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6029ea69ba47149292cb25218790bb66 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-05-ca-53521-story.html | Wishful Thinking in ‘West Wing’ | Wishful Thinking in ‘West Wing’
Hail to the chief.
If the one in the White House and his staff are as proficient and inspiring as their fictional counterparts were in Wednesday night’s special terrorism-themed episode of “The West Wing,” Americans are well-served in the grief-driven, war-footing aftermath of Sept. 11.
Are George W. Bush and the people around him this good? Please let them be this good.
But not this preachy.
Customary spin and photo ops aside, the public has no way of knowing for certain how well or poorly a president performs for the nation in private until biographers and tell-all authors weigh in. On NBC, Josiah Bartlet’s weekly crescendos of strength, deep thought and character fill that void neatly, he and his idealistic staff wearing the halos of heroes and walking just a bit taller than other earthlings while delivering one throat lump after another.
Take Wednesday’s hastily crafted hour, titled “Isaac and Ishmael” and set in the present period following last month’s terrorist strikes.
Series creator Aaron Sorkin’s morality play had a group of visiting high school students trapped inside the White House during a tense lockdown ordered in response to a possible security breach that turned out to be a false alarm. As Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) separately grilled a Muslim American White House worker (Ajay Naidu) wrongly suspected of terrorist links, other staff members took turns lecturing the students and themselves about the roots and nature of terrorism and how a wounded U.S. should respond to it. The president (Martin Sheen) and first lady (Stockard Channing) ultimately dropped by, too, leaving behind silver bullets of profundity.
Named after a biblical tale relating Islam and Judaism, “Isaac and Ishmael” was strongest when confronting McGarry with his own latent prejudice as he interrogated the young White House worker, whose name just happened to match an alias used by a suspected Arab terrorist. As for the rest, well ...
Credit Sorkin with using his series to react swiftly and boldly to address the present difficulty with a risky story stating, above all, how innocent Americans can be victimized by ethnic and religious profiling--in this case, those of Eastern and Middle Eastern origin--in these jittery times.
Hail to NBC, too, for agreeing to run this “storytelling aberration,” as cast member Bradley Whitford called it during a special introduction, in advance of next week’s fall opener that picks up where last season’s ending cliffhanger left off. And also for vowing to give the episode’s future profits to charities whose phone numbers were displayed in place of opening credits.
Noble aims aside, though “Isaac and Ishmael” was doomed creatively from the start, its continuity shattered by the jolting, invasive shrillness of NBC’s commercials and its promos for fall premieres. Sensitive entreaties that ended each act were crushed by loud sales pitches that immediately followed, with NBC failing to use bumpers to distance them from the story. Well, this is commercial TV.
Beyond that, the episode in most ways was a microcosm of the show’s strengths, but also its weaknesses. It was intelligent, acutely relevant and well acted, yet populated as always mostly by characters on speedspeak with one glib, witty voice, as if Sorkin were a ventriloquist.
One by one Bartlet’s staffers popped in on the students, pearls of plain-spoken erudition on their facile tongues. From Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Whitford), a lesson in religion: “Islamic extremist is to Islamic as KKK is to Christianity.” From Communications Director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff): “Bad people cannot be recognized on sight. There’s no point trying.” From his deputy, Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe): Terrorism has a “100%" failure rate (which ignored the horrific terrorist success of those crippling attacks on New York’s World Trade Center). From the president’s African American personal aide Charlie Young (Dule Hill), this addendum to Sam calling poverty abroad “an incubator” for crime: “Same as it is here.” From press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney), on U.S. reliance on spy technology: “We need humans.”
That human homily, Bartlet, tooled in three-fourths into the episode, in just 80 seconds managing to light the room and the eyes of all present with his blinding wattage of wisdom. “We don’t need martyrs right now, we need heroes,” he told the students. “A hero would die for his country, but he’d much rather live for it.”
No wonder that Americans who at times think badly of their elected leaders find hope in “The West Wing,” where the White House’s judgment may be flawed occasionally, but never its motives or its heart, this rush of good intentions and compassion providing an antidote to lingering cynicism about partisan and self-serving politics. Even when much of President Clinton’s behavior brought them pain, for example, Americans could seek sanctuary in the straighter-shooting Oval Office of “The West Wing.”
How powerful and lasting is this juxtaposition of art and reality? What will be its impact, if any, in the volatile days to come as the U.S. and its allies conduct their war against terrorism?
This is guesswork, of course, and Bartlet is a New Hampshire Democrat and Bush a Texas Republican. There is a theory, however, that so deluged are Americans by information in this technological age that making distinctions becomes ever harder.
Will the fictional president’s reputation for honor and high competence rub off on the actual occupant of the White House, with many of the show’s viewers merging the two figures, if subliminally?
Will the opposite happen, with some viewers seeing the eloquent Bartlet as the standard to be met, and Bush coming up short, just as real attorneys have sometimes disappointed observers by not living up to Perry Mason?
More likely is a third scenario: Americans will separate the two men, judging Bush on what he does or doesn’t do while seeing “The West Wing” for what it is, a lush fantasy that epitomizes a nation’s wishful thinking.
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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.
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7c7de9865bc9f21472386c555ee13380 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-05-me-53750-story.html | Paul J. Fitzgerald, 64; Lawyer in Manson Case | Paul J. Fitzgerald, 64; Lawyer in Manson Case
Paul J. Fitzgerald, a pugnacious former public defender who became the lead defense attorney in the bizarre 1970 murder trial of cult leader Charles Manson and his followers, has died. He was 64.
He was found dead by an associate Tuesday at his Beverly Hills home. He had suffered from heart problems for many years and died of an apparent heart attack, his family said.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Oct. 10, 2001 FOR THE RECORD Los Angeles Times Wednesday October 10, 2001 Home Edition Part A Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 3 inches; 101 words Type of Material: Correction Krenwinkel attorney--An obituary Friday on defense attorney Paul J. Fitzgerald mischaracterized the role of prosecutor Stephen Kay in the 1970 murder trial of cult leader Charles Manson and his followers. Kay assisted Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent T. Bugliosi, who, as lead prosecutor, faced off against Fitzgerald. Also, the story suggested that Bugliosi believed Manson family member Patricia Krenwinkel could have avoided guilty verdicts if Fitzgerald had defended her better. Bugliosi’s criticism applied only to Fitzgerald’s defense of Krenwinkel in the murders of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca; he did not believe that Krenwinkel could have gone free on charges that she helped kill actress Sharon Tate and others.
Fitzgerald was legendary in the legal defense community. As a Los Angeles County public defender in the mid-1960s, he wrote training manuals that led to enduring practices in such key areas as the questioning of prospective jurors.
He shared his knowledge of murderers, pimps and other unsavory Los Angeles characters with writer John Gregory Dunne, whose 1982 bestseller, “Dutch Shea, Jr.,” was inspired in part by Fitzgerald and his bounty of incredible cases.
“The law,” said Dunne, “was deadly serious business for him. He defended some of the worst people in the world . . . and he made no apologies for it.”
He mentored members of the criminal defense bar, including now-prominent Los Angeles lawyers Leslie Abramson and Gerald Chaleff, and was a founder of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a defense bar association.
He also was highly respected by his opponents.
“He was an outstanding trial lawyer,” said veteran prosecutor Stephen Kay, who faced off against Fitzgerald during the grueling, often surreal months of the Manson trial.
In news photos from the late 1960s, he looks up in a boxer’s pose, chin down but eyes up. His face, Dunne recalled, had a “punched-in quality.” If his nose looked broken, it probably had been. The second of seven children in an Irish American family, he was a Golden Gloves champ as a teenager in Minneapolis.
He majored in political science and minored in philosophy at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a law degree in 1964. That year he moved to California with his wife, and soon joined the public defender’s office in Los Angeles.
Decades before jury selection consulting became a highly remunerated field, he wrote a guide for public defenders on how to question prospective jurors and uncover their biases that remains a staple in training and practice. “He was in the vanguard,” said Los Angeles County Chief Public Defender Michael Judge.
Fitzgerald rose rapidly, and was assistant chief trial deputy when he became the lawyer for Patricia Krenwinkel, one of three Manson followers accused in the brutal August 1969 killings of actress Sharon Tate, Los Feliz grocery chain owner Leno La Bianca and his wife, Rosemary, and four others.
But when Fitzgerald’s superiors discovered that the office previously had represented others involved with Manson--a conflict of interest--Fitzgerald was told he would have to give up the case. He refused.
“He felt [Krenwinkel’s] role in the events was as a victim of brainwashing by Charles Manson,” recalled Abramson, then a clerk in the public defender’s office. “He felt a tremendous responsibility to keep defending her.”
The only way he could do that was by resigning. Krenwinkel was not only a nonpaying client, she was his only client. The job caused financial hardships for the lawyer, who by then was the father of two small children.
The next seven months brought sensational testimony--often with gut-turning twists--and nightmare moments for the defense.
There was the day midway through the trial when then-President Richard Nixon said Manson and his followers were guilty. Manson flashed a copy of the front-page headline before the jury, but the trial went on.
There was a circus atmosphere outside the courtroom too, on a nearby street corner where Manson groupies eerily mimicked their leader, slashing Xs on their foreheads or shaving their heads after he did.
“All this stuff was daring the jury to convict him,” Fitzgerald told NBC’s “Today” show in a 1999 interview. “And as lawyers, I mean, what could we do? We were . . . out of control. I mean, at some point, we were along for the ride.”
‘He Argued His Heart Out’
Vincent Bugliosi, the original lead prosecutor, wrote disparagingly of Fitzgerald’s courtroom performance in his 1974 book “Helter Skelter,” calling the attorney’s arguments “disappointing” and suggesting that he bungled Krenwinkel’s chance to “beat the rap.”
Others discounted Bugliosi’s criticism.
“He argued his heart out before the jury, but there was just too much evidence against her,” Kay, who assisted Bugliosi, said of Fitzgerald’s defense of Krenwinkel.
“He did the best anyone could do,” agreed Linda Deutsch, a veteran courtroom reporter for Associated Press who covered the trial. “It was an unwinnable case.”
Fitzgerald was, by most accounts, the mainstay of a somewhat motley defense crew. One lawyer had no criminal experience. Another was famous for his obstructionist tactics, reportedly objecting once to a witness giving his mother’s name because that would be hearsay.
The fourth member of the team, Ronald Hughes, had never tried a case before a jury. About five months into the trial, Hughes disappeared and turned up dead in an apparent drowning accident. All but Fitzgerald were found in contempt by the judge for various causes during the long, wild trial.
Fitzgerald, Deutsch said, “was the most experienced and most talented” lawyer on the team. “He had a rapport with all the defendants, and wound up being the lead lawyer and trying to keep a chaotic situation under control.”
All four defendants--Manson, Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten--were convicted and sentenced to death, which later was changed to life in prison when the death penalty was overturned.
The worst moment for Fitzgerald came during the penalty phase, when his client joined Atkins and Van Houten in confessing, in horrifying detail, that they and Tex Watson, another Manson clan member, had killed the victims. “It was devastating,” Deutsch recalled. Fitzgerald looked shellshocked, even though he had been warned of their plan by the women.
Fitzgerald later represented Krenwinkel and Van Houten in parole hearings. “He thought Krenwinkel’s story was very tragic--a middle-class, normal, nice girl who, through the use of drugs and basic brainwashing, turned into a killer and accessory to murder,” Abramson said.
He never had another case as spectacular. He remained in private practice, representing scores of unsympathetic characters. He was so colorful in his descriptions of some of his cases that Dunne appropriated his language word for word for parts of “Dutch Shea, Jr.,” such as a line about a cunning pimp as “our municipal wart.”
Fitzgerald was a sought-after lecturer, especially on the topic of defending the hopeless case.
But, said Chaleff, “I don’t think there was a hopeless case to Paul. He believed the state had to prove its case. There was a purity about him . . . a view that what he was doing was important and beneficial to everyone; it protected society. He was one of those lawyers who, if Paul was on the case, the person was going to get a good defense.”
He is survived by his two daughters, Teresa Nersesyan of Tujunga and Elizabeth Simonian of Lake Tahoe; five grandchildren; three brothers; and two sisters.
A viewing will be held from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Pierce Bros. Mortuary in Westwood. The funeral will be held at 9:30 a.m. next Friday at Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills.
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09f0d2af3f1a560ae30657ceeff4d399 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-07-me-54443-story.html | Monique Mickus, 62; Founded Local French-Style Schools | Monique Mickus, 62; Founded Local French-Style Schools
Monique Mickus, a former translator whose desire to educate her children in a bilingual setting led her to found a five-campus system of French American schools in Southern California, died of cancer Sept. 25 at her North Hills home. She was 62.
Mickus was the founder and director of Lycee International de Los Angeles, a 23-year-old school with 650 students on campuses in Los Feliz, Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Monrovia and Orange.
The school immerses students as young as preschool age in French language and culture. By the time its students graduate from the 12th grade and pass the exams for either a French high school diploma or the international baccalaureate, they can pursue higher education in France.
All of its students go on to college, including a few each year who choose institutions in France.
“What Monique did,” said Antoine Chatelet, the French deputy cultural attache in Los Angeles in charge of French schools, “is create the possibility for the kids to participate in culture and education at the Sorbonne, or at UCLA. It is very difficult to build this . . . ability in students.”
At the lycee, students as young as 6 learn that an escargot carries a coquille on its back. They line up two by two as French tradition dictates, and chat easily in English and French, in accordance with the “total immersion” approach used to teach its comprehensive curriculum.
Mickus was born in Paris to a family of educators. Her grandfather taught sociology at the Sorbonne and was president of an education league. Her great-grandfather was a historian of the French Revolution who was active in his country’s movement to make education free and compulsory.
She was working as a translator for the U.S. Army in Fontainebleau, France, when she met her husband-to-be, John. They were married in Las Vegas and settled in Los Angeles in the 1960s.
When they had children, Mickus enrolled them at Lycee Francais de Los Angeles, founded in West Los Angeles in 1964, but thought the atmosphere was too elitist. With the help of her lawyer husband, she found out what was required to open her own lycee.
“We started with my three children and a friend’s two children in a properly zoned little house in the middle of Van Nuys,” Mickus told The Times in 1992.
Within five years, the school had 100 students, said Elizabeth Chaponot, Mickus’ daughter, who is the secondary school principal on the Los Feliz campus.
About a third of the students are French and another third are American-born. The other students hail from 80 countries, including Bulgaria, Romania and Russia.
The school is accredited by the French Ministry of Education, as well as by the Western Assn. of Secondary Schools.
In addition to her husband and daughter Elizabeth, Mickus is survived by a son, Francis of Paris; another daughter, Catherine Beziat, also of Paris; 10 grandchildren; and her mother, Christiane Bayet of North Hills.
A memorial service will be held at 5:30 p.m. today in the auditorium on the Tarzana campus of Lycee International de Los Angeles at 5657 Lindley Ave. The family asks that any donations be made to the Monique Mickus Memorial Building Fund, 7100 Hayvenhurst Ave., Suite 107, Van Nuys, CA 91406.
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3a77f7be4bc97fb13b80565b29f99ab7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-08-fi-54655-story.html | Cooking Up a Powerhouse of Chinese Fast Food | Cooking Up a Powerhouse of Chinese Fast Food
The founders and builders of Panda Express, the largest Chinese restaurant chain in history, today face the challenge that only comes to successful entrepreneurs: What do you do after you succeed?
Andrew and Peggy Cherng built Panda Restaurant Group from a single Pasadena location to a national powerhouse with 423 outlets in 34 states, with 5,000 employees and about $300 million in annual sales. Now the husband-and-wife team wants to build Panda into a much larger company--establishing Chinese food firmly in the center of the American diet.
“I would like to see 10,000 stores,” says Andrew Cherng, Panda’s chairman, who started the company in 1973 with a Panda Inn restaurant on Foothill Boulevard in Pasadena.
And those ambitious plans haven’t changed since the terrorist attacks Sept. 11. Panda group’s business at its outlets in shopping malls and at airports has been down sharply in the last three weeks. But the firm still expects sales growth of 5% to 6% this year and is going ahead with eight scheduled store openings in November in Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia.
In all, Panda Restaurant Group will open 80 new stores this year, but the Cherngs are considering moves, including franchising or selling shares to the public, that would allow Panda to grow much larger. As a possible model, Cherng cites the Starbucks coffee chain, which is opening its 5,000th store after 30 years in business.
But before Panda can approach such a goal, the company must develop systems to ensure consistency and quality on a much larger scale. “We need to refine the systems for human resources, product consistency and customer relations,” says Peggy Cherng, Panda’s president and chief executive.
Peggy Cherng, who has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, understands the opportunity. “This is a favorable time for Chinese food,” she says. But she knows that realizing her vision of a “high-performance company with a strong culture” will take time.
But competition might force the Cherngs to move more quickly. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro chain of restaurants, which has a highly valued publicly traded stock on Nasdaq, is launching a chain of cook-to-order fast-service Chinese restaurants named Pei Wei.
“Wall Street is looking for something new in restaurant concepts. My sense is that authentic Chinese food could be the next success in casual dining,” says analyst Greg Schroeder of Fulcrum Global Partners, an investment research firm in New York.
But if Chinese food is to be the next successful concept, the Panda company is the obvious candidate to provide that concept to the American public. Panda already has opened seven Panda Panda cook-to-order fast-service restaurants, similar to Pei Wei, in Southern California.
And those casual dining establishments are secondary to the main force of Panda restaurants, the 402-outlet Panda Express chain of fast-food counters in shopping malls, supermarkets, ballparks, university and hospital cafeterias and stand-alone stores in cities coast to coast.
Panda Express is a real innovation. Where most attempts at Chinese fast food have settled for egg rolls, rice and chow mein, Panda Express offers orange-flavored chicken, tofu with black mushrooms, beef with broccoli and many other dishes conceived by Chinese chefs and prepared on site by trained cooks.
The Express idea began in Glendale in 1983, when the developers of the Galleria shopping mall asked Andrew Cherng whether he could adapt the cuisine of his Panda Inn restaurant to a fast-food setting in the mall.
He did so, adapting recipes originated by his late father, Ming-Tsai Cherng, and Panda Express was an instant success.
The elder Cherng, who died in 1981, had been a chef in Shanghai, Taipei, Taiwan and Yokohama, Japan, before coming to the United States in 1973. Andrew had come in 1966 to attend Baker University, a small Methodist college in Baldwin City, Kan., southwest of Kansas City.
Andrew took degrees in applied mathematics from Baker and from the University of Missouri. It was at Baker also that he met Peggy, who had come to the school from Hong Kong.
In 1972, Andrew Cherng, with his father and mother about to immigrate to the United States, bought a shuttered coffee shop in east Pasadena and turned it into Panda Inn.
“The hardest times are starting the business,” Andrew Cherng says. He didn’t want to lose any customers, he recalls. When customers would turn away from Panda Inn because the tables were full, he would go after them. “We had a back door to the restaurant and I would go into the parking lot and say, ‘Thank you for coming. I’m sorry we’re crowded, but if you’ll wait, I’ll buy you a drink,’ ” Andrew says. “And they might return to the restaurant, saying, ‘Wow, all this for our business?’ ”
Panda Inn flourished and Cherng opened a second site in Glendale that attracted the principals of Donahue Schriber Real Estate, the developers of Glendale Galleria who suggested the Express outlet for an expansion of their mall.
With the launch of Panda Express, Peggy Cherng, who had been working as a software developer for McDonnell Douglas and Comtal-3M, as well as raising three daughters, came in to help manage the family firm.
The Express chain grew rapidly. “In 1985, we went from five stores to nine. That was a lot harder than opening 80 stores this year,” Andrew Cherng says.
Today, Panda Express includes eight outlets in Japan and five in Puerto Rico. Panda Restaurant Group also owns five Panda Inn traditional restaurants and nine Hibachi-San Japanese fast-food outlets.
Remarkably, aside from the Panda Express outlets in Japan, which are franchised, and 62 outlets in the Midwest that are owned in a joint venture with financial backers, all of the other restaurants are owned by the Cherngs. “Some 20% of the shares are set aside for employee ownership,” Peggy Cherng says.
That makes Panda one of the largest family-owned restaurant chains in the world.
Expansion is still financed by internal cash flow. It takes $300,000 to open a Panda Express, which means that the company will invest about $24 million to open new stores this year.
Peggy Cherng indicates that the company earns more than 10% pretax on sales, which works out to more than $30 million of the $300 million-plus in revenue this year. Panda is already a large company.
But both Cherngs have visions of making it bigger. And that puts Panda at a crossroads, one that has faced many family-owned firms in Southern California’s entrepreneurial landscape--including restaurant chains from McDonald’s to Taco Bell that also were born in this region.
To grow much larger, the Panda chain will have to sell franchises to independent operators--as McDonald’s and most restaurant chains do--or sell shares to the public--as McDonald’s and many chains have done.
“Of the two choices, public ownership would allow the Cherngs to maintain more control over quality than franchising would,” observes management consultant Cameron McConnell, whose firm is based in Irvine.
Of course, “they could sell Panda to a big company like PepsiCo and be very comfortable for the rest of their lives,” says a financial expert.
But the Cherngs, who are in their early 50s, don’t want to sell Panda. They have visions of a bigger company and a broader purpose. “Chinese food is not on Americans’ weekly to-do list yet, but it could be,” says Andrew Cherng. “We’d like to build a premier company with a good, distinct culture,” says Peggy Cherng.
As Panda has grown, so have the Cherngs’ visions. It goes with the territory in Southern California.
*
James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.
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fedb2059864a83d5cdc4b2181b5ee1b7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-13-mn-56835-story.html | Afghans in Kabul Flee Taliban, Not U.S. Raids | Afghans in Kabul Flee Taliban, Not U.S. Raids
After the worst night of U.S. airstrikes around the Afghan capital, Akmad Samim and his family of nine finally fled Kabul at dawn Friday, but not because they were afraid of the bombs.
They packed up and left because soldiers with the extremist Islamic Taliban regime, despite all the bombs and missiles, were still plying the streets of Kabul to round up young men as conscripts.
In fact, some people in the capital have so much faith in the accuracy of U.S. missiles and bombs, they wander around in the open watching the fireworks as the ordnance falls.
Although refugees from some other cities bring rumors of destroyed houses and civilian casualties, the panic in Kabul has subsided, according to the trickle of Afghans traveling north to opposition-held territory.
Refugees from Kabul report that no bombs or missiles struck the center.
Student Gulam Gaus, 18, joined a crowd of people who stayed outside and watched, enthralled, when U.S. planes roared over at 2 p.m. Thursday and twice struck the Kabul airport.
The Khainkalla district in north Kabul, a hilltop area where many ethnic Tajiks live, offered a spectacular seat for the action.
“People walk around the streets, and they’re not panicking anymore,” said Gaus, an ethnic Tajik. “There was a very good view when they bombed the airport. Everybody was watching.
“We sat near a shop, and when the planes appeared, our eyes were glued to it. We were not afraid because everyone knew the American planes would only hit military targets. In any case, American bombs and missiles are better than the Taliban yoke.”
An Ethnic Tajik Escapes the Taliban’s Clutches
Most of the nation’s minority ethnic Tajiks despise the Taliban, which draws its support from ethnic Pushtuns, who make up 38% of the population. The civil war has a strong ethnic element: It pits the predominantly Pushtun Taliban troops against the Uzbek and Tajik minorities who form the opposition.
Samim, the young man who fled with his family, is an ethnic Tajik. He said he had a lucky escape Thursday night, walking home from the bazaar with his friend Farid Alsoo.
They stumbled across a Taliban patrol roughly shoving young men into a minivan. About five or 10 young men were already captive. The Taliban men seized Alsoo and pushed him into the van.
“They tried to get me, but I ran,” Samim said. “They chased me for a few meters, but I got away,” he said, speaking in English. As the family breadwinner, he couldn’t afford to be arrested or press-ganged to fight.
“When I came home, I said to my father: ‘The situation is bad. We should leave,’ ” he said.
Like Samim, student Gaus left the city fearing not bombs, but Taliban roundups and arrests.
“If they see a group of five or six people sitting together and talking,” he said, “they’ll round them up and take them away.”
Gaus said that residents watched the U.S. strikes with a quiet sense of jubilation but that no one expressed their feelings openly.
“We felt glad, but we didn’t show it because there might have been a Taliban spy in the crowd,” he said.
Samim said many Taliban members had taken shelter in bases in the center of the city, where no bombs fell. But a military base in the east of the city, known as Sherpur--the Lion’s Den--was hit.
“I saw 12 to 15 dead bodies of Talibs there,” Samim said. He and others fleeing north from the city, mainly Tajiks, said people were pleased that Taliban forces were being killed.
Although there is no way of verifying casualties among the Taliban, many people in Kabul believe that considerable numbers have died.
But the figure they generally cite, 150 to 200, seems to be based on rumor, not clear evidence.
Samim said he and friends stood and watched the airport burning after Thursday’s airstrikes.
The Kabul refugees arrived in northern Afghanistan as the military situation here was changing rapidly, with signs of disarray on the Taliban side and numerous defections to the opposition.
But the Afghan Islamic Press, a pro-Taliban news agency in Pakistan, claimed Friday that the Taliban had won back one district in Badghis province, western Afghanistan, and had attacked opposition positions 21 miles west of Bamian.
Opposition Forces Eager to Storm the Capital
Generals in the Northern Alliance opposition forces fighting the Taliban are eager to surge into Kabul once the U.S. bombing ends. But their plans are at odds with those of President Bush, who suggested Thursday that the United Nations should take over the role of nation-building after the U.S. military campaign.
The Northern Alliance is already making plans for a police force in the capital.
Optimistic about a rapid victory in Kabul, alliance officials met Thursday to set up a commission that would oversee the campaign to take the capital and govern the city once it’s occupied.
But even among Tajiks, who generally support the Northern Alliance, there isn’t universal support for the opposition storming the capital.
Samim said there was a feeling that an American ground force would materialize in Kabul, possibly parachuting into the city, an idea that doesn’t mesh with the picture U.S. officials have painted.
“It would be better if the Americans came in to establish security and peace,” Samim said. “If the Northern Alliance comes, there’ll be a lot of fighting with the Taliban.”
But Gaus, the student, said he doesn’t believe that there will be much of a fight for the city because the Taliban’s bases and weapons have been destroyed.
He said people support a Northern Alliance push into the city, and he predicted a popular uprising in support of the opposition.
“Soldiers with empty hands will not be able to resist,” he said. “They’ll surrender and run away.”
With the Northern Alliance champing at the bit, Mohammad Zaher Shah, the exiled former king based in Rome, appealed for restraint. He insisted that there should be no attempt to storm Kabul.
But Northern Alliance generals are impatient with the delicate political maneuvering.
Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah told Reuters on Friday that the opposition wants a political settlement as soon as possible, but that wouldn’t stop it from launching a military advance.
One Northern Alliance commander, Gen. Abdul Basir, bluntly rejected the former king’s appeal.
“We don’t accept this. We have a program to enter Kabul. We’re organized, we have an army, a government, and we’re right. We don’t agree with the king’s proposal to introduce U.N. troops to Kabul. That’s just four or five people sitting around thinking in Rome.”
Basir said it would be difficult for U.N. forces to occupy the city before Northern Alliance troops moved in and defeated the Taliban.
“Kabul is not yet liberated. It’s still occupied by the Taliban, and it’s us who face them. How can the U.N. go in? First we need to liberate Kabul, then if the U.N. asks us, we can withdraw,” he said.
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Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report. Dixon and Loiko reported from Afghanistan.
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e254923c9cef51e575f8f7c1498ceb77 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-21-cl-59659-story.html | After Brush With Death, Hutton’s ‘Life Wish’ Pulls Her Through | After Brush With Death, Hutton’s ‘Life Wish’ Pulls Her Through
The bones in Lauren Hutton’s right forearm and lower leg were shattered on impact. That was after she lost control of her motorcycle in a turn and careened off the road at 110 mph, but before she punctured a lung and skidded 170 feet on her face and chest in her first motorcycle accident, one year ago today.
Hutton doesn’t remember any of this: Traumatic amnesia has wiped out her memory from two minutes before her crash up until 2 1/2 weeks afterward, when she awoke from a coma. Today, the 57-year-old model and actress has multiple scars, a titanium rod in her leg and 16 screws in her arm, but that hasn’t stopped her from getting on with her life and back in the action--again on two wheels.
Last month she rode for the first time since her accident in a Tropicana orange juice commercial, navigating a curvy pass in a Malibu canyon. “I was scared to death,” says the gap-toothed model who has graced Vogue’s cover 25 times. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
But that’s part of what has always appealed to her about riding. “Death is always riding right next to you,” she says. “A lot of people think it’s a death wish, but it’s a life wish really. ... The biggest thing people don’t understand is when everything [in daily life] is so safe, you don’t know that you can die. In a way, you don’t know what life is.”
Last month Hutton also participated in a three-day ride along the California coast and across Death Valley to celebrate the opening exhibit of the new Guggenheim museum in Las Vegas--"The Art of the Motorcycle.” This time she was a passenger, riding on the back of Dennis Hopper’s BMW.
It was during last year’s ride with the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club that she crashed.
“They didn’t want me to ride,” Hutton says of her friends and fellow club riders Hopper, Jeremy Irons, Laurence Fishburne and Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Krens. All of them witnessed firsthand the accident that nearly took Hutton’s life.
Two of them may also have saved it. On the day of the accident, during a break after 31/2 hours on the road, Irons noticed Hutton’s eyes were tearing from the wind and insisted she switch to a helmet with a visor.
She also obliged Hopper’s offer of a leather jacket. Hutton says she normally wears full leathers but was wearing only a cloth jacket with her leather pants, boots and gloves that day.
Shortly before the accident, she had been riding at the back of a pack of more than 100 motorcycles and was eager to catch up with Hopper, Irons and Fishburne at the front. Hoping for a quick start after a short break for water, she jumped on her bike to join them. But moments later, she hit gravel in a turn, went off the road and flew 20 feet in the air before skidding across the rocky desert floor in the Valley of Fire, about 25 miles outside of Las Vegas.
By the time she stopped, her foot was next to her knee--and backward, Hutton says, and her arm was doing “some other weird thing.” The red BMW F650 she was riding had broken into pieces.
“If I hadn’t had a visor, there were all these rocks coming three or four inches out of the ground, so during that skid, it would have gone in and taken out my eyes, my nose, my teeth ... " says Hutton, who, when talking about the accident misspeaks and says “when I died.”
Indeed, most of the people on the scene that day thought Hutton was dead when a medical helicopter picked her up and flew her to a trauma hospital in Las Vegas.
Hutton was there for a month. After that she was in a wheelchair, eventually walking with a cane. Today, she gets around without those aids, but on days she’s spent too much time on her legs, “the ankle feels like about 20 really good bees have hit it” and her knee like a raw wound.
Hutton has saved the helmet Irons gave her and plans to make a sculpture out of it, along with the steel rod that was recently extracted from her leg.
Until her accident made the news, almost no one knew Hutton rode motorcycles, but she has been riding since the early ‘60s. She was working as a cocktail waitress in New Orleans when she met Steve McQueen, who taught her how to ride.
Later, she honed her skills on the set of “Little Fauss and Big Halsy,” a 1970 film about two motorcycle racers that starred Robert Redford. Hutton says that there were about 30 stuntmen working on the film and that she often rode dirt bikes with them in the Arizona desert. In 1977, she starred opposite Evel Knievel in “Viva Knievel!” She took the job “to learn something about motorcycle riding from Evel,” Hutton says.
These days, she splits her time between New Mexico (where she has two Yamaha dirt bikes to “zoom around my little dirt roads”) and New York (where she keeps a BMW F650 “to get out of town”).
In the coming year, she plans to launch a new line of cosmetics (Lauren Hutton’s Good Stuff) and take the trips she was forced to postpone because of her accident--ice diving in the Antarctic, dog sledding in Alaska, camel riding in Africa and on-and off-road motorcycling in Germany.
“To me, all these things are the same because you’re out in nature and you’re seeing everything,” Hutton says. “There’s not a lot of steel between you and the land and the sky. ... You realize how alive you are and what a miracle life is--what a gift it is, just the rich joy and juice of it.”
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384a6afa53f61555dd16015a7d2f1401 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-23-me-60626-story.html | Janet Shaw, 82; Actress Had Role in ‘Jezebel’ | Janet Shaw, 82; Actress Had Role in ‘Jezebel’
Janet Shaw, a blond actress who appeared in about 60 films during the 1930s and 1940s, including a special role in “Jezebel,” has died in her native Nebraska town. She was 82.
Shaw, formally Ellen Martha Clancy Stuart, who began her acting career under the name Ellen Clancy, died Oct. 15 in Beatrice, Neb., of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
She moved to Los Angeles with her parents when she was a teenager and spent most of her life here, returning to Beatrice in 1994. The Beverly Hills High School graduate studied acting in little theater groups and in 1934 began earning mostly uncredited film roles.
But in 1937, when a Hollywood executive saw her perform as a Southern belle in a dramatic scene, he brought her to the attention of Jack L. Warner. Grooming her for bigger parts, Warner changed her name to Janet Shaw and signed her to a seven-year contract.
He also expanded a role for her as Molly Allen in “Jezebel,” the 1938 film that earned Bette Davis a second Academy Award.
Shaw worked her way through popular trends of the period, playing romantically inclined chorines, secretaries, factory workers and ingenues in films about World War II, westerns and glamorous adventures.
In addition to Davis, she appeared with such performers as Clark Gable, Tex Ritter and Robert Taylor.
Among her screen credits were “It’s Love I’m After,” “Prairie Thunder,” “Sergeant Murphy,” “When Strangers Marry” and “I’ll Tell the World.”
Shaw’s last role was in the 1950 film “Prehistoric Women,” about lonely cavewomen in search of mates.
In 1944, Shaw married an actor and at the time an Army Air Force lieutenant, Williard Ilefeldt, whom she met at the Long Beach Municipal Airport while working on a film about women pilots who ferried planes during World War II. The brief marriage produced no children.
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08f2791433a54c2a36a15ce58732079e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-26-fi-61688-story.html | ‘Max Bickford’ Creators to Leave CBS Show | ‘Max Bickford’ Creators to Leave CBS Show
Nicole Yorkin and Dawn Prestwich, co-creators and co-executive producers of Viacom Inc.'s new CBS drama, “The Education of Max Bickford,” are going to leave the show because of creative differences, according to executives close to the production.
The series, which stars Richard Dreyfuss, was given a prime spot on the network’s schedule, following top-rated newsmagazine “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, but ratings have fallen somewhat since its debut. Yorkin and Prestwich declined to comment.
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3926215cf7b8f6f27c351c1661ae42a5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-28-ca-62477-story.html | A Very Scary Business | A Very Scary Business
John Lasseter is a passionate guy.
He gets worked up about telling stories and making movies and harnessing computers to make art. He’s wild about animation and laughter and good jokes and not-so-good jokes and family entertainment and collaboration.
And on this day, the man described as the Walt Disney for the 21st century is really, really excited about Froot Loops. With marshmallow eyeballs. And a monster on the box. For a limited time only.
“Have you seen the Froot Loops? I’m a geek about these things.” Lasseter flashes a big thumbs-up. Toys from his first three movies line the shelves of his office at Pixar Animation Studios, crowd the desk, fill the floor. Many more are on the way. And this time, there will be Froot Loops. “The colors are like our characters, so it’s like green, purple and blue. With marshmallow eyeballs in there. It’s great. I love the toys. I love all that stuff.”
If it’s merchandising, it must be a movie. And if it’s a movie by the so far wildly successful Pixar, then there is serious money behind it, and there are serious expectations ahead. No one at Pixar is talking about just how much it cost to make and market “Monsters, Inc.,” which opens Friday at a theater near you--if you happen to be anywhere in the United States of America.
But lots of people are talking about the expectations, wondering whether “Monsters, Inc.” could possibly be as gripping as the “Toy Story” franchise, as beautiful as “A Bug’s Life.” And they’re talking about the innovations; every Pixar movie rolls out complements of at least one technological breakthrough, and this one is no exception.
They’re also talking about the competition. In the short term, it comes from a boy on a broomstick, when “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” opens Nov. 16. And, in the longer term, it comes from a big, green ogre and PDI/DreamWorks, the studio that brought him to life in the year’s biggest-grossing movie of any kind, “Shrek.” “Monsters” comes out at a pivotal time for the 15-year-old Pixar, whose three full-length, computer-animated feature films are among the 10 top-grossing animated pictures ever made. While Lasseter--described as Pixar’s executive vice president of creative--had his hand in nearly every aspect of the new movie, this is the first Pixar effort that he did not direct.
To Lasseter, that’s evidence of the studio’s maturity. Two movies into a five-picture deal with Disney, the Bay Area company has swelled to 650 employees, at a time when other technology and entertainment companies are hurting. It is about to outgrow its year-old headquarters, and has a seasoned team of directors and other artists.
To investors and moviegoers alike, it’s a hopeful sign that Pixar might finally step up production and aim for its ultimate goal of releasing more than one film every 18 months. But until “Monsters, Inc.” is officially unveiled and other Pixar movies follow, it remains to be seen whether the studio has a deep enough talent pool to meet the high standard set by Lasseter.
Which means that the pressure is on for Pixar and its partner, Disney. Dick Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, says there are always high expectations placed on the companies’ major movies. But he acknowledges that it is different today. This is a big year for animation, with a crowded field and a first-ever Oscar for feature-length animated films at stake. “Falling on the heels of ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Toy Story 2' and ‘A Bug’s Life,’ there’s great anticipation for the next Disney/Pixar movie,” Cook says. “It goes with the territory. As long as we continue to deliver, those expectations are well-founded.”
For now, however, there is “Monsters, Inc.,” five painstaking years in the making--more, if you count director Pete Docter’s childhood, all those nights spent wondering whether it was a tentacle sticking out of his darkened closet or just another shirt sleeve waving in the breeze.
Docter, who was the second animator Lasseter hired at Pixar, joined the studio in 1990 and served as supervising animator on the original “Toy Story.” He also helped write that movie. After “Toy Story” finished production, he was dispatched to develop what became “Monsters, Inc.” It is his directorial debut.
In the world according to Pixar, there are a few home truths. Toys come to life when their owners leave the room. Inside every anthill and beneath every clover leaf exists an entire, teeming world, fraught with drama. And finally, as of Friday, comes the latest dictum: There are monsters in the closet, just waiting to scare children.
The point of “Monsters, Inc.,” Docter says, is to explain why.
“It’s their job,” he says, “their business. They clock in. They clock out. They eat doughnuts. They’re just workaday Joes scaring kids, and they do it for the ‘Scream.’ The monster world is powered by kids’ screams.”
The residents of Monstropolis, like their counterparts in California, are suffering through an energy crisis. This parallel universe was probably at its peak around the 1950s, Docter posits, when the baby boom brought the United States more children than the country knew what to do with. Life in Monstropolis was good.
Because the more children there were, and the easier they were to scare, the more Scream that could be harvested to power the monster world. The company Monsters, Inc., an even creepier version of Pacific Gas & Electric, had patented a means of collecting Scream, the monsters’ equivalent of fossil fuel. The company had been in the family of many-eyed, crab-legged Henry J. Waternoose, the voice of James Coburn, for generations.
But then came Nixon and Watergate and Vietnam and all that television and all those video games and all that carnage, both real and imagined. As Waternoose moans, scuttling through the opening scenes and fretting about meeting quotas, “Kids these days. They just don’t get scared like they used to.”
James P. Sullivan, the voice of John Goodman, is the star employee at Monsters, Inc. Big, bear-like and covered with blue-green fur and purple spots, Sulley has a roar that can yank a scream out of even the most jaded child. Mike Wazowski, a lime-green walking eyeball with the voice of Billy Crystal, is Sulley’s oldest friend and “scare assistant.”
Like the “Toy Story” movies before it, “Monsters, Inc.,” is basically a buddy movie, an hour and a half of Mike and Sulley’s exploits, as they vie with the slithery villain Randall (the voice of Steve Buscemi), grapple with the energy crisis and work valiantly to solve the film’s central problem:
Children are toxic. Monsters are terrified of them. A very small and very loud one has found her way into Monstropolis through a workplace mix-up on Waternoose’s troubled factory floor. Our heroes have to get her home. Along the way, she wins them over with her big, bright eyes and pre-verbal gibberish. She calls Sulley “Kitty.” He calls her “Boo.” She grows to love him, he becomes protective of her.
The morals of this story? One, says executive producer and co-screenwriter Andrew Stanton, is “the idea of facing your fears and this monster realizing he’s the very fear itself that the kid’s afraid of.” Another is a natural, coming from a studio where nearly all employees are in prime childbearing years and every movie credits the babies born to staffers during production. (“Toy Story”: 23 babies. “Monsters, Inc.”: 49.) “Monsters, Inc.,” says Stanton, “also just delves into becoming a parent and what it’s like to learn the responsibility of it. We all are parents and see the three-layered effect the story line had.”
When Pixar came out with “Toy Story” in 1995, it was the first computer-animated feature film produced. In an 81-minute romp, the studio made the world safe for mass-market computer graphics, nudging traditional two-dimensional animation aside for a 3-D movie that was sweet, smart and visually stunning. Each subsequent movie premiered with its own digital development.
In fact, earlier this year, Pixar President Ed Catmull and two Pixar senior scientists won an Oscar for “significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar’s RenderMan,” a proprietary software for creating computer graphic special effects.
It is the marriage of technological innovation with artistic effort that sets Pixar above and beyond most of its competition, says Eugene Fiume, chairman of the computer science department at the University of Toronto.
“They develop software for their own internal computer graphics and animation needs,” Fiume says. “Think of it as tool-smithing....The thing that makes them stand out is their ability with each feature [film] to come up with something new.”
Steve Jobs, who bought what is now Pixar 15 years ago from Lucasfilm, describes “Toy Story” itself as a technological breakthrough--"the first computer-animated film in the history of the world,” he says modestly.
“In ‘A Bug’s Life,’ we went to a new method of lighting and texturing on our models, which gave the entire film a far more textured and luminous quality. No one has yet to catch up with this,” Jobs says, modest again.
“Monsters,” he continues, is even more refined in the visual impact of its computer-generated images. The biggest advance is software that gives artists the ability to animate fur, which is quite helpful when your main character is covered in it, the proud owner of 2.3 million flowing hairs.
Sulley, who is at the heart of nearly every scene in “Monsters, Inc.,” was actually animated naked. The specially designed software allowed computers to add the fur later and make it move, an otherwise hugely time-consuming task.
“If an animator had to touch all of that fur to make all of the hairs move, they’d never get to the rest of the movie,” explains Jobs, who is chief executive of both Pixar and Apple Computer.
Fur is actually a good yardstick for just how much Pixar’s technological abilities have grown between the release of the original “Toy Story” and this week’s release of “Monsters, Inc.”
In the earlier movie, Scud, the evil dog owned by Sid, the evil child, is basically a smooth-sided beast with the mere suggestion of hair. Sullivan’s pelt flows as he runs, blows in the wind, moves gently back and forth as he breathes on it in his sleep. It gets compressed when he rubs up against walls, and is softly backlit on occasion. It collects snow.
Technical directors Steve May and Michael Fong took a bald, blue Sullivan and covered the surface of his body with 25,000 “key hairs,” which were then programmed with the ball and spring motion. Then May and Fong wrote software to fill in the rest of the hairs and communicate the motion of the key strands to the whole pelt.
“Every single hair needs to be different,” Fong says. “The length, the scraggle, the color needs to vary. These hairs clump together. You’re approximating things like oils to make the hair more interesting.”
Why does fur and the ability to make it appear lifelike matter to anyone other than some computer geek? Because it is the essence of Sullivan’s character, part of what makes him the most effective scarer in all of Monstropolis.
“We as human beings were chased by big, hairy animals millions of years ago,” Jobs posits. “When you see something with fur move, you can determine how heavy the character is and, roughly, the internal body shape. It’s hard-wired in our brains because we were chased.”
Anthropology aside, fur and liquids are among the last frontiers of computer graphics, those attributes of the physical world that have been the most difficult and time-consuming to animate. Creating software that can realistically make fur while allowing animators to focus their energies on more salient tasks, therefore, is more than just a great computer trick.
So, fur is key to the story. And at Pixar, as they will tell you over and over again, the story is king. The fur team will tell you the story is king. The lighting specialist will tell you the story is king. Jobs, Lasseter, Docter--shoot, even the guy who mans the wood-burning pizza oven at the Pixar cafe--would tell you the same thing if you bothered to ask him.
Ed Catmull, however, probably says it best.
“There are films that succeed for other reasons,” explains the soft-spoken Pixar president. “Some are like roller-coaster rides without a story. Some are beautiful to look at. The ones that last are the ones with a good story. Most of us grew up loving the old Disney stories, ‘Pinocchio,’ ‘Dumbo.’ Those are the stories that still work. That’s the kind of legacy we want to create.”
Catmull acknowledges that it’s tough to find a moviemaker who would ever even whisper otherwise. Even the most hard-bitten action-movie director would never be caught dead saying, “It’s really all about blowing up cars.” But pay attention to where directors spend their time and money, he suggests.
“Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” for example, flopped, and Tokyo-based Square Co., the video-game company behind it announced last month it is quitting the movie business. This computer-animated feature boasted a main character so realistic (except, of course, for her unrealistic measurements) that it sparked discussion about whether actors will ever be needed again.
“No question,” Catmull says, “Final Fantasy” “was about showing off the technology.”
Pixar, on the other hand, went out of production for a very expensive five months on 1999’s “Toy Story 2" because of a story crisis surrounding the character of Sheriff Woody. The “Monsters” plot took a similar, lengthy wrong turn about 18 months ago.
“To date, we haven’t bought fairy tales or [J.K. Rowlings’ novels about] Harry Potter,” Jobs says. “We came up with original story ideas inside of Pixar and made them into movies.... Every film has had a story crisis. It’s a necessary part of the process. This is really hard.”
Or as the more jovial Lasseter--he of the trademark aloha shirts and mild Froot Loop fetish--says: “Every single movie we have ever done at some point in time really was horrible. Really stank. And we knew it.”
“Monsters,” which apparently fit that description at least once in its five-year gestation, could have ended up a far different movie. The writers initially cast about trying to figure out the movie’s foundation: why monsters scare people in the first place.
“The world itself, we didn’t know what it was,” Stanton says. “For a while, it was thought of that it was like a television show and it was ratings, and people liked to watch kids get scared by the monster. [We didn’t know] whether it was like a game show. Finally, someone said, ‘What if we make it their job to scare children?”’
That was about when Stanton joined the process. He believes that a movie’s fantasy world is built of a lot of rules, all of which must be explicit to the audience. People need to know the parameters of a made-up universe or they won’t believe it.
“So I said, ‘Well, why do they have to scare?”’ Stanton recounted. “I came up with the idea of scaring them for Scream, which would be the fossil fuel of their world.”
Leading man James P. Sullivan also went through dramatic changes. At first, he was envisioned as sort of workplace damaged goods, a monster with post-traumatic stress disorder, a candidate for a workers’ compensation claim.
After a while, co-screenwriter Dan Gerson said, the writing team figured that “was a little bit of a dark place to start. We ended up with a character on top of the world who has something come into his life that causes him to question the very thing he does.”
Such a synopsis, of course, obscures the key fact about “Monsters, Inc.”: That this is 95 minutes of family entertainment with a wittily imagined fantasy world, endearing moments that cause even Jobs to tear up, he says; a couple of mild body function jokes; and an action-packed last half-hour or so.
Anyone who has paid attention to California’s ills will appreciate headlines in monster newspapers like: “Scream shortage looms. Blackouts expected.”
“There’s always something in the background and little gags that you don’t see the first time,” Docter says. “That helps make it (a) more entertaining and (b) just make it a much richer world, a more believable place.”
Like all of Pixar’s movies, the announced goal is to reach everyone in the family in a way that appeals to all and offends none. The key to a movie like that is heart, says Lasseter, going on to quote his hero: “Walt Disney once said that for every laugh, there should be a tear.
“If you could really touch someone--regardless of whether they’re a 14-year-old boy or a mother or a father or a grandparent or a child--if you touch them, and if the characters in the story have heart, I think it stays with people longer.”
“Monsters,” he says, is just such a movie. The jury, of course, is still out for another week or two, until the reviews and box office receipts roll in.
The biggest question mark in this sweet new movie is whether that 14-year-old boy will be entertained enough. “Monsters” is less savvy than “Toy Story 2,” less hip and less scatological than the animated summer hit “Shrek,” the computer graphics ogre tale by PDI/DreamWorks.
Animation historian Jerry Beck has seen “Monsters, Inc.,” and says he loved it. But he did have one caveat.
“To compare it against the other Pixar films, I’d still say ‘Toy Story 2' had the edge with humor, heart and even accessibility to adults,” Beck said. “This film had all those elements too. This one skewed a notch toward the kids more than the adults. But just a notch.”
In the post-Sept. 11 world, however, maybe sweetness isn’t such a bad thing. Action movies have been pulled before release, with studios wary about offending audiences. The proudly G-rated movie probably has a more secure spot now that the world is a scarier place.
That’s a point not lost on Catmull. The day the world changed for the worse, Pixar, like many employers, gave workers the option of going home. One day later, Catmull called his employees together and gave them a very necessary pep talk.
This is what he said: “For some of you, it may be hard to work, because what we do may seem inconsequential. But our job is to bring joy to people and bring out the good. And that’s important.”
Two weeks after “Monsters” comes the much-awaited “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” which is also likely to benefit from post-disaster escapism desires. In December, “The Fellowship of the Ring” opens. Both will likely skew to an older audience than the Pixar production.
Tom Schumacher, president of Walt Disney feature animation, impatiently waves away any notion of Pixar’s competition, past or present. Even though “Shrek” comes out on DVD and home video the day “Monsters, Inc.” opens, he is dismissive.
“A movie that was out six months ago has very little relevance to this movie,” Schumacher says.
Lasseter, however, acknowledges that this has been a banner year for animation in general. There has been a large and wildly varied crop of movies, ranging from the traditional two-dimensional works to those created entirely with computer graphics and others that combine live action with computer-generated characters.
Ken Perlin, director of the Media Research Laboratory at New York University and a 1997 Oscar winner for technical achievement, agrees with Lasseter’s assessment of 2001. To him, “Shrek” was “the first movie that wasn’t about, ‘Look, it’s computer graphics.”’
When watching the “Toy Story” movies, “A Bug’s Life” (1998) or “Antz” (1998) by PDI/DreamWorks, Perlin noted, it was “really impossible to forget you were looking at computer graphics. I’m curious to find where ‘Monsters’ is on that particular continuum.”
Soon, some lucky 2001 movie will receive the first Oscar ever given for a full-length animated feature. “Shrek” and “Monsters, Inc.” will likely be serious contenders.
“It was important for me, important for us, to do the first computer-animated feature film, because I knew we could make a good movie,” Lasseter says. But “I’ve been dying to see this medium get into the hands of other artists, other filmmakers with good budgets, so they can do decent films and [I can] see what they do.”
Even if, on their face, some of these movies might have more appeal to the popcorn-munching, scooter-riding, industry-steering teenager? Sure, says Lasseter, unworried.
“You know what’s nice about a 14-year-old boy nowadays?” he asks. “They grew up on ‘Toy Story.”’ *
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Animation Kings
Nine of the 10 top-grossing animated movies of all time have some connection to Disney. The only holdout: “Shrek.”
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Title Year Gross Studio “The Lion King” 1994 $768 million Disney “Aladdin” 1992 $502 million Disney “Toy Story 2" 1999 $486 million Pixar “Tarzan” 1999 $435 million Disney “Shrek” 2001 $434 million PDI/DreamWorks “Toy Story” 1995 $358.1 million Pixar “A Bug’s Life” 1998 $357.9 million Pixar “Beauty and the Beast” 1991 $352 million Disney “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” 1988 $349 million Touchstone/Amblin “Dinosaur” 2000 $348 million Disney “Pocahontas” 1995 $347 million Disney
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Source: Internet Movie Database
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54abdb750b2d370a051b87df69cee537 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-28-op-62548-story.html | Today’s Germ War, Yesterday’s Weapons | Today’s Germ War, Yesterday’s Weapons
“It’s not your mother’s smallpox,” says Dr. Robert Kadlec, physician and National Defense University professor. “It’s an F-17 Stealth fighter--it’s designed to be undetectable and to kill. We are flubbing our efforts at biodefense. We don’t think of this as a weapon--we look naively at this as a disease.”
