comedies about the quirkiness of life on a campus dominated by math and science whizzes.
“He was a wit,” said Daniel Kevles, a Yale University science historian who taught at Caltech for 40 years. “He could be cutting, in a gentle way, in some of his lyrics. He was never mean.”
Born Sept. 29, 1917, on a ranch in Howell, Utah, near the Idaho state line, Clark developed his musical talents at Brigham Young University, where students had a tradition of entertaining one another with song and dance.
During summers off from college, he worked as a bellhop and program director at a lodge in Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah. By 19, he recalled in a 1989 oral history interview at Caltech, he was a seasoned pro who “had been booed by experts.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Brigham Young in 1939 before enrolling at Stanford University for a doctorate. In 1947, after completing three years of military duty, he moved to Caltech, where he became an instructor and conducted research at the nearby Huntington Library for his dissertation on Jonathan Swift’s politics. He earned his doctorate at Stanford in 1950.
Around that time, he began collaborating with Elliott Davis, a lawyer and musician whose children attended the same Pasadena elementary school as Clark’s. Poking fun at the trials and tribulations of PTA moms, they wrote humorous songs for PTA shows, such as “Where Were You?” and “Give Us Men.” Clark and Davis wrote more than 40 original songs together.
Word of their shows eventually reached the assistant to the president of Caltech, who in 1954 asked Clark to organize a tribute to faculty member and alumnus Linus Pauling, who had just won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
Clark came up with a song that teasingly referred to Pauling’s marriage to one of his graduate students: Dr. Linus Pauling is the man for me/ He makes violent changes in my chemistry . . .
Another famous composition gently lampooned Charles Richter, the Caltech seismologist and physicist who invented the Richter scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes:
One, two, on the Richter scale, a shabby little shiver.
One, two, on the Richter scale, a queasy little quiver.
Waves brushed the seismograph as if a fly had flicked her
One, two, on the Richter scale, it hardly woke up Richter.
Richter, whom Clark once described as “morbidly shy,” did not attend the performance but reportedly laughed when someone played a recording of the song for him later.
In contrast to Richter, Clark was easygoing and highly popular with students, who, playing on the similarity of his name to Superman alter ego Clark Kent, bestowed various nicknames, including Super Prof, Man Super and Namrepus (Superman spelled backward).
“Kent had a special knack for making things we thought we couldn’t possibly get interested in . . . permanently interesting,” said Mike Boughton, a physics major who took freshman English from Clark in 1951 and joined Clark’s ad-hoc theatrical troupe, the Caltech Stock Co., which was active for two decades.
“There were distinctly two sides to him,” Boughton said last week. One side produced two well-regarded biographies -- “Goodwin Wharton” (1984) about a wacky 17th century English rake and treasure hunter, and “Whig’s Progress: Tom Wharton Between Revolutions” (2004), about Goodwin’s brother, a prominent Whig politician -- and a historical novel, “The King’s Agent” (1948).
Then there was Clark’s Gilbert and Sullivan side, which punned with impunity, particularly for a good cause, such as the admission of the first female undergraduates to Caltech in 1970. We honor your intentions, admire your dimensions, we love both your momentum and your mass . . . he wrote in a song he called “What’s a Nice Girl Like You.”
“If you can’t write comedy about Caltech,” Clark often said, “you can’t write comedy.”
Another memorable composition made light of the preoccupations of Caltech’s fabled geologists. Its chief device was a play on the word that rhymes with “nice” but denotes
. . . a laminated metamorphic rock
The only stone a man can trust.
All others are crude, if not faintly lewd;
They fill a man with disgust.
Salt is salacious and chalk is cretaceous
They’re not gneiss . . .
Clark is survived by his third wife, Carol Brunner Pearson; three children; three stepchildren; and four grandsons.
A memorial will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. May 2 at the Athenaeum on the Caltech campus.