Kadlec is talking about a form of smallpox that doesn’t exist yet--so far as we know. But recent research in Australia on genetically engineered mousepox virus shows that such a Stealth-fighter agent may be simpler to create than Western experts used to think. Genetically modified smallpox adds additional terror to a weapon that’s already deadly--a weapon we now understand could actually be used against us.
As we have learned in recent weeks, terrorists have already used biological weapons on our soil: highly refined anthrax delivered in a simple but lethal way. Smallpox would be no harder to distribute: Like anthrax spores, smallpox is durable in the external environment and could easily be dried, turned into powder and enclosed in a letter. But as a weapon it’s far more frightening: Smallpox, unlike anthrax, is wildly contagious as well as lethal. The bioterrorist threat has made the U.S. government ratchet up plans to produce 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine by next year to meet the threat of a smallpox biological weapon.
But in stockpiling vaccines we are planning a campaign based on a very old war. Many in the U.S. biodefense community do not want to combat a possible new threat--vaccine-resistant smallpox--with old weapons: in this case, a smallpox vaccine that might well not work against the smallpox strain released. But government research into the best way to combat an altered smallpox is controversial.
The threat of engineered poxvirus is real. Interviews with former Soviet scientists suggest that Soviet bioweapons labs were actually close to creating it more than 10 years ago. But at this point, scientists and biodefense experts worried about resistant smallpox face a paralyzing dilemma over how to create and test such an agent. Even discussion hangs suspended.
Unlike Soviet bioweaponeers, who were trying to build more lethal agents, the Australian scientists stumbled on their results. Working on a high-tech method of mouse fertility control, they inserted a gene that produced a mammalian hormone, interleukin-4 (IL-4), into mousepox, a disease of mice that’s related to smallpox. The engineered mousepox killed most of the mice injected with it, including those mice that, through vaccination or heredity, were supposed to be immune.
“Monster mousepox,” as pox virologist Mark L. Buller of Saint Louis University calls it, kills not by changing the virus itself, but rather by subverting the mouse’s immune system. This experiment raises the specter of diabolical new biological weapons. Humanity evolved alongside certain diseases, smallpox among them, in an arms race between germs and our species. Over millennia, human populations developed resistance to particular diseases. But what if those evolved defenses--and vaccine-induced immunity, as well--could be shut down by a gene incorporated into the pathogen itself?
Sergei Popov is a Russian scientist who worked, until he defected in 1992, at Vector Laboratories, a Soviet facility in Siberia that conducted clandestine research into smallpox. He says that Vector and other Soviet labs worked with such immunosuppressive agents, synthesizing both immune peptides and the genes that produced them. They studied the effects of these peptides on animal and perhaps on human immunity; they put the synthesized genes into living viruses. They were on their way to “monster mousepox” and beyond--and this work began over 20 years ago.
Many American scientists once doubted that genetically engineered diseases could become functional biological agents. But since “monster mousepox,” even the skeptics are beginning to think again. “We believed that, given the multicomponent nature of the immune responses to viruses, it would be very difficult to engineer them to evade vaccine-induced immunity without compromising the virus’s pathogenicity,” says Peter B. Jahrling of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). “It was a simple idea, and it was wrong. You can engineer the body’s response to the virus instead!”
Popov worked in an ultra-secret division of the Soviet bioweapons program known as “Factor,” which “dealt with small peptides and immune modulators. We started [by] making small genes to produce these peptides. The customer [the Soviet Ministry of Defense] wanted strains with new peptides” for weapons development, says Popov.
By 1981, Soviet scientists knew that viruses could be engineered to express human immune peptides. In 1984 and 1985, Vector researchers incorporated such toxins directly into mousepox and vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine virus, which is closely related to smallpox and often substituted for it in experiments.
Did the Soviets actually synthesize IL-4 to make vaccine-resistant smallpox as the Australians did inadvertently with mousepox? There is no evidence that they did, though all necessary steps were in place in their labs by 1992. And the opportunities to make this strain today may be greater than we like to think. Most biodefense experts believe that smallpox has proliferated beyond the two laboratories, one in the U.S. and one in Russia, authorized by the World Health Organization to maintain stocks of the disease. North Korea has it, and other rogue states may as well. Vaccine-resistant smallpox is now a credible threat--especially since the publication of the Australian experiment.
But U.S. experts are in a quandary over what to do about it. In a series of recent New York Times articles, reporters Judith Miller, William Broad and Stephen Engelberg revealed that the Pentagon has secretly considered creating an engineered strain of anthrax that incorporates two genes from a related bacterial species. The Defense Department is interested in testing a claim made by Russian researchers that this strain overcomes the immunity conferred by anthrax vaccine. But even discussing such testing has caused an uproar. Some experts feel the Pentagon has come close to violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention by just talking about it. Repeating the mousepox experiment would undoubtedly cause an even greater furor, and altering smallpox would be unthinkable.
But, especially now, in the face of ruthless terrorism, we need to know whether a weapon developed against natural smallpox can still protect us against engineered strains. The solution is not to do this experiment alone. Recent smallpox research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has been conducted under the auspices of the World Health Organization. Any testing of engineered strains must be conducted the same way--openly, transparently and with the full cooperation of the people who know the agent well, including the former Soviet scientists at Vector. “Secrecy is fatal,” warns John D. Steinbruner, bioterrorism expert at the University of Maryland. Doing this work openly and cooperatively is the only way to avoid the appearance that the U.S. has gone back into the biological-weapons business itself.
There are influential voices within the government that want to keep IL-4 research classified: They don’t want to make the work of bioterrorists any easier. But the genie has left the lamp. Two decades of Russian research and the widely publicized Australian experiment make secrecy impossible. If the smallpox vaccine can no longer protect the world, we need to know it, so that alternate therapies, including new vaccines and better antiviral drugs, can be developed while there is time.
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7b8a9a5eddb6b66b2fed2bc1a3e95d90 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-01-me-41004-story.html | John Chambers; ‘Apes’ Makeup Won an Oscar | John Chambers; ‘Apes’ Makeup Won an Oscar
Lana Turner once dropped by his Burbank garage for a set of teeth. Howard Keel stopped in for an Indian nose. And Leonard Nimoy visited to be fitted for Mr. Spock’s trademark pointed ears.
John Chambers, an innovative and influential Hollywood special effects makeup artist who won an Academy Award for his ground-breaking efforts in the original “Planet of the Apes” and did much of his work in his home lab, where he trained and mentored young makeup artists, died Aug. 25 of complications from diabetes. He was 78.
Chambers died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills, where he had lived since 1991.
Throughout his 30-year career, Chambers worked on scores of movies and television shows, including the films “The List of Adrian Messenger” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” and TV’s “The Outer Limits,” “The Munsters,” “Lost in Space” and “Mission: Impossible.”
He served at various times as head of special makeup effects at Universal and 20th Century Fox, in addition to working independently with many other studios and production companies.
“John literally brought new techniques and materials to the motion picture business that are still being used today,” said Michael Westmore, makeup designer and supervisor for the “Star Trek” film and television franchise, who began apprenticing with Chambers at Universal in 1963.
Among Chambers’ innovations: a new technique for making “bald caps,” which give actors the appearance of being completely bald. Instead of using rubber, Chambers used liquid plastic, which he sprayed onto a metal form of an actor’s head. His bald caps are considered the most realistic and are the standard in the industry.
Then there was his technique for making veneer theatrical false teeth and the plastic-based material he created for making scars and wounds, which he called Scar ‘Em.
“John Chambers is one of those few rare individuals that have taken an industry to a completely new level,” said Michael Key, editor in chief of Make-Up Artists Magazine. “John brought to Hollywood makeup the ability to create believable and compelling characters in a way that had never been done before.”
Veteran makeup artist Maurice Stein, another Chambers protege, said: “Everything John ever created started in his garage lab. That’s where all of us got our original training.”
For Burbank neighbors, it wasn’t unusual to see Marlon Brando or Mickey Rooney duck into Chambers’ garage for fittings.
Only Frank Sinatra refused an invitation, insisting that Chambers go to his apartment instead.
“He needed a life mask, but he couldn’t stand to have plaster or foam rubber on his face,” Chambers recalled in a 1969 Times interview. “He gave me a sculptured bust to use as a pattern. The bust was made in the 1940s and his face had changed so much it was useless.”
Chambers instead took photographs of Sinatra and made precise measurements of his features. He found a fellow makeup artist with the same facial dimensions as the singer and used his colleague’s face to make a life mask of Sinatra.
“When I tried the [mask] on Sinatra, everything fit perfect,” Chambers said. “Sinatra was so happy, he ordered 20 extra heads.”
At 20th Century Fox in the 1960s, Chambers faced one of his greatest career challenges: turning actors into monkeys for director Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 “Planet of the Apes.”
Chambers told The Times he spent so much time with a notebook in front of the monkey cages at the Los Angeles Zoo that “people came to look at me instead of the monkeys. But it was the best way I could think of for capturing the elastic facial expressions of the apes.”
Thus familiarized, he began creating an orangutan’s face on a Neanderthal-type bust of a man. By working backward on the evolutionary scale, he reasoned, he could create a reasonably attractive animal face that wouldn’t repulse a movie audience.
In making the ape faces, Chambers decided the usual foam rubber used by makeup artists wouldn’t do: Trapped moisture under the thick foam was not only uncomfortable for the actors but caused the adhesive to peel off.
After weeks of experiments trying to create his own foam rubber compound, Chambers came up with an important breakthrough: facial appliances that allowed sweat to seep through the material’s pores.
Using his new foam rubber, Chambers designed eyebrows and lips that could quickly be applied to the actors’ faces. For the film’s stars, he made specially fitted simian appliances that looked realistic even in extreme close-ups.
To ready the stars and supporting cast members for each day’s shooting, Chambers had to hire and train nearly 100 makeup artists.
It was a time-consuming process, taking up to 5 1/2 hours to put the full-face ape makeup on each actor. To streamline the procedure, Chambers came up with a method of pre-blending the makeup on the ape features and installing parts of the hair beforehand, which allowed the makeup to be applied in 3 1/2 hours.
For his outstanding achievement, Chambers became only the second makeup artist to receive an honorary Academy Award. (The first was awarded to William Tuttle for “Seven Faces of Dr. Lao” in 1965; a competitive makeup award was established in 1981.)
Chambers, whose honors also included an Emmy and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, created the artificial nose Lee Marvin wore in his Oscar-winning dual role in “Cat Ballou.” And Chambers once made a new set of heads, hands and feet for Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.
Born in Chicago, Chambers served as a dental technician in the Army during World War II. After gaining a knowledge of facial prosthetics--ears, noses, chins--while working with disfigured veterans after the war, Chambers began his Hollywood makeup career with NBC in 1953.
Few of his colleagues were aware of the many years he spent making prosthetics for indigent cancer victims.
“We are all here to help each other,” Chambers said of his sideline in 1969. “If I can do something to relieve other people’s suffering, why not?”
Better known among the Hollywood community was his penchant for nurturing young talent.
Before Chambers, Westmore said, “studios all had their own little, quiet labs. Nobody talked or interrelated” with one another, which slowed the development of new makeup techniques.
“Anybody [who] ever needed help, he’d spend his time giving them an answer,” Stein said. “The only thing he asked in return for those [who] he trained was that we be willing to do the same as him, that we pass it on to the newer generation.”
Chambers, who is survived by his wife, Joan, had no children.
“Their children were the kids like me and Mike [Westmore],” Stein said. “We’re the ones who used to come to his house and have bologna and cheese sandwiches with him and talk about our next project.”
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c732964eb5baf6b68c15758826f1035d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-02-mn-41294-story.html | At Giuliani Pad, Towels Say ‘His,’ ‘His’ and ‘His’ | At Giuliani Pad, Towels Say ‘His,’ ‘His’ and ‘His’
Howard Koeppel greets a visitor at his posh Upper East Side apartment, with its million-dollar views of midtown Manhattan.
“Welcome to Gracie Mansion annex,” he says with a grin. “I’m the first lady.”
He’s only half-kidding. In a turn of events tailor-made for this city’s tabloid headlines, Republican Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani separated from his wife, Donna Hanover, and then did something that has even many I’ve-seen-it-all New Yorkers baffled:
He vacated the mayoral mansion to become roommates with a gay couple and their pet Shih Tzu, Bonnie.
Since June, Giuliani and his bodyguard have taken residence in the elegant 3,000-square-foot home of old friend Koeppel, a 64-year-old Queens car dealer, and his 41-year-old partner of 10 years, Mark Hsiao.
Traveling with the lightness of a soon-to-be divorced man, Giuliani brought only a few suits and some toilet articles to the residence. He sleeps on a bed laden with throw pillows, one proclaiming: “It ain’t easy being king.”
“He hasn’t exactly moved in,” Hsiao says. “We prefer to call it ‘crashing.’ He makes his own bed, takes away his dirty laundry and tiptoes in when he comes in late at night. Sometimes I feel like I have two husbands.”
The unlikely living situation has opened a window into the world of a mayor often seen as distant and contentious. Giuliani left Gracie Mansion after a judge ruled in May that he could no longer bring his girlfriend, Judith Nathan, to the mayor’s official residence as long as his estranged wife and their children continued to live there.
While Giuliani has declined to speak publicly about his new living arrangement, Koeppel and Hsiao candidly offer intimate, day-to-day details about living with a politician whom appointment-seekers sometimes must wait weeks to see. (They do, however, keep Giuliani’s bedroom door closed when he’s out to protect his privacy.)
Many nights, the roommates watch television together in the three-bedroom, five-bath apartment furnished with Chagall paintings and a life-size David statue. Giuliani prefers such HBO shows as “The Sopranos” and the New York-based comedy “Sex in the City” to what he calls the more morbid fare of “Six Feet Under.”
So what does the mayor of New York City prefer to eat at breakfast?
“I don’t know; we’ve never asked him,” Koeppel says. “He has no choice. He eats what we put in front of him.”
When Giuliani dives into his morning cereal, the three discuss everything from opera to selling cars in Queens, Koeppel says. “He thinks my business is a good barometer for what’s going on in the city.”
Koeppel sometimes jokingly asks the mayor what time he’ll be home. And Giuliani has been known, after bidding goodbye to a growling Bonnie, to kiss both new roommates on the cheek.
“It’s an Italian thing,” offers the no-nonsense Koeppel, who counts among his close friends comedian Jackie Mason.
Adds Hsiao, a Juilliard-trained pianist who works at the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs: “It’s also a gay thing.”
Longtime Democrat Koeppel met then-U.S. Atty. Giuliani in 1989 before his first bid for the mayor’s job. He was so impressed with the man that he switched parties and helped elect him New York mayor in 1993.
“I took an immediate liking to him,” recalls Koeppel, a Brooklyn native who serves in several posts in Giuliani’s administration, including a spot on the board of trustees at Carnegie Hall and one on the city’s economic development board.
“I like his style. It’s like, how do you describe a good piece of chocolate? He’s just so delicious. I could listen to him all night. I inhale what he says. Rudy is never boring.”
Friends with Giuliani through the 1990s, Koeppel and Hsiao saw signs of trouble in the mayor’s marriage. “But he never said anything, and we’d never ask. Just like he’d never ask: ‘So, how are you and Mark getting along?’ We didn’t really know things were so bad until it hit the papers,” Koeppel said.
After discussing the matter, the pair invited Giuliani to move in. And after considering the offer for two months, he accepted.
Gay activists say that the arrangement has shown a positive side to both Giuliani and to gay relationships.
“This is the mayor who introduced the law making domestic partnerships legal in New York,” says Christopher Lynn, 51, a gay attorney who works in the Giuliani administration. “His attitude toward gays is only unusual for people who don’t know Mayor Giuliani’s record.”
Jeffrey Soref, an activist in New York’s gay community, says the publicity surrounding the live-in arrangement also has highlighted some healthy lifestyle values.
“First, these two men have played a supportive role for a friend in need who happens not to be gay,” he said. “And it gives people a glimpse behind the door to what is essentially a long-established, loving relationship between two gay men of very different backgrounds.”
Koeppel says the mayor accepts his new roomies for who they are.
“Even though he’s a devout Catholic, he doesn’t see us as a gay Jew and a gay Chinese guy,” Koeppel says. “He’s never said to me: ‘Couldn’t you find a nice Jewish man?’ Something my own relatives might have said.”
Although yet to endorse same-sex marriages, Giuliani has promised his roommates that if he ever changes his mind, they will be the first couple he marries.
Koeppel jokes with the mayor that if things don’t work out with girlfriend Nathan, he can “come over to our side.” This, Koeppel says, is where Giuliani blushes and promises to think about it.
The three have taught one another things about their worlds.
Koeppel and Hsiao taught Giuliani that his residency there qualifies him as a “friend of Dorothy,” a term derived from the gay obsession with Judy Garland--which they explained means he’s gay-friendly.
And Giuliani has weighed in on their life.
When Koeppel complained to the mayor about his partner’s fetish for throw pillows, Giuliani listened patiently and then gave him a short lecture, pointing to three newspapers on the coffee table.
“He told me that each day there are at least five stories that bug him,” Koeppel says. “He said he has to deal not only with his prostate cancer but running the events of the city, and so I should just cool out.
“After our little talk, the pillow thing didn’t seem so bad.”
Giuliani has a bodyguard who stays awake in the living room at night and another who waits in a car outside. The mayor usually arrives home after the couple has gone to bed.
Koeppel and Hsiao enforce two semi-serious rules: When they’re away, no red wine, which stains the furniture. And no wild parties.
One day, the mayor brought both hosts into his room. “See,” he proudly said, “I’m no jerk. I can make a bed.”
Still, Hsiao neatly remakes the bed each day after Giuliani leaves.
So, how long before a visiting mayor wears out his welcome?
“I’d begin wondering after the first of the year,” Hsiao says.
Adds Koeppel: “No, it’s more simple. When he stops making his bed.”
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5a7552225888d7b115076b8bbb642e98 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-04-ca-41799-story.html | ‘Garbo’ Paints a Full Portrait of Star | ‘Garbo’ Paints a Full Portrait of Star
“Greta Garbo: A Lone Star,” an absorbing AMC documentary, celebrates the legacy of the illustrious, enigmatic beauty from Stockholm.
“There was something about Garbo that just made people want to know more about her,” says biographer Karen Swenson. “The more she withheld, the more they wanted to know.”
Swenson is one of three biographers quoted during this well-rounded, informative program covering the life and career of the Swedish actress with the husky voice and heavy accent who valued her privacy above all.
Narrated by Lauren Bacall, the hour’s most interesting quotes come from 1930s leading lady Karen Morley, who discusses Garbo’s legendary reputation as a recluse. According to Morley, it was MGM, the studio that signed Garbo in 1925, that was partly responsible for keeping her out of the spotlight. Because she was so direct and straightforward in early interviews, asserts Morley, MGM “pretended that she didn’t want to talk, but the truth was she talked too much.”
Some of Garbo’s biggest hits of the silent era were made with the dashing John Gilbert, who proposed marriage on three occasions but was turned down each time. Explaining their combustible on-screen chemistry, Gilbert’s daughter Leatrice Gilbert Fountain says, “There was such unspoken sex going on” between them in films such as “Flesh and the Devil” and “Love.”
In spite of her immense popularity, Garbo had no interest in being a celebrity and was seldom seen on the social circuit. On the set, meanwhile, “she had a desperate need for privacy,” says Fountain. “She could not function if people were watching her.”
Garbo’s final film, “Two-Faced Woman,” which was released in 1941, was slammed by critics and shunned by moviegoers. After starring in such films as “Mata Hari,” “Grand Hotel,” “Queen Christina” and “Ninotchka,” she left Hollywood, moved to a New York apartment and lived there alone until her death in 1990 at the age of 84.
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“Greta Garbo: A Lone Star” can be seen tonight at 7 and 10:30 on AMC. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).
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c007f85bc27c4f3381c8e756d157f0db | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-05-sp-42287-story.html | Yo, Andy, It Seems You Were Right All Along | Yo, Andy, It Seems You Were Right All Along
Fights happen in football, and tempers flared on a hot Los Angeles afternoon 37 years ago. Andy Reid, who decades later would save the Philadelphia Eagles with his stubbornness, got into a scuffle with the Marshall High quarterback. The quarterback was on the ropes and yelled for teammates to step in. They might have, if they hadn’t been doubled over in laughter.
Reid was the 6-year-old ball boy.
He was lying on his back, his chubby hands welded to the quarterback’s facemask as the quarterback was bent over at the waist and windmilling his arms.
“The guy had been harassing Andy, giving him a hard time,” said Reid’s older brother, Reg, who played halfback on that long-ago Marshall team. “He was going, ‘Reid! Reid! Get your brother off me! Get your brother off me!”’
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Looking for a fight? Try rolling into Philadelphia as the new coach of the Eagles, a team coming off a 3-13 meltdown, and turning up your nose at Heisman Trophy tailback Ricky Williams. You use the No. 2 pick to draft Syracuse quarterback Donovan McNabb, a selection that leaves angry fans filling Madison Square Garden with boos.
“I went out to visit Andy for the draft,” said Reg, a geologist in Reno, Nev. “We’re sitting there in the war room the night after the first day. Just a few stragglers in the room. And the mayor--the mayor--comes on a local TV station and starts saying the Eagles blew it. I wasn’t used to having mayors get that vocal. I couldn’t imagine what Andy was feeling at that moment.”
Things got only worse. Reid arrived in Philadelphia from Green Bay, where he’d won acclaim as the quarterback coach who had helped mold Brett Favre.
He had brought backup Doug Pederson along with him, hoping to buy time to shore up holes in the offensive line while grooming McNabb.
The Philadelphia experiment was a bumpy one. Reid stubbornly ran a West Coast offense, even though he didn’t have the personnel for it, and McNabb shifted in his cleats on the sideline. The fans booed louder, and Pederson’s popularity plunged like an iceball lobbed from the upper deck.
“You bite the bullet,” Reid said. “You have to trust in what you believe, and it’s going to test you. So you’d better have some sort of foundation you can grab ahold of, because people are going to question you from all sides.”
Fans began to hang banners reading, “The Future Is Now,” and, “What Are We Waiting For?”
They questioned Reid’s ability as a coach, his sanity. It wasn’t until Week 10, after the 2-7 Eagles had essentially quit against Carolina, that Reid handed over the starting quarterback’s job to the rookie.
That didn’t solve the problems. McNabb was dazzling at times, awkward at others. The team finished 5-11, and fans were ready to punt Reid back to Green Bay.
Pederson was already headed back to the Packers. The Eagles released him, and he later told of a fan who called him over to the stands, presumably to get an autograph. Instead, it was Pederson who got something: a spit shower. There are no loveable losers in Philly.
In the months after the debacle of 1999, Reid concentrated on what he knows best, quarterbacks and offensive linemen. He signed 6-foot-7 right tackle Jon Runyan and paired him with 6-7 left tackle Tre Thomas, giving the Eagles the biggest bookends in the NFL. He released some veterans and brought in players who better fit his offense.
And he worked with McNabb. The results were obvious, although not immediate. McNabb struggled a bit early in the 2000 season, yet improved each week.
By season’s end, he was an average passer and a fantastic runner, one who left linebackers grasping at air and cornerbacks corkscrewed into the turf.
The Eagles finished 11-5 and made the playoffs. Their quarterback led the team in rushing, earned a trip to the Pro Bowl, made lots of magazine covers, even got his own bobble-head doll. Suddenly, he’s one of the most popular players in the game.
Similarly, Reid’s approval rating shot skyward. Fans embraced the bear-sized man, a former Brigham Young offensive lineman, and Reid joked about changing his name to “Yo, Andy!” He hears it all the time these days.
“Yo, Andy! How ‘bout them Eagles!”
Lift the garage door at Reid’s home and there it sits, his dream car. All $25 worth. That’s how much his father paid for the Model A Ford that has been in the family since the 1940s. It was Reg’s first car, then Andy’s.
Back then, it was painted bright yellow and gussied up with a rumble seat and five types of horns.
“It had a bullhorn, some kind of cow horn, everything,” recalled Bob Volkel, one of Andy’s lifelong friends. “Girls liked it. They thought it was pretty nice.”
Back when he was coaching for the Packers, Reid used his Super Bowl check to restore the classic to its original condition.
He took it apart, bolt by bolt, painted it the precise shade of gray Henry Ford intended, gave it a showroom look.
“It was a little like rebuilding a football team,” Reid said.
The car is done, the team is not. The Eagles are 0-9 against the New York Giants and have never beaten them under Reid. McNabb has two new starting receivers, Todd Pinkston and James Thrash, and high hopes for UCLA’s Freddie Mitchell, a promising but unproven first-round pick.
Last week, starting center Bubba Miller suffered a shattered ankle and was lost for the season. Hank Fraley will start in his place.
"[Fraley] snaps the ball well,” McNabb said. “The thing with him is the experience, and he’s definitely going to get that. We worked together last year just watching film, watching every opponent that we faced. He may not have been active that game, but he still worked hard preparing, as though he was the starter.”
New names, new faces, same plan. Reid learned persistence from his late parents, Walter and Elizabeth. His dad was a scenic artist who painted sets for plays and musicals in Los Angeles. His mom was a radiologist and a die-hard Dodger fan who fostered a love of sports in her sons.
“I used to take her to games,” said Reid, who could see the lights of Dodger Stadium from his boyhood home in Los Feliz. “When I’d go back to L.A., the first place we were going was the Dodger game. We’d get the foot-longs, the spicy dogs, and we’d watch.”
Andy got his first job at 10, dishing sweet-and-sour meatballs backstage at “The Tonight Show.” Naturally, he had rules: No more than three meatballs per person. “It could be John Wayne and, man, he was getting three meatballs,” he said.
No exceptions. Well, almost no exceptions.
“If it was an athlete, I’d always give him more,” he confessed. “I wouldn’t look at him. I’d just grab his plate and put more on there.”
Not every plan is perfect. Even stubborn kids can budge.
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4cae3139e481c5490eada5a2d8edb09a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-10-mn-44108-story.html | Some Israelis Hoping for a Concrete Line in the Sand | Some Israelis Hoping for a Concrete Line in the Sand
The Hefer Valley is an extremely narrow stretch of land, where Israelis are squeezed into a 9-mile-wide corridor between the Palestinian-ruled West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea.
So it is a fitting place, perhaps, for a wall.
A thick gray concrete wall stands nearly 8 feet high between the neat residential streets of Bat Hefer, a town in the valley, and the Palestinian city of Tulkarm less than a mile away.
The wall embodies an idea that is rapidly gaining currency in Israel after nearly a year of the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian bloodletting in decades: separation, the erecting of barriers and buffer zones between the enemies. Separation is especially appealing to an Israeli public desperate for solutions and skeptical that diplomacy, politicians or the military will provide any.
The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday authorized the army to establish strips of closed military zones along the Palestinian side of the invisible line separating the West Bank from Israel. Around Jerusalem, trenches, boulders and new checkpoints are gradually separating Jewish neighborhoods from Arab ones.
Advocates argue that erecting barriers between Israel and the Palestinians would go a long way toward stopping terrorist attacks in Israel. Violence would diminish, they contend, because the two sides would essentially be kept apart.
But critics, and there are many on both sides, say the plan simply won’t work and is impractical--especially in the West Bank, where scores of Jewish settlements fall within Palestinian territory, or in Jerusalem, where the rival communities live intermingled. Where would the line be drawn?
Palestinian officials have already warned that they would not accept the Israeli military zones, which they say would amount to illegal annexation--and which Israelis acknowledge could violate established treaties and agreements. Some Israelis also worry about setting down de facto borders.
Residents Believe Wall Has Protected Them
The wall shielding Bat Hefer was built at the same time that the community was being constructed, in 1996. Back then, people thought it was a crazy idea. Why was a barrier needed when Israelis and Palestinians seemed well on their way to reaching a comprehensive peace pact?
When the Palestinian uprising erupted last September, however, Bat Hefer residents thanked their lucky stars. Now they believe that the wall has protected them from gunfire and obstructed the passage of potentially dangerous Palestinians into Israel.
Today, the mile-long wall is being extended 600 yards. The new section, south of the town and closest to Tulkarm, will stand 10 1/2 feet high--2 1/2 feet taller than the old one.
Residents and army engineers have added layers of defense to the wall. Running along the Bat Hefer side is a new electric fence. Surveillance cameras are being affixed to the wall. The concrete has been etched in a sort of argyle pattern to make it more difficult to scale.
The invisible boundary that the wall runs along is the so-called Green Line, the dividing line between Israel proper and the West Bank that existed until Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East War.
The Hefer Valley leadership wants the wall and its reinforcing fence to serve as a model for the country. Other communities have already been coming to the valley for advice, and top national officials have dropped by to heap praise on the project.
But with the plans to establish military zones along the Palestinian side of the Green Line, Sharon’s government appears to be taking separation a step further. Although the government says the zones would be temporary and created on a case-by-case basis, Palestinians would need special permits to enter the zones, or risk prosecution in military courts. The army will have to obtain Cabinet approval for each zone it declares.
Though Israeli officials say the buffer zones would keep out potential suicide bombers and other terrorists, Palestinian officials counter that the plan constitutes another form of “collective punishment” that would make all Palestinians suffer.
Sharon, for reasons of his own nationalist ideology, is said to favor buffer zones over walls and fences near the Green Line because he does not want to establish a de facto border at the 1967 demarcation.
The prime minister has said repeatedly that he wants to keep most of the West Bank in Israeli hands and does not want to withdraw to the 1967 lines. To do so would be to abandon dozens of remote Jewish settlements that he himself strategically positioned.
Barrier Also Creates a Sense of Being in Jail
Among residents of the Hefer Valley, there is appreciation for the safety they believe their wall brings--but also ambivalence. As David Ein Dar, an administrator with the regional government, observed: People want it and they don’t want it.
“It’s a wall, and a wall gives you the feeling of being in a ghetto, in a jail,” said Ein Dar, 60, a retired paratrooper and lifelong kibbutznik. “People came here to get away from the city, to live in green areas, open air, and all of a sudden there’s a wall and a fence and another fence. You get the feeling that you live in a place that was not your dream.”
Ein Dar, like others in the Hefer Valley, says he wishes walls and fences were not necessary. A wall that separates people is something that belongs in a museum, he says, adding that communities will never get along--and will only find reasons to continue fighting--if they are saddled with physical barriers.
“We all the time declare that the minute peace will break out, we will be happy to break down the wall, like in Berlin--sell the pieces,” he said.
But in the meantime, safety comes first, and though residents know that the wall is not 100% impenetrable, a barrier helps.
Sharon Ezer, a Bat Hefer aerobics instructor who has been living with her parents in a two-story house facing the wall for the last five years, says the concrete construction blocks the view of the surrounding countryside. But, she says, it has made her feel safer, and now she would like the wall to be higher, longer and wider.
“We don’t have clear borders in our country. We are mixed together with them, and it’s not a good thing,” said Ezer, 24. “They are very angry, and their anger is too deep.”
Local Palestinians, Israelis Once Got Along
Residents of Bat Hefer and Tulkarm used to get along, more or less. Palestinian workers from Tulkarm built Bat Hefer and crossed into Israel for jobs for many years. Israelis would venture into Tulkarm for meals or shopping. A little over a year ago, Tulkarm and the Hefer Valley municipalities drafted plans to share construction of a sewage line.
But all of that is finished.
Israeli forces shot and killed a top Palestinian activist, Thabet Thabet, on Dec. 31 in Tulkarm. The Israeli army had accused him of ordering attacks on Jews, although many Israeli peace activists who knew Thabet disputed the charge. A Palestinian militia that was formed to retaliate for his death and that operates out of Tulkarm has since killed six Israelis, including two Tel Aviv restaurateurs who stopped in Tulkarm for lunch with an Arab friend.
On Thursday, Israel fired missiles at members of the militia cell, killing two; Palestinian gunmen then crossed the Green Line from Tulkarm, killing one off-duty Israeli army officer and seriously wounding another. The ambush took place about 2 1/2 miles north of Bat Hefer.
The wisdom and practicality of trying to seal off the Palestinian West Bank from Israel are being hotly debated by Israelis.
“If the aim is to reduce the number of Palestinians who enter Israel illegally [to work], then this plan has a chance,” said Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, a former army chief of staff and member of a centrist political party. “But if anyone thinks this will solve the problem of suicide bombers or terrorist cells trying to get into Israel, then it seems to me that we would be creating an illusion.”
Shlomo Ben-Ami, the foreign minister under Sharon’s predecessor, Ehud Barak, and one of the chief negotiators in now-dead peace talks, said the idea of separation was born of diplomatic paralysis and deepening desperation.
However, Barak--who coined the phrase “Us here, them there"--has come out of semi-retirement to promote the building, over four years, of fences and walls as part of a unilateral separation.
Proponents of separation have armed themselves with the work of a demographer from Haifa University, Arnon Sofer, who is warning Israelis that the high birthrate among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will cause the Jewish state to disappear if it does not separate itself. According to his figures, the population on the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River will reach 15.2 million by 2020--and be 42% Jewish and 58% Arab.
“The conflict might continue, but the demographic clock is finishing us, and Israel therefore needs to make a brave, most difficult decision to opt for unilateral separation,” Sofer told a recent conference on security issues. He would have Israel evacuate 35 Jewish settlements in the West Bank and turn over some predominantly Arab parts of the northern Israeli region known as the Galilee to a new Palestinian state.
Others warn that unilateral separation will do nothing to end the violence.
Barring the entry into Israeli territory of all Palestinians will only further devastate the Palestinian economy, senior U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen warned last week.
“Increasing the suffering produces more anger,” he said. “Anger galvanizes into hatred, and more hatred leads to more violence.”
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a3be8921fecfd641d8684c15b4529943 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-11-ca-44417-story.html | ‘Servant’ Attends to Details With Energy | ‘Servant’ Attends to Details With Energy
Theatrical sound designers are usually little noticed, but take a look at John Zalewski in International City Theatre’s exceedingly lively “A Servant to Two Masters” in Long Beach.
You can literally take a look at him, for Zalewski--best known for his behind-the-scenes work at the Evidence Room and Actors’ Gang--is on stage throughout, dressed as a Venetian gondolier. From his “gondola” console at the side of the stage, he produces a stream of clever aural punctuation marks. A new one emerges every few seconds.
Whenever the big-bellied Pantaloon Parsimoni (Edmund L. Shaff), the father of the bride, worries about money, Zalewski brings on a clanging cacophony reminiscent of a horror film. When the buffoonish lovers get mushy, we hear a snatch from the second movement of Dvorak’s “New World” symphony. A parade of vaudevillian pops and rim shots accompanies the production’s abundant slaps and bumps.
Fortunately, Jessica Kubzansky’s staging isn’t only about the sound effects. Every aspect of this production snaps to quick attention and works on the same level as Zalewski’s foley artist exhibition.
Kubzansky uses an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th century script that Lee Hall wrote for an English production in 1999, but it has been Americanized here and there as well. The script is replete with such words and phrases as “kaput” and “I got no problem with that,” such pop cultural signposts as “talk amongst yourselves,” and occasional raw anatomical references.
When Beatrice, who’s posing as a man, shares the secret of her gender with Clarice, the two young women take a “Friends Forever” pact, complete with patty-cake gestures--which neatly emphasizes the gulf between Beatrice’s real personality and her manly facade. Beth Kennedy is superb on both sides of the gender gap in this classic “pants” role, altering her voice and posture radically enough to create a precise delineation. Clarice, the moping would-be bride, is brought to hilarious life by Evie Peck (also of Actors’ Gang), and J. Michael Ross is equally funny as her klutzy, mop-topped swain.
The title character is in the smoothly manic hands of Michael David Edwards, who has mastered Truffaldino’s tough-guy bravado, as well as his frantic bumbling, with equal pizazz. Morgan Rusler, as Beatrice’s lover Florindo, gets the fine-tuned opportunity to run out of his lodgings in the middle of the night, his face covered with a bluish skin cream.
Jennifer Taub’s maid swaggers in Mae West-Bette Midler style. Shaff and Bruno Oliver sputter and seethe as the fathers, and Darren Martin Kelley’s innkeeper oozes reptilian appetites.
The characters wear makeup masks, which allow their features to remain elastic while still honoring their commedia forebears. Susan Gratch’s bright set, lit by Rand Ryan, serves many locations and includes a painted Venetian “canal” around the perimeter.
“A Servant to Two Masters,” Center Theater, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 30. $27 to $35. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.
Michael David Edwards: Truffaldino
Edmund L. Shaff: Pantaloon
Evie Peck: Clarice
Bruno Oliver: Dr. Lombardi
J. Michael Ross: Silvio
Jennifer Taub: Smeraldina
Darren Martin Kelley: Brighella
Beth Kennedy: Beatrice
Morgan Rusler: Florindo
Written by Carlo Goldoni. Adapted by Lee Hall. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky. Set by Susan Gratch. Costumes by Alexa M. Stone. Lighting by Rand Ryan. Sound by John Zalewski. Makeup-hair by Douglas Noe. Stage manager Kevin Carroll. Commedia workshop: Ron Campbell.
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2a8a8d1b609f4a1ed7f79d4f857877e4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-17-ca-46551-story.html | Energy and Passion Drive ‘The Car Man’ | Energy and Passion Drive ‘The Car Man’
Beyond its steamy fusion of dance drama, grand opera and film noir, Matthew Bourne’s “The Car Man” is a sardonic fantasy of 20th century mid-America--a place where stud males are as abundant as auto parts, where social dances are one part bare-knuckled aggression to two parts hip-pumping foreplay, and where any kind of softness, sensitivity or vulnerability is doomed to extinction.
Performed at high heat by Bourne’s London-based Adventures in Motion Pictures company, “The Car Man” plays at the Ahmanson Theatre through Oct. 28, with no fewer than four people covering each role through the run.
Thus, Saturday’s cast may have offered only a cursory tour of Harmony, the fictional small town where Bourne combines and retells classic tales of desire and death.
Even so, I’d submit that Will Kemp’s transition from victimized wimp to dangerous thug in the role of Angelo is one of the great performances of the year.
A repressed slave of duty turned murderous outlaw, Angelo is the counterpart of Don Jose in Bourne’s radical reconception of “Carmen.”
Using Rodion Shchedrin’s percussion ballet score, “Carmen Suite,” intercut with other arrangements of Bizet by Terry Davies, “The Car Man” gives Angelo a devoted girlfriend--Rita--who is the equivalent of Micaela in “Carmen,” but a lot more interesting.
Nevertheless, Angelo becomes obsessed with Luca, a sensual, free-spirited outsider, and those who remember Bourne’s “Swan Lake” will not be surprised that this Carmen surrogate is no Gypsy cigarette girl but a hunky, virile male.
But Luca also ensnares the wife of the aging, out-of-shape owner of the local diner and garage, and her story belongs to the stifled-unto-murder genre of “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
Indeed, her name is Lana (as in Turner, the star of the most enduring film version of “Postman”), and she unknowingly shares Luca with Angelo for a time, even dancing alongside her rival in a clever afterglow duet when both of them bed Luca on the same night.
As the archetypal “Postman” and “Carmen” narratives converge, Bourne adds a bit of “Midnight Express” and even a modern dance parody for seasoning, marshaling a choreographic style incredibly resourceful in its layering of character-dance color and emotional depth.
Whether he’s evoking the heat, insects and lust of a night when nothing is happening or the surreal frenzy of social dances that barely contain the characters’ primal urges, this is daring, accomplished, uncompromisingly lurid movement theater.
Moreover, his addiction to trailer trash seems to be shared by designer Lez Brotherston, who elevates ugly clutter into an all-American aesthetic with his rising/falling/rotating scenic panels that manage to provide a billboard illusion of freedom but keep everyone caged in.
Bourne and Brotherston also share a taste for comedy, and lighten the crime, guilt and destruction of innocence on view with mockery of everything from beatnik-era style to the characters’ hollow pretensions and sex in all its forms.
You can argue that sometimes the comedy goes too far--that Scott Ambler, for instance, initially makes Dino (Lana’s husband) too ridiculous to become the physical threat and symbol of guilt that Bourne needs to make key scenes fully credible.
Angelo, too, could have ricocheted between the laughable and the melodramatic, but Kemp, as mentioned, highlights every facet of his development, gaining sympathy even as his character spirals out of control.
Initially Bourne’s teenage discovery, he has grown into one of the finest dancing actors of his generation.
Alan Vincent also plays Luca’s studly arrogance for comedy yet generates sympathy in his drunken downfall. Yes, this may be the ultimate Adam Cooper role of all time, and it’s too bad that Cooper (Bourne’s original Swan) is currently an expensive international guest star and uninvolved in this project.
But Vincent is very, very sharp in defining Luca’s low opinion of nearly everybody in Harmony--including himself. And it doesn’t hurt that he looks rather like a DNA experiment combining the features of Ben Affleck and Russell Crowe.
As Rita, Etta Murfitt adroitly layers an increasingly irrational commitment to Angelo with a growing sense of alarm. She and Bourne are careful to steer away from bland Micaela-style virtue by having Rita lie to Angelo early in Act 2 and thus precipitate the bloody finale rather like Anita’s lie does in “West Side Story.” (No, you won’t learn the ending from this review, but if you know “Carmen” and “Postman,” you know who dies.)
As Lana, Saranne Curtin is the only major cast member who never plays for sympathy, but exalts her character’s needs above everyone else’s and goes for broke. What eventually happens to Angelo and Luca justifies her approach, but even before her plot takes over from “Carmen” as the driving force in “The Car Man,” you admire the technical strength and emotional scale of her performance.
This is a terrific company and it will be fascinating to see what its other members bring to the leading roles. On Saturday, Brett Morris expertly conducted the 14-member pit orchestra.
*
“The Car Man” runs through Oct. 28 (with alternating lead dancers) at the Ahmanson Theatre of the L.A. Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Additional performances: Sept. 30 at 7:30 p.m.; Oct. 4, 11, 18 and 25 at 2 p.m. $25 to $70. (213) 628-2772.
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ca54504fc904366b1f48aa553d147976 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-27-mn-50539-story.html | Bush Wants More Air Marshals | Bush Wants More Air Marshals
President Bush, seeking to reassure worried travelers, will call today for more government involvement in airport security screening, installation of assault-resistant cockpit doors and a dramatic increase in the federal air marshal program, congressional and aviation sources said Wednesday.
The proposals amount to a broad expansion of the federal role in airport security but stop short of advocating a direct federal takeover of passenger screening, which is now in the hands of private companies hired by the airlines.
Instead, Bush favors much higher standards, better pay and closer federal oversight of screeners, as well as the deployment of local law enforcement officers to airport security checkpoints, sources said. Administration officials were also considering a federally chartered nonprofit corporation to administer airport security.
As for arming pilots, which was proposed by the Air Line Pilots Assn., Bush indicated to reporters Wednesday that he is not enthusiastic about the idea. Congressional sources said it will not be part of his plan.
The president will travel to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport today to make his announcement, along with Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta and a bipartisan congressional delegation.
“One of my concerns is that this terrible incident has . . . convinced many Americans to stay at home,” Bush said Wednesday of the Sept. 11 attacks. “And one of the keys to economic recovery is going to be the vitality” of the airlines.
“We’ll announce some confidence-boosting measures, some concrete proposals, and I believe we’ll be able to work with Congress to get them done in an expeditious way,” Bush added. His comments in a brief session with reporters came at a White House meeting with Muslim and Arab American leaders.
Officials said details of the plan were still in flux Wednesday evening.
Among the measures under consideration was a proposal for video cameras to monitor airliner cockpits and cabins. “We should be using the same kind of video cameras that are used in ATM machines,” said Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who will accompany the president today.
Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation aviation subcommittee, said Bush plans to announce a “dramatic expansion” of the sky marshal program.
The size of the federal air marshal program is kept a secret. But before the Sept. 11 attacks, several members of Congress had indicated that there were only a few dozen marshals in the program. Since the hijackings, their ranks have been bolstered by agents from other federal law enforcement agencies, authorities said. And the Federal Aviation Administration has received hundreds of inquiries from citizens who are interested in becoming marshals.
Another congressional official said the goal is to have an undercover marshal on most flights. There are an estimated 25,000 daily airline takeoffs, but many involve relatively short hops between cities.
Other likely measures include wider use of a computer program that can identify passengers who pose a potential security threat, and an overhaul of antihijacking training for pilots and flight attendants, who now rely on manuals based on the rash of hijackings to Cuba in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Congressional sources said Bush will also propose more federal funding to help airports pay for improved security.
Although all airports except Washington’s Reagan National have reopened, travelers have not flocked back to the skies. In an interview Friday, Mineta estimated that airlines are flying about 80% of their previous schedules with passenger loads less than half of what they were before Sept. 11. Congress has approved a bailout package for the industry, but only a return of consumer confidence can restore it to health.
Meanwhile, businesses that depend on airlines to transport their customers--such as theme parks, hotels and car rental companies--are also taking an economic hit.
Congress is not likely to rubber-stamp the president’s package, particularly if pilots, flight attendants and other aviation interests raise doubts that it will do the job. Lawmakers consider themselves experts on air travel, since they must constantly shuttle back and forth to their districts. They can easily imagine themselves in the place of passengers aboard one of the four hijacked jets.
“The biggest frequent flier club in America is made up of members of Congress,” Durbin said. “We spend many of our waking moments on airliners and in airports. I’ve gone through those checkpoints, and I’ve seen the worst.”
The critical test of Bush’s plan, lawmakers said, is whether it significantly improves airport security through passenger and employee screening. The FAA has already ordered more thorough background checks for employees, and new FAA standards for passenger screening were due out before the hijackings. But lawmakers say more is needed.
“I want real supervision and a new atmosphere at these security checkpoints,” Durbin said. Although he would prefer that federal employees take over the job, Durbin said he is keeping an open mind about what Bush may propose.
Under one scenario still being considered by the administration, a nonprofit corporation would set standards, establish training protocols and provide close supervision of the security checkpoint workers.
“I want results; I don’t care if they are federal employees, or they work for the private sector,” Durbin said.
Senate staffers say there is strong bipartisan sentiment in that chamber for having federal employees take over airport security. But in the House, conservatives are reluctant to expand the size of the federal work force by thousands.
Mica, the House aviation chairman, said he expects a compromise to be reached.
“The standards definitely will be federal” for training, background checks and supervision, he said.
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d3b61af25f0017a8e362c97023b6d673 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-28-cl-50719-story.html | Fashion designer Rudi Gernreich defied haute-couture rules with socially aware clothes that said ... | Fashion designer Rudi Gernreich defied haute-couture rules with socially aware clothes that said ...
Now that the Sept. 11 attacks have made the materialistic, celebrity-fueled fashion scene seem all the more frivolous, it could be time for another Rudi Gernreich moment. The Austrian-born designer, who died in Los Angeles in 1985, is perhaps best known for creating sensational pieces such as the topless bathing suit and the thong. But he was more than a 1960s-era agent provocateur. He was a designer guided by a social conscience, which makes the current reexamination of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art here seem all the more relevant.
“I’m totally unconcerned with skirt lengths,” he told Woman’s World magazine in 1966. “They are not the issue. The issue is flying to the moon, killing men in Vietnam, teenagers pouring kerosene over Bowery drifters and setting them on fire. Life isn’t pretty. Clothes can’t be pretty little things.”
For the record:
12:00 AM, Sep. 29, 2001 FOR THE RECORD Los Angeles Times Saturday September 29, 2001 Home Edition Part A Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 1 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction Wrong photo credit--A photograph in Friday’s Southern California Living section was mistakenly credited to Fahey/Klein Gallery instead of to the photographer, William Claxton.
He defied the rigid traditions of Parisian haute couture, crafting democratic-minded innovations that define dressing to this day. But his influence goes well beyond fashion, giving him a place in the history of American design alongside the likes of Charles and Ray Eames. To him, fashion didn’t have to be just frippery; it could be an instrument for social change, according to longtime Gernreich collaborator Layne Nielson, who is writing a biography about the designer.
The exhibition’s title, “Rudi Gernreich: Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion,” is taken from a 1970 Life magazine interview in which the designer predicted a time when “people will stop bothering about romance in their clothes. Fashion will go out of fashion. The utility principle will allow us to take our minds off how we look and concentrate on what really matters.”
Throughout his career, Gernreich was influenced by social concerns ranging from his Socialist family background to his founding role in the Mattachine Society in L.A., a forerunner to today’s gay movement. “He did what all truly innovative designers do, which was to tap into what was going on at the time,” said Louise Coffey-Webb, curator of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in L.A., which loaned many pieces from its archives for use in the Philadelphia show.
Born in Vienna in 1922, Gernreich, son of a hosiery manufacturer, was forced to flee the city in 1938, six months after the Nazi invasion, according to Nielson. He was 16 when he and his mother joined a wave of Jewish refugees immigrating to Los Angeles.
During the 1940s, he was a dancer and costume designer for the politically progressive Lester Horton Modern Dance Troupe (an experience that undoubtedly influenced many of his body-conscious designs). By the mid-1940s, he was supplementing his dance career designing fabrics for Hoffman California Fabrics, and in 1952, with the help of fellow Viennese immigrant Walter Bass, he introduced his first full-scale clothing line of loose-cut dresses.
In the 1950s, when most designers were mimicking Christian Dior’s New Look (nipped feminine waists, full skirts, torpedo bras and corseting), Gernreich was emancipating the female body, taking the boning out of swimsuits and introducing the first knit tube dresses, according to show curator Brigitte Felderer, who first mounted the exhibit of 125 looks last year at the Neue Galerie in Graz, Austria. He turned heads with shocking shades of orange and red and used cutouts and sheer fabrics long before Gucci’s Tom Ford.
Gernreich, along with Bonnie Cashin, was one of the first designers to use hardware (zippers, springs, metal fasteners) for ornamentation. He was the first to use clear vinyl in clothing, creating what Coffey-Webb considers to be his signature look: the bright-colored, wool knit miniskirt with clear vinyl panels.
Although attempts had been made at creating unisex clothing earlier in the 20th century, they did not succeed. The tanned and toupeed Gernreich, a consummate showman, was able to make the look a fashion statement, dressing male and female models identically for a 1978 Life magazine fashion spread. In 1979, he patented the first thong. Nielson summed it up best: “He is the source of most of what people are wearing today.”
Although Gernreich enjoyed the trappings of fame (he hired a publicist with his first royalty check), he didn’t particularly care about selling symbols of prestige, according to Felderer. In the 1970s, when logo scarves were all the rage, Gernreich--who was largely unaffected by trends--decorated his scarves with jumbled letters instead. He maintained the belief that clothes should be accessible and reasonably priced (although his certainly weren’t cheap).
One of the first to embrace the concept of lifestyle marketing, he introduced the widely copied “total look” with undergarments, colored tights, shoes and bags to match. He also dabbled in home furnishings, perfume and, after his fashion career fizzled out in the 1980s, gourmet soups.
“He basically invented every modern style idea,” said Cameron Silver, owner of Melrose Avenue vintage store Decades. “To a large degree, he’s underappreciated.” (There are no plans currently to bring the exhibit, which runs through Nov. 11, to L.A.)
Like many in the art community, Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art director Claudia Gould is leery of fashion finding its way into museums. But she maintains Gernreich stands apart from the recent Jacqueline Kennedy exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Giorgio Armani show at the Guggenheim. Jackie wasn’t an artist at all, but a personality, and Armani was a master tailor who happened to have the money to fund a good part of his own exhibit. But Gernreich is different, she said: “He transcended fashion.”
Just four days after the terrorist attacks, the Philadelphia exhibition opened as scheduled with a gala for about 1,000. “We thought about postponing, but we didn’t want to,” Gould said. “In a way, it was very cathartic.” Attendance since then has been good, she said.
To see Gernreich’s clothes is to understand how designers, like artists, can reflect social and political unrest. In the 1960s, “His clothes were democratic mediums of equality between men and women, young and old, rich and poor,” Felderer said. But his most revolutionary piece, the topless “monokini,” introduced in 1964, was largely misunderstood by the public, according to model and muse Peggy Moffitt, who wrote “The Rudi Gernreich Book” (Taschen, 1999).
“He wanted it to be a statement about freedom and equality and the smarmy ‘tee-hee’ attitude toward women and their breasts that existed particularly in America. At the time, women with cleavage were being used to sell everything from motor oil to refrigerators,” she said. Originally, the piece wasn’t going to be manufactured, but the moment it was, “Every crazy woman who wanted to be arrested bought one and photographers from sleazy magazines had a field day. The reaction made [Gernreich] wince,” she said.
When his notoriety landed him on the cover of Time in 1967, Gernreich began to feel the intense pressure which all successful designers labor under. In a continual effort to top himself, his creations became more and more outrageous, threatening to eclipse his raw talent. Increasingly, his clothing had less to do with social issues and more to do with theatricality, Nielson said.
The costumey collection of June 1968, replete with thigh-high boots, tweed tutus and oversized turbans, collided with the nation’s somber mood. During that troubled year, the North Vietnamese Tet offensive and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had “exposed American vulnerability,” Nielson said. “The fashion press had had enough. It’s very similar to what’s happening today. People were saying, ‘This is enough frivolity.”’
But even Gernreich’s folly had social value because it forced “the first serious dialogue about the relevance of fashion, fantasy fashion in particular, in a time of social stress,” Nielson said. After 1968, Gernreich would present only a few more collections, many of which simply revisited old themes.
In 1970, the shootings at Kent State University inspired the designer to resurrect his earlier military look (a Gernreich original). The “Back to School” collection, as he called it, was shown by models toting real guns. “He was making a statement. The idea of sumptuous dressing when students were being shot seemed to have no bearing on reality,” Moffitt said. She believes the recent terrorist attacks would have inspired Gernreich to create a similar collection. “Rudi’s are the clothes that are still relevant today. And we might just have to wear them with guns again.”
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c0c0717537709a0033a12b7c55b36a30 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-30-ca-51525-story.html | Musicians Craft Sounds That Transcend Pop | Musicians Craft Sounds That Transcend Pop
* * * GARBAGE, “Beautifulgarbage”, Interscope
Same old Garbage? Maybe so, but the third album from singer Shirley Manson and the three rock-heads who surround her with sound celebrates sheer sonic splendor with such exuberance that it’s hard not to be seduced again.
Guilty pleasure? Maybe so, but like the year’s other great guilty pleasure, “Weezer,” “Beautifulgarbage” transcends the classic pure-pop touchstones it mines, generating moments of genuine feeling.
Smoke and mirrors? It might seem that way, but in packing the album with twists that keep you bracingly off balance, Garbage reinstates a largely lost rock art, and its tendency to go for broke and pile it on seems more the result of a healthy love of excess than an attempt to cover an empty core.
The band’s mix of everything from Spector to break beats, synth-pop hooks to theatrical Bowie blueprint, actually works to bring out the strong sentiments and attitudes in such songs as “Shut Your Mouth,” a sarcastic rant on the way a celebrity is ravaged by fans and media, and “Androgyny,” a go-for-it endorsement of sexual freedom.
Manson doesn’t have the range and power of Annie Lennox or Chrissie Hynde, the two singers she most evokes, but she’s a good fit here, and she even maintains her presence amid the band’s formidable environments.
She’s better off in the thick of things than out front and naked, but she negotiates the ballads with some finesse, especially the gentle finale, “So Like a Rose.” That track is uncharacteristically restrained, but when it comes to Garbage, more is definitely better.
-- Richard Cromelin
*
* * 1/2 JA RULE, “Pain Is Love”, Def Jam
*
“Thug in Love” might be a better title for this third album from the gravel-voiced New York rapper, who gets mixed results from a set of thuggish tunes geared toward the throngs of ladies supposedly vying for his attention.
The single “Livin’ It Up” best exemplifies Ja Rule’s gangster-influenced ballads, which court radio play as intently as they do those ladies. Borrowing its groove from Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do,” this tune is neither profound nor innovative, yet its bounciness makes it thoroughly satisfying. “I’m Real,” his popular duet with Jennifer Lopez, is one of the album’s stronger songs, as Rule’s rough voice and Lopez’s sugary tones make a surprisingly appealing blend.
When Rule veers from romantic overtures, he’s less effective. The bland “The Inc” features many of his less talented label mates, while the predictable “Worldwide Gangsta” teams Ja Rule with R. Kelly’s wannabe rap friends Boo and Gotti. These cuts simply recycle hard-core themes without adding any clever phrasings or creative beat work to compensate for their ordinariness. It’s telling that Ja Rule, who earned his stripes as a hard-core rapper, now makes better love than war.
-- Soren Baker
*
* * * 1/2 THE HANDSOME FAMILY, “Twilight”, Carrot Top
Brett and Rennie Sparks, the husband-and-wife team from Chicago who go by the name the Handsome Family, give us songs that would be in heavy rotation on any radio station hip enough to include the individuality and craft of such a wonderfully eclectic group of artists as Tom Waits, the Carter Family and Grandaddy. In other words, don’t expect the Sparks to show up on “TRL” anytime soon.
For those willing to search them out, however, they are precisely the kind of pop adventurers who give musical diets valuable seasoning. Their key songs have an edginess that is all the more unsettling because Brett sings Rennie’s lyrics in such a deadpan style.
In “The Snow White Diner,” the opening track on the pair’s fifth album, we hear about a man eating hash browns while cars outside are honking and lights on the bridge are flashing. A woman has killed herself and her two children because she has lost her job and doesn’t want them to be poor.
But all the narrator can do is watch two old women at another table. They are eating liver and onions and laughing so hard that they are banging on the tabletop. It turns out that the women are deaf, and oblivious to the commotion. The incident sets up a philosophical punch line for the song.
Brett’s music is nicely melodic, and the stories are just as unexpected on the other tracks of “Twilight,” which ends with “Peace in the Valley Once Again,” a song that celebrates the closing of the last shopping mall in America. The Handsome Family sometimes operates on a rather strange frequency, but it’s a gifted and unique pop vision. Tune them in.
-- Robert Hilburn
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In Brief
* * Spiritualized, “Let It Come Down,” Arista. After the beautiful, arcing orbit of 1997’s “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space,” leader Jason Pierce now seems unable to reach escape velocity. Lush gospel tones that lifted the earlier album weigh this one down--with elaborate orchestrations and choirs on most songs, the kick of opener “On Fire” too often turns to kitsch. “Gravity just keeps on keeping me down,” Pierce sings in “Out of Sight.” It didn’t used to.
-- Steve Hochman * * * Preston School of Industry, “All This Sounds Gas,” Matador. If it constitutes indie sacrilege to suggest Scott Kannberg has upstaged his Pavement co-founder Stephen Malkmus, blasphemy never sounded so good. Six months after Malkmus’ post-Pavement foray, Kannberg (a.k.a. Spiral Stairs) and bandmates have unveiled a collage of righteously ragged songs that embody his indie lineage. Soaring and melodic and laced with jagged and jangling guitars, Kannberg’s creations feel extemporaneous to the point of nonchalance. There might even be an anthem or two here (see “Encyclopedic Knowledge of”) if Kannberg didn’t insist on being so lyrically arcane.
-- Kevin Bronson * * * Ol’ Dirty Bastard, “The Dirty Story: The Best of ODB,” Elektra. Known for his legal woes and his erratic behavior as much as for his brilliantly demented music, this Wu-Tang Clan member fits the role of disturbed genius. “Story” culls some of the better songs from his first two albums, as well Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” remix, on which ODB delivers an over-the-top performance. Not for the weak-hearted, this abrasive set represents many of the zany New Yorker’s best musical moments.
-- S.B.
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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.
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e76734efc4a599077456f23d46934ac4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-02-fi-oil2-story.html | Crude Oil Hits 6-Month High | Crude Oil Hits 6-Month High
Oil futures prices hit a six-month high Monday and retail gasoline prices continued to rise, amid fears that escalating Middle East violence would squelch petroleum supplies.
The May contract for West Texas intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, bumped briefly above $27 before closing at $26.88 a barrel, up 57 cents, on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The last time oil was this expensive was the week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Oil prices have jumped nearly 8% in the last week as a series of suicide bombings brought the biggest military response by Israel in decades.
Even before the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, oil prices had been rising because of fears of a possible U.S. attack on Iraq.
“Crude oil supplies are not directly at risk due to the Israel- Palestinian conflict; however, there could be a spillover effect if more countries become involved,” said George Clemen, an analyst with Oil-gasoline.com.
Iraq called Monday for Arab states to use oil as a weapon to punish countries supporting Israel and to stop the Jewish state’s current military action against Palestinians.
At a news conference, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said any action by Iran would depend on the collective decision of Islamic countries.
“If they decide to use oil as a weapon, it would be very effective,” he added.
Motorists continued to pay ever-higher pump prices, and analysts see little relief ahead as the reviving economy keeps demand high and the summer driving season approaches.
The U.S. average price for self-serve regular gasoline reached $1.371 a gallon Monday, up 2.9cents from last week but down 7.1cents from a year ago, according to the Energy Information Administration’s weekly survey of 800 service stations.
Californians paid $1.592 a gallon on average, a 3.1-cent increase from last week. A year ago, the California average was 12.4 cents higher.
Los Angeles drivers saw prices rise 2.4 cents to $1.567 a gallon, and San Francisco drivers got a 5.8-cent increase to $1.632 a gallon, reported the EIA, the statistical arm of the Energy Department.
“California has plenty of gasoline physically, so the prices shouldn’t be going up, but the futures prices are going out of control,” said Mark Mahoney, an analyst with Oil Price Information Service, a Lakewood, N.J., company that tracks gasoline prices nationwide. “No one wants to be caught short in this market.”
California refineries do not use much oil from the Middle East, instead processing primarily Alaska and California crudes. Even so, the state’s gasoline market is being affected by movements in world oil prices, said Carol Thorp, spokeswoman for the Automobile Club of Southern California.
Pump prices in California generally are higher than those of other states because of the relative lack of competition in gasoline refining and marketing and because the state’s cleaner-burning gasoline, mandated by air-quality regulations, is produced by few refineries outside of California, Thorp noted.
Refinery problems and a switch to more expensive summer gasoline also boosted prices in the state, analysts said. But the unexpected problems have been fixed and most refineries are wrapping up routine winter maintenance.
“Gasoline prices are still below where they were a year ago, but they’re going up faster,” Thorp said. Prices in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area have leaped 60% since the beginning of the year, Auto Club surveys have found. In addition, national AAA surveys find more motorists planning road trips this summer, which could boost demand, further increasing the pressure on prices, she said.
“There are a lot of unknowns here,” Thorp said. The Auto Club is monitoring refinery production to determine whether refiners will keep up with demand or will produce at lower levels to keep prices high, she said.
Reuters was used in compiling this report.
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f7952a51cefc70e8f9e77e185f73e6ca | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-06-me-goins6-story.html | A.T. Goins, 87; One of Few to Survive White Mob’s 1923 Rosewood Massacre | A.T. Goins, 87; One of Few to Survive White Mob’s 1923 Rosewood Massacre
A.T. Goins, one of the few survivors of the 1923 massacre by a white mob in the small Florida town of Rosewood that left the predominantly black community in ruins, has died. He was 87.
Goins, who was awarded $150,000 in compensation by the Florida Legislature in a highly publicized fight in 1994, died March 24 in St. Petersburg. The cause of death was not announced.
The massacre, documented in the 1997 movie “Rosewood” from director John Singleton, began on Jan. 1, 1923, when a white mill worker’s wife in the nearby town of Sumner claimed that she had been attacked by a black man.
A posse was formed to search for the assailant and went straight to Rosewood, a community of perhaps 200 residents.
When no suspect was found, the posse turned into a vigilante mob, pulling blacks from their homes and burning structures. The siege went on for six days and the mob grew in size, eventually numbering as many as 300 people.
While the official death toll was six blacks and two whites, black descendants of Rosewood have alleged that many more were killed and their bodies hidden in mass graves.
Three days into the siege, the mob came to the home of Sarah Carrier, one of Rosewood’s leading residents. The mob had called for Carrier to come out of her house and she refused. Goins, Carrier’s grandson, was 8. He was hiding upstairs with several other children.
In testimony to the Legislature, Goins recalled the assault on the house.
“Grandma didn’t want to go out, so the mob just started shooting in the house,” Goins said. “Grandma got hit in the head with a bullet.”
Goins’ grandmother was killed. So were two members of the mob, who were shot by Sylvester Carrier, Sarah Carrier’s son, as they tried to enter the house.
“They bust right in that front room and came right into the hallway,” Goins said.
Goins and several other children escaped from the house and were led by an adult to safety in the nearby woods.
A train eventually came and took the survivors of the attack--mostly women and children--to Gainesville. Goins said that he believed the train was sent by a white businessman who had dealings with the people of Rosewood.
Black descendants of Rosewood maintained that the attack on the mill worker’s wife was carried out by the woman’s white lover, a railroad worker, and that she made up the story of the racial attack in an attempt to save her marriage.
Goins said that his sister told him she had seen the woman’s attacker. “My sister said she seen this man go out and step across the fence,” Goins said. “She said it was a white man.”
The survivors of the Rosewood massacre fled to various parts of the state. Goins returned briefly to the area as a teenager when he was playing for a baseball team.
“That was the last time I’ve been to Rosewood,” he told the St. Petersburg Times some years ago. “I don’t want no part of Rosewood.”
All the survivors kept quiet about the events, fearing repercussions.
That silence lasted until the early 1980s when a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times happened upon the area near Rosewood and asked residents why the area was all white. Shocked and intrigued by the answer, reporter Gary Moore spent the next two years searching for survivors and piecing together the Rosewood story. A segment of CBS’ “60 Minutes” later explored the massacre and the long-buried secret.
By the early 1990s, there were calls to provide survivors of the massacre and their descendants with restitution for their suffering.
The state Legislature appointed a team of scholars from several Florida universities to investigate the claims. The scholars determined that police in Rosewood “failed to control local events” and failed to contact the state government for help. Despite some legislators’ reservations, administrative analysts recommended that damages be paid.
Each of the eight known survivors was awarded $150,000. Another $500,000 was designated for families that lost property in the massacre and a $100,000 fund was established for minority scholarships.
Goins is survived by his wife, Anna Maude, a sister and nine grandchildren.
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34c9253fb8e0216727b95fa5615f5a56 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-06-me-ins-story.html | Airline Faces Fines for Ferrying Illegals | Airline Faces Fines for Ferrying Illegals
Qantas Airlines faces a federal fine of more than $50,000 after failing to heed a U.S. law enforcement warning and allowing a group of 17 undocumented Chinese passengers to fly to Los Angeles this week from Australia, the Immigration and Naturalization Service said Friday.
The 17 Chinese nationals, who arrived Wednesday aboard Qantas Flight 93 from Melbourne, were among the largest groups smuggled into Los Angeles International Airport in recent years, officials said. All were taken into INS custody but are expected to apply for political asylum.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Apr. 19, 2002 FOR THE RECORD Los Angeles Times Friday April 19, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 3 inches; 72 words Type of Material: Correction INS and Qantas--A story in the April 6 California section incorrectly stated that the Immigration and Naturalization Service notified Qantas Airlines a week in advance that 17 Chinese passengers lacking proper paperwork to enter the United States might be arriving on a flight to Los Angeles International Airport. The INS says it was mistaken and that the airline was actually notified only one day in advance, on April 2. Qantas denies wrongdoing in the case and is fighting a proposed federal fine of $56,100.
Their presence alarmed federal authorities as the migrants landed amid tightened airline security imposed after Sept. 11. The case also occurred at a time when concern is mounting that Asian-based smuggling syndicates may be turning anew to LAX and other major U.S. airports to try to bring in groups of illegal immigrants.
“That’s both unusual and high these days,” Michael Cronin, the agency’s assistant commissioner for inspections in Washington, said of the 17 smuggled Chinese.
Also dismaying, several officials said, is the likelihood that the suspected smuggler--a U.S. passport-holder who is believed to have accompanied the group from Melbourne--managed to escape. Authorities said the group is likely part of a larger trafficking ring bringing in people from southern China’s Fujian province, a major source of illegal immigrants. The 17 may have been in Australia for two weeks before heading to Los Angeles, one official said.
Smuggled Chinese often pay $35,000 or more to be slipped into the United States, officials say. Once here, they often spend years working off the debt in virtual bondage, as factory hands, cooks, prostitutes or in other jobs.
Airlines are required to review the documentation of all U.S.-bound passengers. Federal law subjects carriers to fines of $3,300 for each arriving passenger lacking visas or other required paperwork. The INS has moved to fine Qantas the maximum, $56,100, said Francisco Arcaute, an INS spokesman in Los Angeles.
In the Qantas case, the INS said officers examining airline passenger data became suspicious a week before the flight left Australia, in part because of the size of the group. U.S. authorities alerted the airline and gave a “strong recommendation” that the group not be allowed to board, said the INS spokesman. The passengers are believed to have destroyed or hidden their passports after checking in for the flight.
Airline officials deny any wrongdoing and plan to appeal, said Steve Kernaghan, a spokesman for Qantas, which has four nonstop flights daily from Australia to LAX, its principal U.S. port of arrival.
In a statement, Bryan Banston, a Qantas senior vice president, said that all paperwork is verified closely and that the airline “adheres to rigorous security and procedural protocols in checking and boarding passengers.”
U.S. officials worry about a return of the large-scale smuggling of Chinese and other Asians--especially via LAX and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport--that prompted a major crackdown a decade ago.
Typically, smuggled passengers destroyed their passports after boarding U.S.-bound aircraft, thus erasing evidence of phony documents that could subject them to criminal prosecution. Many applied for political asylum upon arriving in the United States, posted bonds to get out of detention and then disappeared.
In response, federal authorities tightened asylum rules, expanded detention space and began holding suspected fraudulent asylum applicants until they could be deported. In addition, the INS began to work closely with airlines to identify smuggled groups before they boarded aircraft.
As a result, officials say, the number of foreign nationals arriving at U.S. airports lacking proper documents has dropped substantially.
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e14f926e450095a81caafa796a54016d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-07-me-crash7-story.html | Did Errant Driver Have a Death Wish? | Did Errant Driver Have a Death Wish?
A 20-year-old man driving the wrong way down a busy Orange County freeway did nothing to avoid oncoming vehicles before he slammed into a luxury car, killing himself and a couple on their way to a poetry reading class, witnesses said Saturday.
Still shaken by their close brush with death in Friday evening’s fiery crash, witnesses Jerry and Barbara Lehman recalled how they were driving north on the San Joaquin Hills tollway, heading to dinner with friends, when they saw the headlights of a black Ford Ranger pickup hurtling toward them.
Jerry Lehman, who was at the wheel of the family Volvo, instinctively swerved right, rubbing against another car on the freeway’s slow lane as the Ranger rushed past, inches away. Looking into his rear view mirror, Lehman saw sparks fly as the pickup truck, driven by Steven McLin of Long Beach, struck a Jaguar S-Type car that had been immediately behind the Lehmans.
“He was coming very fast--head on,” recalled Barbara Lehman, 56. “It looked like it was totally intentional, almost like it was a suicide.”
The Lehmans stopped their car and ran 300 yards back to the accident scene to see if they could help the injured.
“There weren’t any skid marks at all [on the freeway],” said Jerry Lehman, 60. “I don’t think he made any effort at all to stop.”
California Highway Patrol officers released few details Saturday about their investigation of why McLin was driving on the wrong side of the road.
Killed along with McLin were the passenger and driver of the Jaguar: Farzad Yaganeh and his wife, Fereshteh Sadeghi, both 41. The Laguna Niguel couple, who had two daughters, 7 and 12, were on their way to a reading of Iranian poetry in Irvine.
Clad in black, friends and relatives gathered at the couple’s home Saturday. The two were college sweethearts and remained devoted after 17 years of marriage, friends said.
“They were very much in love,” said Mahasti Sadighi, a close friend of the couple.
“It was good that they died together. They couldn’t have survived without each other. They were always together.”
They came to the United States shortly before the 1979 Iranian revolution and met as college students in Boston. Yaganeh owned an Orange County property rental and investment business, said his brother-in-law, Tony Sadeghi.
Yaganeh’s wife worked until recently as a commodities broker in Aliso Viejo. But two months ago, she decided to quit work so she could spend more time with her daughters, Sadighi said.
The couple, she said, were fixtures at their girls’ elementary school, volunteering to take students on field trips and helping with grading.
Friday evening, the couple were heading to a meeting of the Persian poetry group they attended each week.
Shortly before 6:18 p.m., the CHP said, McLin drove his brand-new pickup up an offramp and onto the freeway at Bonita Canyon Road. Whether he did so mistakenly remains unclear. His family could not be reached for comment.
About two miles up the freeway from the offramp, McLin’s pickup whizzed by the Lehmans’ car before smashing into the Jaguar.
When the Lehmans made their way back to the crash scene, they saw the pickup split in two. The rear of the Ranger lay atop a Toyota Tacoma pickup whose driver, Debbie Kellog of Costa Mesa, escaped serious injury.
McLin and Sadeghi were already dead. Yaganeh was on the side of the road. He was airlifted to Western Medical Center-Santa Ana and later pronounced dead.
“It was terrifying,” said Barbara Lehman. “That was the closest I’ve ever come to death. It could have been us.”
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71b8c16ca89a13fb3bc797a1314e57fd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-07-mn-36626-story.html | Slain Bride’s Parents Tormented by ‘If Onlys’ | Slain Bride’s Parents Tormented by ‘If Onlys’
Anastasia’s parents are tormented by thoughts of what might have been.
If only they hadn’t pushed their daughter so hard to succeed, to seek in America what they couldn’t provide in Kyrgyzstan. If only they hadn’t given the matchmaking agency that photo of Anastasia looking so fresh and innocent. If only they hadn’t believed the lies of that fast-talking American who wanted to make Anastasia his wife.
“We were so blind,” says her mother, a black shawl of mourning wrapped around her shoulders. “If I had trusted him less, I could have saved my daughter.”
Anastasia King was a mail-order bride, one of the 4,000 to 6,000 women who come to America each year, marrying men they barely know.
Many of them find economic security, and some even find love.
Anastasia found her way to a shallow grave. Indle King Jr., convicted of murdering his young bride, was sentenced March 25 to nearly 29 years in prison.
The punishment may be fair but it brings little solace, for nothing can return Anastasia to them, say her parents, Anatolyi Soloviev and Alevtina Solovieva. Memories will have to do, and of those they have no end. Anastasia had an astonishing smile, her parents say. It was a smile that turned heads and lit up the bleakest day like sunshine.
She was their only child, and in her they invested the dreams they could not realize for themselves in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic where prosperity eludes all but a few.
The parents, both music teachers in Bishkek, tried to shield their family from worldly woes with what Alevtina calls “a wall of music.” But they worried about how to pay for a good education for Anastasia, a diligent student and gifted pianist.
When they heard that a relative had found an American husband through a mail-order bride service, they signed up Anastasia. Soon a photograph of their 18-year-old daughter--sitting on the floor, beaming that astonishing smile--joined the pictures of dozens of other women in a catalog.
Before long, letters started arriving. There were piles of them, and among them was one from a man named Indle King.
He’d enclosed a photograph, but it was very small. Mother and daughter peered at it. He seemed old and overweight. “Is that a beard, or a second chin?” Alevtina wondered.
But Indle King was persistent. He wrote, he called, and in December 1997 he arrived in Kyrgyzstan for a visit. He struck Anastasia’s father as an organized, efficient man. He impressed Anastasia’s mother with his interest in classical music.
He was highly educated, with an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was from a well-to-do family in Seattle, which the Solovievs knew as the prosperous land of Bill Gates.
Still, the parents had reservations. At 36, Indle was twice their daughter’s age, and at 270 pounds was nearly twice her weight. She was beautiful, with silken hair down to her waist; he was dumpy and nearly bald. He’d also been married and divorced before, to another Russian mail-order bride, which they wondered about until he explained that she had run off, abandoning him most cruelly.
He had a keen sense of humor, and he swept up Anastasia with promises of a wonderful life. She’d find adventure and a good education in America, he told her, and she’d never want for money.
“A man loves with his eyes, but a woman loves with her ears,” Alevtina says. “The girl just idealized him.”
Three months after meeting Indle in Kyrgyzstan, Anastasia flew to America for a visit. One month after that, on April 30, 1998, they went before a justice of the peace and were married.
The honeymoon soon ended.
Anastasia complained that her husband wanted to know where she was every minute of the day. He wouldn’t let her get a driver’s license. They argued a lot. He said he wanted children; she said she wasn’t ready.
He wasn’t as well-off as he’d led her to believe, so they took in boarders at their home in Mountlake Terrace, a suburb of Seattle. Anastasia enrolled at the University of Washington and worked long hours as a waitress and restaurant hostess. Indle took money from her account.
Anastasia read books about how to save a marriage, but nothing seemed to help. By the summer of 2000, two years into their marriage, “it was warfare,” her mother says.
Indle was corresponding with other prospective mail-order brides. Anastasia was seeing other men and keeping a list of her husband’s transgressions. He threatened to hurt her, forced her to have sex, and forbade her from going to a counselor, she wrote in a journal that she hid in a safe-deposit box.
Anastasia grew depressed. One day, she showed up at work with bandages covering cuts on her wrists, recalls her boss, Patty Swaney.
“Nothing can be that bad, ever,” Swaney admonished her.
“It was a weak moment,” Anastasia said. “I won’t do it again.”
In August 2000, Anastasia flew to Kyrgyzstan, her second visit that summer to see her parents. Shortly after she left, Indle filed for divorce, telling his attorney that he had no idea where his wife was, even though he talked with Anastasia frequently by phone.
In September, Indle joined his wife in Kyrgyzstan. By this point, Anastasia was telling her parents she was determined to go back to America, get divorced and apply for permanent residence, now that she’d been married for the required two years to a U.S. citizen.
The couple arrived at the Seattle airport on Sept. 22, 2000, and took a shuttle bus to their home. It was the last day Anastasia was seen alive.
Indle King initially told police he’d left his wife in Moscow, changing his story only when confronted with records that showed them clearing Customs together in Seattle.
He still insists he had nothing to do with the death of his wife, but jurors at his five-week murder trial earlier this year came to believe a different tale told by Daniel Larson, 21, a boarder in the Kings’ home.
In December 2000, Larson led investigators to Anastasia’s body, buried in a shallow grave on an Indian reservation 25 miles away.
At trial, Larson testified that Indle King had enlisted him to kill Anastasia so he could avoid another expensive divorce like the one from his first wife, which cost him $55,000.
Larson said Indle lured Anastasia into the garage the night they returned, then grabbed her in a bear hug while Larson slipped a necktie around her neck. The trio lurched back into the house, where Indle lay on top of her while Larson twisted ever tighter, Larson said.
They stripped her body and cut off her long, blond hair, then stuffed her into a shallow grave, Larson testified.
Defense attorneys raised doubts about Larson, a convicted sex offender who changed his story several times and testified only after prosecutors offered him a plea bargain for second-degree murder.
But the jury not only convicted Indle King of first-degree murder, they fell in love with Anastasia.
On Feb. 24, three days after handing down their verdict, all but two of the jurors joined Anastasia’s parents at a graveside service. They held hands in a circle around the grave and prayed. Alevtina and Anatolyi gave them each a chocolate egg, one of Anastasia’s favorite treats, and the jurors gave the parents a plaque.
“In remembrance of Anastasia,” it read, “who only wished to follow her dream.”
Brought to America last year to help investigators, Anastasia’s parents now are asking immigration officials to grant them a special humanitarian visa to stay, saying they want to remain close to their daughter’s grave.
Alevtina tries to focus on memories of better times, such as the days in September 2000, when Anastasia, finding strength among family in Kyrgyzstan, regained her bubbly confidence. She started flashing that astonishing smile again, and people turned to look when she walked by.
But one memory leads to the next, and Alevtina cannot help but think about how her daughter looked when she realized her husband soon would arrive to take her back to America.
She would be strong, Anastasia told her mother. She would do what she had to do. But she did not look strong. Her whole body seemed to shrink at the very thought of Indle King. Her green eyes stared vacantly, and tears flowed down her cheeks.
“Mama,” Anastasia asked, “why do I feel so sad?”
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b6ababca584f0773f143c0eeaa19fc0d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-10-me-lopez10-story.html | Chief’s Inflexibility Doomed Him | Chief’s Inflexibility Doomed Him
It wasn’t Mayor Jim Hahn who did in Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, and it wasn’t the Police Commission. If City Council members make it a trifecta, it won’t be them either.
Bernie Parks has always been dedicated, and sometimes he’s been an inspiration, and he brought a much-deserved sense of relief to a community that had lived in fear of unscrupulous thugs wearing badges.
But Parks was sunk by the very thing that drove him to the top of a force he served through four decades--the myopic conviction that by sheer will, he, and he alone, could fix what was wrong with the LAPD.
If there was anything surprising about Tuesday’s Police Commission vote, it was only the margin. As deliberations dragged on behind closed doors, people began wondering if Parks might find a third vote of support among the five commissioners. But in the end it was 4 to 1, which makes it all the more clear it’s time for Parks to go.
“Violent crime has continued to rise ... while cities such as New York and Chicago are experiencing a drop,” said Rick Caruso, head of the Police Commission.
But crime rises and falls in every city, often without any direct relationship to what police do or don’t do. Parks’ greater liabilities were rock-bottom morale, which has led to an 1,100-officer shortage, and an inability to accept a glaring truth:
As the Christopher Commission report put it 10 years ago, the LAPD’s problems are part of an inbred, entrenched, closed culture that can only be saved by opening it up to outside review.
Parks would have none of it.
The Rampart scandal? Not a problem. The chief’s got it under control, and if you happen to hear anything to the contrary, it’s because the L.A. Times has “ginned up” a meager little story. A story that begins, incidentally, back in 1994, when Parks himself headed the Internal Affairs division that first heard complaints of rogue cops brutalizing citizens and planting evidence.
“The Christopher Commission said you’ve got to turn away from the insular, retaliatory, bunker culture; the culture that sinks Serpicos and anybody who blows a whistle,” said Constance Rice, a civil rights attorney who has represented victims of abuse, as well as officers with grievances against the department.
“When you don’t share information with the D.A., you don’t share with the inspector general, and in fact get in the way of information he needs; and you don’t share information with the police commissioners, that’s the old culture,” she said.
“When you say you can take care of your own problems with a ‘policing ourselves’ culture, you’re going to have Rampart and you’re going to have Rodney King.”
Rice, who is African American, believes Mayor Hahn bungled the Parks affair, publicly withdrawing his support without first building an argument for it in the black community and elsewhere.
“He threw a grenade into the process and badly politicized it, and it’s not salvageable at this point,” she said of Hahn’s relationship with the black community, which helped put him where he is.
But Rice agreed with the substance of Hahn’s stand on Parks, and had the courage to say so in a crowd of 1,500 at Second Baptist Church.
“I was the only one in the room who said Parks shouldn’t get a second term,” said Rice.
Parks, she said, will tell you that Internal Affairs is the engine for reform, rather than outside review.
“Internal Affairs is the problem. It’s like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.”
The black community had good reason to feel comfortable with Parks in charge, Rice said, but it should have been more demanding.
“I used to drive down Crenshaw, and there wasn’t a time I didn’t see someone pulled over in what looked like a suspicious stop,” she said.
“The attitude of the cops was, ‘We own the streets.’ When the changes came, I expected the community to say, ‘We like this guy. He comes to our churches, he comes to dinner, cops are respecting us. What more do you want?’
“But I’m looking at it as a civil rights attorney who has studied the system for 15 years, met with cops and lawyers and judges, and wants to get to the point where it doesn’t matter who the chief is.”
Parks has insisted that he’s demanded the same professionalism from every officer, and if morale is low as a result, so be it. But some cops have told me they see it differently, and Rice does too.
“He’s fired some cops who should have been fired, but also kept some who should have been fired. There are people everyone knows committed the same offenses as someone who got fired, but because they’re in the chief’s camp, they’re not even investigated. Yes, there is a group out to get him, and some of those are racist cops. But the vast majority of officers are not in that camp. They’re concerned about how discipline is implemented, how fair it is and how consistent.”
But for all of their intellectual differences, Rice has grown to respect Parks.
“Everything he does is out of the profound belief that it’s for the good of the department, which he loves as much as he loves life. What he does is not venal or a power trip or anything else. It’s totally to serve. He’s blue. LAPD blue.
“But I’ve been locked in a room with him in negotiations and seen him interact with Jim Hahn, mediators and judges, and that rigidity and inflexibility is ferocious to the point that it’s the elephant in the room.
“Is he a great cop? No question. Is he dedicated? Off the scale. But when it comes to leadership and the capacity to move people and sell his vision, it didn’t work, and a lot of it had to do with his inability to hear anyone else.”
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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.
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93e6970fe4a68150224d13a1f85ced89 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-10-me-noga10-story.html | Helen Noga, 88; Club Owner Made Johnny Mathis Into a Star | Helen Noga, 88; Club Owner Made Johnny Mathis Into a Star
Helen Noga, the feisty music industry player who discovered the young Johnny Mathis and tough-mindedly developed his extraordinary singing career, has died at the age of 88.
Noga died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of heart failure, according to her publicist, Warren Cowan.
In the mid-1950s, Noga and her husband, John [who died in 1999], owned two San Francisco jazz clubs, the Black Hawk and the Downbeat. The clubs attracted to their small stages many of the world’s finest jazz musicians, including Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.
A San Francisco State sextet, fronted by a 19-year-old singer named Johnny Mathis, was eager to try its chops in Sunday afternoon jam sessions at the Black Hawk.
Noga’s ears perked up at Mathis’ high-ranging voice, which would soon weave itself into national consciousness with such recordings as “Wonderful! Wonderful!” “It’s Not for Me to Say,” “Chances Are” and “The Twelfth of Never.”
Noga immediately established herself as Mathis’ manager, arranged other club bookings and called George Avakian, head of jazz at Columbia Records.
Avakian heard Mathis sing a haunting version of “Tenderly” and, as the legend goes, cabled his record company’s home office: “Have found phenomenal 19-year-old boy who could go all the way. Send blank contracts.”
The Nogas sold their clubs and moved to Beverly Hills, where the young singer lived with them from 1958 until he severed their business relationship in 1964. During that time, Helen Noga launched him, making certain he got the career-boosting attention he needed, even if it meant dressing the non-tennis-playing Mathis in tennis whites for photo shoots.
Insisting on proper treatment for her protege, Noga refused to sign a contract for Mathis with the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas unless they allowed him to come and go through the front door--a privilege denied earlier African American performers, including Nat “King” Cole.
After her decade of working with Mathis, Noga wrote a novel, “Ayisha,” published in 1972, the story of a love affair between a Turkish Muslim and an Armenian Christian.
In her long career, Noga also worked with Phil Spector to found and fund Philly Records.
She is survived by a daughter, Beverly; a granddaughter and two great-granddaughters.
Funeral services are planned at 1 p.m. Friday at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in the Hollywood Hills.
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156ff674933634a5dbe90e55758e94a9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-17-fo-stuff17-story.html | Lovely Lemon Pickles | Lovely Lemon Pickles
If you want to wait six weeks, you can pickle your own lemons to add their exotic fragrance to salads, cheese dishes and North African stews. But you probably won’t have organically grown Meyer lemons to work with, the way these gorgeous pickles do. Try some with roasted sweet peppers and crushed garlic.
Moroccan lemon preserves, $10.50 for a 17-ounce jar plus $6.95 shipping (either one or two jars) from La Vigne Enterprises; call (760) 723-9997 or go to www.lavigne fruits.com on the Web.
Charles Perry
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Key to the Real Goods
Tired of waiters in ethnic restaurants refusing to bring you that great-looking stuff the next table is eating? Here’s the solution: Your very own multilingual “Chowhound Passport,” which tells your server in seven languages that you want what everyone else is having. Translations include Spanish, Filipino, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Japanese (the Chinese version reads: “I have a foreign face but a Chinese stomach”).
“The Chowhound Passport,” $5 from the Chowhound Web site (chowhound.safe shopper.com).
Russ Parsons
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0574df14407ecd23427c98d90da9339c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-17-me-urich17-story.html | Robert Urich, 55; Popular Star of ‘Vega$' and ‘Spenser’ | Robert Urich, 55; Popular Star of ‘Vega$' and ‘Spenser’
Robert Urich, the personable actor best known for his tough-guy TV roles as Las Vegas private detective Dan Tana on “Vega$" and as Robert Parker’s sophisticated Boston private investigator in “Spenser: For Hire,” died Tuesday morning of cancer. He was 55.
Urich, whose career spanned 30 years, died at the Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, said his publicist, Cindy Guagenti. His wife of 28 years, actress Heather Menzies, and his three children were with him at the time.
Six years ago, Urich was diagnosed with synovial cell sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that attacks the joints. The cancer was discovered in his groin, and had gone into remission after chemotherapy, radiation treatment and two surgeries.
Urich told Daily Variety columnist Army Archerd in November that more lumps had been found over the summer, but that a “wonder drug” had cleared up the recurrence. According to Guagenti, Urich, who was writing his memoirs, titled “An Extraordinary Life,” was hospitalized for breathing problems last week.
According to the book “10,000 Answers: The Ultimate Trivia Encyclopedia,” Urich holds the record of starring in 15 TV shows--the most of any actor. Throughout his career, Urich moved effortlessly between drama and comedy, action-thrillers and period westerns.
After appearing in guest roles on television, he made his sitcom debut in 1973 in the short-lived series “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” The same year, Urich made his feature movie debut in the Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” sequel “Magnum Force.”
Among his series were “S.W.A.T.” (1975-76); “Soap” (1978); “Tabitha” (1977-78); “Vega$" (1978-81); “Gavilan” (1982-83); “Spenser: For Hire” (1985-88); “American Dreamer” (1990-91); “Crossroads” (1992-93); “It Had to Be You” (1993): “The Lazarus Man” (1995-96), “Love Boat: The Next Wave” (1998) and “Emeril” (2001).
Producer Aaron Spelling, who cast Urich in a supporting role in the action show “S.W.A.T.” and later as the lead in “Vega$,” said there was a reason Urich kept turning up in series again and again.
“He was just one of the sweetest men I’ve ever met,” Spelling said. “No matter what you put him in, the audience loved him.”
Urich also appeared in numerous TV movies and miniseries, including the Emmy Award-winner “Lonesome Dove,” as well as “The Defiant Ones,” “Stranger at My Door,” “Final Descent,” “Captains Courageous” and “Miracle on the 17th Green.”
Among his feature credits were “Turk 182!,” “Ice Pirates” and “Cloverbend.” His most recent TV movie, “Night of the Wolf,” premiered Monday evening on Animal Planet.
In 1995, Urich received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He even founded a publishing company, Beaver Dam Press, which specializes in outdoor books.
It was during his first season on the TNT western series “The Lazarus Man” that Urich was diagnosed with cancer. In 2000, he sued Castle Rock Television, the studio producing the show, alleging that the company pulled the plug on the series because of his illness.
Urich had told the company in 1996 that despite his cancer he would be able to perform. In the breach-of-contract suit, which was settled, Urich sought the approximately $73,000 that he would have received for each episode in the second season.
Urich went public with his disease as soon as the cancer was diagnosed, and appeared on such talk shows as “Larry King Live” during his chemotherapy treatment to discuss his condition. His openness and optimism about his battle with cancer made him a popular lecturer.
“I’ve been flying around the country for the last year talking to groups,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1998. “It’s part of my deal I made with God to spread the word that it is survivable, that this notion of ‘cancer-free’ is one that you can achieve.”
Of his popularity and steady work in television, Urich once told The Times:
“I think my longevity has a lot to do with where I come from--a blue-collar town in Ohio--and how I was raised: to work hard and respect other folks.
“I know it sounds hokey but I think, ultimately, on television you can’t hide who you are. It’s why people are always coming up to me, not to talk about my shows but about their families, their pets. They obviously feel comfortable with me.”
Athletically built and ruggedly handsome, the 6-foot, 2-inch actor was born Dec. 16, 1946, in Toronto, Ohio, a blue-collar steel town west of Pittsburgh. Urich was a football star in the small town and attended Florida State University on a football scholarship.
As a student, he hosted his own weekly television series. He earned a bachelor’s degree in radio and television communications in 1968 and received a master’s in broadcast research and management from Michigan State University three years later.
He worked briefly as a television weatherman and as an account executive at WGN-AM radio in Chicago. While at WGN, he was hired to play a young soldier and open a Jewish United Bond drive with a patriotic speech. He fell in love with acting, but ended up losing his job because his boss attended the bond drive and enforced the station’s policy against moonlighting.
Urich made his stage debut in a community theater production in Chicago of Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna’s romantic comedy “Lovers and Other Strangers.” For the next 18 months, he performed at Chicago’s Ivanhoe Theater and the Arlington Park and Pheasant Run Theaters.
He got his big break when fellow Florida State alum Burt Reynolds cast him as his younger brother in a 1972 stage production of Richard Nash’s “The Rainmaker.”
“Robert Urich was an athlete, artist, a wonderful friend, and he was one of those rare people who never said anything unkind about anybody,” Reynolds said Tuesday.
“His professionalism was exemplary,” Reynolds added. “I have known Bob for 35 years, and in all that time he has been the kindest and most loyal friend. I adore him, his wife and children, and we will all miss him greatly.”
Urich and his wife formed the Heather and Robert Urich Foundation for Sarcoma Research at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. Earlier this year, he donated the $125,000 he won on the ABC game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to the foundation.
Urich also was the recipient of the Gilda Radner Courage Award from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., and was named national spokesman for the American Cancer Society in 1998.
The actor returned to the stage in 1999, starring in the national tour and Broadway production of the Kander and Ebb musical “Chicago,” playing slick lawyer Billy Flynn.
His wife and three children--Allison, Ryan and Emily--two brothers, a sister and his mother survive him. A public service is scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in North Hollywood.
The family has requested that any donations be made to the University of Michigan Comprehensive Center’s Robert Urich Fund, 1500 E. Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0755.
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c5ae426cf2be4ae8d6db251411c96acf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-19-fi-yodel19-story.html | Yodeler Tells Yahoo: I’ll Sue You-Hooo! | Yodeler Tells Yahoo: I’ll Sue You-Hooo!
A cowboy-singer-poet from a town called Dusty is accusing Internet giant Yahoo Inc. in a lawsuit of rustling his signature vocalization in thousands of commercials.
Wylie Gustafson, who was paid $590 to record the “ya-hooo” six years ago, says the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based global network owes him $5 million for poaching his yodel.
“All I know is I created this yodel and it’s become an audio trademark for this company, and that wasn’t the original agreement,” Gustafson, 40, said Thursday in a telephone interview from his ranch in eastern Washington, near the town of Dusty, population 12.
“They totally ignored the fact that it is a creation and it’s a copyrighted thing,” he said. “They just ran with it....Getting taken advantage of is part of the business. But this is way beyond the scope of what I consider fair.”
A spokeswoman for Yahoo declined to comment.
Although the copyright issues appear to be garden variety, Gustafson’s attempt to collect on a yodel may be a first, lawyers said.
“I’ve never heard of that one before,” said Jay L. Cooper, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who represents actor Jerry Seinfeld and singer Sheryl Crow. “Usually copyright infringement is on scripts or songs or literary properties of one sort or other.”
But, said New York lawyer Peter Toren, “there is no reason you could not copyright a yodel.”
The bigger question, lawyers said, is whether a yodel is worth $5 million.
“The $5 million is just an estimate,” said Larry C. Russ, Gustafson’s Los Angeles lawyer. The commercials “have aired thousands of times, and there is a value to that.”
The work of Gustafson, one of a handful of professional yodelers in the U.S., was big with advertisers in the 1990s. His yodels were featured in commercials for Porsche, Honda, Taco Bell, Miller Light and Sprint, all of which paid actors union rates for the performance and residuals for each airing, he said.
When Gustafson was asked to yodel for an Internet start-up in 1996, he said, he agreed to do it for $590, less than the union rate.
“They were still a small, starving company,” he said. “They didn’t have a lot of money for their commercials, and I understood.”
The commercial aired, Gustafson said, and he thought that was the end of it. But three years later, Gustafson heard his yodel on a new Yahoo commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.
He said he complained to the production company that he had not given his permission for the yodel to be used in subsequent commercials, and he got another $590 check.
Gustafson describes his life on his Web site as “ropin’, wranglin’, writin’ and recordin’.” He says he would have been happy to leave out litigatin’, but he kept hearing his yodel. He filed suit this week after Yahoo failed to answer letters.
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9cc1c9896fa6bbb7e23974169aa661dd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-27-me-freeway27-story.html | Man, 18, on Life Support After Drive-By Shooting | Man, 18, on Life Support After Drive-By Shooting
An 18-year-old man was on life support and two other men were wounded in a drive-by shooting on Roscoe Boulevard in Sun Valley, authorities said Friday.
Jose Alejandro Padilla of Arleta was shot once in the head Thursday night as the Chevy Suburban he was riding in was riddled with bullets near Webb Avenue, said Det. Vince Bancroft of the Los Angeles Police Department’s North Hollywood Division.
Witnesses told police that three or four men were in a turquoise compact car that fled east on Roscoe after the 10:15 p.m. shooting. The assailants first spotted the SUV leaving a gas station and caught up to it near Webb Avenue, where at least one man opened fire, Bancroft said.
Padilla was sitting in the back seat of the Suburban. An unidentified 26-year-old man also was riding in the SUV.
Bancroft said the Suburban’s 18-year-old driver got on the Golden State Freeway, but his vehicle was losing fluids from bullet holes in the radiator. The driver stopped near the Sheldon Street exit, where a Caltrans crew and a California Highway Patrol officer helped the men, Bancroft said.
Padilla was taken to a local hospital and the other two were treated and released from County-USC Medical Center.
The shooting is believed to be gang-related, Bancroft said.
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f326c1527df5eb069c090e692f60669b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-28-mn-40473-story.html | Ruth Handler, Inventor of Barbie Doll, Dies at 85 | Ruth Handler, Inventor of Barbie Doll, Dies at 85
Ruth Handler, the entrepreneur and marketing genius who co-founded Mattel and created the Barbie doll, one of the world’s most enduring and popular toys, died Saturday.
Handler, 85, died at Century City Hospital in Los Angeles of complications following colon surgery about three months ago, said her husband, Elliot.
The longtime Southern California resident defied prevailing trends in the toy industry of the late 1950s when she proposed an alternative to the flat-chested baby dolls then marketed to girls.
Barbie, a teenage doll with a tiny waist, slender hips and impressive bust, became not only a best-selling toy with more than 1 billion sold in 150 countries, but a cultural icon analyzed by scholars, attacked by feminists and showcased in the Smithsonian Institution.
Although best known for her pivotal role as Barbie’s inventor, Handler devoted her later years to a second, trailblazing career: manufacturing and marketing artificial breasts for women who had undergone mastectomies.
Herself a breast cancer survivor, she personally sold and fitted the prosthesis and crisscrossed the country as a spokeswoman for early detection of the disease in the 1970s, when it was still a taboo subject.
Recognizing the continuity in her evolution from “Barbie’s mom” to prosthesis pioneer, Handler sometimes quipped, “I’ve lived my life from breast to breast.”
Born Ruth Mosko, she was the youngest of 10 children of Polish immigrants who settled in Denver. Her father was a blacksmith who deserted the Russian army. Her mother, who was illiterate, arrived in the United States in the steerage section of a steamship. Her mother’s health was so frail that Handler was raised by an older sister.
When she was 19, she left Denver for a vacation in Hollywood and wound up staying. Her high school boyfriend, Elliot Handler, followed her west and married her in 1938. She worked as a secretary at Paramount Studios while he studied industrial design at the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena).
When Elliot made some simple housewares to furnish their apartment, Ruth persuaded him to produce more for sale. They bought some workshop equipment from Sears and launched a giftware business in their garage, making items such as bowls, mirrors and clocks out of plastic. With Ruth showing the product line to local stores, sales reached $2 million within a few years.
In 1942 they teamed up with another industrial designer, Harold “Matt” Mattson, to launch a business manufacturing picture frames. Using leftover wood and plastic scrap, they later launched a sideline making dollhouse furniture. Within a few years, the company turned profitable and began to specialize in toys. It was called Mattel, a name fashioned from the “Matt” in Mattson and the “El” in Elliot.
Early successes were musical toys, such as the Uke-A-Doodle, a child-size ukulele, and a cap gun called the Burp gun, which the Handlers advertised on the new medium of television. It was the first time a toy had been sold on national television year-round.
In the late 1950s, Elliot was so preoccupied with the development of a talking doll--eventually marketed as Chatty Cathy--that he was of little help to Ruth when she came up with an idea of her own.
Noting their daughter Barbara’s fascination with paper dolls of teenagers or career women, she realized there was a void in the market. She began to wonder if a three-dimensional version of the adult paper figures would have appeal. Why not sell a doll that allowed girls, as she would later say, to “dream dreams of the future”? This doll, she mused, would have to be lifelike. In other words, Handler believed, it would have to have breasts.
When she took the idea to Mattel’s executives, who were men, they sneered that no mother would buy her daughter a grown-up doll with a bosom. “Our guys all said, ‘Naw, no good,’ ” she recalled. “I tried more than once and nobody was interested, and I gave up.”
Inspired by German Doll
She let the project idle until 1956 when, during a European vacation, she spied a German doll called Lilli in a display case. It had a voluptuous figure, reminiscent of the poster pinups that entertained soldiers during World War II. Handler brought the doll home to Mattel’s designers and ordered them to draw up plans and find a manufacturer in Japan who could produce it.
Handler’s dream made its debut at the 1959 American Toy Fair in New York City. Named for her daughter, “Barbie Teen-Age Fashion Model” had a girl-next-door ponytail, black-and-white striped bathing suit and teeny feet that fit into open-toed heels. Mattel sold more than 350,000 the first year, and orders soon backed up for the doll, which retailed for $3. “The minute that doll hit the counter, she walked right off,” Handler said.
By the early 1960s, Mattel had annual sales of $100 million, due largely to Barbie. The company, then based in Hawthorne, annually turned out new versions of Barbie as well as an ever-expanding wardrobe of outfits and accessories befitting the new princess of toydom. Soon enough Barbie sprouted a coterie of friends and family. Ken, named for the Handlers’ son, appeared in 1961; Midge in 1963; Skipper in 1965; and African American doll Christie, Barbie’s first ethnic friend, in 1969. The first black Barbie came much later, in 1981.
Other dolls were named for Handler’s grandchildren, including Stacie, Todd and Cheryl.
Under pressure from feminists, Barbie evolved from fashion model to career woman, including doctor, astronaut, police officer, paramedic, athlete, veterinarian and teacher.
Over the years, the toy inspired Barbie clubs, conventions, magazines and Web sites. Barbie was immortalized by Andy Warhol, preserved in time capsules and inspired conceptual artists who spiked the doll’s hair or posed it in pickle jars to make statements.
M.G. Lord, author of “Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Living Doll,” called Barbie the most potent icon of American culture of the late 20th century.
“She’s an archetypal female figure, she’s something upon which little girls project their idealized selves,” she said. “For most baby boomers, she has the same iconic resonance as any female saints, although without the same religious significance.”
The National Organization for Women and other feminists targeted Barbie in the 1970s, arguing that the doll promoted unattainable expectations for young girls. If Barbie was 5 foot 6 instead of 11 1/2 inches tall, her measurements, would be 39-21-33. An academic expert once calculated that a woman’s likelihood of being shaped like Barbie was less than 1 in 100,000.
(Ken was shaped somewhat more realistically: The chances of a boy developing his measurements were said to be 1 in 50.)
Handler said she did not take offense at the feminist broadsides and often noted that successful women had played with Barbie and told her the doll helped them enact their aspirations. Even artists’ tortured interpretations of Barbie didn’t bother her. “More power to them,” said Handler, who kept a gold-plated Barbie in her Century City high-rise.
“My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be,” Handler wrote in her 1994 autobiography. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.”
Rare Achievement for Woman of Her Era
Handler herself must have bedeviled feminists. Although Barbie was mocked as a bimbo, her creator was ahead of most women of her generation, juggling career and children in the 1950s when the ideal woman was someone more like the cheerful and industrious television housewife Donna Reed.
By 1966, Handler was 50 and Mattel ruled the highly competitive toy world: It controlled 12% of the $2-billion toy market in the United States. “I had my career, my husband, my children, Barbie and Ken, and I was on top of the world,” Handler recalled.
By 1970, however, her world began to unravel. Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. New corporate managers began to diversify Mattel away from toys, and their machinations ultimately resulted in the Handlers’ ouster from the company they had founded.
To make matters worse, in 1978 Handler was indicted by a grand jury on charges of fraud and false reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission. She pleaded no contest and was fined $57,000 and sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service.
She later attributed her downfall to her illness, which she said caused her to be “unfocused” about a massive corporate reorganization she had begun. When she returned to work after her mastectomy, no one mentioned the reason she had been gone but many gave her sorrowful looks, which reduced her to tears.
“I’d been opinionated and outspoken. I had strong leadership skills. I had been running a company making hundreds of millions of dollars a year. We had 15,000 employees. I had a big job. But suddenly,” she said, “I was supposed to whisper about what I’d been through.”
The experience was so unnerving, she told USA Today in 1994, that “I was never able to get back in and grab hold of things as I should have.”
In 1975, she and her husband were forced out of Mattel. The following year she founded a new company, but not to make toys.