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elaine.woo@latimes.com
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c66bda14c152c10e69f93b8d242b2cf0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-16-na-piracy16-story.html | Bill targets piracy at colleges | Bill targets piracy at colleges
Colleges and universities that take part in federal financial aid programs will be under new obligations to take steps to prevent illegal downloads of music, movies and other copyrighted material if legislation overwhelmingly passed by the House last month becomes law.
A two-page portion of the 800-page College Opportunity and Affordability Act has raised alarms in the higher- education community. It would hold schools disproportionately responsible, education groups say, for activities that take place mostly off-campus.
“More than 80% of students live off-campus and use commercial networks,” not school networks, said Steve Worona, director of policy and networking for Educause, a nonprofit that focuses on information technology in higher education.
Universities go well past the minimum legal requirements to dissuade piracy by requiring students to sign copyright-law notifications, Worona argued, yet the commercial networks where the “vast majority” of illegal downloads occur “do nothing beyond it -- and for some reason we’re the ones targeted.”
The main purpose of the legislation, which the House approved 354-58, is to make college more affordable to low- and middle-income families.
But the anti-piracy provision could increase student costs, Worona said. It would mandate that schools develop plans to offer alternatives to illegal downloading and to explore technological deterrents.
Worona called the mandate “expensive, ineffective, inappropriate and unnecessary” and expressed concern that schools could be penalized for failing to come up with such plans.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) had intended to introduce an amendment that no school failing to devise plans “shall be denied or given reduced federal funding,” but after tornadoes struck his state he returned to his district to deal with the aftermath -- and missed a key procedural vote to attach his language to the bill.
Educational institutions’ arguments don’t sway representatives of the artists who receive no royalties from illegal file-sharing.
“Piracy hurts ordinary working musicians, but it also will hurt our nation’s culture and its music fans if enough talented and hard-working musicians cannot survive in the business,” American Federation of Musicians President Thomas F. Lee said in a letter to the House Committee on Education and Labor in support of the provision.
The Motion Picture Assn. of America, which also supports the measure, in earlier congressional testimony cited a 2005 study to claim that 44%, or about $572 million, of industry losses came from students using college networks. But in late January the MPAA, acknowledging “human error,” lowed the proportion to 15%, or about $195 million.
“I have no doubt that the exceptional size of this [initial] number contributed significantly to the sense of urgency in dealing with college students,” Educause Vice President Mark Luker said in an interview. Even 15% is too high, he said: Adjusting for the fact that most students are off-campus, he considered 3% a more reasonable estimate.
UCLA’s director of strategic policy for information technology, Kent Wada, agreed with Luker’s 3% estimate, adding: “Consider also that we see the behavior and values associated with illegal file-sharing already largely developed by the time students arrive at college.”
Research by USC’s John Heidemann, an Information Sciences Institute associate professor, bore out their estimates. After hearing the MPAA’s initial claim, he monitored file-sharing on USC’s network for 14 hours and found 3% to 13% of users using peer-to-peer technology. (USC was among only a few schools to conduct research and not rely solely on the MPAA’s numbers.)
The Recording Industry Assn. of America, which also supports the bill, has subpoenaed numerous universities in recent years over piracy issues, asking schools to identify students who were illegally distributing songs onto file-sharing networks.
But in the last few months, several universities have fought back.
In the most prominent case, the University of Oregon moved in November to have a subpoena dismissed. The school accused the industry of misleading the judge, violating students’ privacy rights and engaging in questionable investigative practices.
The latter charge involves MediaSentry, an Internet service used by the RIAA to obtain user information from file-sharing networks. Some states, including Oregon, require private investigators to have a license, which MediaSentry lacks.
The RIAA says MediaSentry isn’t a private investigator.
The case is pending.
According to Luker, all universities have explicit policies against copyright infringement on campus networks that students must sign each year. And “quite a few” schools, he said, have sponsored subscriptions to legal downloading services such as Napster or the Ruckus Network, with the cost passed on to students.