Ruthton Corp. in Inglewood was the result of the humiliation Handler experienced when she sought to restore her appearance to its pre-mastectomy state. Her doctor told her to stuff the empty side of her bra with a pair of rolled-up stockings. The effect was so awful that Handler went to a Beverly Hills department store and asked a saleslady for an artificial breast. She was taken to a dressing room and with no explanation was handed a surgical bra and a couple of gloves. She eventually figured out that she was supposed to stuff the bra with the gloves.
A New Concept for Artificial Breasts
She finally found someone who made prosthetic breasts, but they were little better. “I looked at the shapeless glob that lay in the bottom of my brassiere and thought, ‘My god, the people in this business are men who don’t have to wear these.’ ” She decided she should manufacture one herself.
The Nearly Me prosthetic breast was made of liquid silicone enclosed in polyurethane and had a rigid foam backing. Handler sold it in lefts and rights according to bra size. Her goal was to make an artificial breast so real that “a woman could wear a regular brassiere and blouse, stick her chest out and be proud.”
She led a sales team of eight middle-aged women, most breast cancer survivors, into department stores where they fitted women and trained the sales staffs. She fit former First Lady Betty Ford after her mastectomy. Her aggressive tactics included talk-show appearances and handwritten invitations to breast cancer patients. She also had what she called her “strip act”: She would remove her blouse to demonstrate that no one could feel or see the difference between her real and prosthetic breast. She was pictured in People magazine yanking open her blouse to flaunt her bosom.
By 1980, sales of the Nearly Me artificial breast had surpassed $1 million. In 1991, Handler sold the company to a division of Kimberly-Clark.
She went on the lecture circuit to promote her product and tell women about the importance of early detection and regular mammograms.
“I didn’t make a lot of money in it,” she said of the prosthetics business. “It sure rebuilt my self-esteem, and I think I rebuilt the self-esteem of others.”
Her son Ken died of a brain tumor in 1994. She is survived by her husband of 63 years; her daughter, Barbara Segal; one brother, Aaron Mosko of Denver; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
Services are scheduled Tuesday at 2 p.m. at Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary, 6001 W. Centinela Ave.
The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to the Stop Cancer organization, 9171 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills 90212.
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936ab42179b416802da29e705f4883f7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-05-sci-genes5-story.html | Playing the Name Game | Playing the Name Game
Scientists are an amazingly competitive lot. Bestsellers have been written about the race to decipher the structure of DNA, sequence the genome and identify a new solar system.
But another, more amusing race is taking place largely out of the public eye: the scientific effort to find the wittiest names for subatomic particles, species--and especially genes.
Biologists have been the pacesetters in the competition, coming up with such unusual names as Abra cadabra for a clam and Heerz tooya and Heerz lukenatcha for some wasps. But among biologists, the indisputable champions are the somewhat odd researchers who study Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly.
Drosophilists have so far identified more than 26,000 fruit fly genes--in 46,000 variations--and the majority of them have names that will tickle your funny bone.
Cultural references, science-fiction references, literary references, Latin puns and a host of other in-jokes festoon the official archive of Drosophila gene names, found at www.flynome.com. Despite its esoteric nature, the archive is actually a good evening’s read.
Sophie Rutschmann of the University of Strasbourg, for example, found a mutated gene that causes adult flies to die within two days after they are infected with certain bacteria. She named the gene Kenny, after the “South Park” character who always dies before the end of the program.
Another group found a pair of genes that cause male and female flies to lack external genitalia. The gene names: ken and barbie, after the dolls with the same features. How about a mutant gene that causes some cells to divide uncontrollably? That gene, of course, is named tribbles, after the classic “Star Trek” episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
“There is a long tradition in Drosophila research that genes get named in a way that is descriptive and memorable,” says Lawrence Goldstein of UC San Diego. “There are some organisms and systems that you name systematically, but that doesn’t provide a lot of information about what they are doing or the phenotype [appearance] of the animal. They are hard to remember.”
Inventive names make it much more easy to recall what the gene does. Besides, he added, “it’s fun. Scientists aren’t really that boring.”
Goldstein’s lab found a family of gene mutants that cause the movement of materials through the cell to be disrupted. The obvious names were chosen: roadblock, gridlock, sunday driver. “Sunday driver is a particularly antique colloquialism,” Goldstein said. “A Japanese scientist asked me about it once. He couldn’t figure out what it means because the concept doesn’t exist there.”
Goldstein noted that his lab has a blackboard with a list of cute names waiting for the right gene to be discovered.
“There’s also a certain amount of one-upmanship,” he noted. “Dave Susuki [a fly researcher] years ago, wanted to give something a profane name. He went to Japanese to find the name shibere, which means messed up. It is abbreviated ‘shi,’ and it is temperature-sensitive, so it gets the superscript ‘ts.’ ”
If you ask Seymour Benzer of Caltech why Drosophilists use funny names, he replies, “Why not? Science should be fun if you can manage it .... There have always been descriptive names for [fruit fly] mutants going back to the ‘20s, so why not make them humorous at the same time?”
Benzer discovered a mutated fly that was learning-deficient, so he called the responsible gene dunce. When several similar mutant genes turned up, they had a problem finding enough similar names. Because the flies were practically brain-dead, “we decided to name them after vegetables, names like rutabaga, turnip, cabbage and so on.” Others had brain degeneration, and his group named them after foods whose appearance they resembled under a microscope: bubble gum, spongecake, popcorn.
Inventing names “is simply a great tradition,” says Tim Tully of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. “If a gene is discovered for the first time, your name takes precedence in all other similar discoveries and homologues in other species. If you are the first one, that is the name forever. It’s romantic and fun.”
Tully’s first scientific achievement was the development of a Pavlovian learning task for flies. The Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov is famous for having taught dogs to salivate when a bell was rung, a so-called learned response. “Because it is so simplified, this response is a building block for all other more complicated forms of learning,” Tully said. “Rats can learn lots more complicated things than flies, but the elemental change is always caused by the association of two stimuli.”
Tully has so far found 47 gene mutations that affect the learned response in flies. He wanted to name them after Pavlov’s dogs, but there was a problem. In all of Pavlov’s papers, only one dog is mentioned by name: Bierka, which means “whitey.”
Tully went to the Pavlov Institute outside St. Petersburg. Its director was Pavlov’s last graduate student, but he couldn’t recall any of the names. Then Tully “just happened” to go on a private tour of Pavlov’s home, which the curator stated was left as it was the day Pavlov died.
“At the end of the tour, I just happened to ask the curator if she knew about the dogs,” Tully said. “She walked to a cabinet and pulled out a photo album with the pictures and names of all the dogs.” Now Tully’s genes are named jurka, jack, marka, joy and so on.
None of the fly scientists seems able to explain why researchers in other fields don’t follow the same naming practices. A few researchers do, of course. There is a wasp called Verae peculya. There is also Agra sasquatch, a beetle with big feet. There is even Myzocallia kahawaluokalani, an aphid whose name reportedly means, in Hawaiian, “you fish on your side of the lagoon, I’ll fish on the other, and no one will fish in the middle.”
But most researchers shy away from such humor, and the worst offenders seem to be nematologists--biologists who study nematodes--who give each gene a three-letter code, sometimes followed by a number, such as unc-1.
“They don’t quite seem to latch on to the fun,” Tully said.
Drosophilist Jeff Hall of Brandeis University near Boston added: “You can’t dynamite an interesting name out of a nematologist.”
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5b919f160f581f9ac0a872ae4fa6570c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-07-me-evans7-story.html | Joshua Evans, 20; 3-Foot, 2-Inch Actor Starred in TV’s ‘Passions’ | Joshua Evans, 20; 3-Foot, 2-Inch Actor Starred in TV’s ‘Passions’
Joshua Ryan Evans, who portrayed the 8-year-old version of actor Jim Carrey in the motion picture “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” acted as a child prodigy lawyer in television’s “Ally McBeal” and was best known as Timmy the living doll in the NBC soap opera “Passions,” has died. He was 20.
Evans, who suffered from a rare growth disorder that limited his adult height to 3 feet 2, died Monday in a San Diego hospital of complications from a congenital heart condition, NBC officials announced.
The diminutive young man often said he chose acting because he spent so much time watching movies and television while recuperating from surgeries as a child.
“I thought, if it’s all pretend, why can’t I do that?” he told The Times in 2000 when the Grinch movie was released.
By then, Evans was already something of a cult figure for his role as Timmy. The character, which he had portrayed since the inception of “Passions” in 1999, is a doll turned into a real boy by a witch named Tabitha.
Associated Press reported that in Monday’s episode of the soap--taped last month--Evans’ character Timmy died. The NBC announcement said future episodes have been edited to remove any scenes that included Timmy.
Evans earned two consecutive Soap Opera Digest Awards for outstanding male scene stealer for the living-doll role.
Even though his makeup as the young Grinch required 5 1/2 hours a day--two more than for Carrey--Evans relished the role and working with director and former child star Ron Howard. “It was wonderful,” Evans told an interviewer. “Every time I got to see Ron it was an honor.”
When the film was released nearly two years ago, Howard told The Times that Evans’ role as the furry green classroom misfit was envisioned as a mere walk-on--until he met the tiny actor.
“As it turned out, [Evans] was able to create a character and generate a lot of heart for the story,” Howard said then. " ... Josh was just delightful.”
Evans was pint-sized lawyer Oren Koolie challenging series star Calista Flockhart in two episodes of her “Ally McBeal” series in 1998.
The native of Hayward, Calif., also played circus performer Tom Thumb opposite Beau Bridges in the 1999 Arts and Entertainment cable presentation of “P.T. Barnum” and was one of the toddlers in the 1999 film “Baby Geniuses” starring Kathleen Turner.
Evans also appeared on “7th Heaven” and in Showtime’s “Poltergeist: The Legacy.”
The actor got his first break in show business at age 12 when he was featured in a national commercial for Dreyer’s ice cream titled “The Dancing Baby.” The commercial won a Cleo Award.
Evans is survived by his parents, Chuck and Cheryl Evans; a brother, James; and grandparents Gene and Belle Riding.
A memorial service is pending. The family has asked that any memorial donations be sent to the Make-a-Wish Foundation, P.O. Box 29119, Phoenix, AZ 85038-9119.
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7307b0e817b881fd953261b013b76649 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-13-me-rowell13-story.html | Photographer Galen Rowell, Wife Killed in Plane Crash | Photographer Galen Rowell, Wife Killed in Plane Crash
Renowned wilderness photographer and mountain climber Galen Rowell and his photographer wife, Barbara, were killed in the crash of a private airplane early Sunday morning just south of the airport in Bishop, Calif.
The twin-engine charter aircraft, an Aero Commander 690-B, crashed about 1:24 a.m. as it made its final approach to the airfield in the town on the eastern flank of the Sierra, according to the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department. The pilot and all three passengers were killed.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Aug. 18, 2002 For The Record Los Angeles Times Sunday August 18, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 61 words Type of Material: Correction Galen Rowell--An article in Tuesday’s California section reporting the death of photographer Galen Rowell and his wife, Barbara, in a plane crash incorrectly stated his age as 62. He was 61.
Members of the National Transportation Safety Board, who arrived at the crash site Monday, are investigating.
The Berkeley-born Rowell, 62, was often compared to Ansel Adams, with whom he shared a photographic love of Yosemite and the Sierra. As much an adventurer as a photographer, Rowell was known to become an active participant in the images he captured, from some of California’s most scenic heights to the mountains of Nepal.
“Rowell photographed the mountains of the Sierra as a challenge,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “There was a lot more distance in what Ansel did. Galen was a climber and photographed things like a climber. When I saw his photographs I always wondered, where ... did he find them?
“He inspired people to get out and engage and explore those places. He was Ansel’s successor, but was much more diverse.”
What dazzled many of Rowell’s fans was that he went to extraordinary lengths to take pictures of familiar landmarks such as Mt. Whitney and turn them into art.
“The difference between Galen and most amateur photographers is that he would be out in the Sierra for 12 straight days and be there twice a day for the twilight hours,” said George Olson, director of photography for Sunset magazine, which frequently taps Rowell’s vast number of stock images. “Galen lived his life to get those photographs, no matter what time of day. The view of those places is the same to all of us, but the picture will never be the same as the ones he took.”
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Aircraft in Trouble
The couple were returning to Bishop after making a trip to the Bering Sea, where Rowell taught a photo workshop.
A caller to the Sheriff’s Department early Sunday morning reported observing an aircraft that appeared to be in trouble and then hearing a crash. An initial examination of the crash site indicated that there had been no fire, according to the Sheriff’s Department.
A spokesman for the Inyo County coroner’s office said Monday that all of the victims have been tentatively identified. The other two were Tom Reid, 46, and Carol McAfee, both of Bishop.
The charter flight originated in Oakland, with a flight plan filled out directly to Bishop, where the Rowells lived and operated Mountain Light Gallery.
Kevin Calder, operations manager for the gallery, said the couple had been expected there Sunday morning; the gallery had arranged for Reid, the pilot, to fly to pick them up. The gallery’s Web site (www.mountainlight.com) said plans for services will be posted when they are finalized.
Rowell, whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Life, Outdoor Photographer, Outside and other national magazines, returned in mid-July from a seven-week trek through Tibet with three friends while on assignment for National Geographic.
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Mountain Climber
The photographer led an adventurous life.
Once called “a cross between Sir Edmund Hilary and Ansel Adams” by People magazine, he made first ascents of more than 100 routes in Yosemite and the High Sierra range. He also made more than 35 trips to the mountains of Nepal, India, Pakistan, China, Tibet, Africa, Alaska, Canada, Siberia, New Zealand, Norway and Patagonia.
In addition to major expeditions to Mt. Everest, K2 and Pakistan’s Gasherbrum II, he made the first one-day ascents of Mt. McKinley in Alaska and Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, as well as first ascents of several Himalayan peaks.
Rowell’s wife, Barbara, 54, whom he married in 1981, was a well-known photographer, whose work appeared in National Geographic and on book and magazine covers.
The couple moved to Bishop from the Bay Area early last year and bought an old bank building in the center of town, which they turned into a gallery.
She accompanied her husband on most of his travels to exotic locations, including a monthlong trek in Nepal with actor-director Robert Redford in 1982, and a National Geographic assignment in Pakistan, where they were flown throughout the Himalayas as guests of the nation’s president.
She also was a pilot who flew her Cessna 206 for most of her husband’s aerial photographs.
Known for his photographic celebrations of the natural world and its beauty, Rowell’s best-selling image is that of a rainbow he shot in 1981 at the end of a monthlong trek through Tibet.
To get the picture he wanted, he literally chased the rainbow until it appeared to end on the roof of the Potala Palace, the former residence of the Dalai Lama. The picture has appeared on book covers, national magazines and posters.
“You work with the elements and you put them where you want them,” he told People magazine in 1986. “In a way I’m part of the picture, not just someone standing there clicking the shutter.”
Rowell was introduced to the wilderness at an early age by his speech professor father and concert cellist mother, who took him camping in the Sierras. By age 10, he was climbing mountains on Sierra Club outings, and at 16, he made his first roped climbs in Yosemite Valley.
By the time he was 30, he had logged more than 100 first ascents of new routes in the Yosemite Valley and in the High Sierra back country.
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Yosemite Assignment
Rowell dropped out of UC Berkeley and opened a car repair shop to support himself while he continued to climb on weekends.
“I started taking photographs just to show friends and family what I was doing, then I got curious about the photographic process,” he told The Times in 1987. “Making good photos became an end in itself.”
He sold his auto repair business and became a full-time photographer in 1972. A year later, he was assigned to do a cover story on Yosemite National Park for National Geographic.
In 1984, he received the Ansel Adams Award for his contributions to the art of wilderness photography.
Rowell wrote, co-wrote or supplied the photographs for nearly 20 books, including “Mountain Light,” “My Tibet” and “North America the Beautiful.”
Climbing continued to inspire Rowell.
“You can go back in the American Alpine Journal and he’s had climbs in recent years and virtually every year going back to the ‘60s,” said Lloyd Athearn, deputy director of the Alpine Club, based in Golden, Colo.
“For several decades, he’s been a leading American climber. In his 60s, he was still climbing at a very high standard that many climbers younger than him would be happy to do.”
“He’s a very important figure in American mountaineering,” said Steve Roper, an Oakland-based outdoors writer and former Rowell climbing partner. “I think every mountain outdoors type in America knows his name.
“He brought the mountains to many, many households.”
*
Times staff writers Bettina Boxall, Eric Malnic, Steve Hymon and Bill Stall contributed to this report.
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1f8145a2604becca69ce1e5ed2a236c5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-14-lv-peanut14-story.html | He’s Doing This for Peanuts | He’s Doing This for Peanuts
Times are tough for the lowly peanut. Pro-legume president Jimmy Carter is long gone from the White House. Schools and airlines have started banning the snack because of potentially fatal allergies. And peanut sales have sputtered in recent years.
So the National Peanut Board did what anyone else would do in such circumstances: It built a 32-foot-high peanut out of steel and foam and began driving it around the U.S.
It also hired a costumed mascot named Buddy McNutty, not to be confused with a certain monocle-wearing peanut who works for the Planters company.
“I am not Mr. Peanut,” McNutty stressed during an interview. “Mr. Peanut wears tights. I wear leggings.”
Over the weekend, McNutty and his entourage visited Los Angeles as part of the National Peanut Tour, a traveling exhibit of peanut propaganda. They parked their giant peanut outside the L.A. Zoo and entertained visitors with peanut trivia, recipes and paraphernalia.
They also had a peanut museum that displayed a video on the making of peanut butter (“Find out what jelly is so happy about”), a replica peanut plant (peanuts grow underground, not on trees) and amusing peanut facts:
* In 1500 BC, the Incas of Peru used peanuts as a sacrificial offering to their deities.
* Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.
* Two peanut farmers have been elected president--Carter and Thomas Jefferson.
* Mountaineer Tom Miller used his nose to push a peanut to the top of Colorado’s Pikes Peak in four days, 23 hours and 47 minutes (if true, that beats the record set by Texan Bill Williams, who took three weeks and went through 170 pairs of pants to accomplish the same feat in 1929).
* The world’s largest peanut butter and jelly sandwich was 40 feet long and contained 150 pounds of peanut butter and 50 pounds of jelly. It was assembled in 1993 in the town of Peanut, Pa.
* When making PB&J; sandwiches, 96% of Americans put the peanut butter on before the jelly.
Also joining the tour was peanut chef Duane Nutter (yes, that’s really his name, and he has a Georgia driver’s license to prove it). Normally, Nutter dishes up a mixture of comedy and cooking, but the zoo didn’t have room for his kitchen, so he paced around in his peanut-shell foam hat, greeting visitors.
The star of the tour--aside from the hydraulically powered 17,000-pound, 32-foot steel peanut--was McNutty, a.k.a. Noah Pransky, a 21-year-old professional mascot whose resume includes stints as Wally the Green Monster (the mascot for the Boston Red Sox), Paws the Polar Bear (a minor-league baseball team mascot) and Rhett the Terrier (mascot for Boston University, Pransky’s alma mater).
To get the peanut gig, he had to defeat two other mascot professionals whose combined work history included jobs as Buckley the Buckle Upper (a mascot for a highway safety program), Firehawk (a tire company mascot), Fuzzy Bear (an Atlanta radio station mascot), the Tasmanian Devil (on loan from Warner Bros. as the mascot for the 1998 Goodwill Games), Harry the Husky (University of Washington) and Sammy the Sounder (mascot for a Seattle soccer team).
“It’s a great career,” Pransky says.
Well, except for the health hazards. “During my four years in the ‘Brotherhood of the Fur,’ I’ve had heatstroke a few times and heat exhaustion a lot,” Pransky says. “I also tore the ligaments in my thumb giving someone a high-five.” Other mascots endure shoulder injuries, knee injuries and broken bones, he says.
“You’re always pushing the limits physically while doing stunts,” he explains.
Still, he loves the job. “It’s almost like the Clark Kent phenomenon, where you have a secret life,” he says. At Boston University, Pransky didn’t tell his roommates or his family that he was the school mascot. “If people know who’s in the suit, it loses the magic,” he says.
As Buddy McNutty, Pransky cavorts, poses for photos and generally makes a fool of himself. “It’s like being an improv comedian,” he says. “You have to read people and react to them in comic ways, all without talking.”
His other trick is climbing onstage at concerts and playing the drums. “It blows people away,” says chef Nutter. “They think he’s getting up there to dance, but instead this oversized fuzzy peanut sits down at the drums and starts playing like a pro.”
Now in its second year, the National Peanut Tour makes stops at state fairs, baseball games, barbecue festivals, horse races and the Suffolk, Va., Peanut Festival, which features an annual peanut butter sculpture contest.
The $1.5-million tab is picked up by the Atlanta-based National Peanut Board, which was formed two years ago after the ailing peanut industry petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create a legume version of the dairy industry’s “Got milk?” campaign.
Ballots were sent to all 23,000 U.S. peanut farmers, asking them to impose a 1% fee on themselves for peanut advertising and research. The result was, yes, a national nut board.
Some of the group’s budget goes toward finding a cure for peanut allergies, but most is funneled into advertising. In one ad, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is shown next to the phrase: “Have lunch with your inner child.”
The effort seems to be paying off, says National Peanut Board chief Raffaela Marie Rizzo, a former timber industry spokeswoman: “Since our campaign began, peanut butter sales are up 6%.”
Then again, Rizzo might be seeing things through peanut-butter-colored glasses. If the L.A. Zoo visit is any indication, peanut professionals have a peculiar way of viewing the world. For example, in the National Peanut Tour’s timeline of history, World War I is put on the same footing as the introduction of Welch’s Concord grape jelly.
And construction of the Empire State Building in 1931 is a milestone that is “eclipsed by ... the invention of crunchy peanut butter by Skippy.”
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f2aa1314883d8c5c4d8f390e2cdb06ce | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-20-me-brooks20-story.html | Antelope Valley Man Pleads No Contest in Sex Case | Antelope Valley Man Pleads No Contest in Sex Case
An Antelope Valley man pleaded no contest Monday to committing a lewd act on a 12-year-old boy.
Howard L. Brooks, a field representative for Assemblyman Phil Wyman (R-Tehachapi), will be sentenced by Superior Court Judge David Mintz on Sept. 19 to three years in state prison under a plea agreement reached between his defense attorney and prosecutors. If he fails to appear, the judge has the discretion to sentence Brooks to a maximum of eight years behind bars.
The plea deal, which also requires the Quartz Hill man to register as a sex offender, avoids a trial that was supposed to begin later this month. Brooks’ attorney did not return calls seeking comment.
Brooks, 61, was executive director of the Antelope Valley Board of Trade for 12 years before taking the job with Wyman’s office last year.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Rouman Ebrahim said he was satisfied with the outcome, especially since the young victim will no longer have to endure a lengthy trial.
“This is a very difficult thing for anyone to go through, much less a child,” Ebrahim said. “This way, Mr. Brooks is held accountable for his actions, and the child doesn’t have to go through the experience of testifying in court.”
Brooks was arrested last year after sheriff’s investigators received a letter that he allegedly sent to an inmate at the state prison in Sacramento detailing sexual conduct with young boys.
Authorities said that Brooks abused the child between March and November 2000 while the boy was living with the Brooks family.
Brooks was charged with five felony counts carrying a maximum of 17 years in prison, including committing a lewd act on a child, continuous sexual abuse of a child, oral copulation with a minor younger than 14, providing lewd material to a minor and possession of child pornography.
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fc22105c2168afb5e806e428afec363e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-23-me-lopez23-story.html | On Ethnicity, We’re Rednecks One Day, Trailblazers the Next | On Ethnicity, We’re Rednecks One Day, Trailblazers the Next
While Anaheim officials were debating this week whether to allow a Mexican supermarket to do business in their fair city, the governor indicated he would sign a bill allowing illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses.
There is not a state in the union, I assure you, half as interesting as California.
Anaheim’s fearless leaders had thrice stood in the way of Gigante’s attempt to open for business, claiming at one point that the store was too Latino for Anaheim Plaza, an outdoor mall near Disneyland.
It was a curious argument, considering that the Anaheim neighborhood is 60% Latino. In my mind’s eye, I played with the idea of a city where illegal immigrants could legally drive cars to their hearts’ content, but couldn’t shop at a Gigante because it was too ethnic.
Anaheim’s backwater rubes were spared further embarrassment Wednesday when the City Council, under community pressure, finally gave the OK to Gigante.
There is no connection between the Gigante and driver’s license stories, except that they speak to California’s continued growing pains and identity crisis. On the issue of ethnicity, we can be rednecks one day and trailblazers the next.
Gov. Gray Davis said he’ll probably sign the driver’s license bill if it lands in front of him, meaning that roughly 200,000 illegal immigrants would be allowed to drive.
But Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) isn’t certain his bill--futzed with since 1999 and then pulled back after Sept. 11--will make it into Davis’ hands. Naysayers on the right think the licensing of illegals is nuts, and those on the left think required background checks are fascist.
At times like this, you can almost respect Davis for being such a spineless centrist.
A lot of people, judging by my mail, believe the very idea of the bill is proof that California has finally gone insane.
“If someone is here illegally, I don’t think they should be allowed to do anything, frankly,” said Diana Hull of Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), which is based in Santa Barbara. “The way we’re so out in the open about this illegality is shocking.”
The state is already overpopulated, Hull says. To begin legitimizing everyone who sneaked in will only encourage more of the same.
She’s probably right. But it’s more complicated than that.
People are here illegally because the unspoken federal policy is to allow them to be here. It’s the lie we’re all in on.
Businesses exploit cheap labor in the fields and hotels and restaurants, and so do homeowners who don’t ask questions of the gardener or housekeeper who work like the devil for rock-bottom wages.
“You’ve got a woman in Pico-Union who could drive to work at a Beverly Hills hotel in 20 minutes, but the bus takes her three hours. That’s who this bill is for,” says Cedillo.
Those who’ve worked the hardest are already driving around without licenses or insurance, so if there’s a crackup on the highway, you and I are going to pay. Licensing people who pass a background check, and prove they’ve worked in the state for 15 months, seems fair to me.
“The issue is to make sure that these are not the terrorists of the world, and not people with criminal histories either here or in their country of origin,” says L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca, who’s on an advisory committee that persuaded Gov. Davis to insist on the background check.
“These are people who came here illegally, but are otherwise honest, hard-working, decent people who want to be part of the American dream.”
I say we should give them more than a driver’s license. We should quit the charade and legalize them altogether.
Just yell olly olly oxen free and say everyone who’s in is in.
And then we should have an honest conversation on population growth and immigration.
The California environment is being destroyed, traffic is insane, there’s a water shortage, a housing crisis, the health-care system is overwhelmed, and our schools are so depressed, even recent improvements still leave them six credits short of mediocre.
In 39 years, the state population is expected to double, and every one of those problems will explode. I’ve been called a dope and a bigot for suggesting it, but Los Angeles and the rest of the state ought to be asking how big is too big.
Baca told me that on a recent trip to China, cops told him they’ll lose their jobs if they have more than one child.
I don’t know if we want to go that far, but I did the math and Gov. Davis has enough money in his campaign kitty to send a three-pack of condoms to every adult in California.
Davis and the state congressional delegation should demand that if the federal government isn’t going to better develop the economies of border nations or enforce its own immigration laws, and 40% of all immigrants are going to continue settling in California, the feds ought to start paying more of the bills.
Especially if Presidente Bush, with one eye on the next election, keeps posing as an amigo.
Baca says 25% of his jail population is made up of illegals, for an annual cost of $90 million. Court costs run another $160 million. Meanwhile, the financially strapped county is going Third World in health care, shutting clinics and cutting off immunization for tens of thousands of children.
Gil Cedillo insists California’s problems are not a function of too many people, but of poor leadership.
I say it’s a combination of the two.
And if we don’t do something about both, driver’s licenses or no, we’ll all be stuck in traffic on the way to Gigante.
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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com
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bf0b92bbbe8689158a79f616679e0be1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-28-fi-andersen28-story.html | Andersen Worldwide to Settle Enron Lawsuits | Andersen Worldwide to Settle Enron Lawsuits
Andersen Worldwide, the international umbrella organization that includes auditing firm Arthur Andersen, has agreed to pay $40 million to settle lawsuits from Enron Corp. investors and employees.
The settlement, announced Tuesday, is the first to emerge from a $25-billion lawsuit filed on behalf of Enron investors, led by the University of California, and another lawsuit filed by former employees in the aftermath of the failed energy company’s swift collapse last year in a swirl of accounting scandals.
Andersen Worldwide serves as the coordinating entity for the international network of Andersen firms.
Arthur Andersen, its Chicago-based U.S. arm, remains a defendant in the suit.
“We regard this settlement only as a first step in obtaining recovery for the class, and will continue to pursue damages from the remaining defendants, most of whom had far deeper involvement in the Enron debacle than the overseas Andersen firms,” said James E. Holst, general counsel for the university.
Bill Lloyd, an attorney with Sidley Austin Brown & Wood in Chicago who helped negotiate the settlement, declined to comment Tuesday.
Arthur Andersen spokesman Patrick Dorton also declined to comment.
The settlement is subject to approval by U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon in Houston.
The university said the $40-million settlement includes $15 million that will be available to pay for costs associated with the suit, but not attorney fees in the litigation.
Robin Harrison, one of the attorneys who represents employees, said lawyers haven’t yet determined how to distribute the money.
Andersen Worldwide denied any liability or wrongdoing with regard to Enron, the university said.
In April, Andersen Worldwide said Arthur Andersen, which was Enron’s outside auditor for 16 years until it was fired in January, was the only proper defendant in claims relating to audits of faulty financial statements.
The U.S. arm, like other offices around the world, operates autonomously from the umbrella organization, Andersen Worldwide said.
“This first settlement recovers millions of dollars for the class and demonstrates that even relatively minor actors may face substantial liability to Enron’s investors,” said Bill Lerach, the lead plaintiff’s attorney in the lawsuit.
Arthur Andersen was convicted in June of obstruction of justice as investigators were looking into Enron’s collapse.
The crippled firm has lost hundreds of clients and offices throughout the U.S. and other countries.
The firm, which has said it expects to formally end any remaining audit business next week, will be sentenced by Harmon on Oct. 17.
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2a35ce283cce8de4659b10ce35bc92f3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-01-na-einstein1-story.html | Einstein Exhibit Adds a Human Side to the Equation | Einstein Exhibit Adds a Human Side to the Equation
This is not the textbook Albert Einstein.
This lusty fellow was a draft-dodging bohemian with sweaty feet, a skirt-chasing cad and a security risk whose outspoken humanitarian politics filled a 1,500-page FBI dossier.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Dec. 06, 2002 For The Record Los Angeles Times Friday December 06, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 6 inches; 248 words Type of Material: Correction Einstein -- A photograph of Albert Einstein published in Sunday’s Section A incorrectly credited Agence France-Presse. The photo should have been credited to the California Institute of Technology.
An amateur violinist, he set space, time, matter and energy dancing to his own tune. And with a two-page letter in 1939, he launched the nuclear arms race, yet he also set a standard for moral responsibility that scientists today still emulate almost 50 years after his death.
A sometimes startling portrait emerges from a major retrospective on this pivotal scientist of the 20th century organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Skirball Center in Los Angeles.
The exhibit, which opened last month in New York and comes to Los Angeles in 2004, highlights the challenge of restoring humanity to an iconic figure at the center of perhaps the most far-reaching intellectual and scientific revolution of modern history.
And on Saturday, the crowd waiting to enter the exhibition at the American Museum on Central Park was as thick as the holiday throngs awaiting entry to FAO Schwarz on 5th Avenue.
For the first time, Einstein’s original letters, manuscripts and memorabilia have been pulled together. The result is sharply at odds with Einstein’s popular image as a gentle, mental giant crowned by a halo of frizzy hair.
“He was a skirt-chaser; he had mistresses; he cheated on his wives,” exhibit curator Michael Shara said. “He also is the person who more than any other physicist -- more than any other scientist -- taught us that scientists have enormous social responsibilities.”
Shara, an astrophysicist who studies stellar evolution, is not content simply to revise Einstein’s public image. He is also determined to teach Einstein’s physics to the millions of people expected to tour the exhibit over the next three years.
“I want them to come away with the core of his science,” Shara said, “with the essence of special relativity and of general relativity. The core can be explained in 10 minutes to an attentive 10-year-old.”
Even so, Shara spent three years organizing the exhibit.
The result is a clever science lesson encompassing 7,000 square feet of gallery space, sugar-coated with scandal and seasoned with controversy. It combines interactive exhibits with intriguing personal documents from the Einstein archive at Hebrew University.
When Saturday’s visitors stepped through the exhibit’s double doors, they found themselves distorted by a black hole -- an effect created with fish-eye lenses and projectors to demonstrate the gravitational “lensing” effect predicted by Einstein. “This is my space-time reality,” an elderly man murmured ruefully as he watched his bald spot expand to encompass a galaxy.
They had entered Einstein’s world, where space has hills and valleys; where time travels at different speeds; where energy and mass are interchangeable.
“I’m not sure I understand it all at all,” Luke Keller, 22, from Iowa City, Iowa, said after watching light pulses in an exhibit illustrating Einstein’s ideas of relativity. “But it is not as abstract as you might think.”
For Shara and the exhibit designers, however, the real proof is in the mind of a child.
Joshua Littman, 10, from Greenwich, Conn., spent nine minutes Saturday studying one interactive exhibit on Einstein’s revolutionary formulation of mass and energy: E=mc2.
“He is a very bright young man,” said his grandfather, Stanley Darer, 68, who brought the boy to the exhibit. “With a 10-year-old, you just want to plant seeds; then you have to see where they grow.”
This seed began to sprout almost instantly.
Asked about Einstein’s equation, Joshua, in Harry Potter glasses and a rumpled red school jersey, did not hesitate. “A kilogram of mass could make a light bulb burn for 30 million years,” he said.
Aaron Deutsch, 11, visiting with his family from Princeton, N.J., where Einstein lived for many years, also pondered the scientist’s breakthrough. “It is a weird concept, almost too strange,” he said. “But I think I got it.”
Suzannah Fraker Graber, an 11-year-old visiting with her parents from Washington, DC., put her finger on the moral conundrum at the heart of the equation.
“E=mc2 helped people make the bomb,” she said. She frowned. “But Einstein wanted peace too.”
In a telling illustration, two letters that launched the modern world are displayed together.
The first was written by Einstein in 1939 to alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the potential of nuclear weapons. Next to it is Roosevelt’s terse reply, assuring Einstein that the United States would devote all resources necessary to investigating the possibility.
With his few dozen well-chosen words, Einstein set in motion the Manhattan Project and the development of the first atomic bomb.
The exhibit’s paper trail begins with Einstein’s high school report card, which dispels the popular myth that he was something of a dunce in school. Einstein was a straight-A student with perfect scores in math and science. But he hated formal classes so much that he dropped science completely for a year after graduation.
Also on display is his Nobel Prize certificate and the letter offering him the presidency of the state of Israel. His FBI file takes up most of a wall.
Stephen Mackler, a 60-year-old periodontist from Greensboro, N.C., lingered over the original 72-page manuscript of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
“This was revolutionary. It still is revolutionary,” he said. “Now if I could combine this with dentistry, I’d really make a contribution ... brushing and flossing and relativity.”
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3d0b97b0d0d868a8ab960bdc6e602795 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-01-op-tolan1-story.html | Beyond Regime Change | Beyond Regime Change
If you want to know what the administration has in mind for Iraq, here’s a hint: It has less to do with weapons of mass destruction than with implementing an ambitious U.S. vision to redraw the map of the Middle East.
The new map would be drawn with an eye to two main objectives: controlling the flow of oil and ensuring Israel’s continued regional military superiority. The plan is, in its way, as ambitious as the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between the empires of Britain and France, which carved up the region at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The neo-imperial vision, which can be ascertained from the writings of key administration figures and their co-visionaries in influential conservative think tanks, includes not only regime change in Iraq but control of Iraqi oil, a possible end to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and newly compliant governments in Syria and Iran -- either by force or internal rebellion.
For the first step -- the end of Saddam Hussein -- Sept. 11 provided the rationale. But the seeds of regime change came far earlier. “Removing Saddam from power,” according to a 1996 report from an Israeli think tank to then-incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was “an important Israeli strategic objective.” Now this has become official U.S. policy, after several of the report’s authors took up key strategic and advisory roles within the Bush administration. They include Richard Perle, now chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense; and David Wurmser, special assistant in the State Department. In 1998, these men, joined by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz (now the top two officials in the Pentagon), Elliott Abrams (a senior National Security Council director), John Bolton (undersecretary of State) and 21 others called for “a determined program to change the regime in Baghdad.”
After removing Hussein, U.S. forces are planning for an open-ended occupation of Iraq, according to senior administration officials who spoke to the New York Times. The invasion, said Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, would be “a historic opportunity that is as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.” Makiya spoke at an October “Post-Saddam Iraq” conference attended by Perle and sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute.
Any occupation would certainly include protecting petroleum installations. Control of the country’s vast oil reserves, the second largest in the world and worth nearly $3 trillion at current prices, would be a huge strategic prize. Some analysts believe that additional production in Iraq could drive world prices down to as low as $10 a barrel and precipitate Iraq’s departure from OPEC, possibly undermining the cartel. This, together with Russia’s new willingness to become a major U.S. oil supplier, could establish a long-sought counterweight to Saudi Arabia, still the biggest influence by far on global oil prices. It would be consistent with the plan released by Vice President Dick Cheney’s team in June, which underscored “energy security” as central to U.S. foreign policy. “The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy,” the report states.
Some analysts prefer to downplay the drive to control Iraqi oil. “It is fashionable among anti-American circles ... to assume that U.S. foreign policy is driven by commercial considerations,” said Patrick Clawson, an oil and policy analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in an October talk. Rather, Clawson said, oil “has barely been on the administration’s horizon in considering Iraq policy.... U.S. foreign policy is not driven by concern for promoting the interests of specific U.S. firms.”
Yet Clawson, whose institute enjoys close ties with the Bush administration, was more candid during a Capitol Hill forum on a post-Hussein Iraq in 1999: “U.S. oil companies would have an opportunity to make significant profits,” he said. “We should not be embarrassed about the commercial advantages that would come from a re-integration of Iraq into the world economy. Iraq, post-Saddam, is highly likely to be interested in inviting international oil companies to invest in Iraq. This would be very useful for U.S. oil companies, which are well positioned to compete there, and very useful for the world’s energy-security situation.”
Indeed, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, whose close ties with Perle, Wurmser, Rumsfeld and Cheney predate the current Bush administration, met recently with U.S. oil executives. Afterward, Chalabi, the would-be “Iraqi Karzai” and the hawks’ long-standing choice to lead a post-Hussein Iraq, made it clear he would give preference to an American-led oil consortium. He also suggested that previous deals -- totaling tens of billions of dollars for Russia’s Lukoil and France’s TotalFinaElf -- could be voided.
Next month, key Iraqi exiles will meet with oil executives at an English country retreat to discuss the future of Iraqi petroleum. The conference, sponsored by the Center for Global Energy Studies and chaired by Sheik Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister, will feature Maj. Gen. Wafiq Samarrai, the former head of Iraqi military intelligence, and former Iraqi Oil Minister Fadhil Chalabi, now executive director of the center.
Fadhil Chalabi estimates that total oil reserves in Iraq could exceed Saudi Arabia’s and that daily production one day could reach 10 million barrels, making it the world’s largest producer. Hence, on the center’s conference agenda is a discussion of Iraq as a “second Saudi Arabia,” and the prospect of a world without OPEC. Oil executives and analysts heading to the country retreat will also be able to purchase the center’s 800-page analysis of the prospects for exploration in Iraq. The cost: $52,500.
But taking over Iraq and remaking the global oil market is not necessarily the endgame. The next steps, favored by hard-liners determined to elevate Israeli security above all other U.S. foreign policy goals, would be to destroy any remaining perceived threat to the Jewish state: namely, the regimes in Syria and Iran.
“The War Won’t End in Baghdad,” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen in the Wall Street Journal. In 1985, as a consultant to the National Security Council and Oliver North, Ledeen helped broker the illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran by setting up meetings between weapons dealers and Israel. In the current war, he argues, “we must also topple terror states in Tehran and Damascus.”
In urging the expansion of the war on terror to Syria and Iran, Ledeen does not mention Israel. Yet Israel is a crucial strategic reason for the hard-line vision to “roll back” Syria and Iran -- and another reason why control of Iraq is seen as crucial. In 1998, Wurmser, now in the State Department, told the Jewish newspaper Forward that if Ahmad Chalabi were in power and extended a no-fly, no-drive zone in northern Iraq, it would provide the crucial piece for an anti-Syria, anti-Iran bloc. “It puts Scuds out of the range of Israel and provides the geographic beachhead between Turkey, Jordan and Israel,” he said. “This should anchor the Middle East pro-Western coalition.”
Perle, in the same 1998 article, told Forward that a coalition of pro-Israeli groups was “at the forefront with the legislation with regard to Iran. One can only speculate what it might accomplish if it decided to focus its attention on Saddam Hussein.” And Perle, Wurmser and Feith (now in the Pentagon), in their 1996 Israeli think tank report to Netanyahu, argued for abandoning efforts for a comprehensive peace in favor of a policy of “rolling back” Syria to protect Israel’s interests.
Now, however, Israel is given a lower profile by those who would argue for rollback. Rather, writes Ledeen, U.S. troops would be put at risk in order to “liberate all the peoples of the Middle East.” And this, he argues, would be virtually pain-free: “If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support.”
Perle concurs on Iraq -- “The Arab World ... will consider honor and dignity has been restored” -- as well as Iran: “It is the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime.”
Now, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has joined the call against Tehran, arguing in a November interview with the Times of London that the U.S. should shift its focus to Iran “the day after” the Iraq war ends.
The vast ambition of such changes to the Middle Eastern map would seem an inherent deterrent. But it is precisely this historical sweep, reminiscent of Sykes-Picot and the British arrival in Iraq in 1917, that many close to the administration seek. Publicly, Perle and Ledeen cling to the fantasy that American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad, Tehran and Damascus with garlands of flowers. Yet they are too smart to ignore the rage across the Arab and Muslim worlds that would surely erupt in the wake of war on multiple Middle Eastern fronts.
Indeed, the foreshadowing is already with us: in Bali, in Moscow, in Yemen and on the streets of Amman. It’s clear that even in Jordan, a close ally of the U.S., the anger at a U.S. attack on Iraq could be hard to contain.
Indeed, the hard-liners in and around the administration seem to know in their hearts that the battle to carve up the Middle East would not be won without the blood of Americans and their allies. “One can only hope that we turn the region into a caldron, and faster, please,” Ledeen preached to the choir at National Review Online last August. “That’s our mission in the war against terror.”
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fc5a4d228f9c83bcad7c362cdbc5967e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-05-me-clive5-story.html | A Family’s Heartbreak, a Community’s Resolve | A Family’s Heartbreak, a Community’s Resolve
On the day of his death, 14-year-old Clive Jackson Jr. was waiting for a bus to go to the mall, having turned down a ride from his father.
Out of school early, Junior -- as everyone called him -- wanted to take the bus with two friends.
Junior was a basketball player. He hoped to play for the NBA. First, he intended to attend UCLA, his mother’s alma mater. He was already saving money for college textbooks. He got mostly A’s at Crenshaw High School. He wore suits to church. He was not a gang member.
On Nov. 21, Junior stood with his two friends in front of Magees Donut Shop on South Western Avenue near Vernon Avenue when he was approached by another teenager. Authorities say it was Antwaine Butler, 17, a member of the Rollin’ 40s Crips. An exchange of words led to a scuffle. Losing the fight in front of two gang cohorts, Butler pulled out a handgun and shot Junior in the chest and head, police say.
Police have an arrest warrant out for Butler and are seeking to interview his fellow gang members.
In the weeks since Junior’s death, he has become a poster child against gang violence. In a news conference announcing a crackdown on gangs earlier this week, Mayor James K. Hahn stood at the lectern flanked by Junior’s family.
“Let the death of Clive Jackson be a call to action,” Hahn said as Junior’s parents wept.
Junior’s father, Clive Jackson Sr., was at the carwash less than two blocks away when Junior was gunned down. Shooting at the bus stop, someone said. Jackson raced over. He found his son lying with his face covered.
“My heart stopped,” said Jackson, 42, general manager and executive chef for a catering company. “I’m lost, really. What kind of world are we living in?”
Junior intended to go to the mall to get T-shirts for a Thanksgiving vacation trip to New Orleans that his father had planned.
Usually Jackson dropped his son off wherever he wanted to go. Why didn’t he insist this time? he asked himself over and over.
“It should be fine for a kid to hop on the bus without worrying that he is going to get killed,” Jackson said.
Before Jackson remarried earlier this fall, he brought Junior with him to the bank to withdraw money for the engagement ring.
Junior, after all, would be the best man at the wedding. Jackson told Junior to put the money in his pocket. At the jeweler’s, he and his son picked out a ring and Junior plunked down all the cash. His father gently scolded him, “You have to count it first,” he told him.
It was, Jackson thought, an indication of Junior’s trusting nature. Here was his son, whose heroes were Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, assuming that the world was honest and good.
Junior was born and raised in the same South Los Angeles neighborhood where he was killed. He attended Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and Audubon Middle School.
“He was always calm; he knew to avoid trouble,” said his half sister, Monique Smith.
Junior spent most of his week with Monique and their mother, Sharon Smith, 42, an operations manager at a bank in Gardena.
But he adored his new stepbrother, 5-year-old Blair. He and Blair played baseball, which was Blair’s sport, and basketball, which was clearly Junior’s game -- he was a member of Crenshaw’s freshman basketball team.
In the days after Junior’s death, Jackson and his new wife tried to explain to Blair what happened. Whenever anyone called their Baldwin Hills home, Blair would pick up the phone.
“Did you know Junior died?” Blair would ask. Then he’d say, “Junior is not going to ride his bike anymore. Junior is not going to wear his nice clothes anymore. Junior is not coming back.”
At Sharon Smith’s home, the grief is also still fresh.
“He was my life, he was not just my son but a best friend,” she said.
Smith and her son watched basketball games together and shopped together.
When they strolled in Beverly Hills, Junior admired the shoes in Gucci. She told him she wouldn’t purchase shoes that expensive for him until his feet had stopped growing.
He had no beef with that. She did, however, get him shirts and a hat at Burberry’s.
Junior liked to talk about college with his mother, who -- like his father -- emigrated from Jamaica. He liked to hear about her days at UCLA, where she’d won a scholarship. Because she went to UCLA, Junior also hoped to go to school there.
Monique Smith, 23, said she hopes that in death her brother will make the difference he planned to make in life.
“He cared about the neighborhood,” she said. “He had so many plans. He knew what he wanted and knew what he had to do to get there. He was so gifted.”
Junior’s parents took great pains to keep their teenager safe. Since age 11, Junior had a cellular phone and he would call his parents, letting them know about basketball practices, games and whenever he was heading to a friend’s house.
“We are responsible parents,” Jackson said. “We did everything possible, but still it didn’t work.”
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f6e211c1604cba040a0b1ca204b5b64e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-13-na-bush13-story.html | Bush Advances Faith-Based Initiative | Bush Advances Faith-Based Initiative
Circumventing Congress, President Bush used his executive powers Thursday to make it easier for religious groups to obtain federal funds to perform charitable services.
Bush’s action puts into effect key elements of his faith-based initiative, a cornerstone of his agenda of “compassionate conservatism” and a proposal he unveiled just days after taking office.
The initiative was blocked by Congress’ failure to agree on the extent to which religious groups could mix their messages with charity work while accepting government money.
Under Bush’s order, groups that hire workers based on the individual’s religious beliefs will not be barred from receiving federal money, as they have been in the past.
“When the federal government gives contracts to private groups to provide social services, religious groups should have an equal chance to compete,” Bush said in a speech to several thousand religious leaders and other representatives of religious charities. “When decisions are made on public funding, we should not focus on the religion you practice; we should focus on the results you deliver.”
In a setting that mimicked a bill-signing ceremony, Bush sat at a small desk behind a sign reading “Compassion in Action” and signed an executive order that he said would direct federal agencies “to follow the principle of equal treatment” in awarding social service grants.
Later, back in Washington, he also ordered such agencies as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services to remove any regulations that might block religious nonprofit groups from qualifying for federal aid.
The measures implement an important part of the president’s initiative, but two important elements need congressional approval:
One would provide tax incentives to spur private charitable contributions for religious groups that deliver social services. The other would provide funding to help smaller faith-based groups compete for federal money to pay for the help they give the needy. A measure that did not pass Congress last year set a figure of $1.275 billion over two years.
Opponents argue that providing government funds to religious groups violates the Constitution’s separation of church and state.
“Bush is on a crusade to bring about an unprecedented merger of religion and government,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington-based organization, and a minister in the United Church of Christ. He said the group would consider challenging the action in court.
The American Civil Liberties Union predicted that Congress would continue to object to what the group’s legislative counsel, Christopher Anders, called “taxpayer-funded religious discrimination.”
To illustrate its objection to the plan, the ACLU noted that a Jewish psychotherapist, Alan Yorker, had sought work at the United Methodist Children’s Home in Decatur, Ga., which found him to be the most qualified applicant but denied him the job because of his religion.
In his speech here, Bush offered his own examples of the sort of charitable work that had been blocked by concern that it crossed the constitutional barrier:
The Victory Center Rescue Mission in Iowa had been told to return a government grant because its board of directors “was not secular enough,” he said. And the St. Francis House Homeless Shelter in South Dakota lost a grant “because voluntary prayers were offered before meals,” he added.
“I recognize that government has no business endorsing a religious creed, or directly funding religious worship or religious teaching,” the president said.
But, he added, “Government can and should support social services provided by religious people, as long as those services go to anyone in need, regardless of their faith.
“And when government gives that support, charities and faith-based programs should not be forced to change their character or compromise their mission.”
The trip to Philadelphia offered Bush an opportunity to shift the White House spotlight from Iraq and the economy to a program at the heart of his social agenda -- one favored by some of his most loyal, energetic and conservative supporters.
At its center is the use of nongovernmental groups to help meet the demands for social services -- work that the charities have traditionally performed and that relieves pressure on the government.
Under the 1996 revision of the federal welfare law, for example, religious groups compete for federal funds to carry out foster care programs or to help welfare recipients receive job training. Or they might accept federal aid for drug abuse, alcoholism or housing programs.
Such charities, Bush said, deserve the support of foundations, corporations, individual donors and religious groups and, “when appropriate, the support of the federal government.”
He is likely to make the faith-based initiative a key part of his proposals to Congress next year, hoping that legislators will pick up quickly from where the previous Congress left off, although new votes will be required in each chamber.
In the last session, the House passed a measure that would allow religious groups to provide social services typically offered by government agencies -- receiving federal money for the work without having to muffle their religious missions. The president’s executive orders are close to the provisions of the House measure.
The Senate never completed work on a bill placing greater restrictions on religious teaching and the groups’ use of religion to discriminate in hiring for their charitable work if they receive federal financial assistance.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who was trying to work out a compromise, called Bush’s action Thursday “a constructive step” and said it appeared to be “a sound plan for realizing the principle of equal treatment for faith-based groups.”
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e33a5d7e9371b83018cfe8cbebc42bfe | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-17-na-right17-story.html | Too Far to the Left for Far Right | Too Far to the Left for Far Right
WASHINGTON -- As one of the Senate’s most conservative members, Republican Trent Lott is an unlikely punching bag for his party’s right wing.
But the voice of the conservative community has been among the loudest in the growing clamor for Lott to relinquish his post of incoming Senate majority leader, turning those who should be his natural political allies into some of his fiercest adversaries.
Their animus is helping propel the challenge to Lott by Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, one of the few Senate Republicans who is arguably more conservative than the Mississippian.
This has laid bare a long-standing political reality little noticed outside the GOP inner circle: Many in the GOP’s influential conservative wing have never much liked him, even before this month’s imbroglio over comments by Lott that seemed to endorse segregation. They also have viewed him as an ineffective leader.
These conservatives believe he has not pushed their agenda aggressively enough. Many blame him for the defection of Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont from the GOP last year, which stripped the Republicans of their Senate majority when Jeffords became an independent. And they question whether Lott is, in his heart, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative -- or just a typical politician most interested in steering federal dollars to his state.
“They have never felt comfortable with Lott,” said one GOP source close to conservative activists. “They believe he’s a dealmaker, not an ideologue.”
On that tinderbox of hostility, the controversy over Lott’s remarks at a party honoring Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) was like a lighted match. Demands for his resignation have flared from such bastions of conservative opinion as National Review commentators William J. Bennett and Charles Krauthammer.
“If he were an effective leader or personally popular, he would have weathered this easily,” said William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard. He also has called for Lott’s resignation as leader.
On paper, Lott is about as conservative as they come. He opposes abortion rights and government regulation of business; he supports tax cuts and gun rights; he has a 93% lifetime voting record with the American Conservative Union.
When he was first elected Senate GOP leader in 1996, conservatives were delighted because he promised a more aggressive, combative form of leadership than was expected from the man he beat for the job, fellow Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran. He also was expected to more aggressively push conservative causes than the GOP leader he succeeded, Bob Dole of Kansas.
But many conservatives were quickly disappointed. Some were especially angered when Lott in 1997 did not block Senate passage of a chemical weapons treaty, despite vehement opposition from conservatives skeptical of such international pacts. Conservative activist Paul M. Weyrich denounced Lott as a “doormat for [then-President] Clinton.” In 1998, Lott and other GOP leaders enraged fiscal conservatives by accepting a budget deal that critics said spent too much and gave too much ground to Clinton.
More recently, conservatives were disappointed that Lott was not more combative in dealing with Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. They argue that Lott did not push hard enough to get a Senate vote on a ban on human cloning. He infuriated conservatives in the House by last year joining in support of an airport security bill that allowed federalization of baggage screening jobs and this year by backing a tougher corporate reform bill than the one the House had passed.
“We didn’t see that Lott was able to hold his own against Daschle,” said one activist who asked not to be named.
To an even greater degree, the rap on Lott among conservatives has been based more on style than substance.
“Trent is not perceived as a fighter,” said a Republican close to the Senate leadership. “It isn’t ideology; it’s how hard is he willing to fight and lose occasionally [to score political points]. Trent does not like to lose.”
Lott’s allies say that conservatives -- especially activists who do not hold office -- do not understand the pragmatic need for compromise within Congress.
“There are things you must do as leader that you have the luxury of not doing when you’re not in the leadership,” said a senior Senate GOP aide. “It’s always much easier to stand outside this tent machine-gunning in.”
Some conservatives were already calling for Lott to step down after the 1998 elections, in which the GOP failed to gain despite the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal looming over Clinton. The National Review urged Republicans to replace Lott with Nickles, arguing that Lott “has proven himself better suited to the back bench, where he is at least a generally reliable vote.” Just last week, the magazine revived its argument for Nickles. “We have long considered Lott a clumsy and ineffective Republican leader, and his controversial Strom Thurmond birthday remarks are a spectacular confirmation of that judgment,” the magazine editorialized.
Also criticizing Lott, but stopping short of demanding he resign, has been the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. It did, however, raise the question of “whether Mr. Lott can still lead the GOP Senate in what is a historic opportunity for conservative reform.”
The Family Research Council, a conservative group that focuses on social issues, complained that Lott’s comments “will serve only to reinforce the false stereotype that white conservatives are racists at heart.”
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ea780bb45eb533065d24bbf294e9029e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-19-me-baseball19-story.html | Judge Throws Splitter in Dispute Over Baseball | Judge Throws Splitter in Dispute Over Baseball
SAN FRANCISCO -- Who says there are no ties in baseball?
A judge Wednesday ruled that Barry Bonds’ record-setting 73rd home run ball belongs to both fans who battled for the hunk of sports history in the stands of a delirious PacBell Park last year. And neither is happy about it.
Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy ordered that the scuffed ball, with an estimated value of $1 million, be auctioned and the profits split between Berkeley restaurant owner Alex Popov, who first touched the ball as it flew into the right-field seats, and Sacramento marketer Patrick Hayashi, who recovered it after a fierce rumble.
The judge emphasized that Popov’s attempts to hold onto the coveted baseball were “interrupted by the collective assault of a band of wrongdoers” who descended on him, making it impossible to determine whether he had legal possession of his prize.
“Judicial rulings, particularly in cases that receive media attention, affect the way people conduct themselves,” McCarthy wrote. “This case demands a vindication of an important principle. We are a nation governed by law, not by brute force.”
Lawyers on both sides said they would study the judge’s complex 12-page ruling before deciding whether to appeal. But nobody wasted time putting their own spin on McCarthy’s decision.
“All I know is that I had possession of that ball,” fumed Hayashi. “Now I’m going to have to go back and evaluate what the legal definition of possession is.”
He said the judge’s ruling proved that he did not attack Popov in the scramble, and he insisted on an apology.
Nothing doing, countered Popov outside the courtroom, suggesting that he still held Hayashi partially responsible for yanking the baseball from his glove during the much-publicized scrum. “He owes me an apology.”
Contradicting his lawyer, Martin Triano, who called the ruling “a victory for all fans,” a disgruntled Popov insisted that the judge’s decision gives outright support to mob violence.
All he ever wanted, Popov said, was to keep the baseball he caught, a dream now very much in doubt. “It’s a piece of baseball history, a piece of San Francisco history and a piece of legal history,” he said. “The way I see it is that anything short of full possession gives power to mob mentality and allows people to profit from aggression.”
One baseball expert called McCarthy’s ruling a contradictory end to a case furthered by greed and selfishness.
“Everybody’s saying all they want is to touch history,” said Paul Zingg, provost at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a baseball writer who consulted on the Ken Burns PBS documentary “Baseball.” “But the judge is putting a value on anything that might allow someone to be part of history. Where do you stop?”
15-Day Trial
McCarthy’s ruling followed last month’s 15-day trial, which featured a retired major league umpire, a consultant with a degree in biomedical engineering, a teenager who testified that he was bitten in the battle for the baseball and four legal scholars who argued the legal possession history of “fugitive baseballs.”
Popov, 38, contends that he legally caught the ball and lost it only after being attacked by fans. Hayashi insists that he picked up the ball after it rolled out of the press of bodies and that it belongs to him. After the two sides failed to reach an out-of-court settlement over the ball, which sits in an Alameda County bank safety deposit box, McCarthy set the matter for trial.
Central to the case, the judge said, was who had possession of the ball and when and how they could prove it. But despite 17 eyewitnesses and video footage showing Popov catching the ball and holding it for 0.6 seconds before being descended on by fellow fans, McCarthy said crucial evidence was nonetheless missing.
“We will never know if Mr. Popov would have been able to retain control of the ball had the crowd not interfered with his efforts to do so,” the judge said. “Resolution of that question is the work of a psychic, not a judge.”
McCarthy, a baseball neophyte who says he has never been to PacBell Park, nonetheless sounded like a play-by-play announcer as he read his verdict on the events of Oct. 7, 2001. “Barry Bonds came to bat in the first inning. With nobody on base and a full count, Bonds swung at a slow knuckleball,” he read to a courtroom packed with reporters and supporters from each litigant. “He connected. The ball sailed over the right-field fence and into the arcade.”
But then things went haywire.
The judge described how the ball landed “in the upper portion of the webbing of a softball glove” worn by Popov. “While the glove stopped the trajectory of the ball, it is not at all clear that the ball was secure. Popov had to reach for the ball and in doing so, may have lost his balance.”
But the judge acknowledged how Popov was thrown to the floor and buried under several bystanders as they clawed for the baseball. He called the fans “a band of wrongdoers” and likened the melee to a “collective assault.” When Hayashi plucked the ball from the floor, the ball already had “a cloud on its title,” the judge said.
But McCarthy said it would be unfair to deny Hayashi the ball because it is possible that Popov might not have caught it cleanly even if he hadn’t been thrown to the floor.
“Hayashi was not a wrongdoer,” McCarthy wrote. “He was a victim of the same bandits that attacked Mr. Popov.” And Hayashi, not Popov, was the one who obtained “unequivocal dominion and control” over the ball.
During the trial, McCarthy heard Popov’s lawyers refer to 100-year-old whaling disputes, buried-ship-salvage cases and hunting laws holding that, since mortally wounded animals often flee, a shooter acquires possession upon the act of wounding an animal, not at the eventual capture.
But McCarthy on Wednesday waved away those references to cite other legal precedents, including case law dating back to the 1880s involving five boys who found a sock containing $775 along railroad tracks in Elizabeth, N.J.
McCarthy said the court at the time ruled that “each boy had possession of the sock at some point” before any of them knew that it contained the money and that “each boy was entitled to an equal share.”
In the months after the melee, Popov and Hayashi have been criticized by baseball insiders, including Bonds, who has suggested that the pair sell the ball and split the profits.
But Donald Tamaki, a member of Hayashi’s legal team, called the judge’s ruling “puzzling.”
“He made a ruling that is unprecedented in California law and even in American law,” he said. “Without controlling a piece of property somehow you have a ‘qualified pre-possessory interest in it.’ The way I see it, either you have it or you don’t. It’s like being half pregnant -- either you are or you aren’t. And so that concept of an in-between right is actually new.”
Unruly Fans
Law professor Paul Finkelman, who helped Popov’s legal team, said McCarthy’s ruling rewards unruly fans at ballparks. “While this may seem to be a Solomon-like decision -- cutting the baby in half -- what it does is say if you are involved in a mugging ... then you get to profit from that.”
He complained that the judge did not follow through on the evidence, particularly a video of the so-called catch.
“The evidence shows the ball is in Popov’s hands,” said Finkelman, a Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa College of the Law. “This rewards essentially those who would commit violence at the ballpark.”
Both Popov and Hayashi acknowledged that the legal fight has changed them. Popov joined a Christian fellowship group. Hayashi quit his job at Cisco Systems and moved to Sacramento.
But there was no joy in Mudville, or San Francisco, for that matter, Wednesday as neither man was ready to shake hands and move on.
“I had talked with friends about having a party and enjoying this baseball,” Popov said. “Now that will have to wait.”
Said Hayashi: “Who would have thought? I go to the ballpark for a good time and end up in court.”
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809727bbdbaf54ac3dd3b2514611c00c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-19-me-register19-story.html | Hundreds Are Detained After Visits to INS | Hundreds Are Detained After Visits to INS
Hundreds of men and boys from Middle Eastern countries were arrested by federal immigration officials in Southern California this week when they complied with orders to appear at INS offices for a special registration program.
The arrests drew thousands of people to demonstrate Wednesday in Los Angeles.
Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesmen refused Wednesday to say how many people the agency had detained, what the specific charges were or how many were still being held. But officials speaking anonymously said they would not dispute estimates by lawyers for detainees that the number across Southern California was 500 to 700. In Los Angeles, up to one-fourth of those who showed up to register were jailed, lawyers said.
The number of people arrested in this region appears to have been considerably larger than elsewhere in the country, perhaps because of the size of the Southland’s Iranian population. Monday’s registration deadline applied to males 16 and older from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Men from 13 other nations, mostly in the Mideast and North Africa, are required to register next month.
Many of those arrested, according to their lawyers, had already applied for green cards and, in some instances, had interviews scheduled in the near future. Although they had overstayed their visas, attorneys argue, their clients had already taken steps to remedy the situation and were following the regulations closely.
“These are the people who’ve voluntarily gone” to the INS, said Mike S. Manesh of the Iranian American Lawyers Assn. “If they had anything to do with terrorism, they wouldn’t have gone.”
Immigration officials acknowledged Wednesday that many of those taken into custody this week have status-adjustment applications pending that have not yet been acted on.
“The vast majority of people who are coming forward to register are currently in legal immigration status,” said local INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice. “The people we have taken into custody ... are people whose non-immigrant visas have expired.”
The large number of Iranians among the detainees has angered many in the area’s Iranian communities, who organized a demonstration Wednesday at the federal building in Westwood.
At the rally, which police officials estimated drew about 3,000 protesters at its peak, signs bore such sentiments as “What Next? Concentration Camps?” and “Detain Terrorists Not Innocent Immigrants.”
The arrests have generated widespread publicity, mostly unfavorable, in the Middle East, said Khaled Dawoud, a correspondent for Al Ahram, one of Egypt’s largest dailies. He questioned State Department official Charlotte Beers about the detentions Wednesday after a presentation she made at the National Press Club in Washington. Egyptians are not included in the registration requirement.
Beers, undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs, was presenting examples of a U.S. outreach campaign for the Middle East, which includes images of Muslims leading happy lives here. Dawoud asked how that image squared with the “humiliating” arrests in recent days.
“I don’t think there is any question that the change in visa policy is going to be seen by some as difficult and, indeed -- what was the word you used? -- humiliating,” Beers said. But, she added, President Bush has said repeatedly that he considers “his No. 1 ... job to be the protection of the American people.”
Relatives and lawyers of those arrested locally challenge that rationale for the latest round of detentions.
One attorney, who said he saw a 16-year-old pulled from the arms of his crying mother, called it madness to believe that the registration requirements would catch terrorists.
“His mother is 6 1/2 months pregnant. They told the mother he is never going to come home -- she is losing her mind,” said attorney Soheila Jonoubi, who spent Wednesday amid the chaos of the downtown INS office attempting to determine the status of her clients.
Jonoubi said that the mother has permanent residence status and that her husband, the boy’s stepfather, is a U.S. citizen. The teenager came to the country in July on a student visa and was on track to gain permanent residence, the lawyer said.
Many objected to the treatment of those who showed up for the registration. INS ads on local Persian radio stations and in other ethnic media led many to expect a routine procedure. Instead, the registration quickly became the subject of fear as word spread that large numbers of men were being arrested.
Lawyers reported crowded cells with some clients forced to rest standing up, some shackled and moved to other locations in the night, frigid conditions in jail cells -- all for men with no known criminal histories.
Shawn Sedaghat, a Sherman Oaks attorney, said he and his partner, Michelle Taheripour, represent more than 40 people who voluntarily went to register and were detained.
Some, he said, were hosed down with cold water before finding places to sleep on the concrete floors of cells.
Lucas Guttentag, who heads the West Coast office of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrant rights project, fears the wave of arrests is “a prelude to much more widespread arrests and deportations.”
“The secrecy gives rise to obvious concerns about what the INS is doing and whether people’s rights are being respected and whether the problems that arose in the aftermath of 9/11 are being repeated now,” he said.
Many at Wednesday’s protest said they took the day off work to join the rally, because they were shocked by the treatment.
“I came to this country over 40 years ago and got drafted in the Army, and I thought if I die it’s for a good cause, defending freedom, democracy and the Constitution,” said George Hassan, 65, from the San Fernando Valley.
“Oppressed people come here because of that democracy, that freedom, that Constitution. Now our president has apparently allowed the INS vigilantes to step outside the Constitution.”
Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, called the detentions doubly disturbing because “a lot of the Iranians are Jews who fled Iran because of persecution, and now they are undergoing similar persecution here.... This is just terrible.”
Attorney Ban Al-Wardi, who saw 14 of her 20 clients arrested when she went with them to the registration, said that although everyone understands the need to protect the nation against terrorist attacks, the government’s recent action went too far.
“All of our fundamental civil rights have been violated by these actions,” she said. “I don’t know how far this is going to go before people start speaking up. This is a very dangerous precedent we are setting. What’s to stop Americans from being treated like this when they travel overseas?”
*
Times staff writers Greg Krikorian and Teresa Watanabe in Los Angeles and Johanna Neuman and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this report.
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c02658fa19275b19011f9f7f4b279c26 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-22-op-avineri22-story.html | The Arab World’s Democracy Deficit | The Arab World’s Democracy Deficit
In the 19th century, it was a widely held belief among certain European and American intellectuals that Catholicism and democracy were irreconcilable. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, once complained in a letter to Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle of “Romish priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism.” This seems an absurd assumption today, in a world where heavily Catholic Christian Democratic parties are pillars of democracy throughout Europe.
It is equally absurd, though quite common, to assume that Islam and democracy are incompatible.
Take the case of Turkey, where a secular constitution has transformed the country over the last 80 years into a functioning, albeit deeply flawed, democracy. The country’s recently held democratic elections saw the victory of a party with strong Islamic roots that is nonetheless committed to democracy and human rights.
Iran, too, should be considered. The country’s Islamic constitution is obviously oppressive. But this same constitution guarantees elections that, while not entirely free, are not a sham. Elections are contested; women as well as men have the right to vote; and, though all candidates have to be approved by religious authorities, there are factions and nuances within the limited discourse.
President Mohammad Khatami has been elected twice against a hard-line conservative establishment candidate and, because he stands for a more open version of Islam, he was supported by young voters and women. Parliamentary debates are lively, with issues of state and religion openly discussed and voted on. In the last parliamentary elections, the reformist factions received a majority. The unelected conservative Council of Guardians still controls many aspects of public life, yet politics are lively, disputatious and much more open than just 10 years ago. Iran’s careful support of the U.S. war on the Taliban suggests how varied the world of Islam can be.
Other examples -- Bangladesh, Indonesia, even Pakistan between military dictators -- suggest that multiparty systems and elections are not alien to the Muslim world.
Yet it is a fact that in the heart of the Muslim world there is a bloc of countries where not one is democratic and there has been no real movement toward democracy: the 21 member countries of the Arab League. Even the much-publicized October parliamentary elections in tiny Bahrain -- a welcome development -- have been made irrelevant by the king’s parallel appointment of an unelected consultative council whose powers equal those of the elected assembly. Not surprisingly, the elections were boycotted by some parties, and the so-called constitutional reform turned out to be mainly a sham.
The Arab world encompasses a great variety of countries: Some are poor, such as Egypt, Algeria, Sudan and Yemen, while others are enormously rich, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. They are small and large, populous and sparsely populated. There are monarchies and military dictatorships, benevolent and harsh. But none of their leaders was freely elected.
Moreover, at a time when regions of the world from Eastern Europe to Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia have moved toward democracy, there has never been anything comparable in any Arab country. We have seen no Arab Mikhail Gorbachev, no Arab Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel, no Arab Solidarity Movement. No Arab dictatorial regime has ever been overthrown by a popular uprising. No Arab country has spawned a serious movement of opposition to the (unelected) powers that be.
Compare the following: A few months ago, an outspoken Iranian academic, Hashem Aghajari, was put on trial and sentenced to death for criticizing some tenets of Islam. Since his trial there have been constant student demonstrations in Tehran and other cities. At great personal risk, demonstrators have clashed with police. Reform leaders, including even some from circles around President Khatami, have called for quashing the sentence. After weeks of unrest, the conservative legal establishment has now agreed to review Aghajari’s sentence.
In Egypt, on the other hand, Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim was put on trial two years ago and sentenced -- twice -- to seven years of hard labor because he dared conduct election research and look into issues of women’s rights and human rights for the Coptic Christian minority. Criticism from abroad moved the government to call for a new trial, but there has been no protest in Egypt. For two years there have been no significant popular demonstrations supporting Ibrahim, and few Egyptian intellectuals have voiced criticism of the attempt to stifle a dissenting voice.
As a 2002 United Nations Development Program report noted, “the transfer of power through the ballot box is not a common phenomenon in the Arab world.” This democracy deficit is coupled with a weakness of civil society, and an almost total absence of civil courage. It has far-reaching consequences for women, among others.
In Iran, despite the chador, women vote, and a woman is deputy speaker of the Majlis, or parliament. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, women are not allowed even to drive and cannot venture from home without a chaperon. In countries like Egypt and Syria, the situation is obviously different -- they are secular autocracies -- but women are nevertheless politically marginalized.
This lack of a democratic culture in Arab countries still needs an explanation, but until Sept. 11, it was not politically correct to mention it. It is now finally getting both political and scholarly attention worldwide, not because of a simplistic acceptance of a “clash of civilizations” theory but for more practical reasons. The democracy deficit in Arab societies has become a major issue for global security.
When people in Saudi Arabia and Egypt are deprived of freedom at home, they are pushed to religious fanaticism as the only way to express anger at their oppression. The 15 Saudi suicide-murderers of 9/11 were not poor or illiterate. They, as well as their Egyptian leader, Mohamed Atta, were middle-class people, relatively well educated. In an open society, they would be members of a legitimate opposition. Denied other channels of dissent, they became terrorists.
Added to this is that, in some cases -- the Saudi one especially -- official ideology focuses on depicting the West as pagan, materialistic and hateful. In Egypt, where no criticism of the government is allowed in the media, lambasting the U.S. (and Israel, of course) is allowed, and even encouraged, to divert criticism from the failures of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.
Islam is not the enemy. But the lack of democracy in Arab countries pushes people toward religious fanaticism and terrorism. This major danger to world security must be addressed frankly and openly.
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38b69b0c5edb440ea3669e1d6d867921 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-24-fg-excerpts24-story.html | ‘We Are Capable of Fighting 2 Major Regional Conflicts’ | ‘We Are Capable of Fighting 2 Major Regional Conflicts’
Here are excerpts from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s briefing.
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The moment [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] and his ruling clique seem to feel that they’re out of danger, they will undoubtedly see no incentive to comply with their international obligations. That is why, after the passage of Resolution 1441, the U.S. and coalition countries are continuing to take steps to keep pressure on the regime.
Among other things, we’ve continued patrolling the skies over the north and south “no-fly” zones. We’ve continued developing a humanitarian relief and reconstruction plan for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
We’ve continued working with the Iraqi opposition. We’ve taken steps to prepare for a post-Saddam transition. And we’re continuing to work with friends and allies to keep the military pressure on Iraq.
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We’re taking prudent and deliberate steps with respect to alerts and mobilizations and deployment of U.S. forces: active, Guard and Reserve.
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None of these steps reflect a decision by the president or the United Nations or anyone else, to my knowledge, to use force. The president has not made such a decision. Rather, they are intended to support the diplomatic efforts that are underway, to enhance force protection in the region and elsewhere in the world, including the United States, and to make clear to the Iraqi regime ... that they need to comply with their U.N. obligations.
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I have no reason to believe that you’re correct that North Korea feels emboldened because of the world’s interest in Iraq. If they do, it would be a mistake.
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We are capable of fighting two major regional conflicts, as the national strategy and the force-sizing construct clearly indicates. We’re capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other. And let there be no doubt about it.
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... The leadership of the country [North Korea] is currently repressing its people, starving its people, has large numbers of its people in concentration camps, driving people to try to leave the country through China and other methods, starving these people. Their economy is in the tank. People at all levels are unhappy with that leadership.... The idea that it’s the rhetoric from the United States that’s causing them to starve their people or to do these idiotic things, or to try to build a nuclear power plant. They don’t need a nuclear power plant. Their power grid couldn’t even absorb that.
If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark.
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0fb2763cbf4d6b79da6f52b302700816 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-24-fg-korea24-story.html | Military Action Possible, U.S. Warns N. Korea | Military Action Possible, U.S. Warns N. Korea
WASHINGTON -- North Korea took new steps toward reactivating its nuclear weapons program Monday as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned Pyongyang that the U.S. military could win a war on the Korean peninsula even while battling Iraq.
In Vienna, officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the U.N. organization monitoring the North Korean nuclear program, said that they saw new signs that Pyongyang was moving ahead with the bomb-building program.
The officials said the North Koreans on Monday dismantled U.N. surveillance cameras and broke locks on a reprocessing plant for spent nuclear fuel rods at the sprawling Yongbyon complex. The move came after the North Koreans removed surveillance cameras and seals from a storage facility for spent fuel rods at the same complex over the weekend.
In Washington, Rumsfeld warned that if North Korea was resuming its bomb program out of a belief that the United States was distracted by a possible war against Iraq, “it would be a mistake.”
“We’re capable of winning decisively in one [theater] and swiftly defeating in the case of the other,” he said. “Let there be no doubt.”
Rumsfeld added, however, that military action was not imminent, and that he had seen no evidence to suggest North Korea’s actions were timed to coincide with the approach of a possible war against Iraq.
Still, the likelihood of confrontation with North Korea seemed to grow over the weekend, with the North Koreans taking steps at Yongbyon -- where 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods are stored -- to restart their nuclear program.
The impoverished Stalinist regime is moving more quickly than U.S. officials had expected toward resuming a bomb-building effort that North Korea halted in 1994 in exchange for an international program of energy aid.
Pyongyang could have a handful of nuclear bombs by the second half of next year if it begins reprocessing the spent-fuel rods to acquire bomb-making material, U.S. officials and other experts say. Such a move would pose a dangerous new nuclear proliferation threat, and destabilize northeast Asia, already one of the most heavily armed regions of the world.
The plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon could be ready to begin producing fissile material for bombs within a few months, said Mohammed Baradei, director general of the IAEA. North Korea was expected to finish removing the cameras and seals from the reprocessing site today, officials said.
Baradei, in an interview with CNN, described the situation as “rapidly deteriorating.”
He added that if the North Koreans restart the reprocessing plant, which was taken offline in 1994 under an agreement brokered by the United States, “then we [would be] in a pretty dangerous situation.”
The IAEA views the events unfolding in North Korea as being just as serious and dangerous as those in Iraq, said Mark Gwozdecky, director of public information for the agency.
“This is every bit as important as Iraq -- they are different in so many ways, but they are sharing equal billing at the top of our priority list,” he said.
Two IAEA inspectors who live on the Yongbyon site saw the North Koreans cutting the seals and disabling the surveillance cameras Monday and alerted the Vienna headquarters. So far, the North Koreans have not asked the inspectors to leave, although without surveillance cameras, it is difficult for the monitors to do their job. The IAEA has little muscle unless, as was the case with Iraq, it is given specific authority by the U.N. Security Council to undertake intrusive inspections backed up by the threat of force.
Despite Rumsfeld’s warning, U.S. officials insist that they want to solve the problem not by military action, but through a diplomatic campaign by the United States and countries in northeast Asia. North Korea has a huge concentration of troops, artillery, tanks and other equipment along its border with the South near Seoul, and a military conflict could kill hundreds of thousands of people within its first hours, experts predict.
Philip T. Reeker, a State Department spokesman, said the United States seeks “a peaceful resolution of the situation that North Korea has created by its pursuit of the nuclear weapons program.” However, he said that the United States would not make concessions because of the threatened moves to build a bomb, as the Clinton administration and allies did eight years ago.
“We will not give in to blackmail,” he said. “The international community will not enter into dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we’re not going to bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has signed.”
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell talked over the weekend and on Monday to officials in Britain, France, Russia, Japan, China and South Korea about North Korea’s latest moves, Reeker said.
Plunged into his first crisis only days after his election, South Korean President-elect Roh Moo Hyun met Monday with outgoing President Kim Dae Jung about how to handle the North Korean situation.
Some U.S. analysts noted that despite the North Korean moves, the regime has not yet actually resumed its nuclear program.
Joel Wit, an Asia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that until the North Koreans begin reprocessing the spent fuel, or eject the IAEA inspectors, they have not taken the final step. Yet he said he believed most officials in the North Korean regime favored resuming the nuclear program, and predicted that the North could have a handful of nuclear weapons by the latter part of next year.
He said he found it “shocking” that the United States would be willing to allow North Korea to build a bomb without trying to resume negotiations. “It serves the cynical purpose of pushing all the other countries in the region into our lap, to isolate North Korea,” he said. “And then, according to our cynical game plan, North Korea will collapse.”
Roh won last week’s election in South Korea on promises of using gentle persuasion to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons. But North Korea’s recent actions threaten to strain his patience and might be a key test for the new president even before he takes office Feb. 25.
“North Korea’s behavior pattern is difficult to understand. It was thought that the North Korean leadership would have been happier to see a progressive win the election and that there would be some cooperation with regard to the nuclear issue, but they are behaving in sharp contrast to expectations,” said Chung Ok Nim, an international relations specialist at the Sejong Institute in Seoul.
The North Koreans had informed the IAEA in Vienna that they would unilaterally remove the monitoring equipment, but it was widely assumed that they were bluffing, or that weeks would ensue before it happened.
“They are acting in a hasty and obnoxious manner,” said Song Young Sun, a North Korea watcher from the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul. “They are really desperate to draw the United States into negotiations. They figure that the United States is in a hurry to go to war with Iraq and that they will have the best bargaining position now.”
Pyongyang on Monday repeated its demand for a pact with the United States that would guarantee that the North would not be attacked.
“If the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula is to be settled properly, the U.S. should stop posing a nuclear threat to [North Korea] and accept [our] proposal for the conclusion of a nonaggression treaty between the two countries,” said Rodong Sinmun, the daily newspaper of the North Korean ruling party.
Richter reported from Washington and Rubin from Vienna. Times staff writer Barbara Demick in Seoul contributed to this report.
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1490f988d1ccefaa0f8584b06d04d56b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-27-et-book27-story.html | Pointed observations on an ancient sport | Pointed observations on an ancient sport
By the Sword
A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions
Richard Cohen
Random House: 520 pages, $29.95
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Richard Cohen writes of fencing that “of all sports arguably the most romantic, it also most closely simulates the act of armed manslaughter.” A five-time national saber champion in Britain and member of the British team in four Olympics, Cohen hangs on this observation an exhaustive book on the history of swords and swordsmanship.
Fencers and other sword fanciers will be engrossed by the details of “By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions.” Others will discover in it a more ambiguous picture of life, in which death and the ways to inflict it become entwined with personal honor, technological improvements and, yes, elegance and beauty.
Much as Patrick O’Brian, in his novels about the royal navy in the Napoleonic Wars, revived the seafaring past of the English tongue, Cohen reminds us that it is easy to find vestiges of swordsmanship in modern society and that it is common in all modern languages to find metaphors and aphorisms for thrusting, cutting and slashing.
“We shake hands,” he writes, “to show that we are not reaching for our swords; a gentleman offers a lady his right arm because at one time his sword was at his left hip; a man’s coat buttons left over right, so that a duelist might unbutton it with his left, unarmed hand. The two main parties in the House of Commons are separated by the precise length of two sword blades; and each MP’s locker still contains a loop of silk on which to hang up his sword. Kamikaze pilots took their samurai swords with them into their cockpits.”
Cohen surveys the history of metallurgy and swords around the world. He quotes R. Ewart Oakeshott, an authority on early arms, as believing that swords first appeared between 1500 and 1100 BC in Minoan Crete and Celtic Britain. The earliest known depiction of fencing is in a temple built around 1190 BC near Luxor in upper Egypt by Ramses III. The Chinese, Japanese, Persians, Babylonians and Romans sometimes fenced as a pastime, but fencing was mostly used by soldiers in combat. Ancient Hindu legend recounts that the god Brahma taught his priest-warriors martial exercise with the sword.
By the European Middle Ages, the sword had become the symbol of dominion and kingship. And even as the longbow and then gunpowder pushed the sword from center stage in combat, it took on in Europe a new aura of personal skill and manliness. Here began the romance, if that is what it truly is, of fencing and swordsmanship that persists to this day. And began too the custom -- or rather the fashion -- of dueling.
Cohen is good on how dueling came about, but short on the why. It seems to have been an expression of individuality as, in the 18th and 19th centuries, societies moved from emphasis on hierarchy to that of the individual (and the exquisite as well as, perhaps, absurd cultivation of personal points of honor). Dueling was intimately related to the Romantic movement in art, music and sensibility.
In cinema, fencing had become fun and games. Cohen has a lively section on fencing in films. He writes that Alexandre Dumas, author of “The Three Musketeers,” “did more to popularize swordfighting than anyone in history -- because so many people read him and because he created the archetypes who would reign again in cinema.”
Hollywood had its fencing masters too. Cohen thinks the best fencing actors were Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Errol Flynn, because they did it themselves.
Cohen quotes from a letter to him from Nicolo Perno, who coached both the Italian and German national teams in the fascist years: “The fencing strip has always seemed to me a metaphor for life itself: he who knows how to move on it, how to overcome a rival by honest means, has really discovered how life itself must be.” Many fencers have said similar things of the sport, and readers of “By the Sword” are entitled to wonder which element, romance or combat, outweighs the other.
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01cf07f869f3c722060ea50a34b41df6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-27-et-thomas27-story.html | Wooden-headed ‘Pinocchio’ | Wooden-headed ‘Pinocchio’
Roberto Benigni’s “Pinocchio,” the most expensive Italian movie ever made, with a $45-million budget, opened in Italy in October with tremendous fanfare at a record 860 theaters -- and also a record weekend take estimated at $7.9 million, overriding mixed reviews. By contrast, it opened in America in a dubbed version, ostensibly the better to connect with the family trade, on Christmas Day with little hullabaloo and no press previews, which is scarcely encouraging.
While it’s hard to imagine that in Italian it would seem anything but a stultifying monument to Benigni’s self-indulgence, it could conceivably at least have come alive, if only fitfully. Although technically a superior example of dubbing in regard to intelligent English speech coming out of Italian mouths in reasonably good synchronization, the film nevertheless remains stubbornly moribund. That’s because the English dialogue track has that dreaded hollow and colorless sound of most dubbed movies, and its flatness is further underlined by the contrasting richness of Nicola Piovani’s lovely score.
This “Pinocchio” in fact is lovely to look at, the final work of late, great production and costume designer Danilo Donati, who built a charming medieval town whose citizens are dressed in clothes inspired by Daumier prints, which would set the story roughly in the era when Carlo Collodi wrote it in 1881. Among the many confections Donati created are a red plush and baroque gilt circus arena, a vast interior of a whale filled with such picturesque detritus as a ship’s prow complete with figurehead and, for Pinocchio’s mentor, the Blue Fairy (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s wife and producer), an exquisite Gothic castle and a mice-driven coach so gossamer as to outshine any conceived for Cinderella (or owned by Elizabeth II).
But the film is all too literally an instance of “all dressed up and no place to go.” As the wooden puppet who yearns to be human, Benigni, again directing himself in his first outing since the seriously overrated “Life Is Beautiful,” is steadfastly insufferable, from his naughty, naive stage through a transformation to a state of virtue that is steeped in a self-congratulatory martyrdom and nobility.
When Benigni starred in Federico Fellini’s 1990 “Voice of the Moon,” Fellini envisioned making a “Pinocchio” with Benigni, and with his seductive and often profound visionary style, he might well have pulled it off. Would that Benigni had let the idea die with the maestro.
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‘Pinocchio’
MPAA rating: G (general audiences)
Times guidelines: Suitable for all ages
Roberto Benigni Pinocchio, dubbed by Breckin Meyer
Nicoletta Braschi The Blue Fairy, dubbed by Glenn Close
Mino Bellei Medoro, the Blue Fairy’s servant, dubbed by Eric Idle
Carlo Guiffre Geppetto/the Narrator, dubbed by David Suchet
Peppe Barra The Cricket, dubbed by John Cleese
A Miramax Films presentation of a Melampo Cinematografica production, Director Roberto Benigni. Producer Nicoletta Braschi. Producers for Melampo Cinematografica Elda Ferri and Gianluigi Braschi. Executive producer Mario Cotone. Screenplay by Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni; based on the book “The Adventures of Pinocchio” by Carlo Collodi. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti. Editor Simona Paggi. Music Nicola Piovani. Production design/costumes Danilo Donati. Costumes for The Blue Fairy by Jane Law. Visual effects supervisor Rob Hodgson.
In general release.
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5c03549041bb075715a750b2f981c389 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-27-oe-foner27-story.html | A Fight for Freedom of Speech | A Fight for Freedom of Speech
We are two of the professors to whom Daniel Pipes refers when he asks: “Why do American academics so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes?”
Pipes, a self-appointed arbiter of acceptable speech and founder of Campus Watch, recently included us in a list of six “Professors Who Hate America” in a New York publication. Using us as examples of professors who relentlessly oppose their own government, he called for “outsiders” (alumni, state legislators, parents of students and others) to “take steps to ... establish standards for media statements by faculty.”
If Pipes were simply displaying a profound misunderstanding of academic freedom, there would be no cause for alarm. But his screed is symptomatic of a broader trend among conservative commentators, who since Sept. 11 have increasingly equated criticism of the Bush administration with lack of patriotism.
William J. Bennett, co-founder of the conservative think tank Empower America, claims in his recent book “Why We Fight” that scholars with whom he disagrees “sow widespread and debilitating confusion” and “weaken the country’s resolve.” The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization founded in 1995 by Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, that calls on those groups to take a more “active” role in determining what happens on campuses, chastised professors who fail to teach the “truth” that civilization itself “is best exemplified in the West and indeed in America.”
Pipes’ call for “outsiders” to police the statements of faculty conjures up memories of World War I and the McCarthy era, when critics of the government were jailed and institutions of higher learning dismissed antiwar or “subversive” professors. Historians today consider such episodes shameful anomalies in the history of civil liberties in the United States.
In equating opposition to government policies with hatred of our country, Pipes displays a deep hostility to the essence of a democratic polity: the right to dissent.
What was our sin that unleashed this assault? Our comments appeared in our respective universities’ student newspapers opposing the Bush administration’s assertion of the right to launch a preemptive war against Iraq.
The same position was voiced by numerous public figures, including members of the first Bush administration, former President Carter and members of Congress. It is the viewpoint of virtually every country in the world, including most of the longtime allies of the United States.
Neither of us offered any “excuse for dangerous and repressive regimes.” It is one thing to deem a regime repressive, quite another to believe that the United States has the right to assume the unilateral role of global policeman.
There is little chance that Columbia or Yale, where we teach, would heed the call to allow “outsiders” to dictate what opinions faculty may voice. The danger is that institutions less financially secure and more dependent on legislatures may bend to this gathering threat to freedom of speech.
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f6d7a9e755dd49f16d16f6e25f00d1cc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-30-na-father30-story.html | A Grieving Dad Takes His Own Vengeance | A Grieving Dad Takes His Own Vengeance
Cole Bailey Sr. walks a fine line on the pavement where it happened. He pictures his son lying here two months ago -- bleeding, groaning, begging for mercy.
He glares at the ground. He stands over the spot where his son was punched and kicked and stomped, where 20-year-old Cole Jr., an innocent bystander caught up in a vicious bar brawl, took his last faint breaths.
“At some point tonight,” Cole Sr. says, “I’ll probably break down all over again.”
But also at some point tonight, Cole Sr. will probably read the police report again, sort through a few more leads again -- and again -- because Cole Sr. is no ordinary grieving father.
He’s a hunter, stalking the suspects in his son’s killing, one by one.
Ten days ago, he caught his first. After two months of working the phones, huddling with private investigators, directing his squad of ex-Marines and security guards from the Arizona nightclubs he owns, Cole Sr. tracked down Chris Whitley, a 24-year-old white supremacist.
Through go-betweens, Cole Sr. sent Whitley an ominous message: Surrender or face a father’s wrath.
So, days before Christmas, in a bizarre confrontation, Whitley met with Cole Sr. at a Phoenix coffee shop.
“It was one of the hardest and strangest things I’ve done in my life,” Cole Sr. says. The grief-stricken father sat directly across from his son’s suspected killer, whose face and head are covered with tattoos.
Whitley ordered a hamburger, and he let it sit while he rambled and justified himself and admitted nothing. “I wanted to get a full admission,” Cole Sr. says. “But the only thing he said was that Cole’s death was wrong.”
Still, the meeting was a victory for Cole Sr. He got the chance to look Whitley hard in the eye before undercover police officers, posing as customers, swarmed and made the arrest. More important, Cole Sr. managed to contain his rage. Had the meeting taken place right after the killing, he admits, it might not have gone the same way.
“In those first days,” he says, “I felt like I needed to do to them what they did to my son. And I felt I would give my life to do it. Time goes on, you think a little differently.”
He walks a fine line, he concedes, between vengeance and justice.
And yet, in the very next breath, he says he’s now turning his full attention to Samuel Colin Compton, 26, suspected leader of the mob that set upon his son. “He’s the one I have a passion for,” he says, predicting that Compton’s capture won’t be peaceful. “This is the type of guy that, if somebody comes between him and his freedom, they’re going to suffer consequences.”
Cole Sr. isn’t afraid, he says. And his bravery has little to do with the .40-caliber Sig Sauer he carries. “The anguish I feel inside overpowers the fear.”
While Phoenix police say Cole Sr. should be afraid of the suspects -- some of whom have spent time in prison -- they refrain from condemning his hunt. In fact, police are including Cole Sr. in their investigation and helping with his.
“This is a father who’s not going to stand by idly and watch the people who murdered his son roam freely,” says Sgt. Randy Force, a Phoenix police spokesman. “As a father myself, I can understand what would drive a father to do what Cole Bailey Sr. is doing.”
Cole Sr. looks nothing like a hunter, and even less like a father. At age 38, dressed all in black, with long black hair and gold hoop earrings, he looks like someone’s rebellious teenage son.
He became a father young, he explains. An 18-year-old Navy seaman when Cole Jr. was born, he was surprised by fatherhood -- then caught off guard by its emotional hold.
Cole Jr. was born with a heart defect, and he wavered for months between life and death. “The first year of his life I’d stay awake every night and watch him to make sure he didn’t stop breathing. I was probably overdoing it a little,” Cole Sr. says.
But such is the power children have over you, he says.
After Cole Sr. separated from Cole Jr.'s mother, Cole Jr. lived with his father. Father and son got along well, Cole Sr. says, but lately they had been arguing. Cole Jr. had fallen behind in the payments on his Mustang, and Cole Sr. was frustrated. The day his son died, Cole Sr. scolded him.
“It brings you to your knees,” Cole Sr. says. “If you could just have a few minutes to say some other words.”
The three suspects named in Cole Jr.'s killing have ties to white supremacist groups, police say, and Cole Jr. didn’t know them or their world. He merely wandered into the path of their unpredictable hatred.
It was Oct. 16, about 8:30 p.m.
Cole Jr. stood outside River City Pockets, a pool hall where he had just applied for work as a bartender. He was waiting for a taxi, going to see his girlfriend, who was sick with the flu.
Suddenly, a fight erupted inside the pool hall. Several skinheads, ejected from the hall, began goose-stepping around the parking lot, shouting, “White Power!”
Police say the skinheads spotted Cole Jr. -- shy, bespectacled, painfully soft-spoken. He stood 5 feet 9 inches and weighed barely 130 pounds. (He also had a pacemaker, because of his congenital heart defect.)
Cole Sr. -- who interviewed nearly every witness -- says Compton confronted Cole Jr. and asked what he was looking at.
Cole Jr. didn’t answer.
Compton, tall and burly, allegedly marched toward Cole Jr.
“He walked up to my son and punched him straight between the eyes with brass knuckles,” Cole Sr. says.
Cole Jr.'s glasses went flying as he fell to the ground.
“He rolled over to his hands and knees,” Cole Sr. says. “He crawled about 3 feet and gathered enough of his senses, and had enough adrenaline, to run.”
But the mob gave chase.
“One of them pulled my son to the ground and the other two began kicking him with their steel-toed boots in the head and the body. While he could speak, he said, ‘No, please, I was just waiting for a taxi.’ ”
When Cole Jr. went limp, his attackers ran -- except one, who allegedly delivered one last “field-goal kick” to Cole Jr.'s head.
Police arrested that last alleged attacker two days later, Cole Sr. says. While police have named three suspects, Cole Sr. believes there are six.
Cole Sr. visits the crime scene frequently. Each visit hurts, he says. But there is always the chance of learning something new.
Now, standing where his son waited for the taxi, Cole Sr. turns to see a man emerge from the shadows. The man comes forward slowly, haltingly, and introduces himself: He was the bouncer at the pool hall the night of the slaying.
“Joe,” he says, shaking Cole Sr.'s hand. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
Joe tells Cole Sr. how the fight in the pool hall started, how violent it became, how quickly he managed to get everyone out the door. Only minutes passed, he says, before someone ran inside and told him what was happening in the parking lot.
“I came out,” he says. “And saw -- you know.”
“Where was he?” Cole Sr. whispers.
“His feet were right about here,” Joe says. “His head was here.”
They stand over the spot.
“What was his appearance?” Cole Sr. asks.
Joe clears his throat. He doesn’t want to answer.
“Please,” Cole Sr. says.
“I wouldn’t know how to describe it,” he says. “I never seen anything like it. I wouldn’t want to choose the wrong words.”
“Were his eyes open?”
“I couldn’t tell,” Joe says. “His eyes were so covered in blood, I couldn’t tell if they were open or not.”
Cole Sr. barrages Joe with questions: Was Cole Jr. breathing? Was he conscious? Was anyone with him at the end?
Joe answers each question plainly, but reluctantly, seeing how the answers fall like blows on the father. Finally he walks back to the pool hall.
Cole Sr. takes a last look around the parking lot. He stares at the cars, the pavement, the horizon.
“Those must have been the longest three minutes of his life,” he says.
Then, shoulders hunched against the cold, he returns to his car, to his grief.
To the hunt.
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7fb5d8730ea0a0fdd8f7ed3b9cd17c73 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-30-oe-hanson30-story.html | The Administration Can’t See the Forest for the Sequoias | The Administration Can’t See the Forest for the Sequoias
In the spring of 2000, then-President Bill Clinton issued a proclamation establishing the Giant Sequoia National Monument east of Bakersfield, ensuring that the giant sequoia groves and their surrounding ecosystems would be forever protected, or so we thought.
This month, the Bush administration announced its draft management plan for the 329,000-acre monument, which proposes a commercial logging program that includes patch clear cuts within the sequoia groves and large-scale removal of big, green trees. Even century-old giant sequoias would be logged.
That the Bush administration would target such a revered refuge for logging raises a serious question: If the Giant Sequoia National Monument isn’t safe under this administration, what is?
Though shocking, the move comes as little surprise, given that the sequoia monument is still managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which, in turn, is overseen by a former timber industry lobbyist, Bush appointee Mark Rey.
The plan cavalierly ignores the fact that the monument proclamation was clearly intended to prevent continued logging and designed to ensure far greater protection than the area previously had as a national forest.
Instead, the Bush administration’s proposal turns this goal on its head.
What’s even more disturbing is that the plan claims such logging of large trees is necessary to prevent severe forest fires.
The federal government’s own scientists have consistently found that removal of large trees increases severe fire risk by removing the most fire-resistant elements -- big trees -- from the forest and by reducing the cooling shade of the forest canopy.
The logging of mature trees also increases sun exposure, causing more rapid growth of highly flammable brush within a few years.
Indeed, the comprehensive Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Report, which was produced by university and Forest Service scientists, concluded that “timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity.”
The report recommended thinning of undergrowth and prescribed burning as appropriate fire management tools. It strongly opposed the removal of mature trees.
The Forest Service’s own National Fire Plan, which again was developed by government scientists, warned that the Forest Service “should not rely on commercial logging or new road building to reduce fire risks” because the “removal of large, merchantable trees from forests does not reduce fire risk and may, in fact, increase such risk.”
The Bush administration doesn’t appear to care what the nation’s top scientists -- even the government’s own researchers -- are saying.
For this administration, it’s all about pleasing big timber industry campaign contributors, and logging corporations have no interest in underbrush.
The timber industry wants economically valuable big trees, and lots of them.
The Giant Sequoia National Monument was established for the protection of the sequoia ecosystem and the species it supports, including the California spotted owl and the mink-like Pacific fisher.
The fisher is nearly extinct in the Sierra, in large part because of habitat degradation from logging.
Bush’s new logging plan may well drive the remaining fisher population to extinction in the Sierra Nevada range.
This plan to “save” the Giant Sequoia National Monument by allowing logging corporations to clear-cut within sequoia groves and remove big trees is more than a little disingenuous.
It is a shameless political move loaded with enough hypocrisy and cynicism to flatten a forest.
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2bf1dacaa6f1b5d15e3a4a21c89d49e2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-04-et-munoz4-story.html | The New Bleacher Features | The New Bleacher Features
Yes, there will still be bleachers for fans at this year’s Academy Awards--despite earlier rumors that they would be banned. But getting a bleacher seat will be much tougher than before, and don’t plan to camp out ahead of time to get one.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce today that it is implementing stricter procedures to determine who can watch the celebrity arrivals from the bleachers at the 74th annual Academy Awards, which this year moves to its new home in Hollywood at the Kodak Theatre.
For the last few months, fans and industry people alike have speculated that the academy would ban the bleachers because of concerns about security and traffic around the new site. Fans will still be able to catch a glimpse of their favorite stars from the bleachers, academy officials said. But the days of fans camping out at the Oscar site days in advance in hopes of getting a bleacher seat on Oscar Sunday are over.
This year, fans will have bleacher seats by advance reservation only. They must submit an application including their name, passport and Social Security numbers, and agree to be subject to a background check. Once fans have been vetted, they will be assigned seats.
Fans will also be subjected to a metal detector test--don’t feel bad, the stars must go through one as well--and wear an identification badge with their photograph. The applications will be available beginning Wednesday on the academy’s Web site, www.oscars.org.
“The prevailing wisdom here is that these folks are such an important part of the event we wanted to keep them,” said Ric Robertson, the academy’s executive administrator.
The bleachers will be on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard next to the Kodak Theatre, which is part of the new Hollywood & Highland complex. About 400 bleacher seats will be available, the same as in past years. The red carpet for celebrities and guests will run down Hollywood Boulevard outside the theater.
The relocation of the Oscars to the Kodak Theatre brings the industry’s most important awards show to its fabled home, but it has also created some logistical challenges. The outside site is smaller than the Oscars’ former homes, the Shrine Auditorium and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. All businesses near the Kodak Theatre will be closed March 24, the date of the ceremony. And nearby residents will be subjected to closed street traffic for several days before the ceremony.
In years past, seats on the bleachers were given on a first-come, first-served basis. To get seats, fans would set up “tent cities” outside the bleacher site, three or four days before the ceremony. This year, the city of Los Angeles has yet to determine whether it will allow people to camp out to line the streets as the celebrities arrive, said Robertson. But in discussions with the merchants, it was made clear that they did not want the fans staked out in front of their stores.
“Some of the neighbors haven’t exactly been thrilled with having their sidewalk turn into tent city,” Robertson said.
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The academy’s decision to keep the bleachers will surely bring relief to the legions of celebrity spectators who make the trek to the Oscar site every year. The academy decided that it could not do away with the frenetic energy that excitable fans create for the stars on the red carpet. It is a tradition as wedded to the Oscars as thanking agents and dressing in designer gowns.
Whether it was Clark Gable waving at his adoring fans in the ‘30s, soldiers saluting the stars during World War II or an unknown starlet losing her slip and throwing it to the crowds in the ‘50s, the bleachers have always been a focal point for celebrity worship at Hollywood’s most glamorous event--and one of the most-watched televised events in the world.
One of the only notable contretemps in the bleachers was in 1996, when director Milos Forman was nominated for “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” and protesters infiltrated the bleachers holding signs against pornography. Any real protests over the years--such as during the Vietnam War, the 1996 Jesse Jackson-led protest against the lack of minority representation in Hollywood, or opposition to director Elia Kazan receiving an honorary Oscar in 1999--have been held outside the bleacher area, usually far from cameras and reporters.
“Very little has transpired on the bleachers in terms of drama,” said Oscar historian Damien Bona, author of “Inside Oscar 2: A Year by Year History of the Oscars.” “People who are willing to wait a couple of days in line are usually not very political.”
And perhaps nothing represents the era of celebrity worship more than the 400 people who have traveled from all over the world to catch a momentary glimpse of a movie star.
Their enthusiasm for the celebrities is something the stars themselves are prepped for by the publicists who walk them down the red carpet. The shouts, clapping and buzzing from the fans in the bleachers, along with the flashes from the paparazzi, make for a frenzied environment that gets the stars hyped.
“I told Juliette Binoche, ‘When you get there and they recognize you, it will be like nothing you have ever seen or heard or felt,’” said Melody Korenbrott, head of Block Korenbrott PR, describing the deafening noise and blinding flashes on the red carpet. “I told her, ‘Enjoy it.’ It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for some people.”
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f93439c674a5e8cc214fcf6533b0d581 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-05-et-ybarra5-story.html | Bay Area: I Want My NBC | Bay Area: I Want My NBC
Sam Jennings has learned a lot about the TV viewing habits of his friends since NBC changed its local affiliate station on New Year’s Eve. When NBC switched from San Francisco-based KRON to San Jose’s KNTV, tens of thousands of viewers in the northern broadcast area discovered that they couldn’t pick up the new channel--including four of Jennings’ friends, for whom he now videotapes their favorite NBC shows.
“They’re not about to pay for cable to watch ‘Will & Grace,’” Jennings said. “One surprising thing about this whole NBC nonsense is that I’ve discovered that people I would never have imagined [to be] devotees of sitcoms are [fans of these shows]. One friend in particular wants episodes of ‘Just Shoot Me,’ which is, in my opinion, the stupidest thing on the air.”
Or not on the air--as is the case for some 145,000 households in the country’s fifth-largest television market, which stretches from San Jose to San Francisco, where most of the lost viewers are located.
When NBC switched its affiliation to KNTV after 50 years with KRON, it did more than change from Channel 4 to Channel 11--it also switched transmitters from Mt. Sutro in San Francisco to Loma Prieta south of San Jose.
That meant that homes that could never get the signal in the southern reaches of the market finally got NBC, but that tens of thousands of viewers in the north who took broadcast TV as a birthright suddenly found themselves staring at a screen full of snow instead of “The West Wing” or “ER.”