“The corresponding costs must be charged back to the students, ultimately, through tuition or fees, raising the cost of higher education,” he said.
UCLA and USC say they have not increased charges to students because of their Ruckus subscriptions.
The RIAA supports several such means to promote legal campus downloads. But they aren’t catching on.
“The commercial alternatives simply don’t provide the services consumers want,” Educause’s Worona said. “They can’t download to an iPod or move tracks from place to place, and many don’t have a full range of selection. It doesn’t make sense for Congress to mandate something that has failed in the public marketplace.”
Universities still have hope based on the Senate version of the education bill, passed last summer. In response to vocal critics such as Educause, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) withdrew his amendment to require federally funded universities to use technological deterrents.
A House-Senate conference committee is to meet this year to work out differences in a final bill to be sent to the White House.
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ben.dubose@latimes.com
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55cface444d30434cf77e2ed438ac149 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-16-op-bilmes16-story.html | War’s price tag | War’s price tag
The war in iraq, which will enter its sixth year this week, is turning out to be the most expensive conflict since World War II, and the cost will fall especially hard on Californians.
By the end of 2008, the federal government will have spent more than $800 billion on combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (government accounts make it hard to separate the two). On top of that comes a mountain of future costs: caring for war veterans (to date, more than 1.6 million troops have been deployed), replacing the military hardware that is being used and worn out in Iraq and paying interest on the enormous sums of money we’ve borrowed to finance the war.
All told, we estimate that the cost of the war will easily reach $3 trillion in today’s money. This number assumes that the U.S. begins a pullback from Iraq after the election in November but retains a small presence there for the next decade.
Californians are going to face a disproportionate share of the bill for three reasons. First, California’s population is among the youngest in the U.S., with 26% under 18 (compared with 24% nationwide). Because of irresponsible fiscal policy (cutting taxes for the rich while a war is in progress and borrowing the money to pay for the conflict), the burden of paying for this costly adventure has been shifted to these younger Americans. The Iraq war is the first time since the Revolutionary War that we have borrowed from overseas to finance war spending (the colonists borrowed from France). The next generation will be paying all the interest on the money we have borrowed, including the 40% of it that comes from Middle Eastern countries, China and other foreign lenders. It will also be forced to confront the $9-trillion national debt, which has risen by 12% as a result of the war.
On top of servicing huge war debts, America’s children will also have to pick up the tab for the rising cost of veterans’ care. The intensity of the combat over the last five years and the high injury rates mean that close to half the current service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to qualify for long-term disability compensation. The cost generally peaks many years after combat has ended -- claims from World War II veterans, for instance, peaked in 1993.
We will also need to provide a lifetime of medical care for many of the 70,000 men and women in the armed services who have been wounded in combat, injured in accidents or airlifted out of the region for emergency medical care, plus temporary care for an additional 250,000 returning troops who are seeking treatment for hearing loss, joint pain, post-traumatic stress disorder or other conditions at veterans medical facilities.
The 1991 Persian Gulf War lasted only a month, but the federal government pays out $4.3 billion a year in disability compensation to Gulf War veterans. If the Iraq war follows the same pattern, we can expect that the next generation of Americans will eventually spend $600 billion to look after the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
The second reason California will pay a disproportionate share for the war is because its residents are so rich. California already contributes a disproportionate share of federal taxes -- more than 14% of the total last year from a state that makes up only 12% of the nation’s population. The tax burden is especially high in the Bay Area, greater Los Angeles and San Diego, places where individual taxpayers pay some of the highest total federal taxes, according to a recent study of 3,000 counties across the country. The average household in San Francisco is already paying $36,409 annually in federal taxes (combining income tax, payroll tax, excise tax, estate tax and corporate tax) -- the second-highest federal tax burden in the United States.
This means that Californians are already paying more to support the war effort than most Americans. Expect that burden to get considerably larger no matter what happens to incomes in the years ahead.