NBC’s “Must See TV,” the San Francisco Chronicle carped, turned into “Can’t See TV” for many.
The timing, too, just before the February ratings sweeps (which began Thursday) and the Winter Olympics (opening Friday), has galled many would-be viewers.
“I feel abandoned by NBC,” said Michelle La Plante, a law student in San Francisco, who turned to Channel 4 one day after the switch and found an infomercial instead of NBC fare.
Still, most viewers have managed to locate NBC. On a recent Thursday, for example, the network finished second in prime time, grabbing 14% of the available audience, just behind CBS.
“KNTV is doing remarkably well,” said Steve Doerr, NBC senior vice president for news and programming. “It has exceeded our hopes and expectations. Four weeks ago no one had even heard of this station. Now it’s No. 1 or 2 in many categories. That’s unbelievable. We’re neck and neck with the guys who’ve been around for 60 years; we’ve been around three weeks.”
Ratings growth notwithstanding, KNTV’s news operation has already been dinged by Grade the News, a Bay Area media watchdog group, which gave the station a D+ for its local coverage.
“KNTV’s newscast was the worst we’ve ever rated for newsworthiness,” wrote John McManus, on the group’s Web site, gradethenews.org, adding that the station’s newscasts “were riddled with ‘Journalism 101' errors you just don’t expect to see in the nation’s fifth-largest market.”
Move Is Paying Off
Already for KNTV
Affiliation changes remain rare, although there was a flurry of such activity in the mid-1990s, after Fox boldly convinced a dozen stations affiliated with the three elder networks to align themselves with Fox, which had just acquired rights to NFL games.
KNTV, which has seen its prime-time market share jump from 1% to double digits, certainly seems happy.
“Switches are disruptive,” said Bob Franklin, the general manager for KNTV. “It takes a while for viewers to establish viewing patterns. It can be months and months before markets solidify. But the bottom line is that 20 days after the switch, we’re No. 1 or 2 in morning news, the ‘Today’ show, prime time, late news and late night. I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’ve never seen such an extraordinary acceptance of a product so soon into a switch.”
The machinations behind the channel switch itself sound like the stuff of a TV miniseries. KRON was born as an NBC affiliate in 1949 and owned for half a century by the Chronicle Publishing Co., which was controlled by the heirs of the De Young family, who also owned the Chronicle newspaper. In 1999, the family put the company’s assets on the block.
NBC offered $700 million for KRON--which would have given the network an owned-and-operated station in the largest market where it lacked one. But NBC was outbid by Young Broadcasting, which owns KCAL in Los Angeles among dozens of other independent stations. Young wound up paying about $737 million in cash and stock for KRON, figuring it could make money either as a network affiliate or as an independent--NBC seemed to have no place else to go.
Then KNTV stepped into the picture. The San Jose station had been a secondary ABC affiliate in the Salinas-Monterey market before it became an independent in 2000. When NBC and Young couldn’t come to terms over an affiliation agreement, the network decided to go with Granite Broadcasting’s KNTV.
In December, NBC announced that it was buying the channel for $230 million, knowing that the change in transmitters would cause some viewers to lose the network’s over-the-air signal.
“The topography of the San Francisco area compounds the problem,” said Jay Ireland, president of NBC TV stations. “You have a lot of dead spots.”
Which is why more than 80% of households in the area have cable. The network, in fact, decided to advertise the station as NBC3 for its position on the cable dial and joined with AT&T; Broadband to aggressively market cable subscriptions on everything from grocery bags to billboards. AT&T; spokesman Andrew Johnson said cable subscriptions jumped 15% to 20%.
Even so, some apartment dwellers still can’t get cable, and others have balked at spending anywhere from $14 a month (just to improve their broadcast reception) to $35 for basic cable to get a channel that is nominally free.
Looking to Improve
Signal in Problem Areas
Out of 2.4 million households in the market, NBC says it has received about 10,000 e-mails and letters complaining about lost reception. The network has dispatched trucks to prowl those ZIP codes that are having the hardest time getting NBC to better map problem areas. NBC is also considering using low-power signal repeaters to boost reception in certain neighborhoods during the Olympics. .
“If it works, it may give us a permanent solution,” said NBC’s Ireland. “We’re trying to reach as many viewers as possible.”
Moving the transmitter is also being studied. “It’s quite possible we could move it and very quickly,” said KNTV’s Franklin. “But no matter where you put the tower, there will always be neighborhoods that won’t get the signal. The south Bay has had to deal with the lack of reception for stations in the north Bay for 40 years. Everyone will not be satisfied.”
While people in San Francisco who have lost NBC say they’re watching less TV and spending more time reading or listening to music, some in the south Bay are actually gloating.
“KNTV should resolve to tell the whiny television elitists in San Francisco they should shut their sourdough yaps,” wrote San Jose Mercury News columnist Mark Purdy, who was just getting warmed up.
“Folks up in the Bay Area’s second-largest city complained that the signal was too weak to pick up there. Awww. Too bad. For years, we South Bay residents without cable hookups had to twizzle and bend our outdoor antennas to pick up San Francisco stations. Now it’s payback time, baby. If anyone in San Francisco really misses ‘Fear Factor,’ they can always walk outside and confront a few aggressive panhandlers.”
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53b9e227e95749201709ddc5d481c9ec | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-06-me-count6-story.html | Sigvard Bernadotte, 94; Former Swedish Prince | Sigvard Bernadotte, 94; Former Swedish Prince
Count Sigvard Bernadotte, a former Swedish prince who lost his royal title in 1934 after marrying a commoner then sued recently to get it back, has died. He was 94.
Bernadotte, who was also a noted industrial designer, died Monday in Stockholm, according to the royal court, which did not announce the cause of death.
The Bernadotte dynasty has ruled since 1818 in the Scandinavian country of nearly 9 million people.
Sigvard Bernadotte was the second son of King Gustaf VI Adolf, who reigned from 1950 to 1973, and an uncle of the present King Carl XVI Gustaf.
But Bernadotte’s title and place in the royal succession were removed in 1934 after he married German commoner Erika Patzek.
After his removal from the line of succession, Bernadotte and his wife lived for a time in Southern California. A gifted artist, Bernadotte made his living as a silversmith.
Bernadotte, who initially accepted his removal from the royal line, sued Sweden, a constitutional monarchy, in the European Court last May to regain his title. The lawsuit was still pending at his death.
“I was born a prince, and I want to die a prince,” Bernadotte said when he filed the suit, saying his human rights were violated when his right to his title was denied.
In 1951, he was dubbed Count of Wisborg by Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg.
Bernadotte divorced Patzek in 1943 and married Sonja Helene Robbert the same year. He divorced Robbert in 1961, marrying his last wife, Marianne Lindberg, later that year.
For many years, Bernadotte felt wronged and refused to participate in celebrations of the royal family, but he enjoyed warmer relations with the family in recent years.
Bernadotte attended the funeral of his brother, Prince Bertil, in January 1997 at the invitation of the king, and was at the royal couple’s 25th wedding anniversary last summer.
The flags flew at half staff at the royal palace in Stockholm, and the royal family canceled part of its program this week in mourning, court spokeswoman Elisabeth Tarras-Wahlberg said.
The royal family is expected to attend the funeral, Tarras-Wahlberg said, but no date for it has been set.
Bernadotte is survived by his wife and a son from his second marriage, Michael.
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4c58c94a54b40b219ea47af33b0111a9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-07-me-pintoff7-story.html | Ernest Pintoff, 70; Animator Won Oscar | Ernest Pintoff, 70; Animator Won Oscar
Ernest Pintoff, an Academy Award-winning animator and a film and television director, has died. He was 70.
Pintoff died Jan. 12 at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills of complications from a stroke.
He won the Oscar for best animated short for “The Critic,” a 1963 satire on modern art written and narrated by Mel Brooks. Pintoff previously earned an Oscar nomination for his animated short “The Violinist,” narrated by Carl Reiner.
On television, Pintoff directed episodes of numerous series, including “Hawaii Five-O,” “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Falcon Crest.” As part of NBC’s “Experiments in Television” in the late 1960s, he directed the documentaries “This Is Marshall McLuhan” and “This Is Sholem Aleichem.”
Among Pintoff’s feature credits as a director are the low-budget “Who Killed Mary What’s ‘Er Name?,” starring Red Buttons, and “Dynamite Chicken,” a collection of songs, skits, commercial parodies and old movie clips with appearances by Richard Pryor, John Lennon, Andy Warhol and other celebrities.
Pintoff, who taught directing at the School of Visual Arts, American Film Institute, California Institute of the Arts and UCLA, received the International Animated Film Society’s Winsor McCay Award for distinguished lifetime contributions to the art of animation in 1998.
Born in Watertown, Conn., and raised in New York City, Pintoff originally was a jazz trumpeter and later taught painting and design at Michigan State University.
He began his animation career in 1956.
After suffering a stroke in 1983, Pintoff turned to writing books, including a memoir, “Bolt From the Blue”; a novel, “Zachary”; and animation textbooks.
He is survived by his wife, Caroline; son Jonathan of Los Angeles; daughter Gabrielle Stornaiuolo of San Francisco; and three grandsons.
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160e474ba3cb94d9e53323a55dd6def8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-09-sp-nbarep09-story.html | Marbury Is Charged With ‘Extreme DUI’ | Marbury Is Charged With ‘Extreme DUI’
Phoenix Sun point guard Stephon Marbury was arrested Friday on a charge of driving under the influence after an officer saw his car weaving on the road in Scottsdale, Ariz.
An officer started following Marbury because he appeared to be speeding, then watched as the car began moving in and out of its lane, Scottsdale police spokesman Officer Scott Reed said.
Marbury was clocked at 75 mph in a 50 mph zone and pulled over, Reed said. Marbury’s speech was slurred and his breath smelled like alcohol, police said.
A portable breath test indicated Marbury had a blood alcohol level of .153, the police said. The legal limit for driving in Arizona is 0.08. A blood test also will be conducted.
Marbury was booked into the city jail on charges of extreme DUI, DUI and speeding, Reed said. Extreme DUI, a charge that can be used when a person has a blood alcohol level of at least 0.15, carries harsher penalties.
Reed said Marbury was held for about two hours before being released. The case was referred to the city prosecutor’s office.
“I must accept responsibility for my actions and I apologize to my teammates, the organization and the community for whatever embarrassment I have caused,” Marbury said in a statement.
Sun president Bryan Colangelo, who was in Philadelphia for the All-Star game, said the team would act after the details of the arrest and the legal outcome were known.
“We are extremely disappointed to learn of this incident involving Stephon Marbury,” Colangelo said.
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Charlotte Hornet guard Baron Davis was picked to replace the injured Vince Carter for Sunday’s All-Star game.
Carter, the leading vote-getter for the third consecutive season, strained his left quadriceps Thursday in Toronto’s game against San Antonio.
Davis, in his third season from UCLA, will participate in his first All-Star game. He is averaging 19.1 points and 8.7 assists.
Davis’ bags were packed for a trip to Los Angeles before he learned at midnight Thursday that he would take Carter’s place on the East roster.
“I was excited--how would you take it?” Davis said. “Man, that was a like a dream come true. This is like a whole other level.”
East Coach Byron Scott said Jason Kidd will start in Carter’s spot.
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The clock trick known as “home cooking” won’t be a factor in this year’s NBA playoffs.
The league’s Rules and Competition Committee adopted a change in timekeeping practices, mandating that the person running the clock in postseason games must be from a neutral city.
“We’ve had a few occasions in regular-season games where there been some issues with timekeepers,” NBA vice president Stu Jackson said.
Timekeepers, from time to time, have been known to start the clock a split-second late if the home team is inbounding with very little time left on the shot clock or the game clock. The practice has become common enough that players routinely notice when a timekeeper doesn’t provide “home cooking.”
“This will ensure that the game is timed correctly and there’s no concern by anyone as to whether or not there’s anything going on with the home team,” Jackson said.
The committee decided against tinkering with flagrant foul rules, but it did decide to move toward changing the name of the injured list to the inactive list, thereby ending the practice of teams stashing healthy players with phony injuries because there is no room on the 12-man active roster.
Such a change must still be approved by the players’ union.
*
Gerald Wallace didn’t see Julius Erving take off from the foul line, missed Spud Webb’s electrifying performance and the classic battles between Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins.
Wallace never was a fan of the NBA slam dunk contest. Today, the 19-year-old rookie forward will try to win it anyway.
“When I was in high school, I could dunk anytime I wanted, so dunking never was very exciting to me and I didn’t pay attention to the slam dunk contest,” Wallace said. “I just want to go out and have fun.”
Wallace, averaging 2.7 points for the Sacramento Kings, will be going against Golden State’s Jason Richardson, Houston’s Steve Francis and Seattle’s Desmond Mason, the defending champion.
It’s the fewest contestants since the event was first held in 1984.
“I got a few tricks up my sleeve,” Richardson said. “I saw what Desmond did last year and I’m sure there’s some things he can do better.”
Today’s schedule also includes a rookie-sophomore game, the three-point shootout and a mini four-on-four Hoop-It-Up tournament with teams made up of an NBA player, a WNBA player, a former NBA player and a celebrity.
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85bac5606ae07b408341bc2b5984bb38 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-13-hy-wheels13-story.html | A 4-Door, 7-Passenger, V-6 Engine ... Shoe? | A 4-Door, 7-Passenger, V-6 Engine ... Shoe?
Auto makers have latched onto almost every conceivable theme in their struggle to come up with names that will help sell cars.
There are fish and fowl, insects and trees, Latin words and foreign places, letters, numbers and the human races. They’ve used royalty, meaningless alpha-numeric combinations, weapons, celestial bodies, poisonous snakes, mythology and more.
But never before has anyone named a vehicle after a shoe.
Ford Motor Co., fighting to come back from a disastrous series of safety, marketing and reliability problems in recent years, has decided on CrossTrainer as the name of a new sport-utility-styled vehicle.
“I think a cross trainer is an athletic shoe, isn’t it,” said Tom Healey, director of marketing services at the automobile research firm J.D. Power and Associates. “What are they trying to resonate with? I don’t know the point.”
Indeed, a cross trainer is a type of shoe that purportedly allows the amateur athlete to engage in a range of activities, from tennis to running, basketball to television watching.
The new Ford vehicle will fit a genre that packages a station wagon with the image of a sport-utility vehicle. The idea is that it supports many activities.
It’s not a particularly glamorous look, but no doubt Ford’s research has shown a sizable market for a rugged vehicle that is smaller, better performing and less costly than a true SUV.
Ford is betting big on it, converting a Taurus/Sable manufacturing plant in Chicago to CrossTrainer production in 2004.
But oh, that name.
Will you get a car or a pair of athletic shoes when you ask the parking valet to bring you the blue CrossTrainer?
More important, will questions like that cross consumers’ minds--and color their decision making--when they go car shopping?
The trend in car naming in recent years has been to select names loaded with testosterone or to swing to combinations of letters and numbers.
Infiniti, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Lexus, among others, use virtually all alpha-numeric names: Q45, 330i, SLK320, S80, IS300.
But even with something so bland, there are pitfalls.
Mostly, the numbers denote a vehicle’s engine size. But Mercedes-Benz, among others, has tripped up when the engine size changed but the model name remained the same.
In a bid for novelty, some car makers have strung things together in unmanageable fashion: the bonkers Merkur xr4ti, a short-lived Mercury from Europe.
Meanwhile, the growing dominance of trucks has given vehicle naming a tougher edge, said Kenny Morse, the Mr. Traffic radio host.
Take, for example, one edition of the most popular vehicle in the nation, the Ford F-150 pickup truck. The company this year came out with the Harley Davidson F-150 Super Crew, Morse said.
That’s consistent with such names as the Sequoia, Expedition, Mountaineer, Tahoe, Trailblazer and the Ironman, a special edition of Isuzu’s Vehicross sport-utility--a model discontinued this year.
“There is almost no appeal to women, which is the strangest part of it all,” Morse said. “They are the car buyers in the U.S. They are involved in most of the car purchases.”
Some names have simply been around too long.
Does Ford’s Crown Victoria, apparently referring to British royalty, resonate well with today’s buyers? Or Mercury’s Grand Marquis?
These are old names on old vehicles, perhaps intended at one time to appeal to the pretensions of the middle class. Names such as the Dodge Monaco and the Chevrolet Monte Carlo are in the same vein. They are unlikely to ever be duplicated.
Except for its success, the same might be said of the venerable Suburban, the king of the SUV class that has been around for decades.
Suburbia today is the often-unattractive sprawl of the 1960s and ‘70s.
But when GM named the vehicle in 1935, the Suburban was purchased by a lot of rural dwellers and “instead of saying you were a hick or a farmer, it said you are a suburbanite,” Healy said. “Somebody from the boonies would see the suburbs as glamorous.”
Animal names are consistently popular. Among the best have been the Falcon, Mustang, Sting Ray, Barracuda, Super Bee and Viper. The antithesis of these are the engineered names of imports: Camry, Acura, Jetta.
The Japanese have an odd affinity for Latin or Latin-sounding names: Lexus, meaning law, or Maxima, the biggest.
Spanish pops up sometimes in domestic as well as import names: Japan’s Isuzu had an Amigo, Ford had a Ranchero and Chevrolet had a Nova.
There have been a smattering of Indian names too: Aztek, Cherokee. In fact, the Aztek is a Pontiac, which is an entire brand named after a Native American chief.
Terrible names often are associated with failed models. Among the worst: the General Motors Impact.
“Why not call it the crash-boom-bang?” Morse asked.
The Chevy Citation, the so-called X-platform car that was to beat back imports in the 1970s, became known as the traffic ticket.
Finally, there is the Edsel, the car named after Henry Ford’s downtrodden son.
“It has become synonymous with a bad idea. I don’t think there is anything essentially goofy about the name,” Healey said, “but it has come to mean loser.”
Although the car was a styling experiment that didn’t catch on with buyers, naming it after someone who spent most of his life pushed into the shadows by a domineering patriarch wasn’t the keenest piece of marketing savvy.
“After a time,” Healey said, “the name will define the car.”
In the Edsel’s case, it became the definition of a failure.
And that’s about as bad as it gets in product marketing.
*
Ralph Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: ralph .vartabedian@latimes.com.
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e529126719d0da9235e13442002e16e5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-17-mn-29392-story.html | Dam Leaves Some Residents High, Dry | Dam Leaves Some Residents High, Dry
Qin Feiyun dices greens with a cleaver in her restaurant, puts an oiled wok on the gas stove and waits for customers who never come.
Qin’s family recently joined thousands of people forced to evacuate homes in central China that will be flooded by the reservoir of the giant Three Gorges Dam.
Dozens of high-rise housing projects were built to receive them. But attempts to restart normal life are failing on their broad, empty boulevards.
“Nobody here has any money to buy things. The only thing that sells is burglar bars” for apartment windows, Qin said.
Demolition has begun of centuries-old cities and villages along the Yangtze River that will be flooded by the world’s largest hydroelectric project. They are being replaced by rose of white or yellow apartment complexes springing up on hilltops that will soon form the shore of a vast new reservoir.
More than 395,000 people have been moved, and China plans to relocate another 130,000 before closing off the Yangtze in June 2003.
All told, 1.13 million people must be resettled before the reservoir reaches its full length of 411 miles in 2009.
Most people will be moved to new cities and villages above the reservoir’s crest. But 125,000 are to be transplanted to areas as distant as Shanghai and the far western region of Xinjiang.
The scale of the $5-billion relocation is vast even for a country that has long shifted large populations to build water projects.
Emperors carved canals across China’s richest farmland. Since the communists took over in 1949, more than 10 million people have been moved to make way for 80,000 reservoirs.
“Moving millions of people is all in a day’s work if it’s in the name of advancing China’s position in the world,” said Vaclav Smil, an expert on China’s water projects at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
But never has a Chinese water project generated as much public controversy as the $25-billion Three Gorges Dam. Critics complain of widespread human rights abuses, such as villagers moved out by force and with inadequate compensation.
Resettled people have complained in petitions to Beijing. Violence erupted last August, when as many as 1,000 villagers displaced to the central province of Hunan scuffled with police while protesting the size of compensation payments.
Dam officials admit there have been problems. But they say the payments, which are administered by local governments and vary widely, are enough to buy a new home as big as the one lost.
And they say relocation has an additional benefit: the chance to raise living standards in a region where average incomes per person are about $250 a year. In one fell swoop, they can move people now living in primitive conditions into modern apartments with hot showers and indoor toilets.
“The dam has brought inconveniences, but it has also brought money to a poor region that would never have been able to attract it otherwise,” said Wang Jiazhu, deputy general manager of the China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corp., the state-owned company building the dam.
Ask those who have already been moved into the new housing projects, and they agree their new apartments are more comfortable. But they also tell of dysfunctional communities that threaten to become slums under the weight of widespread unemployment and a painful sense of loss.
Qin, the 30-year-old restaurant owner, and her husband, Qin Wanyun, have a 5-year-old son and received $1,375 in resettlement compensation.
They spent that--plus their entire $750 savings--to buy a modern two-bedroom apartment in Longbao, a housing project 40 minutes outside their former home of Wanzhou, a city in the central region of Chongqing.
Qin, who had been forced to abandon a thriving restaurant, opened a new one. She named it Wanyun after her husband. But she doesn’t earn enough even to pay its monthly rent of $18.
Her family has run out of money, and her husband hasn’t found work since getting laid off last year from a state-run plastics factory.
“There’s no way to make a living here,” her husband said.
The hardships of relocation fall even harder on older people, especially in rural areas where family histories stretch back generations.
“I don’t want to leave these streets,” said 48-year-old shopkeeper Qin Quehua of Shibao. “This is my world.”
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fe4f409424094a60eac7643aa642738b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-21-mn-29111-story.html | 4 Terror Suspects Arrested in Italy | 4 Terror Suspects Arrested in Italy
Italian authorities said Wednesday that they had arrested four Moroccans in possession of a plastic bag containing a cyanide compound, along with maps of Rome highlighting the U.S. Embassy and the city’s water supply system.
Italian news media said police were investigating a possible plot to poison the water in an aqueduct feeding the embassy and surrounding neighborhoods. One of the four suspects, the reports said, is believed to have ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.
There were conflicting accounts, however, about whether the contents of the powder-filled bag could have harmed anyone. The bag, said to weigh nearly 9 pounds, was seized from a suburban Rome apartment Tuesday in a 4 a.m. police raid that rousted the suspects from their sleep.
Italian officials told the U.S. Embassy that the bag apparently contained potassium cyanide, easy to buy in Italy and commonly used by farmers to kill rodents. Nine pounds of potassium cyanide dissolved in a few thousand gallons of water or less could be lethal to anyone drinking it, according to Rome University pharmacologist Luciano Caprino.
U.S. officials took the report seriously. They issued a statement thanking the Italian police and security forces for “excellent work concerning the most recent security threat against the embassy.”
Later, Italian Chief Prosecutor Salvatore Vecchione said judicial police had tentatively identified the bag’s contents as potassium ferrocyanide. That compound, used to make wine and ink dye, contains small amounts of cyanide and is harmless when dissolved in water, pharmacologist Caprino said.
The prosecutor ordered further analysis of the compound but clamped a lid on new information about the case. He said Italian media reports of the arrests Wednesday had damaged the investigation, making it difficult to catch other suspects.
That didn’t stop Justice Minister Roberto Castelli from boasting that the raid demonstrated Italy’s stand “on the front line in the fight against international terrorism.”
European law enforcement officials have been worried about bioterrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. They say they have uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda and associated groups have been gathering chemicals to manufacture poisons for assassinations and other terrorist operations.
Last year, police dismantled what they called an Al Qaeda cell near Milan and arrested seven Tunisians, who are now on trial on charges of criminal association with intent to obtain and transport arms, explosives and chemicals. In wiretapped conversations before their arrests, the defendants spoke cryptically about an unspecified “liquid” that would suffocate anyone breathing it.
Prosecutors say the alleged leader of the cell, Essid Sami ben Khemais, is suspected of--but not charged with--supervising a plot to attack the U.S. Embassy here in January 2001. Word of the plot prompted the embassy to shut down for three days that month.
At least one of the four Moroccans arrested Tuesday is linked to the busted Milan cell, Italian newspapers said. None of the four men, said to be in their 30s, was named. Two were said to be working legally as telephone operators; the others were described as illegal immigrants.
Italian state radio said police who raided the men’s apartment in Tor Bella Monaca, a southern suburb, found Arabic-language videos and agendas--which had not yet been translated by police--and about 100 blank documents used to certify that a foreigner has permission to live in Italy.
Along with up-to-date diagrams of the city’s water system, the police found a city map with the U.S. Embassy circled in red, Italian newspapers reported. Italy’s ANSA news agency said the bag allegedly containing the cyanide compound wasn’t hidden.
Police had followed the suspects for days, and their detention was related to the arrest of three other Moroccan immigrants in the same suburb last week, Italian media reported.
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d7455f102fbf7adc4403696a4508c06a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-22-sp-olyskatetv22-story.html | TV Viewers Left to Figure It Out | TV Viewers Left to Figure It Out
This time, NBC’s figure skating announcers didn’t give viewers much guidance at all.
Ten days after their incredulity at the results of the pairs competition was followed by the Winter Olympics’ biggest controversy, the three commentators never got around to telling the TV audience why Sarah Hughes won the women’s gold medal.
Indeed, it wasn’t until 11/2 minutes after Thursday night’s results were official--and a camera captured Hughes’ spontaneous reaction, falling to the floor, shrieking and hugging her coach--that a graphic was put on the screen to show who won silver and bronze.
To that point, Tom Hammond, Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic failed to mention that Irina Slutskaya of Russia had finished second and Michelle Kwan of the United States was third.
Some might have thought Kwan had taken the silver medal, just as she did at the 1998 Olympics in Japan. That’s what was implied when Hammond said: “And for Michelle Kwan, Nagano revisited.”
Before Slutskaya skated, the network showed a graphic showing that Kwan was in first place ahead of Hughes. But the network didn’t explain that Hughes could pass Kwan depending on Slutskaya’s scores.
A skater’s final ranking is reached by adding their placements from the short and long programs. Until Slutskaya skated, Kwan’s combined score would have been enough to trump Hughes.
But Slutskaya’s performance in the free skate earned her second place and pushed Kwan into third for that portion. The placement differential left Kwan with the bronze medal and put Hughes and Slutskaya in a tie. Hughes won the tiebreaker because she won the long program.
Even by the time NBC closed its show 25 minutes later, there wasn’t a full explanation of why Hughes was first, Slutskaya second, and Kwan third, other than a reference to a “three-way tie.”
The only attempt at translating the results was Hamilton saying: “Mathematically, it had to be perfect. Mathematically, Sarah Hughes had to win the long [program] and Michelle Kwan had to be third in the long for this result. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Hamilton was also the one who most clearly framed what had happened right after the results were known.
“Sarah Hughes wins the gold medal! What an upset! What an unexpected result,” he said. “But the performance of the night won the gold medal. What a deserving gold-medal performance.”
To Bezic’s credit, she did make clear right after Hughes’ program--Slutskaya, Kwan and another U.S. contender, Sasha Cohen, were still to skate--that it was spectacular and put the American in position for a top finish.
“She’s just made a case for herself,” Bezic said when Hughes finished. “Those three skaters are going to have to skate their best. What a phenomenal performance.”
Then, after Slutskaya closed the competition, Bezic set the stage for the surprising final result, saying, “Sarah’s was the performance of the evening. What will the judges do?”
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Figure Skating Judging
(text of infobox not included)
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67ba89d503e3e39e9afe933037080d4e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-feb-24-bk-schwartz24-story.html | In From the Cold | In From the Cold
Lev Lazarevich Feldbin, alias Alexander Orlov, was the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect to the West. Born in 1895, Orlov had been head of the Soviet secret police in Republican Spain, during the civil war in that country. He fled to the United States in 1938, claiming to have abandoned his duties out of fear of the Stalinist purge machine. He adopted an underground existence in the U.S. from which he did not emerge until Stalin was safely dead. He then published a book, “The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes,” and became a leading informant for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Yet the nature of Orlov’s defection has always been controversial. As it happens, Orlov told the CIA very little about Soviet intelligence operations in the West. Two decades after his death in 1973, the book “Deadly Illusions” by John Costello, an English writer, and Oleg Tsarev, a KGB officer, argued that Orlov’s passing to the side of the West had never been sincere. That book was widely considered a disinformation product from Moscow intended to demoralize U.S. intelligence functionaries by showing them up as naive fools. Edward P. Gazur was Orlov’s FBI control agent, and Gazur’s “Alexander Orlov: The FBI’s KGB General” is a response to Tsarev and Costello’s book, defending the defector’s honesty in joining the Western cause and the U.S. intelligence agencies’ handling of him.
But Gazur’s book also runs up against another controversy entirely. From the moment he went public in the 1950s, questions were asked about Orlov’s role as head of the KGB Rezidentura in Republican Spain, in the suppression of the anti-Stalinist Partit Obrer d’Unificacio Marxista, known as POUM and based in Catalonia. This was the party in whose militia George Orwell served during the Spanish war. In particular, that movement’s veterans wanted to know the details of Orlov’s involvement in the murder of their party’s leader, Andres Nin, the Catalan literary essayist, translator, labor organizer and theoretician of national independence.
Orlov was tetchy about this matter, flatly denying any complicity. Nobody among the Spanish anti-Stalinist exiles--anarchists, syndicalists, socialists and liberals as well as party members who left their native land at the end of the war in 1939--believed him for a second. Burnett Bolloten, author of “The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution” and widely recognized as the greatest historian of the Spanish war, did not believe Orlov. Nor did Bertram Wolfe, the former American Communist leader who went to Spain during the civil war.
Indeed, any claims of innocence for Orlov in the attacks on Nin and his movement would seem to have been thoroughly demolished by the publication of “Deadly Illusions,” which included a convincing discussion of the Nin murder. The same year in which that book was published, a striking documentary on the Nin affair appeared on prime-time television in Barcelona, “Operacio Nikolai.” Both “Deadly Illusions” and “Operacio Nikolai” benefited from the opening of KGB archives in Moscow. These primary sources showed that Orlov directly supervising the murder of Nin and his burial in June 1937. Gazur’s book, although it swipes at the Costello-Tsarev project, does not offer a detailed analysis of their various errors or their claims about Orlov’s disputed loyalties. However, Gazur has inexplicably sprung to the impassioned defense of Orlov, in the matter of the POUM, its persecution and the martyrdom of Nin.
It would be hard to imagine a more outrageous, nightmarish development in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War: an FBI agent attempting to vindicate the Stalinist butcher who sought to kill Orwell and his comrades. Gazur seems to have realized that he could not exculpate Orlov by answering the citations on Nin in “Deadly Illusions,” and he never heard of the Catalan TV documentary. Instead, Dick Tracy-style, Gazur set out to “investigate” the role of the movement and Nin in the war. After some hasty reading of secondary sources, he adopted as his own the infamous Stalinist slanders issued against the anarchists and POUM in Barcelona in 1937 and refuted in Orwell’s classic “Homage to Catalonia.” Gazur declares that Nin was killed at the insistence of the Spanish Communists out of personal spite, with the Soviets, including Orlov, uninvolved. Such an argument runs against the whole of the Soviet documentation on the war, not just the KGB files on Orlov.
The wider materials on this episode were surveyed in recent books published by Yale University Press, including “Spain Betrayed,” edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck and Grigory Sevastianov, and “Enemies at the Gates,” edited by William J. Chase. The weight of the Soviet archives unequivocally sustains the charge that the suppression of the anti-Stalinist party, the pursuit of Orwell and the murder of Nin were ordered by Moscow and carried out by its agents, under Orlov’s supervision. Gazur’s whitewash of a Stalinist terrorist, only because after he committed his crimes he collaborated with the West, is truly shameful. The publication of “Alexander Orlov: The FBI’s KGB General” should embarrass Gazur and his former employers.
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Stephen Schwartz is the author of “Intellectuals and Assassins” and the coauthor, with Victor Alba, of “Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM.”
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bba87e113ede0fd5086f9d741938167f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-01-mn-19390-story.html | 2 Days of Torment, Triumph | 2 Days of Torment, Triumph
It is the sheer grit, and heartbreak, of runners such as Yuji Nakamura that once again will keep tens of millions of Japanese glued to their TVs for 13 hours Wednesday and Thursday.
Nakamura ran with all his might on the second and longest leg of the brutal, 130-mile Hakone Ekiden relay a few years ago. But his bum knee kicked in, and for miles seemingly all of Japan watched as Nakamura--then an Olympic marathon contender--hobbled and grimaced but refused to throw in the towel.
His coach finally took matters into his own hands, giving Nakamura the feared tap on the shoulder, meaning “You’re out.” Nakamura covered his eyes with his hand, grabbed on to his coach’s car for support, and wept.
His entire squad was disqualified, but his teammates ran their paces anyway, forced to wear a yellow sash--a sash of dishonor.
The annual Hakone Ekiden is to New Year’s in Japan what the Rose Bowl is to the United States, and then some. Maybe with the NCAA Final Four thrown in.
Fifteen 10-member, all-male squads from Japan’s universities compete. Schools go so far as to recruit athletes from Africa, who stand out among the otherwise homogenous Japanese runners.
It is a grueling competition, with runners frequently collapsing from dehydration; no water was allowed until recently, and even now it is permitted only once each relay leg, at the 10-kilometer mark, roughly the halfway point. (In a marathon, it is furnished every five kilometers, about three miles.)
“It’s only 20 kilometers. They don’t need water,” says legendary marathoner and ekiden racer Toshihiko Seko, who won the Boston Marathon twice and now coaches a corporate team for other ekidens.
Millions line the asphalt route from downtown Tokyo to the resort town of Hakone, while millions more watch from home during the O-Shogatsu (New Year’s) holidays that virtually shut down Japan for the week.
“The fact that the Japanese are getting drunk on sake while the kids are out there killing themselves adds to the drama,” says Robert Whiting, an expert on Japanese sports. “Leave it to the Japanese to think of something more difficult than a marathon.”
Some call the race a metaphor for the samurai spirit. “It symbolizes life itself,” says Kenji Asai, 58, a company worker. “Even if you alone win your leg [of the race], it’s not that meaningful. You have to work as a team and trust each other. You have to pass something [the tasuki, or team sash] to the others to get to the goal.”
Adds his wife, Yoko, 55, a homemaker whose heart aches for runners who struggle: “It’s so profound. I see the greatness of human strength and will through ekiden.”
But the race also shows a dark side of Japan’s vaunted teamwork.
While there are no superheroes in the ekiden--even a superhuman performance by a runner won’t guarantee a win--anyone who lets the team down shoulders an overwhelming sense of personal responsibility. Athletes who get sick or injured and can’t complete their legs often find that the race haunts them forever, ruining their running careers and even their lives.
Historical failures are dredged up annually on television programs and in magazines previewing the race.
Takashi Sugisaki was anchor of the 1974 team when he stumbled about a mile before the end, picked himself up, then fainted from exhaustion not far from the finish line. “Because of me, the sash of Aoyama Gakuin University was dishonored,” he recalled in the 1994 book “Enjoy Hakone Ekiden 10 Times More.” “It’s been more than 20 years, but I’m still struggling with that 150 meters.”
Nakamura, who got the tap on the shoulder in 1996, considered suicide. “I was so sad, had so many regrets and was in shock because I’d done something from which I could never redeem myself,” he recalled in a telephone interview.
The first ekiden, in 1917, was 304 miles long and lasted three days. Runners stopped at 23 eki, or postal stations, along major roads to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the transfer of power from the ancient capital of Kyoto to Tokyo.
Ekidens are now run in places around the world, with races tailored for high schoolers, girls, professional squads sponsored by corporations and others--and with courses that are usually far shorter.
But the Hakone Ekiden, which dates to 1924, seems to border on the sadistic. Each squad member runs close to a half-marathon. (Five racers run each day, and the entire thing is televised live.) To train, teams run up and down mountains in Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics.
One leg of the Hakone course is virtually entirely uphill, a slow climb up a mountain that makes the Boston Marathon’s Heartbreak Hill look like an anthill. The next leg, coming down, is brutal on the knees.
Runners sometimes battle snow and ice, heavy winds and freezing rain--that’s part of the poetry, apparently.
“The true pleasure is found after going through agony,” the late Shoichiro Takenaka, recalling at age 80 his ekiden races in the 1930s, said in a television documentary. “There’s no play without struggle and agony.”
The runners get sick, dehydrate, collapse, swoon, and still they don’t give up, for there are no substitutions allowed once the race starts. They press as hard as they can to deliver the tasuki even one second faster to their teammate. If any runner falls more than 10 minutes behind the leader, the entire team forfeits. And any team that is disqualified forfeits its automatic berth in the following year’s race.
“Because my school has a long tradition, and so many fans and graduates are supporting us, I feel the great importance of the tasuki,” said runner Makoto Yabana of Waseda University, which lost its seeding last year and is ranked 10th this year. “So I must not stop--even if I die.”
The ekiden requires more complex strategies than Western relays, in which the strongest runner usually runs the last leg. The second leg in the ekiden, about 14 miles, is the longest, so it is usually given to the top runner. For other legs, coaches must consider criteria such as who runs best uphill and who performs best in the morning cold and afternoon warmth.
In the U.S., sports have long been played for enjoyment and to release tension, motives that are secondary in Japan to doryoku, or effort--which is an end in itself, says Whiting, who lives in Japan and wrote “You Gotta Have Wa,” a book about Japanese baseball.
“Japanese grafted the philosophy of martial arts, based on zen-samurai thought, onto imported foreign sports--a philosophy stressing endless training, dedication, development of spirit, obedience and self-sacrifice,” Whiting says. “The idea was to teach the all-important lesson that nothing comes easy in life.”
Hence, Japan’s “Thousand Fungo Drill” for baseball fielding and throwing practice. Instead of letting players quit when they tire, that’s the time Japanese coaches really turn up the heat, continuing the drill until the athletes literally drop from exhaustion.
Naohiko Arai, producer of the ekiden television program for the NTV network, argues that enjoyment is becoming more important in Japan. “Now most runners respond like an American--'I’m doing this for my own sake.’ ”
Seko, the marathoner and ekiden coach, says, “Of course I love running, but there’d be a problem in Japan if I said it was all about me, me, me.”
Pressure to win is intertwined with national identity. When marathoner Kokichi Tsuburaya won a bronze medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, he apologized. Four years later, after suffering an injury while training for the next games--and finding his former fiancee, whom his coach had refused to let him marry for fear of disrupting his concentration, wed to someone else--he killed himself, leaving behind a note again apologizing for letting his country down.
Apologies, and tears, abound in Japan for anything less than a gold-medal performance. “How disappointing,” said Olympic swimmer Yasuko Tajima upon earning the silver in the 400-meter individual medley at the Sydney Olympics.
Seko, who previously coached Waseda’s ekiden team, says the pressure becomes particularly fierce as an athlete gets more prominent.
Runners feel they owe something to their schools. Pressure ratchets up all the more as fans wave school flags and cheer the runners on. “Gambare!"--fight harder--they scream. In some years, the coaches have run alongside their charges, singing the school song, bringing tears to the eyes of both runner and coach.
But coaches must also be mindful that the Hakone Ekiden can ruin a good runner, Seko says.
In his first year as a coach at Waseda, Seko put Seiji Kushibe in the race the day after he’d gotten food poisoning from sashimi donated by an alumnus.
There was great pressure for him to run: Kushibe’s time was five minutes faster than the substitute’s, and he seemed fine the morning of the race. But as he ran, he began to swoon, became delusional and could barely keep himself upright as he handed over the tasuki in dead last place.
In later years, Kushibe worked hard and ran tremendously well in practice sessions--but he faltered in marathons and ekidens, developing blisters or becoming dehydrated, Seko says.
“Ten years later, he’s still dragging that feeling around,” he says.
Takashi Ito, who last year couldn’t complete his leg of the race because of a fever, says frankly that he’s “still sort of depressed. I just can’t forget it.”
Ito, now with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, blames himself. “There was criticism of the coach to let me run,” he says stoically. “Yes, Japanese do try to internalize the blame, but overall in my case, I still think it’s my fault. . . . I had a mission to pursue and I couldn’t pursue it. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine. It’s also my fault that I had a fever the previous night.”
Coach Seko agrees that, indeed, athletes are to blame if they get sick.
“If they catch a cold, it’s because they should have been careful. I tell them every day, don’t eat sashimi or drink cold milk in the morning. Go to bed early.”
He also tells them to avoid crowded places, which is akin to telling a driver in Los Angeles to avoid the freeways.
Yuji Nakamura’s televised breakdown came during his junior year at Yamanashi Gakuin University. He rarely left his dorm room for four months afterward and barely uttered a word to anyone. Moreover, his knee injury had ruined his chances to compete as an Olympic marathoner.
Then, after watching his kohai, a younger student whom he had mentored, compete in a race, Nakamura began to feel miserable being on the sidelines.
In June 1996, he was invited by a corporate team to do high-altitude training in Boulder, Colo., and he got back into a rigorous training schedule.
As New Year’s and the Hakone Ekiden drew closer that year, however, his nerves became tighter. With two weeks to go, chronic diarrhea kicked in. He couldn’t sleep, could barely eat. The night before the race, he was so exhausted that he slept as if he were in a coma.
On race day, Nakamura awoke refreshed. His coach jogged with him to see how he was holding up. “He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything,” Nakamura recalls. “Everything was communicated without words.”
When he got the Persian-blue tasuki after the first leg, his team was far behind. Somehow, he managed to summon his energy and focus as never before. He fell into a trance so deep, he didn’t notice his parents or all the supporters on the sidelines cheering him on. All he could see was an image of himself running a step at a time. One by one, he overtook all eight runners ahead of him; when he handed over the tasuki, his team was in first place. An enormous wave of relief washed over him.
The team’s lead waxed and waned over the next several legs, and his team ultimately placed second.
The comeback didn’t alleviate Nakamura’s misgivings over his failure a year earlier. But his spirits were bolstered when he received a homemade video of a fourth-grade class acting out his trials in the earlier race and his triumphant return.
Now, after running on a corporate team for five years, the tall and willowy Nakamura, 31, is back on his family’s farm in southern Japan, growing melons and rice. He still runs in shorter local races.
If he had it all to do again, would he run that dismal year? He says it made him stronger. “Such huge pressure is one of the attractions. Many students want to break through the pressure and achieve.”
And if he ever has a son, “I’d wish for him to run Hakone too.”
*
Hisako Ueno of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
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a3514d9bf585933a9657725300a768b5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-06-mn-20645-story.html | Car Theft Rings Are Hot Stuff in Japan | Car Theft Rings Are Hot Stuff in Japan
From a gas station attendant, the gangsters got access to the keys. From a couple of Russians, they got a connection to perhaps the world’s biggest market for stolen Japanese cars.
Before they were busted a few months ago, the gang in northern Japan simply drove away with more than 100 sought-after sport-utility vehicles using duplicate keys made by the crooked pump jockey.
Their final destination: the Russian far east.
Alliances between Japan’s criminal syndicates and their foreign counterparts have long troubled authorities here. Now they have even more reason to worry--stolen cars smuggled out of Japan are showing up everywhere from London to Lagos.
After remaining flat for most of the decade, the number of cars reported stolen in Japan jumped 20% in 1999 and 30% more in 2000, when a record 56,205 vehicles were reported missing. Thefts for the first half of 2001 were up 23% from a year earlier.
“I see the numbers getting worse,” said Sachio Kuroya, an official at the National Police Agency that specializes in larceny cases. “These people are organized and they have international connections.”
Thieves target Toyota Land Cruisers and Mitsubishi Pajeros--vehicles popular in developing nations where roads are rough--and Japanese luxury sedans with a high resale value.
The best customers are Russian gangsters based on Sakhalin Island and other remote regions near Japan’s northern tip.
But Russians are not the only ones interested in the illicit car trade. Police have broken up auto theft rings involving Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Burmese.
Authorities believe Asian brokers give the Japanese mob access to black markets in the Middle East. From there, the cars make their way to Europe and other parts of the world.
In Britain, where Japanese right-hand-drive models are easiest to sell--a trade group recently estimated that at least 1,000 stolen vehicles, most of them Japanese, arrive every year via Dubai in the Persian Gulf.
Records of cars seized last year by Japanese customs officials show that some were headed as far as Nigeria in West Africa.
Authorities say they’re cooperating more with their foreign counterparts through Interpol. They’re also using roadside cameras that monitor the license plates of passing cars and drive-through X-ray machines that let customs officials peek inside shipping containers.
But nobody’s talking about stopping the traffic--only slowing it.
“It’s impossible to check every car that comes through here,” said Setsu Sato, a customs inspector in the port of Yokohama. “We have to rely on intuition and random inspections.”
Police don’t publish comprehensive figures on theft losses, but the problem is clearly growing.
Insurance payouts to owners of stolen cars reached $443.6 million last year, 17 times the bill a decade ago, according to the Marine and Fire Insurance Assn. of Japan.
Japan’s 88,000 mobsters, known as yakuza, have dealt with Chinese gangs for years, most prominently in trafficking guns, drugs and prostitutes. More recently, they’ve been caught operating burglary rings together.
But analysts describe the car racket as a particularly attractive deal for the yakuza and their foreign allies, and predict the ties created now will lead to alliances in other kinds of crime.
“They’re trading a guaranteed supply of cars for a guaranteed market,” said Atsushi Mizoguchi, an expert on the Japanese underworld. “I can see more sophisticated rackets in the future,” such as using the Internet.
The Japanese government unwittingly made smuggling cars easier six year ago when it eased inspection and documentation requirements for exporters of used vehicles.
But stealing cars has never been that hard.
Few people in big Japanese cities have garages, and many cars lack basic anti-theft equipment. Hot-wiring is not a required skill--about 40% of cars taken have had the keys left in them. During the summer, thieves hang around convenience stores waiting for customers who drive up and leave their engines running to keep the air conditioning on.
“The myth of Japan as a crime-free nation is an enduring one,” said Naoto Nakayama, an insurance association official.
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29c81bdcc127a1cd78cabd4371bd860f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-06-re-harney6-story.html | Fannie Mae Permits Some Lenders to Waive Appraisals | Fannie Mae Permits Some Lenders to Waive Appraisals
WASHINGTON -- Could 2002 be the year when you buy a home or refinance a mortgage, and your lender surprises you with the news: Oh, by the way, we’re not going to need an appraisal on your property? Just give us $50 at closing and we’ll eliminate the $300 to $350 you’d normally have to pay.
Could the most traditional and long-standing piece of the home buying and financing puzzle--the professional property appraisal--be headed for oblivion?
Probably not--and certainly not in 2002. But the biggest player in the American housing finance market, mega-investor Fannie Mae, quietly has been moving in that direction. With no public fanfare or announcement, Fannie has been permitting some lenders to dispense with appraisals on home purchases and refinancings, in exchange for a $50 fee.
Known as the “property inspection waiver,” the pilot program is being offered around the country by a select group of mortgage companies who sell loans to Fannie. The lenders welcome the plan because it allows them to close mortgages faster, attract price-conscious loan shoppers and sometimes even lower their rate quotes. It also allows them to dispense with their customary contractual warranties to Fannie regarding the mortgaged property’s condition and value. Those warranties open lenders to financial penalties should a home’s stated value later turn out to be bogus.
Fannie Mae declines to identify the mortgage lenders taking part in the $50 appraisal-waiver program.
Word of Fannie’s no-appraisal-needed experiment has professional appraisers understandably upset. Frank K. Gregoire, chairman of the Appraisal Committee of the National Assn. of Realtors, calls the idea “radical” and worrisome.
“People seem to have forgotten the lessons of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s,” said Gregoire. He was referring to the multibillion-dollar losses racked up by thrift institutions that lent money in recessionary markets on the basis of inaccurate or fraudulent property appraisals. Many of them subsequently had to be closed down or bailed out by the federal government, which seized and then resold thousands of overvalued properties.
Patrick Turner, a professional real estate appraiser in Richmond, Va., called Fannie’s new program “ridiculous” and “dangerous.”
“Common sense will tell you,” said Turner, “that you can’t know what a house is worth” without some form of appraisal. He cited the example of a home he recently examined that appeared normal from the outside, but was a mess inside--with multiple building-code violations, including no enclosed bathroom in the entire house. "[Fannie Mae is] trying to pull rabbits out of hats” by eliminating appraisals, said Turner, but “they’re going to hurt the consumer and hurt themselves.”
Home buyers need professional appraisals, said Turner, “so that they’ve got an independent judgment that what they’re paying [for the property] is the correct price.”
Fannie Mae, for its part, said it is not eliminating appraisals by any means, but instead is allowing some lenders to dispense with them when there is sufficient electronic valuation data available on a given house. A Fannie Mae official said that about three-quarters of the home-purchase mortgage applications it now receives through its automated underwriting system--Desktop Underwriter--do not require full, traditional appraisals.
Some applications qualify for a total waiver. Others require appraisals with exterior-only examinations by the appraiser. Only a minority of applications need interior and exterior examinations as part of the appraisal.
Fannie’s competitor, Freddie Mac, has a more restrictive appraisal-waiver program. Freddie requires no appraisal on home purchase transactions where the down payment is 20% or more, and the borrower’s credit profile is strong. In such cases, Freddie charges the lender a $200 fee, which most lenders then pass on to borrowers in lieu of a full-cost appraisal.
Fannie’s $50 pilot program fee, by contrast, costs much less, and can be used on home purchases and refinancings where the borrower’s equity is as low as 10%.
Fannie’s and Freddie’s waivers or reduced appraisal requirements are available only on loans up to their $300,700 purchase maximum.
The upshot of Fannie’s new moves on appraisals? For most consumers, $50 certainly sounds better than $300 or $350. After all, it’s the lending institution--not the borrower--that traditionally has demanded a professional valuation of the real estate securing a loan.
But Turner has a point, too: An independent appraisal could steer you away from paying too much for a house. If you spend $200,000 on a house that a professional appraiser would have valued at $180,000, you’ve saved $350 on the appraisal, but you’ve spent $20,000 too much.
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Distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.
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3c5b14b1e48776c253df2536a9ab74f5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-08-me-21128-story.html | Whoopi Goldberg Will Host Oscar Ceremony | Whoopi Goldberg Will Host Oscar Ceremony
Actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg has been named to host the 74th annual Academy Awards in March.
It is the fourth time that Goldberg has hosted the ceremony--most recently the 1999 show--but the first time for the Oscars at the new Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
“It’ll be the first broadcast done from Oscar’s new home, and I love a housewarming,” Goldberg said in a statement. “And this broadcast, in my opinion, carries a different weight, because it says that we as filmmakers, actors and technicians worldwide will continue to do what we do best and celebrate it. And who wouldn’t want to front that?”
The Oscar ceremony will be held March 24.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has not decided if the public will be allowed to watch the red carpet arrivals, due to security concerns.
The ballots for nominations are being sent out today, and the nominees will be announced Feb. 12.
Goldberg, who won a best supporting actress Oscar in 1991 for her performance in “Ghost” and a nomination in 1985 for her role as Celie in “The Color Purple,” follows Steve Martin as Oscar host; Billy Crystal hosted in 2000. It was the first time for Martin, the seventh for Crystal.
Laura Ziskin, who is producing the Oscar show this year, said Goldberg was chosen for her “great warmth, with humor, humanity and social conscience, all qualities that I feel are essential for this year’s show. I look forward to collaborating with Whoopi to put on a meaningful and entertaining evening.”
Although she earned Emmy nominations for her performances at the 66th and 68th annual shows, Goldberg was not well received by many critics in 1999. Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker panned that performance as “assiduously self-congratulatory and determinedly lame hosting.”
The Academy Awards for 2001 are widely considered to be one of the most wide open Oscar races in years, with no clear favorites and a number of smaller independent films likely to be nominated for major awards.
The Kodak Theatre is part of the new Hollywood & Highland project; last year’s show was at the Shrine Auditorium. The show will be broadcast live on ABC.
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f3c0357a28497de0af303e68011b1dfe | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-09-me-21332-story.html | 6 Private Campuses in Valley Face Eviction | 6 Private Campuses in Valley Face Eviction
Los Angeles Unified School District officials say they do not plan to renew private schools’ leases at six campuses in the western San Fernando Valley, sending the schools scrambling to find new homes or risk losing students because of the uncertainty.
Because the West Valley is one of the few areas in Los Angeles where the school district does not anticipate needing more campuses, officials at the private schools question the need for them to move. Land in the West Valley is hard to find, they say, particularly to suit schools.