Third, the standard of living of car-dependent Californians is being hit especially hard by a steep increase in oil prices that are the result, at least in part, of the war in Iraq. It is easy to forget that oil prices were at $25 a barrel when the war began in March 2003. True, a lot of the increase has been driven by sharply higher demand from Asia and by a chronic shortage of refining capacity. But futures markets had predicted that oil prices would remain stable despite rising demand. Most experts blame at least some portion of the skyrocketing price of oil on the drop in supply caused by the instability in the Middle East.
In our book, we attribute just $5 to $10 of the increase in the cost of a barrel of oil directly to Iraq. But even this modest price increase accounts for a transfer of $300 billion to $800 billion from the pocketbooks of U.S. consumers to the oil-producing countries.
A few Californians may benefit from the war if they work for defense contractors, which have been among the major beneficiaries of the conflict. But overall, the war has not stimulated the economy because so much of our spending on Iraq has been devoted to employing subcontractors from countries such as the Philippines and Nepal, and paying for food, laundry, local transportation and cleaning services for troops in the field. This kind of expenditure benefits the U.S. economy very little.
Meanwhile, the war has taken a heavy toll on our military. Sixty percent of military officers above the rank of major now say that our forces are weaker than they were five years ago, according to a recent survey of 3,000 active and retired military officers commissioned by the Center for a New American Security. And 42% went further -- agreeing that the war in Iraq “has broken the U.S. military.” The war has forced the Army, in order to meet basic recruiting targets, to lower standards for physical fitness, health and education and to turn a blind eye to criminal records. It may take decades for the military to recover to its prewar state of readiness, and once again, the next generation of Californians will be paying a big share of this effort.
Beyond that, the ongoing cost of the war has made it more difficult for the federal government to pay for roads, schools, medical research and aid to local communities. And then there is the opportunity cost: The money spent on the war could have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years or provided health insurance to all U.S. children.
In California, with its fast-growing and diverse population, the opportunity costs are especially painful. Over the next two decades, greater Los Angeles needs to invest $20 billion in bus and rail and $150 billion for transportation generally, according to the draft Los Angeles County MTA plan for 2008. The bustling Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach require an infusion of $3 billion for vital environmental and security improvements, according to a recent statement from the Long Beach and Los Angeles boards of harbor commissioners. They are proposing to increase cargo fees yet again to raise revenue.
But as we enter the sixth year of combat, the “burn rate” for each month we continue in Iraq is $12 billion -- with the full cost (including paying for veterans and replenishing equipment) easily double that.
We’re already committed to a tremendous amount of spending in the decades ahead to pay for this war. There’s little or nothing we can do to avoid those costs. All we can do at this point to keep them from rising further is to withdraw our troops from Iraq as soon as is reasonably possible.
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e0460c479d0cbc04bb273fc9eea7eda6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-16-op-sanchez16-story.html | Wiretapping’s true danger | Wiretapping’s true danger
As the battle over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rages in Congress, civil libertarians warn that legislation sought by the White House could enable spying on “ordinary Americans.” Others, like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), counter that only those with an “irrational fear of government” believe that “our country’s intelligence analysts are more concerned with random innocent Americans than foreign terrorists overseas.”
But focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps poses to a democratic society. Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can -- and repeatedly have -- abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters.
The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts -- and the presidents they served -- had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices -- even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often “collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.”
Political abuse of electronic surveillance goes back at least as far as the Teapot Dome scandal that roiled the Warren G. Harding administration in the early 1920s. When Atty. Gen. Harry Daugherty stood accused of shielding corrupt Cabinet officials, his friend FBI Director William Burns went after Sen. Burton Wheeler, the fiery Montana progressive who helped spearhead the investigation of the scandal. FBI agents tapped Wheeler’s phone, read his mail and broke into his office. Wheeler was indicted on trumped-up charges by a Montana grand jury, and though he was ultimately cleared, the FBI became more adept in later years at exploiting private information to blackmail or ruin troublesome public figures. (As New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer can attest, a single wiretap is all it takes to torpedo a political career.)