The Woodland Hills schools poised to lose campuses over the next 17 months are Castlemont School, Kadima Hebrew Academy, Lewis Carroll Academy of the Arts, Lycee International de Los Angeles and Rabbi Max D. Raiskin West Valley Hebrew Academy. In West Hills, the West Valley Christian Church and School rents two campuses.
Collectively, the affected private schools enroll about 1,300 students. Another L.A. Unified campus, in Chatsworth, housed a Pinecrest school before the lease expired last July.
Recommendation May Be Made Next Week
L.A. Unified vacated the Valley campuses in the 1980s, said Kathi Littmann, the district’s deputy chief executive for new construction. The former elementary schools are too far from central Los Angeles to receive students bused from those overcrowded areas, officials said, and the district’s demographic projections indicate the campuses will not be needed for 10 or 15 years--if ever.
District staff members might make a recommendation for the campuses’ future as early as next week. The possibilities include selling the land and using the proceeds to build schools in areas that badly need them, said Littmann, adding that continuing to lease the Valley campuses is not a moneymaker.
“It barely covers the cost of having the schools sit there,” she said.
Castlemont officials, for instance, do not want to move when the school’s 10-year lease ends in August. The campus of the former Collier Street Elementary School is “located centrally for all of our parents,” said Sheryl Hausman, Castlemont’s financial vice president. Since moving to the site in 1992, Castlemont has made improvements at its own expense, adding an athletic field, computer lab and repaving, she said.
“It’s a nice area. The neighbors are great, and I think it benefits everybody around,” Hausman said.
Since parents learned Castlemont could lose its 6 1/2-acre campus, enrollment has dropped from its peak of 335 last year.
“It’s decreased because of the uncertainty,” Hausman said, but she would not say how many students did not return when classes began last fall.
Castlemont is in “favorable negotiations” with L.A. Unified, Hausman said, but she declined to elaborate. The for-profit elementary school has offered to buy the campus, Littmann said, but because it is public land the school would have to bid against any other suitors. Extending the lease would also require bids, she said.
West Valley Christian Church is close to buying land in West Hills for its sanctuary and school, said Robert Lozano, administrator of the 400-student campus.
“We’ve looked at probably over 100 sites in the last four years,” he said. “It’s been a real arduous task.”
The church and school’s two leases expire in June 2003, which provides just enough time to make a move, Lozano said.
“If we didn’t have a place located at this point and looking good, it definitely would have affected enrollment,” he said.
Public Schools Have Room for the Students
If any of the schools close, Littmann said there is room for their students in the West Valley’s public schools, which are among the district’s least crowded.
But because many families chose the private schools for their religious instruction and other programs not found in public schools, Alan Shapiro, president of the West Valley Hebrew Academy, said he doubted the families would accept the district’s invitation to enroll. Shapiro said his school owns land in the West Valley and hopes to move there after its lease expires in 2003.
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5b42a15d2637c2ef7b0dfdec6fb5e0c2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-10-sp-nflrep10-story.html | Soward Is Suspended for 2002 Season | Soward Is Suspended for 2002 Season
Jacksonville Jaguar receiver R. Jay Soward was suspended Wednesday by the NFL for the 2002 season following his third violation of the league’s substance-abuse policy.
Soward, Jacksonville’s top draft pick in 2000 from USC, didn’t play this season because of three previous suspensions, including one by the club.
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Dennis Green won’t be coaching in the NFL next season. He’ll be gone fishin’.
Less than a week after he was forced out as coach and general manager of the Minnesota Vikings, Green said he will appear on “FLW Outdoors,” a fishing show to be carried on the Pax Network.
Green’s program will be broadcast live Saturday afternoons from a studio at Little Rock, Ark.
Green, 52, said the new venture “absolutely” ruled out a chance of him coaching in 2002, but said he “probably” would continue his coaching career in the future. He alluded to doing studio analysis on NFL games next fall, but declined to identify the network.
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Forty-four former Philadelphia Eagle cheerleaders joined a lawsuit charging that visiting players spied on them as they showered and dressed in a Veterans Stadium locker room.
In the lawsuit filed in state court in Philadelphia, the women seek damages from members of the 29 NFL teams that played at the stadium since 1983.
The players allegedly spied on the women through holes in a door that separates the visitors’ locker room from the cheerleaders’ shower room, and through cracks in various walls and scratches in a painted window.
Eagle spokesman Ron Howard said the team had no immediate comment.
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Baltimore Raven linebacker Brad Jackson successfully defended himself in Baltimore County Circuit Court against civil assault charges filed by Gretchen Kocher while the two were exchanging their children outside her Owings Mills apartment on New Year’s Eve.
Police responded, but no criminal charges were filed.
Jackson and Kocher are involved in a bitter legal dispute over custody of the children, ages 5 and 3, according to court papers.
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New Orleans re-signed defensive tackle Martin Chase to a two-year contract.... Denver receiver Ed McCaffrey, who sat out most of the 2001 season because of a broken leg, had surgery Tuesday to remove two screws used to stabilize a rod inserted in his leg.
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a9a54080e1502a53e62b37eabec89502 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-14-mn-22490-story.html | Choking on Pretzel, Bush Faints Briefly | Choking on Pretzel, Bush Faints Briefly
President Bush briefly lost consciousness Sunday after he choked on a pretzel while watching a football game on television in his living quarters, the White House said.
After fainting, the president tumbled to the floor from a couch, bruising his lower lip and suffering an abrasion the size of a half dollar on his left cheek, White House physician Dr. Richard Tubb said.
Tubb, an Air Force colonel, said Bush recovered quickly.
“I do not find any reason that this would happen again,” Tubb told news agencies in an interview arranged by the White House. “He fainted due to a temporary decrease in heart rate brought on by swallowing a pretzel.”
Bush, 55, was found to be in good health during a full physical exam in August.
Aides say he conscientiously adheres to an exercise regimen, running on a treadmill in the White House residence, and while at his Texas ranch or Camp David, routinely racing through three-mile jogs in 21 minutes.
The result of his aerobic workout routine has been a resting pulse rate of 35 to 45 beats per minute, which medical personnel consider extremely low even for a well-trained athlete. A typical resting pulse rate is about 70 beats per minute.
Tubb said Bush’s slower heart rate made him more prone to fainting when a nerve was stimulated by the pretzel caught in his throat. The medical term for such an episode is vasovagal syncope, or vasovagal fainting, Tubb said. In such cases, the body sends a signal to the heart via the vagus nerve. This causes a sudden drop in heart rate, which is restored when the person falls.
Such fainting is a common and harmless event that does not signify any underlying illness or have any lasting effects, said Dr. Marshall Morgan, head of the emergency department at UCLA.
“If food goes down the wrong pipe, the natural response is to cough,” he said. “It is pretty common for people who are coughing to have a syncope,” a brief fainting spell.
It remained unclear Sunday night whether the episode was accompanied by any seizure-like activity that could be a symptom of a more serious matter. Both cardiac rhythm aberrations and seizures are among the transient medical problems that can cause someone to lose consciousness.
Sunday’s incident occurred while Bush was alone, watching the National Football League playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and the Baltimore Ravens, the White House said. His wife, Laura, was using the telephone in a nearby room at the time.
“He said it [the pretzel] didn’t seem to go down right,” Tubb said. “The next thing he knew, he was on the floor.”
Bush believes he blacked out for only a few seconds because, as he revived, his two dogs were sitting in the same positions they had been in when he lost consciousness, the doctor said.
“But the dogs were looking at him funny,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told Associated Press.
According to the White House, Bush fainted about 5:35 p.m. EST. About five minutes later, he contacted a nurse on duty at the White House; Tubb was summoned eight minutes later and hurried to the White House to examine the president.
The White House said Bush used an elevator to go from his residence on the second floor of the White House to the ground-floor doctor’s office. The medical examination that was conducted there included the use of a heart monitor.
Tubb said Bush’s blood pressure and pulse were normal and that he was not taking any medication as a result of the incident.
The doctor said the president had complained Saturday and Sunday that he was “a little off his game” and thought he was coming down with a head cold.
“He had not been feeling well the last couple of days,” Tubb said, adding that Bush had exercised rigorously Saturday but had a lighter workout Sunday.
The White House disclosed the incident about 2 1/2 hours after it occurred.
The episode is the second medical incident involving the president in about a month. In early December, the White House acknowledged that Bush had several benign skin lesions removed from his face. The announcement came several days after the procedure, in response to questions from reporters who noticed red marks on the president’s face.
Today, Bush is scheduled to leave the White House for a two-day trip to the Midwest and New Orleans to promote trade and its role in stimulating the economy. Tubb said he would examine the president this morning before he left on the trip.
Fleischer said Bush did not plan to alter his schedule: “At this point, he intends to travel.”
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Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Maugh from Los Angeles.
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c906dd0692c3839398414622a9979fb4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-15-et-woodard15-story.html | Gestures Large and Small at CalArts Festival | Gestures Large and Small at CalArts Festival
Sunday night at CalArts, a barefoot, quietly bustling team of performers-workers were busily realizing a piece called “Rain.” In the school’s main gallery space, a layer of white dust was slowly laid in a circle, akin to the sand mandalas made by Tibetan monks. Next, a vast number of white helium balloons were anchored to form a surreal, rubbery cloud formation overhead. All was eerily quiet, except for the occasional “pop!” of an escapee from the balloon population.
For the official performance of the 45-minute piece, part of California Institute of the Arts’ fifth annual festival of experimental computer music, the balloon clouds were made to dance by tugs of the strings, all dramatically illuminated. Gentle, randomly rhythmic, rain-like bleeps constituted the audio portion of the program.
What did this Dadaistic, hands-on piece--devised by Jacob & Carol (Jacob Joaquin and Carole Kim)--have to do with a three-day festival sponsored by the Center for Experimentation in Art, Information and Technology? As it turned out, its unique, process-oriented design embodied much of what took place at the festival, which, in the end, was mostly about a stubborn diversity of voices and ideas.
The experimental-computer music world may still be a relatively marginal and hidden dimension, but it’s full of vigor. And that increases the importance of a local venue like this festival. The event, organized this year by CalArts faculty member Clay Chaplin, has been a work-in-progress itself. It began as a student-sponsored event five years ago; participants from around the world were involved in this year’s event, with programs Friday through Sunday, and a loose after-party Saturday.
Contrasts ruled. After the loopy softness of “Rain,” Bob Bellerue’s “Threat Level Charlie” upped the angst as three musicians bowed pieces of plate glass, producing an aura of volatile intensity, while also illustrating the medium-specific emotional quality of sounds.
Sounds and instruments were being radically tweaked and analyzed all weekend. One of the best, and most darkly impressionistic, laptop-based pieces was Michael Gendreau’s “T921 pt. 2,” an abstract work made of found sounds from Taiwanese and Malaysian factories. Gendreau gradually amassed sounds, suddenly cutting them off to reveal just a low thumping, like an erratic heartbeat, to end the piece.
Anthony De Ritis’ “Plum Blossoms” took as its source recordings by pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, then scattered and reconstituted them into an ultra-exotic construct. For composer Tae Hong Park’s “T1,” trumpeter Edward Carroll was on hand to supply simple gestures and effects, while the composer processed his real-time labors into an electro-acoustic swirl.
In her keynote performance Saturday, San Francisco-based Pamela Z waved her “wired” arms to trigger sounds, created delay loops with her voice (instant background singers) and a range of vocal tones and percussion sounds, all while interacting with a video system that allowed her to appear in triplicate.
In Z’s case, the centrality of her own over-the-top presentation is hard to get around, and contrasts sharply with the almost ascetic performance attitude of others in the experimental world.
Perching at a mixing board, Joe Colley built a dense wall of sound, in and out of which textures flowed. Although his add-and-subtract process was simple, it was effective, and theatrical in its own way.
You could even say that Barry Schrader’s pointed, teasingly brief tape piece grew out of a laconic sense of theater, telegraphed through a fragment of its title: "... an apprehension of something sensed, not expected an impression of something experienced, not remembered ... " Suffice it to say, contemporary experimental music is going after ideas not easily contained in the usual hooks, structures, isms or sound bites.
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45977eb8a0f3fc5521c8a06852296e29 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-22-mn-24121-story.html | Kremlin Shuts Down TV Station | Kremlin Shuts Down TV Station
Russian authorities blacked out private television station TV6 today, pulling the plug mid-broadcast in what critics called a bid to silence the last national broadcaster willing to challenge the Kremlin and President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mass Communications Minister Mikhail Y. Lesin said he had no choice but to close down TV6 after a court ordered the station’s license revoked late Monday, but the explanation drew cynical comments from analysts and the staff.
“The Kremlin is preparing for the next presidential election, and it wants all four federal channels singing the same tune of loyalty and approval,” said Igor M. Klyamkin, director of the Institute of Sociological Analysis, a Russian think tank.
He predicted a chill will be felt by any who think of questioning central authority.
“The Kremlin demonstrated to every mass medium, to every journalist, that it can close down a major television channel just like that,” he said.
The revocation left Russia for the first time since 1991 without a national broadcaster consistently willing to challenge the Kremlin line. The remaining channels are either owned or controlled by the state or focus on entertainment.
TV6 was staffed largely by journalists and others who resigned in April from another station, NTV, when it was taken over by the government-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom. In the past nine months, the staff transformed the little-watched TV6, boosting its ratings so that they often surpassed those of the state-owned ORT and RTR networks.
But TV6’s legal troubles mounted, adding to the belief that they had more to do with politics than business.
The decision to close TV6 culminated a campaign by a minority shareholder, the Lukoil pension fund, which won a court order Jan. 11 to liquidate the station based on an obscure and rarely enforced debt law that was changed after the case was filed.
Until Monday, the Mass Communications Ministry had been hinting that the station could go on broadcasting and that its staff would acquire a new license if it broke with TV6’s owner, self-exiled oligarch Boris A. Berezovsky.
But the channel was shut off just after midnight in the midst of “Nightingale’s Night,” while a presenter was singing folk ballads with his guest. First the screen went blank. That was followed by a test pattern, and then it went blank for good.
“The speed and efficiency with which these people operate is incredible, especially in the country where hundreds, if not thousands, of people are sitting in prison for months and years waiting for trial,” said network spokeswoman Tatyana Blinova. She said the station would have to wait until daytime to try to get the shutdown reversed.
Anchor Svetlana Sorokina, one of the country’s best-liked news personalities, sounded dejected in an early-morning telephone interview.
“I am sitting here looking at the black screen, and I know the worst has happened, but it is still hard to believe and even harder to accept,” she said. “Well, for me it means that I have lost my job. And most likely my career in television.”
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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.
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519fbe4ccca5d1a1541b6649faefafee | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-24-ed-pooh24-story.html | A Mouse in the Honey Jar | A Mouse in the Honey Jar
Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws and began to think.
First of all he said to himself: " ... The only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee.”
Then he thought for another long time, and said: “And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.”
And then he got up, and said: “And the only reason for making honey is so that I can eat it.”
*
Winnie the Pooh began life not as a loyal retainer in the House of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck but as a gentle, befuddled character in a father’s bedtime story for his son. A teddy bear from London’s Harrod’s department store was A.A. Milne’s birthday gift in 1921 to his 1-year-old son, Christopher Robin. The stories Milne wove around that stuffed bear, published in 1926, were the writer’s gift to generations of children.
The Disney company got into the act in 1961, buying the Pooh clan from Stephen Slesinger Inc., a literary agency to which Milne sold his merchandizing rights in 1930. Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the others now may generate more than $4 billion a year for Disney’s empire and licensees.
In 1991, Stephen Slesinger’s heirs sued Disney, claiming that the media behemoth had cheated them out of $200 million in royalties from Pooh-related videos, DVDs, computer software and Pooh attractions at theme parks. For 11 years, Disney has pooh-poohed that claim, insisting that the deal with Slesinger, revised most recently in 1983, bound Disney to pay royalties on only a limited line of Pooh products, including apparel and stuffed animals.
The fraud and breach-of-contract suit will go to trial later this year. In the meantime, the mouse appears to have gotten its head stuck in the bear’s honey pot. Secret company memos and other documents unsealed by the trial judge last week reveal that Disney executives knew early on that the company’s right to profit from the furry creatures in Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood were far from exclusive.
“A.A. Milne has certainly and completely balled up his rights to Winnie the Pooh in America,” harrumphed Walt’s brother, Roy Disney, in a 1967 memo. “If we were to do anything with Winnie the Pooh, Slesinger is in a beautiful spot to either hold us up for an outrageous price or ... reap the rewards of our work and investment.”
Add to that the $90,000 the judge fined Disney in August upon learning the company had destroyed 40 boxes of documents, including one labeled “Winne the Pooh--legal problems.” In all, things right now don’t look so good for the mouse.
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“Eeyore,” said Owl, “Christopher Robin is giving a party.”
“Very interesting,” said Eeyore. “I suppose they will be sending me down the odd bits which got trodden on. Kind and Thoughtful. Not at all, don’t mention it.”
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c8e2166ff462c659f88d9237cca86d69 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-24-mn-24528-story.html | Ex-Argentine Leader Faces Bribery Probe | Ex-Argentine Leader Faces Bribery Probe
Swiss and Argentine authorities are investigating an allegation that former Argentine President Carlos Menem received a $10-million bribe from Iranian agents to cover up Tehran’s alleged role in an anti-Semitic terrorist bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994, officials said Wednesday.
Swiss authorities opened an inquiry in Geneva last week based on a request from Argentines investigating the van bomb attack that killed 85 people at the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Assn. community center, according to Folco Galli, a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Justice Office.
In October, Swiss authorities froze nearly $10 million in two bank accounts allegedly linked to Menem during a separate Argentine investigation of an international arms trafficking ring, Galli said in an interview.
Now a magistrate in Geneva is pursuing testimony of a former Iranian spy who told Argentine investigators that Menem was paid $10 million via a Swiss bank in exchange for a promise to say there was no proof against Iran in the terrorist attack, according to Swiss and Argentine officials.
One frozen account is in a Geneva bank in the name of Menem’s daughter and former wife, Galli said. The other account bears the name of a company allegedly linked to Menem, he said, and investigators want to know whether Menem had additional Swiss accounts.
In a post-Sept. 11 world focused on terrorism, the case contributes to renewed concern about Iran’s alleged sponsorship of Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. Argentine, U.S. and Israeli officials are convinced that the Jewish center bombing and an unsolved 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires were the work of Iranian spies and Hezbollah with local accomplices.
The discovery of the Swiss accounts comes after years of accusations that Menem and his inner circle made millions from kickbacks and arms and drug trafficking. He has repeatedly denied such charges.
Political Plans Sinking Under Claims
But the allegation that Menem helped engineer a cover-up in the 1994 attack speeds the downfall of the former leader, who recently announced that he will run for president again in 2003. His 1989-99 presidency was a whirlwind of scandal and free-market transformation that spurred rapid growth and made him a favorite of U.S. diplomats and investors. Weakened by skyrocketing debt, however, the Argentine economy foundered in his final years in office and has slid into all-out collapse in recent months.
Although Argentina’s Supreme Court ordered his release from house arrest in the arms case late last year, Menem remains the target of corruption probes and public condemnation in a crisis-torn country governed by his archenemy, newly installed President Eduardo Duhalde.
Critics say Menem, the son of Syrian immigrants, obstructed the Jewish center and embassy bombing investigations to hide his government’s ties to Middle Eastern terrorism and organized crime.
“We always had many obstacles of all kinds,” prosecutor Jose Barbaccia, who has worked on the 1994 case since the bombing, said in a phone interview. “We never saw the supposed political will translated into deeds. For example, the police anti-terrorist squad was created three years after the attack. For a long time, we worked with only eight police investigators.”
Argentine investigators will probably seek to question Menem after the Swiss have had time to investigate, Barbaccia said.
“If this is true, we are not just talking about [corrupt cops] but total political protection,” Barbaccia said. “But the [Iranian] witness did not give an exact date or an account number. That makes the investigation more difficult. We have to interrogate this witness again now that we know about the accounts. And we must see what the Swiss find.”
No one was charged in the embassy case. In the Jewish center case, a small-time gangster and a group of police officers are on trial for allegedly providing the stolen van that was used as a rolling bomb.
The new Iran-related investigation could be another in a series of promising leads that ran into dead ends. It could even be attempted retaliation by Duhalde against Menem, who has criticized the president’s handling of the economic crisis.
“My first reaction was that it might be Duhalde getting back at Menem,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has followed the Argentine cases closely and has pushed for answers. “You are always going to have to take what happens in this case with not a grain of salt, but a quarry of salt.”
The Jewish center case figured in a brutal feud between Menem and Duhalde that began in 1996 when Duhalde was governor of Buenos Aires province and a presidential hopeful determined to thwart Menem’s designs on a third term. Many observers saw the federal indictment of police officers from Duhalde’s province as terrorist accomplices as a political ambush by the Menem administration. Duhalde soon returned fire when provincial authorities filed murder charges against a mysterious tycoon close to Menem in an unrelated case.
Nonetheless, now there is a money trail to follow. And the Swiss justice system is well removed from Argentine political intrigue.
“If this turns out to be a smoking gun,” Cooper said, “we want a commitment from the Argentine judicial and political leadership that this man goes on trial.”
Latest Development Was Slow in Coming
Like other developments in a glacially slow case, this one did not happen overnight. The secret witness, who was once the No. 3 official in Iran’s spy service, first testified to Argentine investigators in 1998 in Germany, where he lived under the protection of German authorities and helped resolve Iranian terrorist acts.
The witness, identified only as C, testified that Iranian agents masterminded the 1994 bombing but said he had information he would withhold until Menem left power, according to Argentine officials. Soon after Menem stepped down, the witness testified again, this time in Mexico. He told interrogators about the alleged bribe in Switzerland, saying Iranian operatives paid it either directly to Menem or someone close to him, Barbaccia said.
The witness testified that the money changed hands as investigators zeroed in on Iranian diplomats in Argentina--police eventually said a cultural attache was the suspected mastermind.
Over the years, Menem’s comments about the case mixed promises of justice with steadfast defenses of his government. The victims’ families complained that he never met with them to express condolences.
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3c32f03d8ac60b480eda415bf6d977f7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-30-me-magner30-story.html | Martin Magner, 101; Versatile Theater, TV Director for 70 Years | Martin Magner, 101; Versatile Theater, TV Director for 70 Years
To celebrate his 99th birthday, he did what he liked to do every birthday. He directed and produced a challenging play. That year it was “The Envoy,” tackling the prickly subject of just how neutral Switzerland was during World War II.
When the millennial census was tallied, the busy theater maestro was listed among about 51,000 centenarians nationwide.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Feb. 09, 2002 FOR THE RECORD Los Angeles Times Saturday February 9, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 1 inches; 30 words Type of Material: Correction Magner obituary--An obituary of theater director Martin Magner in the California section on Jan. 30 said that Magner worked in Breslau, Poland. At the time Magner worked in Breslau, it was actually a part of Germany.
“I came in with the century. I don’t expect to go out with it,” he told The Times in 1989, not long after undergoing surgery for a blood clot near his brain.
And he in fact outlived it.
Martin Magner, who directed innovative television such as “Studio One” when the medium was young, and opera and drama on stages from Nuremburg, Germany, to North Hollywood from 1929 to 1999, has died as he predicted in the 21st and not the 20th century.
Magner died Friday in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of cancer, said his caretaker Loretta Morgenstern. He would have been 102 on March 5.
Respected around the world for what one Times critic called his “formidable and remarkably durable talent,” Magner was given a lifetime achievement award in 1989 by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle.
He was born in Stettin, Germany, to a Jewish mother and Lutheran father, and began his career as an actor in the Hamburg Chamber Theater at the age of 18.
“I played a lot of ghosts,” he once told The Times, “did many plays by Strindberg, Dr. Rank in ‘A Doll’s House,’ Mephisto. I think I was quite a good devil--a little devil.”
But when the company’s Jewish director fled under the burgeoning threat of Nazism, Magner suddenly found himself named general director. He protested that he was also Jewish, but a 1904 death certificate was produced, showing that his father, Maximilian, was Lutheran.
The director handled his uneasy role for about four years--until the night of March 21, 1933, when he was ordered to fire the seven Jewish actors in the company. He packed a suit and a tuxedo, grabbed his hat, coat and briefcase, and took the night train to Vienna.
He worked there and in Breslau, Poland, and staged opera in Prague, Czechoslovakia, for three years.
Among his memories of the European directing years were a visit from George Bernard Shaw when Magner was rehearsing his “Too Good to Be True,” eliciting the grudging compliment from Shaw: “Sometimes youth is not wasted on the young.” Another admirer was Sigmund Freud, who liked a show about a psychiatrist Magner directed so much that he offered to train Magner as a lay psychoanalyst.
But with Nazi threats and the approach of war in Europe, Magner fled to America in 1936.
Moving to Chicago, he taught at Northwestern University, directed opera and soon settled into a quarter-century as a producer and director in television. He worked for NBC in the 1940s and from 1950 until his retirement in 1965 for CBS in New York.
“‘Studio One,’ ‘Montgomery Presents.’ It was a medium that was not yet developed. We had to do that,” he said in 1989. “And we could experiment to our heart’s content. Nobody was looking over our shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that'--because nobody knows anything.
“It was the most exciting direction because it was in your hands,” he added. “In theater, you’re backstage biting your nails. But in live television, you are in control. You edit while you’re on the air.”
Nevertheless, when mandatory retirement rules forced him out at the age of 65 in 1965, Magner returned to theater. He moved to Los Angeles and became artistic director first for the Inglewood Playhouse and later his own New Theatre Inc., which worked closely with Goethe-Institut of Los Angeles.
Magner produced and directed classics--ancient, modern, popular and seldom-done plays that enhanced Los Angeles theater educationally and artistically. Among them were the 1836 Georg Buchner play “Woyzeck,” the Ben Jonson comedy “Volpone,” Jean Paul Sartre’s “The Condemned of Altona,” Somerset Maugham’s “The Sacred Flame” and Athol Fugard’s “The Blood Knot.”
A widower, Magner left no immediate survivors. Morgenstern said a celebration of his life will be planned, and asked that memorial contributions be sent to a charity of the donor’s choice.
Although Magner willed himself to live long, he was philosophical about death, telling The Times in 1995: “I like to think that something remains [after we die]--call it the soul, the spirit. If not, what are we all here for?
“You know, I’ve been asked a hundred times if I believe in God. I always say I believe in a God that believes in me.”
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e4c60f8d1c8339c75c76ad74343453ef | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-30-sp-pavelich30-story.html | PLACID LIFE | PLACID LIFE
Small lakes dot the northern woods of Minnesota, blue specks on the map, too many to count, and beside one of them Mark Pavelich lives happily ever after. Far from the sport of hockey that brought him acclaim. Far from the world and its commotion.
“Just the wild and his wife and his dog,” a friend says. “He moved out there for a reason.”
Once in a while, he visits the nearby town of Lutsen for groceries or someone spots him driving his truck on a back road, headed for a fishing spot perhaps. Few know the exact whereabouts of his cabin.
So when a reporter calls--after getting the unlisted number--Pavelich is polite but guarded. Mostly “ums” and “ahs” followed by silence. The conversation quickly moves to that night in Lake Placid, N.Y., against the Soviet Union, more than 20 years ago, when he collected the puck along the boards and slid it in front of the net.
“The past is the past,” he says.
That puck ended up on the stick of teammate Mike Eruzione, who scored to give the U.S. squad an upset over the USSR on the way to a gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
The “Miracle on Ice” still ranks among the nation’s greatest sporting moments and, in many ways, Pavelich was symbolic of the American team. An underdog because of his small frame. Selfless and hard working. Quietly fierce. In the years since, he has become something else: A mystery.
Some of his teammates have basked in the enduring spotlight, playing in celebrity golf tournaments, getting paid as motivational speakers. Others have kept in touch by phone, gathering in small groups for dinners or golf vacations, bonded by their experience. Pavelich has kept to himself.
The players now hope he will come to their biggest reunion yet. With the Winter Games back on American soil--and patriotism in vogue--they have been invited to play an exhibition Friday at Staples Center, the day before the NHL All-Star game. It will mark the first time in two decades all of them have gathered. All, perhaps, but one.
“We may have to send one of those drone planes or Global Positioning Satellites to find him,” former defenseman Ken Morrow says of Pavelich.
They might have to kidnap him.
“He’s not being aloof,” says Bill Baker, another former teammate. “You’ve just got to know Pav.”
Lutsen sits snug against Lake Superior, two hours north of Duluth, almost to the Canadian border. Even in this town, remote as it is, the man and his ways are noteworthy.
“People are always talking about him,” a local named Doc Rose says. “How’s he doing and what’s he doing.”
Rose is among the few who have been shown the way to Pavelich’s cabin a dozen miles off the highway. He is a retired trainer for the Minnesota North Stars--the NHL team that moved to Dallas--and has known Pavelich for years. He recalls when the player moved to Lutsen in the late 1980s after playing professionally in New York, of all places.
Pavelich bought a townhouse by the shore, but, as Rose explains, “he went into the bush as soon as he got a chance,” trading his home for a parcel of forest land, moving into a garage with only a couch to sleep on. From there, he set about building a cabin.
“One board at a time,” Rose says. “Nothing extravagant but well-built. And you’d have a heck of a time finding it.”
There is fishing in the lake outside his door and small game to hunt in the woods. Asked about his home, Pavelich says only that “there’s a lot of stuff to do other than hockey.”
Not that he’s a recluse. Several houses stand nearby. Friends who know the way are met with a friendly welcome and perhaps a fish dinner cooked on the outdoor grill. Still, the place is secluded enough that whenever Rose stops by, he feels as if he is intruding. And visitors, especially acquaintances from New York, come away wondering how Pavelich survives out there.
The question should be: How did he survive in the bright lights and big cities?
He was born in nearby Eveleth, in rugged country known as the Iron Range, where boys learn to hunt and fish from an early age. The town claims to have the world’s largest hockey stick at 107 feet long, so they also learn to play.
Pavelich was small for the game, never growing taller than 5 feet 8, but all those childhood days on outdoor rinks molded him into a clever skater and stickhandler. “A throwback player who could control the puck like he had it on a string,” says Baker, who grew up nearby in Grand Rapids.
In the late 1970s, those skills made Pavelich one of the greatest players in the history of the University of Minnesota Duluth. They subsequently earned him a spot on the Olympic team.
More than half of the American players and their coach, Herb Brooks, came from Minnesota. The others were from Wisconsin, Michigan and Massachusetts, sworn rivals on the ice. Yet from this group emerged a close-knit bunch, Pavelich playing the quiet one.
“I’ve known him since high school and he was always a man of few words,” Baker says. “You never know what he’s thinking.”
He earned respect with his work ethic and a knack for passing the puck. Former goaltender Jim Craig recalls him as “an honest man, just a wonderful guy to be around.”
Little was expected of the Americans that winter, their coach reportedly telling them before the Olympics it would take some luck to win a bronze. But after an opening tie against Sweden, they rolled to four consecutive victories against the likes of Norway and Romania to reach the medal round against the powerhouse Soviets.
Pavelich played an essential, supporting role that night, assisting on two of the four goals. Two days later, the U.S. defeated Finland to win the gold medal, and Pavelich wound up with six assists in the seven Lake Placid games.
The players became overnight heroes, appearing on television, visiting the White House, attending promotional events across the nation.
“A lot of commotion,” Pavelich says. “I tried to avoid it as much as possible.”
Then he signed with the New York Rangers and moved to Manhattan. The team photo shows a young man with shaggy hair and heavy features, his lips pressed together in only the faintest semblance of a smile. He claims to have enjoyed his time in New York, taking in the sights of the city, but teammates recall he wasn’t much for the nightlife.
“He’d rather do his job and be gone,” says Baker, who joined his pal in New York for a season. “He’d rather go to the corner bar, have a few beers and talk to the old-timers than go to Studio 54.”
On the ice, Pavelich scored 76 points as a rookie--still a team record--and led the Rangers the following season with 37 goals, five of them in a memorable game against the Hartford Whalers. Though such numbers surely established him in the league, he retired after only five seasons because of differences with a new coach.
There would be flickers of comebacks, a dozen or so games with the North Stars and San Jose Sharks, but his career was basically over.
“It was pretty easy,” he says. “I just stepped away from it.”
The players who reunite at Staples Center this weekend like to joke that Eruzione made a career of his historic goal. That includes two decades of working as a broadcaster, speaking at corporate meetings and playing in celebrity golf tournaments.
“When the Olympics ended, Mike and I ... thought we could have some fun with this for a year, maybe two,” his agent, Bob Murray, says. “In our wildest dreams we never thought he’d still be doing this.”
Craig, too, gets hired as a motivational speaker.
“It was more than a hockey game,” he says. “I’ve learned over the years how much this meant to people.”
But for Pavelich, those two weeks in Lake Placid seem distant. He describes himself as “kind of retired” and says a couple of years have passed since he last wore a pair of skates. Rose guesses he saved enough money from his playing days to live simply and comfortably, often fishing for his dinner. There is little need for nostalgia.
So he has skipped every reunion, large and small, save for the wedding of former teammate Steve Christoff. Even those players who live within a few hours’ drive of Lutsen say they have not seen him in years.
“I call him to see how he’s doing,” says Phil Verchota, now a bank executive in Willmar, Minn. “He’s just private. He doesn’t like social functions.”
His teammates hoped he would make an exception for a golf vacation they arranged in South Carolina two years ago. They left a plane ticket for him, and Baker, now an oral surgeon in Brainerd, Minn., arrived early at the airport, eager to talk about old times.
“I waited and waited but he never showed,” he says. “I had an empty seat beside me on the plane.”
This time, with an insurance company paying to bring the team to Los Angeles, Pavelich is noncommittal when asked if he will come. “Well, um ... we’ll see,” he says.
Verchota, who spoke to him recently, was doubtful.
The players say they will be disappointed if he does not attend, but also admit to getting a certain amount of enjoyment from his reticence. They joke about him being a hermit. They speculate about him chasing Bigfoot.
And, in more serious moments, they suspect he isn’t so mysterious after all.
“He could care less about the limelight,” Craig says. “He just lives his life and is happy ... all of us should be that courageous.”
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d924c462cfcfcd1480f29075c3e898c8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-31-wk-desowitz31-story.html | A Colorful Era in Filmmaking History | A Colorful Era in Filmmaking History
This year marks the 40th anniversary of “Dr. No,” the film that introduced James Bond to the movies, made Sean Connery a star and ushered in the ‘60s spy craze.
“Dr. No” also brought Pop art to the cinema with its super-slick design, thanks to cinematographer Ted Moore, production designer Ken Adam and Technicolor, whose celebrated dye-transfer printing process made those primary colors scream almost as loudly as the famous James Bond theme.
So with Bond mania amazingly still going strong after all these years (“Bond 20" is due in November, and the films have grossed more than $1.04 billion worldwide), it is fitting that the American Cinematheque lead off its second “Technicolor Dreams” series with “Dr. No” and “From Russia With Love” on Friday night at the Egyptian Theatre.
Talk about enhanced reality. Bond and dye-transfer were a perfect visual match through the early ‘70s, even in these first two films, which relied more on glossy surfaces and exotic locations than fancy gadgets and fantastic settings.
In “Dr. No,” dye-transfer contributes an overripe look to the Caribbean locale. The same goes for Ursula Andress’ sensual presence. In “From Russia With Love” (1963), the race for the elusive Lektor in Istanbul and aboard the Orient Express offers a darker and richer palette.
To this day, the dye-transfer process arguably achieves greater clarity and vibrancy than conventional film printing by separating the primary colors and then individually applying complementary dyes directly to the film. A modern version of the process, which reigned from 1935 to 1974, was reintroduced a few years ago, but has been used only sporadically, mainly because it’s more expensive.
The best recent examples are “Apocalypse Now Redux,” “The Thin Red Line” and reissues of “Funny Girl” and “Rear Window.”
“Technicolor Dreams” runs on two consecutive weekends through Feb. 10. The series offers 16 classics, including nearly half a dozen rare nitrate prints, and covers a more diverse range of styles and genres than the previous series in 2000.
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The best of the nitrate-era films is “Black Narcissus” (1947), the eerie and erotic British drama from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that also screens Friday. Deborah Kerr plays a troubled nun overwhelmed by both the physical beauty and harsh climate of her new home in the Himalayas. This hothouse of repression and sexual longing was exquisitely photographed by cinematographer Jack Cardiff, the master of Technicolor and the Vermeer of his craft when it came to manipulating light to convey sheer beauty and spiritual transcendence.
Cardiff won an Oscar for his work on “Black Narcissus,” and it’s hard at first to believe it wasn’t shot on location. Using oatmeal-colored tones and chaste-looking light in the early scenes and crimson tones and a fog filter for the sexually charged climax, Cardiff certainly pushed the aesthetic envelope, because during this time Technicolor was also a photographic process.
From 1935 to 1955, Technicolor (founded by Dr. Herbert Kalmus) utilized its own special three-strip camera that simultaneously exposed individual black and white film strips with a series of mirrors and prisms, because color negative film didn’t exist. Each strip was light sensitive to red, blue or green, and the colors were achieved during dye-transfer printing. The three-strip era ended with the advent of the color negative, yet dye-transfer endured, with some clever modifications.
But what an era it was. Not for nothing did they call it “glorious Technicolor.” Audiences experienced films as much as watched them, with Technicolor providing a surreal, 3-D-like experience. As director Martin Scorsese and others have pointed out, it was the equivalent of discovering masterworks in a museum. You were intoxicated by the colors and swept away by the emotions. Above all, these were films about color--both electric and refined--and were the result of brilliant collaborations between engineers, filmmakers and technicians.
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On the oversaturated side, the series offers two more nitrate delights on Saturday: “Forever Amber” (1947), the 17th century costume drama directed by Otto Preminger that stars a blond Linda Darnell as a chamber-hopping maiden who sleeps her way to the court of Charles II (George Sanders), and “Blood and Sand” (1941), the smoldering melodrama from director Rouben Mamoulian in which dashing bullfighter Tyrone Power throws over Darnell for an even hotter Rita Hayworth (in her Technicolor debut).
Both are examples of Fox’s use of Technicolor at its most theatrical. “Forever Amber” may be a terrible movie, but it’s sumptuous to look at, with garish costumes and decor. “Blood and Sand,” which earned Oscars for cinematographers Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan, is imbued with the seductive style inspired by some of the great Spanish painters.
Delirious is probably the best way to describe the look of Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical film “Samson and Delilah” (1949), which screens Feb. 10 in a nitrate print.
It’s yet another feast for the eyes with little else to offer. An Academy Award winner for best art direction and costumes, you can decide who was more gorgeous: Victor Mature or Hedy Lamarr.
On the tamer side are two early examples of Technicolor from 1939 (screening on Feb. 9): “The Little Princess,” a Victorian rags-to-riches story starring Shirley Temple in a mint nitrate print; and “Gulliver’s Travels,” the animated classic from Max and Dave Fleischer that bravely followed in the footsteps of Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Both feature a sepia tone that is typical for the period, when Technicolor had to compensate for various printing deficiencies.
For sci-fi fans, two cult favorites, “Destination Moon” (1950) and “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” (1964), screen on Feb. 9.
The former is a colorful three-strip gem from producer George Pal that catapulted the genre in the ‘50s, earning an Oscar for special effects. The latter is a rarely revived film full of ‘60s angst and featuring a more muted look.
Speaking of which, the series offers several later examples of dye-transfer from the mid-'60s to the early ‘70s when it had to cope with a darker, grainier and more naturalistic trend in cinematography. This includes “Fiddler on the Roof” (1971), screening on Saturday; “Cabaret” (1972), “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) and “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) screening on Feb. 8; and “A Man for All Seasons” (1966), the best picture Oscar winner about the clash of principles and wills between Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and his former friend King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw), screening on Feb. 10.
Fittingly, cinematographers Oswald Morris (“Fiddler on the Roof”), Geoffrey Unsworth (“Cabaret”) and Ted Moore (“A Man for All Seasons”) all won Oscars for their work.
Meanwhile, Bond’s screen debut isn’t the only anniversary being celebrated during “Technicolor Dreams.” There are also 50th-anniversary salutes on Sunday to John Ford’s “The Quiet Man” and John Huston’s “Moulin Rouge.” Like “Black Narcissus,” they each boast subtle palettes.
Filmed on location in Ireland, “The Quiet Man” stars an unusually sexy and sensitive John Wayne as a former boxer who returns to his birthplace and falls in love with the fiery Maureen O’Hara. The film offers a soft, misty look while emphasizing the gorgeous green countryside. Ford won an Oscar as did cinematographers Winton C. Hoch and Archie Stout.
Unlike Baz Luhrmann’s sultry “Moulin Rouge,” Huston achieves a flatter, monochromatic look to simulate the style of painter Toulouse-Lautrec in his portrait of the notorious Parisian dance hall.
“Technicolor Dreams” is not to be missed. Although dye-transfer is fade-proof, there aren’t many prints available anymore, especially those films shot in three-strip. And the highly flammable nitrate, replaced by safety film in the early ‘50s, is even scarcer.
So the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
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b4dac4cf158b0f7cd13e20831f20ffdd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-04-me-dufty4-story.html | William F. Dufty, 86; Wrote ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ and ‘Sugar Blues’ | William F. Dufty, 86; Wrote ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ and ‘Sugar Blues’
William F. Dufty, who told Billie Holiday’s life story in “Lady Sings the Blues,” helped popularize macrobiotics in America, wrote “Sugar Blues” about the evils of processed sugar, and became the sixth and final husband of sugar-eschewing actress Gloria Swanson, has died. He was 86.
Dufty died Friday of natural causes at his home in Birmingham, Mich., said his literary executor, Timothy Rooks.
A friend of both women for many years, Dufty dedicated “Sugar Blues” to “Billie Holiday, whose death changed my life, and Gloria Swanson, whose life changed my death.”
Dufty published the Holiday book in 1956, and at her death in 1959 wrote a remarkable 3,000-word obituary, a personal essay, that appeared on the front page of the New York Post, where he spent 1951-60 as assistant to the editor. Rooks said the essay sold a record number of issues for the newspaper.
Swanson, who had advocated a sugar-free diet for many years, met Dufty in the mid-1950s and inspired him to re-educate his sweet tooth.
After eliminating sugar, Dufty went from 225 pounds to 142 pounds. In 1976 he published “Sugar Blues” and married Swanson, 16 years his senior.
Dufty remained devoted to Swanson until her death in 1984, serving as cook, advisor, muse and the ghostwriter of her 1981 autobiography, “Swanson on Swanson.”
Born the son of a banker near Grand Rapids, Mich., Dufty learned to play piano by ear and as a child had his own radio show. He attended Wayne State University but dropped out to become an organizer and then speech writer for the United Auto Workers.
He spent four years in the Army during World War II, rising to the rank of sergeant and serving in North Africa, France, Germany and Austria.
After the war, Dufty worked as an editor for the Congress of Industrial Organizations and Americans for Democratic Action and as a consultant to the American Jewish Committee and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in New York.
He also began selling freelance articles to the Post and then worked as an editor through the 1950s, earning a George Polk Award and a Page One Award from the Newspaper Guild for investigative articles on such issues as police and court treatment of drug users and minorities, particularly Puerto Ricans.
His writing occasionally attracted brickbats as well, notably for the Holiday book, which was turned into a 1972 motion picture starring Diana Ross.
Bob Blumenthal, in a 1994 Chicago Tribune review of another book on Holiday by Donald Clarke, said Dufty’s book “was filled with factual errors and romanticized glosses.”
Yet Blumenthal praised Dufty’s style over the other author’s, stating: “ ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ conveys a stylistic pungence that Clarke cannot even conceive. It contains, to cite a most obvious example, one of the great opening paragraphs in literature: ‘Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was 18, she was 16, and I was three.’ ”
Holiday’s parents were actually 18 and 16 when she was born and they never married, the review noted.
Dufty also helped Edward G. Robinson Jr. write his 1957 book, “My Father, My Son.”
The writer embraced macrobiotics when he met George Ohsawa in Paris. Dufty soon began touting the discipline’s “conscious concern of the relation between food and spiritual development"--for example, linking consumption of brown rice and vegetables with meditation--in the United States.
In 1965 he published a translation of several of Ohsawa’s books under the title “You Are All Sanpaku,” which became a cult favorite.
“After rediscovering the hard way, through pain and suffering, that illness can be the doorway to health,” Dufty once wrote, “I hope to encourage rediscovery in the West of the ancient Eastern principles underlying the relation between food and spiritual development, with a primary emphasis on embryological education.”
In recent years, Dufty returned to his native Michigan, where he wrote articles for magazines and lectured at Wayne State.
Before his marriage to Swanson, Dufty married and divorced Maely Bartholomew, the mother of his only child, Bevan Doyle Dufty. His son survives.
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da1ede948a05c3bc4fe0d184b6e6ba12 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-11-sp-golfcol11-story.html | This Teed-Off Shot Was Out of Bounds | This Teed-Off Shot Was Out of Bounds
Is there anyone else who thinks that Augusta National could have handled the situation with the National Council of Women’s Organizations just a little better?
Clearly, the time is coming when there will be female members at Augusta, everybody knows that, but what transpired this week isn’t going to speed the process any.
All right, so a respected women’s group believes the private club needs to start inviting women to become members and says so in a letter to the club. Fair enough, it’s a position, whatever.
But instead of simply responding with a “Thanks for your letter
Club chairman Hootie Johnson let off some major steam.
Johnson, whose anger in his three-page statement released to the media was obvious, turned a medium-sized issue into a giant one. It has no chance to go away now and little chance to be smoothed over.
Johnson even went so far as to list points of a campaign that he could expect to see over the issue. Tongue in cheek, Martha Burk of the NCWO thanked Johnson for the blueprint.
Bogey for Hootie.
That’s Just Grand
It’s the third leg of the Tour de Slam for Tiger Woods, but even if he wins the British Open next week at Muirfield in Scotland, it’s not that big a deal--according to Jack Nicklaus.
“For all intents and purposes, he’s already done it,” Nicklaus said Wednesday. “He didn’t do it in one year, so now you want him to do it in one year. All I know is, he had all four of them at the same time.”
But isn’t a true Grand Slam all four majors in the same calendar year?
“I think it’s insignificant,” Nicklaus said. “You [reporters] want to make a big deal out of it.”
Well, actually it is sort of a big deal, basically because it has never been done before.
For his part, Woods considers holding all four major titles at the same time to be a Grand Slam and everything else is just quibbling. The record shows that Woods did hold all four of the major professional titles at one time--the 2000 U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championship and the 2001 Masters.
In Nicklaus’ opinion, that was more difficult to accomplish than a calendar year slam might be.
Or maybe not. What if Tiger does pull off the Grand Slam, with victories at Muirfield and then the PGA Championship at Hazeltine in August?
“That would be not only unbelievable, but super unbelievable,” Nicklaus said.
Mac Update
He is 51 and he hasn’t played a PGA Tour event in three years, but Mac O’Grady will be making a comeback--sort of--when he tries to qualify next week at the B.C. Open.
Of course, O’Grady will try it in his noted free-spirited style.
“I come from the other end of the galaxy,” he said.
O’Grady will play left-handed and says he intends to play under the name Mac O’Grady II.
“Because I want to start all over again,” he said.
But that’s not all. O’Grady also wants to try to get into the field in the past champions’ category--he won twice on the PGA Tour--and hopes to also play right-handed as Mac O’Grady.
“Tell me I’m not weird,” said, well, presumably O’Grady I.
In his dream, O’Grady I and O’Grady II will wind up in the same pairing--one person, two names.
“Wouldn’t it be delightful?” said O’Grady, who has been through two previous name changes, from Phil McGleno to Phillip McClelland O’Grady to Mac O’Grady.
“Everybody knows I have multiple personalities.”
When he told the PGA Tour of his intentions, officials laughed, but said only one entry would be possible. O’Grady I and II say they are considering litigation.
Tiger Update
Where’s Tiger? He left Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday and supposedly is fishing in Ireland, possibly on the river Moy near Ballina.
According to the Associated Press, ESPN inquired about whether Woods might attend Wednesday night’s ESPY awards and was told the chances of getting him were “less than zero percent.”
What a Player
News item: Gary Player, 66, who will try to qualify for his 46th consecutive British Open, begins every day with 1,000 sit-ups.
Reaction: Impressive.
More numbers: He’s a three-time champion. Let him in.
A Trophy House
The quote of the week is from Juli Inkster, who won the U.S. Women’s Open on the very same Prairie Dunes course in Hutchinson, Kan., where she had won the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1980.
Said Inkster, “I think I’m going to have to buy a condo.”
Dearly Beloved
The second quote of the week is from Michael Campbell, who managed to win the European Open by one shot last week and had to explain afterward how he’d bogeyed the last four holes: “I was preparing my acceptance speech.”
U-Turn City, Baby
As it turns out, if Campbell hadn’t made his 18-inch bogey putt at the last hole, he wouldn’t have been nearly as embarrassed as Retief Goosen. A miss by Campbell would have meant a five-player playoff with Campbell, Padraig Harrington, Bradley Dredge, Paul Lawrie and Goosen, who had already left for the airport.
Gulp!
Western Open champion Jerry Kelly on his ultra-competitive, golf-playing mother, Lee: “I’m lucky she didn’t eat me when I was younger.”
Consolation Prize
It took a record-tying low closing round by Inkster to beat her, but Annika Sorenstam can probably find solace somewhere: Her $315,000 payday made her the LPGA’s first $10-million woman.
Tune In
News item: The U.S. Women’s Open gets a 2.2 overnight rating for its last round, compared to the 2.1 rating for the last round of the Western Open on the PGA Tour.
Reaction: LPGA Commissioner Ty Votaw likes to say that you can’t compare the LPGA to the PGA Tour and that the LPGA must be compared to other women’s sports. OK. The women’s singles final at Wimbledon had a 4.6 overnight rating.
Love’s Labor
That fan who yelled “Choker!” at Davis Love III in the last round of the Western Open didn’t make him one bit happy.
Said Love, “I don’t like going to the ropes and yelling at people, but it seems like I do it every week now.”
He says that fans are overstepping their bounds, that they’re not supposed to yell.
But Kelly said that’s where golf is headed.
“You know, every other sport gets heckled but golf,” Kelly said. “You know the heckling is coming. I’m sorry, you’re going to have to have some thick skin to play this game from now on because New York [the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black] just opened a nice, big can of worms. It’s going to be different.”
Moving News
It’s the oldest event on the Senior PGA Tour, having begun in 1978 as the Legends of Golf, the brainchild of the late Fred Raphael. And next year, the venerable Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf gets its seventh home in 26 years and its fifth in the last seven years.
The Legends tournament is moving to the Westin Savannah Harbor in Savannah, Ga., for 2003-2006. Previous sites: King & Bear Course at St. Augustine, Slammer & Squire Course at St. Augustine, Amelia Island, PGA West at La Quinta, Barton Creek in Austin, Texas, and Onion Creek in Austin.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
This Week
Senior Players Championship
When: Today-Sunday.
Where: TPC of Michigan (6,876 yards, par 72), Dearborn, Mich.
Purse: $2.5 million. Winner’s share: $375,000.
TV: ESPN (today and Friday, noon-2 p.m.) and Channel 7 (Saturday and Sunday, 1-3 p.m.).
2001 winner: Allen Doyle.
PGA, Greater Milwaukee Open
When: Today-Sunday.
Where: Brown Deer Park Golf Course (6,759 yards, par 71), Milwaukee.
Purse: $3.1 million. Winner’s share: $558,000.
TV: The Golf Channel and Fox Sports Net (today and Friday, 12:30-3 p.m.), and Channel 7 (Saturday, 3-5 p.m., delayed; Sunday, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.).
2001 winner: Shigeki Maruyama.
LPGA,
Jamie Farr Kroger Classic
When: Today-Sunday.
Where: Highland Meadows Golf Club (6,365 yards, par 71); Sylvania, Ohio.
Purse: $1 million. Winner’s share: $150,000.
TV: ESPN (Friday, 10 a.m.-noon; Saturday and Sunday, 1-3 p.m.).
2001 winner: Se Ri Pak.
European Tour
Scottish Open
When: Today-Sunday.
Where: Loch Lomond Golf Club (7,050 yards, par 71), Scotland.
Purse: $3.4 million. Winner’s share: $566,000.
TV: The Golf Channel (today-Friday, 7-10 a.m.; Saturday, 6-9 a.m.; Sunday, 5:45-8:45 a.m.).
2001 winner: Retief Goosen.
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1244a02a9f3c30d35c3dcd8c0a8af7af | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-13-me-jvwrite13-story.html | Juvenile Hall Writing Class Gives Troubled Youths a Creative Outlet | Juvenile Hall Writing Class Gives Troubled Youths a Creative Outlet
If you had 15 minutes to address the world, what would you say?