In 1945, Harry Truman had the FBI wiretap Thomas Corcoran, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” whom Truman despised and whose influence he resented. Following the death of Chief Justice Harlan Stone the next year, the taps picked up Corcoran’s conversations about succession with Justice William O. Douglas. Six weeks later, having reviewed the FBI’s transcripts, Truman passed over Douglas and the other sitting justices to select Secretary of the Treasury (and poker buddy) Fred Vinson for the court’s top spot.
“Foreign intelligence” was often used as a pretext for gathering political intelligence. John F. Kennedy’s attorney general, brother Bobby, authorized wiretaps on lobbyists, Agriculture Department officials and even a congressman’s secretary in hopes of discovering whether the Dominican Republic was paying bribes to influence U.S. sugar policy. The nine-week investigation didn’t turn up evidence of money changing hands, but it did turn up plenty of useful information about the wrangling over the sugar quota in Congress -- information that an FBI memo concluded “contributed heavily to the administration’s success” in passing its own preferred legislation.
In the FISA debate, Bush administration officials oppose any explicit rules against “reverse targeting” Americans in conversations with noncitizens, though they say they’d never do it.
But Lyndon Johnson found the tactic useful when he wanted to know what promises then-candidate Richard Nixon might be making to our allies in South Vietnam through confidant Anna Chenault. FBI officials worried that directly tapping Chenault would put the bureau “in a most untenable and embarrassing position,” so they recorded her conversations with her Vietnamese contacts.
Johnson famously heard recordings of King’s conversations and personal liaisons with various women. Less well known is that he received wiretap reports on King’s strategy conferences with other civil rights leaders, hoping to use the information to block their efforts to seat several Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson even complained that it was taking him “hours each night” to read the reports.
Few presidents were quite as brazen as Nixon, whom the Church Committee found had “authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security.” They didn’t need to be, perhaps. Through programs such as the National Security Agency’s Operation Shamrock (1947 to 1975), which swept up international telegrams en masse, the government already had a vast store of data, and presidents could easily run “name checks” on opponents using these existing databases.
It’s probably true that ordinary citizens uninvolved in political activism have little reason to fear being spied on, just as most Americans seldom need to invoke their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. But we understand that the 1st Amendment serves a dual role: It protects the private right to speak your mind, but it serves an even more important structural function, ensuring open debate about matters of public importance. You might not care about that first function if you don’t plan to say anything controversial. But anyone who lives in a democracy, who is subject to its laws and affected by its policies, ought to care about the second.
Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king -- something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance.
In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends -- well, it would be a first.
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1592c341366fa797e255017cfcc09cc0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-16-re-hotprop16-story.html | It’s time that this Jack hits the road | It’s time that this Jack hits the road
Sean Hayes, who played Jack McFarland in the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace,” must have gotten word that the housing slump hasn’t hurt sales in the upper tiers of the market. He has listed his Hancock Park home at close to $9 million, according to area real estate agents.
The house, built in 1930, has four bedrooms and five bathrooms in 5,700 square feet. The gated, English Country-style home also has an English garden, manicured grounds and an outdoor fireplace -- great for alfresco dining.
There is a living room with bay windows, a formal dining room with walnut floors and crown moldings, and a cook’s kitchen with a butler’s pantry, family room/media room and library/study overlooking the pool.
The master bedroom suite has a fireplace and French windows. The master bathroom has white marble floors and a Juliet balcony. There are two other en suite bedrooms, a separate guesthouse and an office.
Hayes, 37, appeared in the recent comedy-drama “The Bucket List,” in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman portray two men dying of cancer who meet when sharing a hospital room.
In “Will & Grace,” he played a gay friend of lawyer Will Truman, a role performed by Eric McCormack. Debra Messing played interior decorator Grace Adler, Will’s roommate, and Megan Mullally played Karen Walker, a tipsy socialite.
Each of the costars won an Emmy (Mullally won two), and the show won 16 Emmys during its 1998-2006 run.
Maya outpost in Rancho Mirage
Six months ago, Stan Jolley, a movie art director, a TV producer-director and one of the original designers of Disneyland, took working at home to a new level.
That’s when he purchased and started a major restoration -- now nearing completion -- of a Maya-themed home in Rancho Mirage.
Jolley bought the 22,000-square-foot house for $7.7 million, according to public records. He estimates he has spent about $1.25 million on the interior and exterior, plus $2.25 million on furnishings.
The six-bedroom, nine-bathroom house sits on 7 acres at the top of the gated community of Thunderbird Heights. It is the highest-elevation home in Rancho Mirage.
“Some of the residents don’t even know this property is here,” Jolley said, attributing the privacy to a winding, cypress-lined, half-mile drive.
The house was built and designed in the early ‘70s by Modernist Howard Lapham for socialite-sportswoman Maxine Cook. An admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Lapham focused on blending ancient Maya and modern design
The house will be Jolley’s residence and will double as the entertainment center, with a game house, for his soon-to-be-announced film company.
Some guest quarters will be provided for those involved in films Jolley shoots in the Palm Springs area. And there are garages for eight cars.
When not scouring antiques stores for original furnishings, Jolley, an octogenarian who has been in the entertainment industry for three generations, has been installing movie memorabilia and original artwork.
Called Cook House, Ichpa-Mayapan, the house has a hand-carved Maya calendar near the front door and hand-carved, redwood entry doors, 14 feet high and 4 feet across. “This house will be here long after we’re gone,” Jolley said.
In Brentwood: big home, big heart
Actor Van Heflin, who won an Oscar for his supporting role in “Johnny Eager” (1942), owned a Brentwood home in the late 1940s that is on the market at close to $6.6 million.
The sellers are Barry and Kathy Silverton. She was named the 23rd District’s Woman of the Year by the state Senate in 2005 for her work starting the Stitches From the Heart charity and nonprofit store in Santa Monica. Volunteers send their handmade items to her, and she ships the items to families in need across the nation.
The traditional-style home, with a tennis court and swimming pool, has a spiral staircase in the foyer. The house has 10 bedrooms and 10 1/2 bathrooms in nearly 13,000 square feet.
Mary Ann Saxon of Coldwell Banker Real Estate, Brentwood West office, has the listing with Sharon Rubel of Coldwell Banker’s Pacific Palisades office.
Some Hollywood stars shone here
John Barrymore, the early stage actor turned screen star who was nicknamed the Great Profile and was a member of “the Royal Family” of Broadway, had a Hollywood Hills-area house built for him in 1936. The villa, in Outpost Estates, is listed at $3.2 million.
It isn’t clear how long the actor lived in the Spanish-style home. He died at age 60 in 1942. After that, orchestra conductor Andre Previn and actors James Coburn and Lee Marvin lived there at various times, said listing agent Verna Cornelius at Keller Williams Realty, Sunset.
The house has four bedrooms and six bathrooms in just under 4,000 square feet. Restored recently, it also has a library, media room, separate guest unit, antique French pavers and extensive tile work.
The rooms have French doors, which open to landscaped patios, and the master-bedroom suite has a fireplace, patio, spa and outside shower.
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ruth.ryon@latimes.com
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247092feca08334d4c25d06a206948b2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-17-fg-wolves17-story.html | New danger menaces Iraqis | New danger menaces Iraqis
The bloodthirsty enemy had gathered on the city’s perimeter, but this time the locals were ready.
They had formed armed committees similar to the “Sons of Iraq” forces fighting off Al Qaeda in Iraq militants in western Iraq. They were gearing up for a fight.
Their foes had been attacking them with increasing abandon on the outskirts of this river city 145 miles southeast of Baghdad. They struck along the harsh desert plain leading to Saudi Arabia. They came day or night.
Among children, supernatural powers were attributed to these adversaries. They could withstand intense cold, according to legend, and their eyes changed from yellow to orange to green.
There would be no mercy for this enemy. And no negotiations.
The enemy, after all, was packs of hungry gray wolves who had overcome their fears of humans and had begun feasting on livestock, right in front of farmers.
“The locals formed armed groups, exchanging shifts throughout the day in order to protect people, cattle, sheep, and also children and women heading to schools, from those ferocious wolves,” said Mohammed abu Reesha. “They appear during the day and don’t fear bullets and challenge even men holding rifles.”
The Arabian wolf, a subspecies of the gray wolf, is among the most impressive predators in the Middle East. It grows up to 6 1/2 feet long and stands as tall as 3 1/2 feet, weighing up to 120 pounds, said veterinarian Fahad abu Kaheela. It has powerful jaws and can sprint at speeds of 40 mph.
The wolves hunt strategically, organizing themselves into packs and communicating via howls at different tones. They’ve been prowling Iraq’s dusty wastelands for hundreds of years.
But something strange happened this year. Locals believe the wolves must have crossed some threshold of desperation or hunger, reached a tipping point that had prevented them from venturing onto human turf. They overcame their fear of people and began entering towns and villages to feast on sheep and cattle.
Animal experts say predatory beasts such as wolves overcome their fear of humans when they’re in close proximity to them. Some farmers speculated that the wolves had migrated from deserts to the villages because of three years of sparse rains and a lack of suitable prey. Others, including the local vet, said the incursions began after nomadic tribes began using high fences to protect their livestock.
“The wolves are fierce because of hunger and thirst that plagued them,” said Abu Kaheela, the vet. “That is why they began showing no fear.”
Children began likening the wolves to Saloueh, a witch in Iraqi fairy tales. Locals worried that the animals might attack women and children.
“I have passed 60 years and I have never seen such wolves!” exclaimed Ugla Mohammed, a farmer wearing a full ammunition belt and carrying a rifle in his hand. “They are vicious and stubborn grays.”
One old-timer, Fadhel abu Reesha, recalled that in the 1950s lone wolves were frequently spotted coming into villages, then escaping as they were confronted by farmers. They headed back, he said, into the barren lands near the Saudi border.
Today’s wolves, farmers said, seem more brazen.
Hussein Dakhel said a pack of a dozen wolves devoured five of his sheep, acting largely undisturbed as he fired gunshots into the air.
“We thought that wolves would run if they hear the sound of man or weapons,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of species this is.”
To fight the wolves, residents set up positions just beyond their hamlets and armed themselves with assault rifles and pistols. Determined fighters gathered at night, awaiting the wolf packs. They spread out in every direction. They waited and watched.
Mohammed abu Reesha, among the many residents belonging to the Abu Reesha clan, and his neighbors confronted a pack of 10 wolves after the animals attacked Adnan Ismael’s home, killing eight of his goats.
“We opened intense fire and killed two of them,” Mohammed abu Reesha said.
In the village of Hamidiya, wolves attacked farmer Mohammed Salim’s cows. He shot at one wolf from 100 yards away.
“I hit him, but he started coming toward me, not caring about his injury,” he said.
“I answered him, along with my uncle, with a barrage of bullets and he dropped dead two yards from us,” he said. “Since that day we are committed to guarding the house in case any of them might come back.”
A video taken by a cellphone shows the bloody remains of one wolf, its side shot out and its mouth draped open, lying lifeless on the desert floor. Its eyes, whatever the color at the time of death, were shut tight.
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daragahi@latimes.com
Special correspondent Halawa reported from Samawah and Times staff writer Daragahi from Baghdad.
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