Author Karen Hunt presented the premise to a group of students in Van Nuys some years back. One girl’s response changed Hunt’s life.
“Well, there’s a shoe sale at Nordstrom, and we all need shoes, so we should go out and buy some. And, oh yeah, there’s all these people starving in the world, and we should feed them, I guess,” the girl said.
After hearing that, Hunt, who has written 21 children’s books, decided to spend time with unfortunate youth and developed the idea for a writing class at Juvenile Hall.
In 1999, she launched InsideOUT Writers to encourage and teach writing to youths incarcerated at Juvenile Halls in Sylmar, Downey and Central Los Angeles.
More than 100 youths are currently in the program, which meets twice a week for two hours. Some of their work has been collected in a book, “What We See,” published by the Alethos Foundation of Calabasas.
One enthusiastic participant, a Pacoima teenager held at the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar who is soon to be transferred to an adult facility, lamented having to leave the writing program behind.
“I really like this class and I’m going to miss it, but I’m going to keep on writing wherever they send me,” said convicted kidnapper Jose de la Torre, 18, who will be sent to state prison or the California Youth Authority when he is formally sentenced on Aug. 5. “The writing keeps me busy, keeps me out of trouble. I could be gang-banging in here.”
On a recent Friday evening, 12 young people--charged or convicted of crimes ranging from carjacking to murder--gathered in a semicircle in a gymnasium to write and read and occasionally take in some advice from Hunt and another teacher, Marilyn Morton.
When asked individually about the program, 11 of the 12 began their review identically: “It’s cool.”
One writer, a 17-year-old Athens Park boy accused of murder, read an essay about growing up in a gang-infested South Los Angeles neighborhood.
“Why I had to live in a place like that, I don’t know,” he read loudly, his face staring down hard at his paper. “I tried to avoid it, but it was hard. They just kept coming and coming. I told my mom about it, but we didn’t have enough money to move, so I started to go around the other way.”
The young man’s mother, Shelly Warren, said that even though he is possibly facing life in prison, her son often talks about his writing.
“I think it’s great for him,” she said. “I’m glad he’s in that program. I’m behind him 100%.”
Hunt said that a nun, Sister Janet Harris, a social worker who deals with gang members, initially introduced her to Juvenile Hall, which inspired her to create the program.
“I was raised to make a difference,” said Hunt, 46, whose pen name is Karen Mezek Leimert. “I wanted to get them interested for themselves, get them excited about what they value.”
What the youths wrote surprised her.
“I was blown away hearing about these girls who looked so tough that I’d be horrified if I passed them on the street. But they had these amazing stories,” said Hunt, who has assembled a group of professional writers to volunteer their services for the program. One is John Horn, who covers the motion picture industry for Newsweek magazine.
“What the program tries to do is impose a little form and structure as a means of expression,” said Horn, who has been teaching in the program for two months.
Horn said he was hooked after sitting in on a Central Juvenile Hall class taught by a friend.
“These kids have generally had very few adult figures that have helped them without judging or punishing them,” said Horn, adding that the program has no grades or tests.
“Some of the writing is advanced and well thought out, but all of it is extremely heartfelt. These are kids who have gone through more bad times than many adults. If they can tap into the bad experiences, they will have a lot to say.”
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3fb90d2e05528a0f81d9266d358f086a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-13-me-stayner13-story.html | Trial in Yosemite Killings to Begin | Trial in Yosemite Killings to Begin
It is one of the most infamous crimes in California history: A woman, her daughter and a friend disappeared while visiting Yosemite National Park and were savagely killed by the handyman at their motel. Caught months later after beheading a nature guide, Cary Stayner gave the FBI a detailed confession to all four slayings.
Three years later, Stayner, 40, is finally going on trial for killing the tourists, with opening statements expected Monday. The trial was moved to San Jose because of intense publicity in Mariposa County, where the killings occurred.
Despite the notoriety, there is an anticlimactic aspect to Stayner’s trial. He already is serving life without parole in federal prison after pleading guilty to killing the park guide, Joie Armstrong.
But state prosecutors want to execute him.
Stayner, who once said he would prefer the death penalty to life in prison, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. Executing him will require slogging through a trial expected to last almost three months and cost taxpayers $3 million. Then there are the appeals.
“You have to imagine there are better ways of spending the money, even though I support the death penalty,” said Ken Hawkins, the auditor for Mariposa County.
The county, with a population of just 16,000 and an annual budget of $31 million, has spent $940,000 on the case and expects to shell out at least $2 million more for the prosecution’s costs and Stayner’s defense.
Most of the costs will be reimbursed by the state.
Stayner is charged with murder, kidnapping and special circumstances that could bring the death penalty--including sexual assault and attempted rape--in the killings of Carole Sund, 42, her daughter Juliana, 15, and Silvina Pelosso, a 16-year-old friend from Argentina.
The three disappeared while visiting the park in February 1999. Their burned-out rental car was found a month later with Carole Sund’s and Silvina’s bodies in the trunk. They had been strangled.
A week later, Juliana’s body was discovered in a thicket near a remote lake, after Stayner had mailed the FBI a letter with a map directing agents to the scene. Her throat had been slashed.
After his arrest, Stayner told the FBI that killing the tourists made him feel “like I was in control for the first time in my life.” He said he sexually assaulted Juliana after killing the others, and that she had begged him to end her misery.
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e30f816b6afdd8db0bdf52ee2a3c55d0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-16-na-secure16-story.html | Ridge Urges Congress to Preserve Homeland Plan | Ridge Urges Congress to Preserve Homeland Plan
Even as powerful factions in Congress angle to carve up a Cabinet department that does not yet exist, a top advisor to President Bush pleaded Monday with senior lawmakers to preserve the core of the administration’s homeland security proposal, and the White House moved to unveil a companion strategy to combat terrorism.
Tom Ridge, Bush’s homeland security director, told a special panel of House leaders that the administration was ready to bargain over some parts of its proposal to reorganize the executive branch but would fight to win approval for others.
For instance, Ridge said, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are all “critical” to the success of the proposed Department of Homeland Security.
Last week, in the opening skirmish of what is expected to be an intense turf battle, some influential House committees voted not to move those agencies to the proposed department.
Meantime, Ridge disclosed that a long-awaited “National Strategy for Homeland Security"--detailing in about 100 pages the threats the nation faces and the rationale for the newly proposed department--would be released today.
A summary of the strategy, which the White House made public Monday evening, laid out stark challenges.
“We must defend ourselves against a wide range of means and methods of attack,” the summary said. “Our enemies are working to obtain chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons for the purpose of wreaking unprecedented damage on America.... Our society presents an almost infinite array of potential targets that can be attacked through a variety of methods.”
The strategy, according to the summary, reflects many initiatives already underway since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in six “critical mission areas”: intelligence; border and transportation security; domestic counterterrorism; protection of critical infrastructure; defense against catastrophic terrorism; and emergency readiness and response.
For example, the strategy calls for development of systems of nuclear and chemical sensors to prevent terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction. Bush will outline the strategy today in a meeting with lawmakers.
Monday’s developments came as Congress intensified its search for compromise legislation to enact what the administration calls the broadest government reorganization in more than 50 years, since the modern Defense Department and intelligence agencies were created.
As announced by Bush in a June 6 address to the nation, the Department of Homeland Security would embrace more than 169,000 employees from 22 agencies now dispersed throughout the government.
Most lawmakers now agree that a new department, which would be the 15th in the cabinet, should be created. But there is so far no consensus on its size or its responsibilities.
This week, a special nine-member panel of House leaders will attempt to craft a homeland security bill for floor debate and a vote next week. To do that, the panel must meld competing, often conflicting recommendations from 11 House committees.
On the other side of the Capitol, the Senate plans to consider its own version before it begins a summer recess next month.
In his appearance before the House panel, Ridge did make some concessions. For instance, he announced that the administration would agree to keep in the Agriculture Department several thousand federal employees in charge of protecting crops and livestock. Originally, Bush had sought to move the entire 8,600-employee Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to Homeland Security.
The concessions reflected the emerging reality conceded by GOP leaders: Bush cannot get everything he wants on homeland security through Congress.
House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), chairman of the special leadership panel and one of the president’s strongest allies on Capitol Hill, said Bush had proposed “the basic template” for legislation that could be enacted. “But there will be noticeable differences from the president’s plan,” Armey added.
House Democrats on the special panel warned that the congressional GOP leadership and the administration would have to remain flexible to win their party’s support in a closely divided Congress.
“To make this work, we must build a bipartisan coalition that is as deep as it is broad,” Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told Ridge.
Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), assistant to Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), said that the House should give “serious consideration” to the committees that recommended major changes in the Bush plan.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, for example, voted to block transfer of the Coast Guard and FEMA. The House Judiciary Committee voted to block the movement of a large division of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to block the proposed shift of health research units, focusing on bioterrorism, from the Department of Health and Human Services.
But many lawmakers remain loyal to Bush.
The House Government Reform Committee endorsed much of the Bush plan as drafted, though it narrowly voted to guarantee collective bargaining rights in the proposed department for federal employees now represented by unions, an amendment the administration opposes.
To defend the Bush plan, Ridge faces the difficult task of persuading lawmakers that many agencies whose functions are only partly tied to homeland security should move, in whole, to the proposed department. On the Coast Guard, which some defenders note serves the maritime industry in many ways that have little to do with port security, Ridge offered a practical political argument. If it is in Homeland Security, he said, the Coast Guard is likely to get more money--funding that can be used for non-security missions.
On the Secret Service, which has jurisdiction over some types of financial crimes, Ridge said that its training would be “a perfect match for the new department.” And on FEMA, he said, preparing to respond to terrorist attacks would also help the agency respond to fires and floods and other natural disasters.
But Ridge did not use those arguments with the crop and livestock units within the Agriculture Department, an instance when the administration bowed to protests from powerful farm-state legislators. Speaking with reporters, Ridge acknowledged that when divvying up and reshuffling agencies, “some tear lines are easy to identify,” but for others, “it’s difficult.”
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afa20af9f510967670ae68c65ba47e28 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-21-me-lopez21-story.html | Idea for the Road: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Way in L.A. | Idea for the Road: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Way in L.A.
It’s not even rush hour, but I’m jammed up on the I-5 between L.A. and Downey. This is irritating enough, obviously, but now the vehicle in the next lane keeps crowding me.
I look across and find an anorexic woman on a cell phone, driving a humongous Ford Extinction. You’ve seen her, I’m sure. And if there’s not a model called Extinction, there ought to be.
So I turn on the radio and learn:
A) Traffic is bad everywhere, but, B) It’s going to be mostly sunny today and tomorrow.
It’s not clear to me why such reports don’t also inform us that fish are in the ocean and day will follow night. Of course there’s horrible traffic everywhere. Los Angeles just topped the national charts for the 15th year in a row, nosing out the San Francisco-Oakland area, with Angelenos stuck in traffic an average of 136 hours a year.
And guess what. It’s going to get so disastrously worse, we’re going to look back longingly on the mess we’ve got now.
The most frightening projections tell us that, in the next 20-30 years, barring an economic collapse or some unforeseen calamity, Southern California will add on the current population of Chicago, and the entire state will add the current population of Texas.
There’s not a transit master plan in place that would keep up with the expected growth, and that includes the proposal to double-deck the 101 Freeway through the San Fernando Valley. By the time it’s completed, we’d need to go to a triple-decker, anyway, so why not play it safe and go four-high, with parking on Level 4?
Transportation planning is so shortsighted, traffic experts say, that even if we complete the billions of dollars worth of projects now scheduled in the Los Angeles area, average freeway speeds will drop from the current 30 mph to 20 mph or less in the year 2025.
Misery will abound. We’ll all point fingers and wonder why nobody did anything.
So the question is, is there any way to keep ourselves from descending into eternal gridlock hell? And the answer is yes, but you’ll never hear these solutions from any politician.
“Freeways should remain free,” California Gov. Gray Davis has said in denouncing the state’s tollways.
As is often the case, the governor could not possibly be more wrong.
Everything about driving ought to cost more, not less. Any nitwit with $6 in a bank account can drive a $35,000 set of wheels off a new-car lot, fill the tank for $25, and cruise all day. You don’t even have to know how to drive, which is the case with half the people on the road.
Speaking of gas, you know how we all gripe when a gallon of petrol creeps up to $1.60, then $1.70, and then $1.80?
I’d bump it up to $2, just to get everyone’s attention, and then I’d go to $3 and keep it there. But the increase wouldn’t feed the fat of oil company executives. It would be added to the meager 37-cent tax we now pay per gallon.
So now, at $3 a gallon, piloting that Ford Extinction like a bug driving a dump truck is even more ridiculous. But if you insist, go ahead. The tax you generate can be pumped into buses, trains, and subway cars, and we can do smart, previously unheard of things, such as extend the airport rail line so that it actually MAKES IT TO THE AIRPORT!
Brian Taylor of UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies says drivers are getting a great bargain as things stand. For a lot of employees, there’s free parking at work, even if it means the boss loses money on the deal. And drivers don’t pay for environmental or health-care costs caused by the pollution they spew.
It’s almost a free ride, which is why Taylor is such a fan of tollways.
“Everybody’s badmouthing them, but the transportation world is going gaga,” he said of experiments like the private 91 Express Lanes between Anaheim and Riverside County.
When the private two-lane tollway was built several years ago, the Orange County Transportation Authority agreed not to widen or improve the adjacent free roadway, so as not to compete with the tollway. Now the OCTA is buying back the tollway so it can make those improvements, and tollways are considered an endangered species in California.
But Taylor would like to see more tollways, more options for drivers, and more direct user fees, not fewer. If you want to live in Agoura Hills and work in Long Beach, fine. But you’ll pass several electronic toll booths on the 101 and the 405, and you’ll get the tab in the mail.
“It ought to be like a cell phone bill, where you pay for exactly what you consumed. And if you want to travel during peak hours, you’d pay a premium.”
This would encourage people to live closer to work, to carpool, and to avoid using the highways when they’re most congested.
Those who say the heck with it, and decide to pay premium, will help subsidize a transit system that makes it more attractive to get out of your car.
Roughly 19 million people live in Southern California today. In the next 20 years, as many as 7 million more will be moving in.
If we don’t act soon, early Californians, who sped about on burros, are going to seem like an advanced culture.
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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.
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6db6390a996dafa4dc6a3e4f8ab7e7dc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-22-fg-spy22-story.html | Accused Spy Said to Have Died in Russia | Accused Spy Said to Have Died in Russia
Former CIA agent Edward Lee Howard, who fled to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s after he was suspected of selling secrets to the KGB, reportedly has died after an accident at his residence outside Moscow.
Howard vanished from Santa Fe, N.M., in September 1985 before the FBI charged him with espionage. He surfaced about a year later in Moscow, where he was granted political asylum.
Disclosures made by Howard reportedly dealt a powerful blow to U.S. intelligence networks in the Soviet capital, and a Soviet aviation expert said to have been turned in by Howard was executed for spying.
Richard Cote, ghostwriter of “Safe House,” Howard’s 1995 memoir, said Sunday that he received an e-mail Friday about the death from a friend who was “intimately involved with [Howard’s] business dealings around the world.” Cote would not identify the man who sent him the e-mail, which said Howard had died from a broken neck suffered in an “accident” at his dacha. The friend added: “As far as I can tell, the Russians are covering it up.”
The CIA said Sunday that it was unable to officially confirm the death, which was first reported by the Washington Post, citing a friend of Howard’s. In Moscow, a U.S. Embassy spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity said the embassy had received reports of Howard’s death and was seeking to verify them with the Russian government but had not received a response.
Howard joined the CIA in 1981 and was being groomed for a Moscow posting in 1983 when he failed a polygraph test and was fired. He got a new job with the legislature in New Mexico, where he was born in 1951. In 1984, he allegedly met KGB agents in Austria and sold them secrets for $6,000.
As the FBI closed in on him, he eluded capture with an elaborate ruse involving a dummy made to look like him and a tape recording of his voice.
Howard and his wife, Mary, went out to dinner. As they drove home, he jumped out of the car as it rounded a corner and she propped up the dummy in his place. Once his wife arrived home, she placed a phone call using the recording. The FBI, which had the residence under surveillance and was listening to calls from the home, apparently believed that he was there.
He left behind his wife and his toddler son, Lee.
Cote spent 11 days with Howard in Russia in 1995 but has not kept up with him since.
“Ed was very candid with me, but having a professional spy be candid with you doesn’t mean a single word was true,” Cote said.
He said the dacha where Howard apparently died was owned by the KGB, had been used as a safe house and is about 10 miles outside Moscow. The two men grilled steaks there while Cote interviewed Howard for the book.
Howard also had an apartment in Moscow. Cote said both dwellings would have been considered luxurious by Russian standards but “decidedly lower middle class” by U.S. standards.
He said Howard lived in “total isolation” for years, his only contacts being KGB and Soviet officials. He was allowed visits with his wife and son once a year.
In infrequent public comments over the years, the defector claimed that he loved the United States and denied giving the KGB vital information that led to the arrest and execution of U.S. agents.
Getter reported from Washington and Daniszewski from Moscow.
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edb0cd2aa4e380f65fd853d839ba1493 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-25-wk-king25-story.html | Lauren Ambrose: Youthful Maturity | Lauren Ambrose: Youthful Maturity
One of the greatest moments in Lauren Ambrose’s young life took place two years ago at the Slamdance Film Festival screening of “Swimming,” an intimate coming-of-age drama in which she plays a young woman adrift but trying to find her place in the world.
“It was the first time I had seen it,” recalls Ambrose, who also plays the artistic but troubled teen Claire on HBO’s drama series “Six Feet Under.”
For the record:
12:00 AM, Jul. 26, 2002 For The Record Los Angeles Times Friday July 26, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 6 inches; 235 words Type of Material: Correction Myrtle Beach--A profile of actress Lauren Ambrose in Thursday’s Calendar Weekend put Myrtle Beach in the wrong Carolina. It is in South Carolina.
“Everybody was so excited to see this movie, and people asked so many questions about the film and were so moved by the film,” says Ambrose. “Everybody had a sense that something was going on--there was a real energy in that room. Everyone had a passion for filmmaking.”
After playing the festival circuit for more than a year, “Swimming” has been slowly rolling out in theaters across America. It has played three months in Boston, two months in Dallas and arrives for a one-week run in Los Angeles this Friday--a week after Ambrose was nominated for a supporting actress Emmy for “Six Feet Under.”
The pale, red-haired actress dominates the low-budget indie film as Frankie Wheeler, a rather plain Jane who operates a cafe with her brother in the North Carolina resort of Myrtle Beach. The film focuses on one pivotal summer when Frankie’s mundane life is turned on its ear with the arrival in town of a beautiful young woman who becomes a waitress in the cafe and a drifter who lives in a van with his two dogs.
When director Robert J. Siegel saw Ambrose in the waiting room before the audition, he knew she was his Frankie. “As a smart actor, she dressed for the role,” he recalls. “She had some baggy shorts that made her look less like Lauren Ambrose and more like Frankie Wheeler. It was her face and her eyes, which immediately take her inside of you. You get this gut feeling sometimes; nobody even came close to Lauren.”
“I kind of went for it,” says Ambrose, during a recent lunch at a quaint greasy spoon in Benedict Canyon. Ambrose, 23, is friendly but reserved as she picks at her grilled cheese sandwich.
Playing Frankie, she says, was “really an interesting” exercise and a “new venture for me to play a character that is practically in every frame of the film and has the least amount of dialogue. It’s really cool to figure out a way to make the character real without the aid of words. It’s a very subtle film.”
Being simpatico with director Siegel helped. “He had an idea of the kind of movie he wanted to make, not any explosions or any big changes in the character. It’s sort of a miracle to see if it will all jibe and see if the director’s vision will be there and if the actor is doing what is appropriate for the scene.”
As far as Siegel is concerned, Ambrose rose to the occasion. “She had done wonderfully before in films,” says Siegel, “but they were ensemble pieces, and here she faced being a star. She had to internalize to express her inner life without being able to articulate it into words. She frumped herself up. A lot of up-and-coming young stars would be very concerned about doing that.”
Ambrose didn’t dress up for her audition for “Six Feet Under” but, according to executive producer Alan Poul, she lighted up the room. Poul and series creator and executive producer Alan Ball (“American Beauty”) had a hard time casting the role of Claire, the tormented but vulnerable youngest child of a dysfunctional family that owns an L.A. mortuary. At the end of last season, Claire, who drives a green hearse, didn’t know if she had been accepted at an arts college in Los Angeles or if she would be forced to attend a community college.
“Claire was one of the most difficult roles to cast because on paper, if you read the pilot, it is such an unusual character, such an edgy character,” says Poul. “Finding someone who had the combination of genuine edge and, when necessary, hostility but also was deeply vulnerable, and it was truly difficult. It’s very taxing for a young actor to do something that complex.”
Ball and Poul eventually narrowed their choices to three, including Ambrose, and presented them to HBO brass. “She is so fearless,” says Poul. “She filled the room. I think that was the moment we saw her limitless capability. It was one of those moments of absolute clarity.”
“I work well under pressure,” Ambrose says. “I read the script and thought it was wonderful, and having Alan Ball’s name on the front page, I wanted to be a part of it.”
That the series has become one of the most popular on the cable outlet and received 23 Emmy nominations last week, including one for Ambrose, took the actress by surprise. “It’s really struck a chord,” she says. “It’s really flattering. I get to act every day and am surrounded by really creative people, especially the actors in the show. You make a little film every week. It’s an intense shooting schedule. We made an episode in nine days and it’s a very dense hour.”
Ambrose, says Poul, made a major contribution in the development of her character. “We can take her anywhere,” he says. “Lauren has been working for a while and she has a great deal of experience for someone her age. I see a lot of young actors working without a rudder. She has a great deal of wisdom. She has a very secure knowledge of her own gifts, and she understands what works for her and what doesn’t.”
Although she’s made her mark playing angst-ridden teenagers, Ambrose seems to have known at a very young age what she wanted to do with her life. Born and raised in New Haven, Conn., she discovered she had a voice as a youngster and trained as an opera singer. “That’s how I found performing and acting,” she says, taking another bite out of her sandwich. “I went to Catholic school, and there was always singing going on.”
At 14, she told her parents she wanted to act professionally. “I can’t remember how it worked,” she says. “I had an agent send me out. It was very low-key during the summers. I did episodes of ‘Law & Order’ during the summer vacation, and that was sort of my introduction to it. After that, I decided to go for it and see what happened. I started working pretty consistently.”
Ambrose’s acting career has been so hectic that she didn’t have much time to sing. But this summer, she has made the time. “Maybe it will be another career one day,” she says.
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f7290e146ce164bcbc584d8001513a6c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-26-et-kuchwara26-story.html | At the O’Neill Center, the Process Is the Thing | At the O’Neill Center, the Process Is the Thing
In the velvety darkness of an old wood-beamed barn, actors Chris Noth and Mark Blum sit on a small, dimly lighted stage and rehearse their lines.
“Try to keep this next section clean--don’t slur too much,” cautions director Harris Yulin as veteran playwright Romulus Linney stretches out on a nearby bench and listens. The play is called “Klonsky and Schwartz,” Linney’s take on the argumentative relationship between poets Milton Klonsky and Delmore Schwartz.
Outside, underneath a mammoth copper beech tree, a similar exploration is taking place. The play is called “The Bebop Heard in Okinawa,” the author a 23-year-old newcomer from Naperville, Ill., named Mat Smart. Half a dozen actors huddle around Smart and director Steven Williford as they rehearse the young writer’s turbulent tale of a racially mixed family in present-day Okinawa.
Nearly five decades--and a lot of theater experience--separate the 71-year-old Linney and Smart, but they are here at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center for the same reason: Both have written new plays.
Each is taking part in the center’s annual Playwrights Conference, one of six major theater-related programs run on the grounds of the old Hammond Mansion, a rambling yellow-frame structure that overlooks Long Island Sound.
“We are where things begin,” says executive director Howard Sherman, who is in charge of the entire operation. “We are not the end. The O’Neill is a starting place.”
A starting place, over the years, for a lot of plays that went on to have lasting lives on stage: works by August Wilson, including “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson”; John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves”; Wendy Wasserstein’s “Uncommon Women and Others”; Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods”; and the musical “Nine.”
For much of its nearly 40-year existence, the center, which began in 1964, was the domain of two men: founder George C. White and Lloyd Richards, the first artistic director of the Playwrights Conference. After a long, successful run, Richards left in 1999 and was succeeded by James Houghton. White retired the following year, and Sherman arrived in October 2000. Now, the new team is hard at work, slowly putting its mark on the center and what it represents.
The Playwrights Conference is the center’s best-known program, but the estate is also home to a music-theater conference, a critics’ institute for theater reviewers, a puppetry program, a residency for trustees of nonprofit theaters and the National Theater Institute. It is an accredited college-level training program for actors. The institute’s tuition helps cover much of the center’s $2.4-million annual budget.
The center was named for O’Neill, whose family vacationed in nearby New London and whose summer home there, the Monte Cristo Cottage, was the setting for his “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” The center now owns the house and is in the process of restoring the structure.
Sherman, who has worked at such regional theaters as Geva in Rochester, N.Y., and Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, oversees them all. Yet artistic control of the Playwrights Conference is in the hands of Houghton, who also heads the Signature Theatre in New York and is an artistic advisor at the Guthrie in Minneapolis.
It was the 43-year-old Houghton, a soft-spoken, unassuming man, who ultimately decided which writers filled the 15 slots--out of 700 or so submissions--in this summer’s monthlong Playwrights Conference, which ends Sunday. Then the music-theater conference takes over, running Aug. 3 through 18.
There is a three-tiered selection process, beginning with a letter of intent from applicants, a biography and a character breakdown for their plays. Scripts are read and evaluated by more than 50 theater professionals before Houghton and a small advisory board make the final decisions.
This summer’s 15 plays are a diverse lot and so are their authors. Besides works by Smart and Linney, they include “Hindustan,” which deals with the love affair between Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, and Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the British viceroy. It was written by William di Canzio, a college professor from Pennsylvania.
Then there’s “Millicent Scowlworthy,” a look at how a group of teenagers deals with the aftereffects of violence, not unlike Columbine, by Rob Handel, a development director for the Mark Morris Dance Group in New York.
“One of the great things about this place is that there is all this support--not only from the staff members, but from other people,” Linney says. “Jim sets a tone here so that there is no competition. All the playwrights support each other.”
Linney was among several established playwrights asked by Houghton to participate in this year’s conference. They didn’t go through the selection process. Several other playwrights, including August Wilson, were also present as writers-in-residence, able to work on their latest efforts without the pressure of public performances.
Those staged readings are put together quickly. The actors in each show are at the center for a week. There are four days of rehearsal, an afternoon of technical rehearsal and then two performances, scripts in hand, in one of four theater spaces.
“I am working here with people I really trust--I know these guys,” Linney says of his director, his two actors and Houghton, who presented a season of Linney plays at the Signature a decade ago.
It was Noth who suggested to Linney, a friend since they worked together at off-Broadway’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, that he write something about Schwartz. Some two years later, “Klonsky and Schwartz” found its way here.
“We are able to do things that would drive other people crazy,” Linney says, discussing the intense preparation for his two staged readings. “People sitting here watching these rehearsals think the whole thing is chaos, and we are all nuts. I have changed a million things. There is a lot of give and take. Chris and Mark are ace actors, and if you have any sense as a playwright, you pay a lot of attention to what they are saying.”
“It’s all about discovery,” adds Noth, best known for his television roles as a detective on “Law & Order” and as Big on “Sex and the City.”
“We are here to articulate for Rom--to help him find out what’s not working. Illuminating the different rooms of this play--and there are a lot of them. It’s good, hard work but it’s scary.”
For Houghton, that cooperation is part of the process. He and Sherman have instituted operational changes that are not readily apparent to visitors or people attending the conference.
“What I tried to do when I came here was to start fresh, to ask some of the same questions that were asked initially when this place began,” Houghton says. “How can we serve our writing community now? What are the challenges a writer faces in the field as it stands now? And apply those answers and ask those questions every single year.
“One of the things we can do is bring as many new people here as possible every year so that we are constantly refueling and seeing this event fresh, seeing it through a first-time experience.... There are no givens except to be flexible and open to change.”
The playwrights now live on the O’Neill campus and can bring their families. Originally, the conference employed five or six directors, who would divide up the plays and hire what essentially became a rep company of actors, who would be around for the duration of the conference.
“Now, there is a director per project, and each show is cast individually,” Sherman says. “This made enormous artistic sense in terms of giving each playwright the best resources for their specific plays.”
Ask Smart, an O’Neill success story, who worked at the center for two summers as a writer’s assistant before submitting a play to the Playwrights Conference.
“The wonderful thing about having ‘Bebop’ at the O’Neill is that I can have the appropriate actors in the roles,” says Smart, who just finished his first year in the master of fine arts playwriting program at UC San Diego.
“Bebop” grew out of a summer visit to Japan and later a trip to Okinawa.
“In a school production, I wouldn’t have a 50-year-old and a 70-year-old Japanese woman. I would probably have a 25-year-old white girl. It’s wonderful to have the people that I need to do the play. It is empowering to have all these people working with you and just trying to help you tell the story you want to tell.”
As Sherman explains it, “Everybody does workshops these days. You can’t turn around without someone telling you about their play development series. What we offer is the idea that there are all of these artists at varying levels of their careers here together in the same boat and, ultimately, if they each choose, acting as resources for each other. That’s a very different dynamic.
“Some of the greatest experiences at the O’Neill come out of who you sit next to at lunch--there are no barriers,” he adds. “We all walk around wearing name tags. It creates a leveling effect. Jim and I wear them because it sets the tone. It says, ‘If we can do it, you can do it.’ ”
On a recent cool, mosquito-flecked evening, Smart stood with his actors under the same copper beech tree where they rehearsed for four days.
He smiled broadly as the crowd on bleachers cheered.
A new play and a real playwright were meeting their audience.
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005e4c31d6d1dd90c1f10c09e3e7fbe5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-31-me-bodies31-story.html | Stress Pushed Man to Kill Son, Himself, Family Says | Stress Pushed Man to Kill Son, Himself, Family Says
Delfin Bartolome was a hard-working family man, a father of three who never buckled under the stress of raising a son with severe autism--a 27-year-old who still slept in his parents’ bedroom.
But the 55-year-old Laguna Niguel engineer was becoming increasingly despondent about his job security. The stress of that uncertainty, his family said, was something Bartolome couldn’t handle.
Monday, Bartolome shot his son Dale to death outside Vocational Visions A.R.T.S, a Mission Viejo school for the developmentally disabled that he attended. Then Bartolome turned the gun on himself.
Witnesses saw the two talking in the back seat of their minivan about 3:30 p.m.
Three hours later, a teacher noticed the van was still there with its engine running. She looked inside and found father and son dead.
Authorities say Bartolome shot Dale twice in the upper torso with a .357-caliber handgun and shot himself once in the head.
The violence left family members stunned and seeking answers as they gathered in Bartolome’s Laguna Niguel home Tuesday.
“We have always known Delfin to be a devoted husband and father,” said Roger Mationg, 27, Bartolome’s nephew. “Although we cannot understand what was going on in his mind at the time, we imagine that he believed his intentions were out of concern and love for his family during what may have been a stressful time for him.”
Bartolome was described by those who knew him as a quiet man who was devoted to his family and to providing for them.
On Friday nights, he played poker with family and friends--and always won. On weekends, he and wife, Alexis, 54, would go swing dancing, taking Dale along for the ride across the floor. Each Sunday, Bartolome made breakfast for his family before taking them to church.
“Dad, he lived for us,” said his son Don, 20. “He was hard to shop for on Father’s Day or Christmas because he didn’t have any hobbies. He cared for his family and didn’t care about what others had.”
At Vocational Visions, a caseworker said the severity of Dale’s autism required one-on-one attention. Neighbors said he would occasionally burst from his home, run screaming to the end of the block, then turn and calmly walk back.
By necessity, Dale was his family’s focal point, someone who required constant love and patience. That was something family members say Delfin and Alexis Bartolome had plenty of.
“Every time Del talked about him, he would have this big smile,” said neighbor Mary Beth Molnar. “You know he loved his son and loved to care for him.”
A native of the Philippines, Bartolome came to the United States in 1971. He worked as an electrical engineer for Bechtel Corp. for 20 years, first in San Francisco and later in Orange County, where he was transferred.
He went to work for Aliso Viejo-based Fluor Corp. in 2000. When his project came to an end in mid-June, a company official said Bartolome was given a “customary” leave of absence.
“It’s the first time he stayed home, and it was a big adjustment,” said Priscilla Nishiyama, his sister-in-law. “It was difficult.”
Bartolome was called back to work on a new project July 19, but only for a month, according to family members. He wasn’t sure if he’d have a job once the month was over, they said.
“He gladly and enthusiastically returned to work,” company spokeswoman Lori Serrato said.
The temporary nature of the job unnerved Bartolome, said family members who tried to reassure him.
“He had great skills, and we told him they usually extend the projects,” said a brother-in-law who worked with him at Fluor and declined to give his name. Monday, hours before he shot his son and himself, Bartolome went to work.
“He was fine,” said his brother-in-law. “There was no indication this would happen.”
Bartolome talked of retiring in four years. He planned to buy his two younger sons each a duplex near family in Rancho Santa Margarita. Then he planned to return to the Philippines.
“He wanted to take Alexis and Dale back and build a house for them,” said Juan Mationg, Bartolome’s brother-in-law. “He was always thinking about their future.”
*
Times staff writer Scott Martelle contributed to this report.
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7a33a3bb33e354dcdd60ee31e1e1b7c8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-04-me-nude4-story.html | Oceanside Buys, Closes Nude Dance Club | Oceanside Buys, Closes Nude Dance Club
Downtown has taken a giant step closer to shedding its notorious reputation as a honky-tonk for off-duty Marines and sailors.
No more will there be a Playgirl Club, which for four decades allowed even underage military personnel from nearby Camp Pendleton to drink soda pop and go bug-eyed looking at buck-naked women.
At a ceremony last week, cheers came from city officials who had tried for 20 years to convince Playgirl owner Edward “Skip” Arthur to sell.
Finally they made Arthur an offer he could not refuse: $700,000 for the property and another $700,000 for promising not to open another nude entertainment establishment elsewhere in town.
At 68, Arthur and his wife, Jeanne--"She’s my boss"--say they are ready to slow down.
Tears, on the other hand, came from two young dancers--stage names Nadia and Jessie--who watched as Mayor Terry Johnson and City Council members Jack Feller, Betty Harding and Carol McCauley took turns being hoisted aloft by a cherry picker to paint over the Playgirl sign.
“The dancers were like family,” said Nadia, 23. “And the young Marines were always polite. No touching, no nasty stuff. Not like those businessmen at the club where I worked in Sacramento.”
“It’s all very sad,” said Jessie, 18. “The Marines are just boys and they weren’t hurting anybody by coming here to listen to the jukebox and watch us dance without our clothes on.”
Maybe not, but an establishment that advertises “Totally Nude Dancers” and “Girls Girls Girls” is not what Oceanside wants for its rapidly upscaling downtown as it attempts to draw tourists and home buyers with beach-close condominiums that routinely fetch $500,000 apiece.
Already the city has had feelers from people interested in opening a restaurant, retail outlet or comedy club once the site is renovated.
Slowly the downtown Oceanside of old, which police once branded a combat zone, is disappearing.
“I came here in the 1980s and the prostitutes were everywhere,” Harding said. “We got to know their names. Now they’re gone, or at least invisible. This is not the same city it was.”
Gone are the tattoo and massage parlors, sawdust-floor bars and locker clubs that once dotted the blocks around the Greyhound bus station.
Even Jughead’s, a Marine-friendly bar that a self-described “tough old broad” named Rosemary “Mom” Hamilton ran with an iron fist, has been replaced by a trendy restaurant.
The late Gustav Hasford, the ex-Marine whose book “The Short-Timers” became the movie “Full Metal Jacket,” also wrote about his off-duty time at Camp Pendleton in the 1970s in a book titled “A Gypsy Good Time”:
“The civilian slop chute off base was called Oceanside, a pocket paradise of institutionalized sleaze, fertile soil for bad country and western bands and cheap-ugly women. Outside the bus station in a hot night, marijuana dealers and pimps open for business were strutting up and down the broken white line in the center of the street.”
Signs of change are everywhere on the palm tree-lined streets. A movie house that once specialized in X-rated features is now being used by community theater groups, one soon to offer a production of the Restoration comedy “The Rivals.”
Computer stores, pizza parlors, T-shirt shops and curio stores are sprouting. A surf museum and an art school are popular. There are still quickie laundries and uniform and equipment stores that cater mostly to Marines, but the City Council has sought to discourage further “personal service” businesses.
The Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton has done its part to erase the Hollywood image of brawling Marines and drunken sailors. More recreational opportunities are provided on-base and active-duty personnel are warned that off-duty misbehavior can mean an end to their careers.
To city officials, the Playgirl Club was a particularly obnoxious obstacle on the march to redevelopment, not because of what went on inside--police concede that Arthur actively discouraged drugs and prostitution--but because of its prime location.
The club, on Pier View Way, is two blocks from City Hall and smack in the middle of what the city hopes will be a popular promenade from downtown to the beach and pier.
“The demographics of downtown are changing,” said Jane McVey, director of the city’s economic development and redevelopment department. “The people buying the condos have incomes well above $100,000. They want to see Trader Joe’s or a nice bookstore, not a Playgirl Club.”
There already is a bookstore on the street, right next to the former Playgirl Club, but it is not the type that McVey and other officials have in mind: Midnight Adult Book, featuring X-rated fare.
Many of Playgirl’s 17 dancers now work at Deja Vu, a San Diego establishment near the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.
The departure of the Playgirl Club leaves but one strip joint in Oceanside. But the Main Attraction, which, unlike Playgirl, sells alcohol, is several blocks from the heart of downtown and less visible. City officials have asked the owner about a possible purchase but have been rebuffed.
For a total of $1.5 million, which includes closing costs, the city took possession of the Playgirl furnishings, mostly chairs and tables that the city plans to donate to charity. The brass pole that featured prominently in many of the dancers’ routines disappeared at about the time escrow closed.
The mirrored ball was still above the dance floor when the politician-painters arrived Friday morning. Later, Mayor Johnson took the ball to his automobile for possible display at City Hall.
“Why do you get to take that?” Nadia asked. “You’re taking our memories with you.”
There was no immediate response.
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afcbc0229942509507cfe7a36ebe0d4f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-05-na-sheikh5-story.html | Key 9/11 Planner Is Named | Key 9/11 Planner Is Named
U.S. intelligence officials believe they have identified a mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks--a mysterious Kuwaiti already wanted for his alleged role in a 1995 plot to bomb a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean, authorities said Tuesday.
“It looks like he’s the man, quite honestly,” one Bush administration official said of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key lieutenant to Osama bin Laden. “We believe he is probably the leader of this. We have reason to believe it was his idea to create the plan for the four hijackings and [that he] discussed the plan with ... Bin Laden.”
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he had been briefed recently on Mohammed’s alleged role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and was told that the information was coming from the interrogations of “various people,” including Al Qaeda members in custody.
In particular, captured Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubeida has told his interrogators of Mohammed’s role in the plot, according to the Bush administration official and a second U.S. official. Both spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity, citing the ongoing investigation and the fact that Mohammed is still at large and believed to be hiding somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
A third person, an FBI counterterrorism official closely involved in the investigation, also described Mohammed as “perhaps the most wanted” of Al Qaeda operatives, possibly even more so than Bin Laden and top aide Ayman Al-Zawahiri, because of his direct operational role in various terrorist attacks.
In an interview with The Times two weeks ago, that FBI official would not specifically discuss Mohammed’s role in the suicide hijackings but cited him as a key fugitive who figures prominently in the investigation.
Some officials, though, downplayed Mohammed’s role. “He’s one of the people believed to be behind it. It may be a stretch to say he’s the mastermind,” said a U.S. intelligence official. “It’s not clear at this point what role he played.”
Mohammed, who is believed to be 36 or 37 years old, was designated one of the Bush administration’s 22 most-wanted terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. He was linked not to Sept. 11, but to the 1995 plot to blow up airliners. Authorities had placed a $25-million bounty on his head.
But in recent weeks, those authorities have come to believe that Mohammed discussed the Sept. 11 plot in detail before the attacks not only with Bin Laden but also with Zubeida, who was an operational commander for Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.
Authorities say Zubeida put Bin Laden’s global vision for a worldwide Islamic state into action by orchestrating a series of terrorist attacks, managing the training camps in Afghanistan and serving as a liaison with terrorist cells around the world. Tuesday’s disclosures are also the first indication that Zubeida has been tied directly to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Zubeida, a Palestinian who is believed to be about 31, was captured in a raid in Pakistan in late March. He has been interrogated almost continually since recovering from gunshot wounds suffered when he tried to escape.
The Bush administration official said Zubeida’s identification of Mohammed as a key orchestrator of the Sept. 11 attacks occurred over the last two months and that U.S. authorities have been able to corroborate significant elements of his story. The official said such independent corroboration is important because authorities have been highly skeptical of some of the information provided by Zubeida, a hardened terrorist with no obvious reason to help the U.S.
Information from Zubeida has prompted authorities in recent weeks to go public about potential terrorist attacks on U.S. banks, shopping malls and even the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty--even when they could not find any independent corroboration or even a time, date or place for such attacks.
The Bush administration official speculated that Zubeida may have identified Mohammed as a way of taunting U.S. military forces in Afghanistan.
“Zubeida is definitely talking. I think he knows that Mohammed is alive and on the loose and that we won’t be able to catch him,” said the official. “Who knows? It’s all pop psychology at this point. [But] I’m very confident that there were discussions with Mohammed and Abu Zubeida over what ultimately became the 9/11 attacks.”
Authorities have long believed that Mohammed played a significant role in Al Qaeda, ranking one or two levels below Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef, Al Qaeda’s military commander, in the terror network’s hierarchy. They also think he was involved in the 1998 truck bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.
“The point here is that we knew of Mohammed prior to 9/11, but no one knew the role he had in the organization, or his significance, until we began the interrogations,” the Bush administration official said. “Our knowledge base of him was limited. But now we know he is an extremely significant player in the Al Qaeda hierarchy.”
The official said the investigation into Mohammed’s alleged role in the plot, and within Al Qaeda, is proceeding at a breakneck pace now that authorities have leads to follow. Already, they believe that Mohammed participated in planning the financial aspects of the Sept. 11 plot as well as conceiving and orchestrating it.
The second U.S. official who confirmed that Zubeida has identified Mohammed as a key orchestrator of the attacks said Pentagon interrogators gleaned the information from him. He would not say where Zubeida is being held or what other information has been released to the White House and to the Justice and State departments.
For years, U.S. authorities have quietly investigated Mohammed for his alleged role in Bojinka, the terrorist plot based in the Philippines to blow up airliners flying routes to the United States from Southeast Asia in January 1995.
In a test run, a small bomb was detonated aboard one plane and a man was killed, but the plane did not crash. U.S. authorities and their Asian counterparts uncovered the larger plot after a fire broke out in Mohammed’s apartment in Manila.
The conspiracy was orchestrated by suspected Al Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef was also implicated in a 1995 plot to crash a small plane into CIA headquarters.
When unveiling their “most-wanted list” in October, U.S. authorities said Mohammed went by many aliases, including Ashraf Refaat Nabith Henin, Khalid Adbul Wadood, Salem Ali and Fahd bin Abdullah bin Khalid.
At the time, Assistant Atty. Gen. Michael Chertoff--who is heading the Sept. 11 inquiry--described Mohammed as a fugitive “at large from one of the plots that didn’t go off.”
“Ramzi Yousef, who’s one of the masterminds among the terrorists, had a plan to blow up 12 airliners over the ocean and kill hundreds of people,” Chertoff said in an interview in December on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” “They actually tried a test run and exploded a small device on a plane, killed somebody. Ultimately, through good luck and good investigative work, the plot was foiled.”
“This particular individual,” Chertoff said of Mohammed, “is one of the fugitives in the case.”
Mohammed also uses several birth dates, including April 14, 1965, and March 1, 1964, according to the FBI. Authorities describe him as having black hair and brown eyes and being slightly overweight. He also wears glasses on occasion, has olive skin and may or may not wear a beard, according to his wanted poster, which has been distributed worldwide.
The FBI also says Mohammed was born in Kuwait, but even that is a matter of dispute.
In December, when his name was circulated on the most-wanted list, Kuwaiti leaders officially disassociated themselves from Mohammed, saying he was “not a Kuwaiti,” as U.S. and European officials had claimed.
In an interview with Kuwaiti editors, Kuwait’s information minister, Sheik Ahmed Fahd Al Ahmed Al Sabah, said Mohammed was actually a Pakistani national who was born in Kuwait and that people born in Kuwait don’t automatically qualify for citizenship.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials said the Justice Department has identified 23 people in the United States with various levels of “terrorist ties.” At least one of them allegedly had links to Al Qaeda, according to officials who said the men are either in custody or are being closely watched.
Information about the suspects was given to the FBI, officials said.
Times staff writer Bob Drogin contributed to this report.
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5507fadd8ccae67bc02bda46b4e2f97d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-07-me-thelaw7-story.html | Prosecutors’ Puzzle: When to Try, Try Again | Prosecutors’ Puzzle: When to Try, Try Again
The first time Carlos Burns was tried for attempted murder, the case ended in a mistrial when a sole juror held out for acquittal.
So prosecutors retried Burns, who is now 21, for allegedly shooting a man in the leg. This time, the majority voted not guilty--8 to 4--and another mistrial was declared.
Legal experts say it is usually more difficult to win a conviction with each successive trial. But Los Angeles County prosecutors nonetheless decided to try the street gang member a third time. The jurors were again split, 6 to 6, when the judge declared a mistrial because of evidence issues.
At that point, Burns’ lawyer declared that enough was enough. “If their case was so good, they should have won it the first time,” defense attorney Juanita McLean told the judge.
But since a unanimous verdict had not yet been reached, double jeopardy protection did not apply. And prosecutors, confident that Burns was guilty, decided to try him yet again.
The fourth time was the charm. Burns was convicted of attempted murder and is due to be sentenced to up to life in prison.
The Burns case illustrates the tug-of-war between prosecutors who are determined to win a conviction against people they believe are guilty and defense attorneys who believe their clients should not be tried over and over.
Trying 1 Defendant 4 Times Is Rare
Although prosecutors routinely try cases twice, and occasionally even three times, when jurors deadlock, it is rare to try a defendant four times. And it is even rarer for prosecutors to be so persistent in a case that does not involve a murder, lawyers and judges said.
“I think it’s unusual, but certainly not unprecedented,” said Supervising Criminal Judge Dan Oki, though he could not comment specifically on the Burns case.
In deciding whether to allow a fourth--or even fifth--trial to move forward, Oki said, judges consider several factors, including the seriousness of the crime, whether prosecutors have additional evidence and the cost of trying a particular case. It runs more than $9,000 a day to operate a courtroom, said Kyle Christopherson, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
With every trial, the likelihood of winning a conviction diminishes, because witnesses are no longer available or their recollections dim, attorneys said. In addition, at that point, defense attorneys have had several dress rehearsals and may know the best ways to attack the prosecution’s case.
As a result, prosecutors usually decide to offer a plea bargain, because they don’t believe they will get a jury to reach a guilty verdict in another trial, said Peter Keane, dean of Golden Gate University Law School.
Although there is no law preventing repeat prosecutions, Keane said trying someone more than two or three times raises ethical questions. Prosecutors have a duty only to try cases if they firmly believe they can convince jurors beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, he said.
“After three trials, it is very difficult for a prosecutor to ethically justify another prosecution,” he said.
Keane said he represented a defendant in a capital murder case in which jurors deadlocked twice. Instead of trying the case a third time, prosecutors allowed his client to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter, he said.
Diane L. Karpman, an attorney who specializes in legal ethics, agreed that devoting public resources to trying someone over and over “is very questionable.” In such cases, attorneys may have become overly zealous.
“That many times, you wonder if the lawyer has crossed over and gotten too emotional,” she said.
Type of Crime Is Key, Says Former D.A.
On the other hand, Karpman said, prosecutors should not give up on cases if the alleged crime is egregious.
Former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian says prosecutors have to carefully consider the type of crime when deciding whether to go forward. “Attempted murder is still a very serious crime,” he said.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Jose Arias succinctly explained his reason for trying the Burns case a fourth time: “I believe to the best of my ability that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
On Dec. 1, 1999, two men were walking on 53rd Street just east of Normandie Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles. A red car drove by, made a U-turn and backed into an alley. The passenger of the car fired at the two men, missing one and hitting the other in the knee, according to police.
The driver, Omar Camacho, was arrested that night after a car pursuit by LAPD officers. Camacho told police that the shooter, who fled on foot, was a Rolling 40s gang member named Carlos. Police made wanted signs with Burns’ picture on them, leading to his arrest two months later.
Camacho and Burns were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of attempted murder, along with a special allegation that the crime was committed to benefit a street gang.
In the first trial, which began in March 2001, Camacho took the stand in his own defense, telling jurors that Burns threatened him and forced him to drive. The jury acquitted Camacho on all counts and found Burns not guilty of conspiracy. They deadlocked on the attempted murder charges against Burns, with all but one juror voting for guilt. The judge declared a mistrial.
In the second trial, which began that November, Camacho again took the stand and testified against Burns. The jury deadlocked again.
The third trial took place in March 2002. Camacho did not testify, but both attorneys referred to him in front of jurors. McLean told jurors in her opening statement that Camacho was not able to identify Burns as the passenger. Arias told jurors in his closing argument that Camacho gave police information that pinpointed Burns.
The jurors began deliberating and sent two notes to the judge. The first said they were divided: six votes for guilty and six for not guilty. The second stated that they needed clarification about the references to Camacho.
After reading the notes, Judge Robert J. Perry declared a third mistrial because he believed that the emphasis on Camacho’s statements outside of court confused the jury.
McLean then asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that her client’s protection against double jeopardy would be violated if he were tried again. Prosecutors said they wanted to try him a fourth time. Judge Perry denied the defense motion.
In the fourth trial, Burns was finally convicted of attempted murder.
His mother said the prosecutors wanted a conviction, no matter what. “I don’t understand it,” said Mary Burns, a fleet service clerk for American Airlines.
But she said she too refuses to give up, and will urge his lawyer to appeal. Or demand yet another trial.
“I’ll fight for him any way I can,” she said.
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d91b0d2bd35ff3363aac7a0374acc70e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-10-fg-badgas10-story.html | Traces of Nerve Gas Found at Uzbek Base Used by U.S. | Traces of Nerve Gas Found at Uzbek Base Used by U.S.
A routine environmental inspection turned up traces of nerve and mustard gas at a military base in Uzbekistan that about 5,000 U.S. troops have passed through since fall, military spokesmen here disclosed Sunday.
Although the origin of the contaminants remained a mystery, Bagram headquarters spokesman Col. Roger King played down the possibility that they might be evidence of terrorist sabotage. He suggested instead that the gases emanated from spills or chemical weapons leakage at the base, which was long used by the Soviet army.
Still, all U.S. personnel were evacuated from the areas near the discovered traces, and inspections by the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine, based in Landstuhl, Germany, have been ordered for all coalition locations in the region, including this sprawling command post north of the Afghan capital.
No U.S. soldiers have reported symptoms that would alert medical personnel to illness from exposure, said Col. Doug Liening, chief surgeon for the Coalition Joint Task Force, which has as many as 17,000 military personnel deployed in and around Afghanistan for the war against terrorism.
But further testing and inspections at the Uzbek facility will be necessary to determine how the contaminants got there, including a hangar in which the base headquarters staff works, the officers said.
The base, in the village of Karshi Khanabad, is being used by coalition forces as a staging ground for regional operations. It was reportedly swept last fall by U.S. environmental experts who failed to discover any hazardous elements.
“There’s no proof that it was placed there recently,” Maj. Chet Kemp, Bagram’s deputy chief planner for nuclear, biological and chemical hazards, said of the nerve agents. Traces that were not detected in the autumn inspection might be detectable now because gases are dispersing in the intense seasonal heat of Central Asia, he added. Daytime temperatures across Afghanistan and in the parched Uzbek territory to the north regularly reach 120 degrees at this time of year.
“The central concern now is to identify possible hazards to U.S. troops,” Kemp said, conceding that he would “have a little concern” about the potential health risks to anyone exposed to the nerve agent.
“We don’t have any patients from this exposure,” Liening said. “No one, to the best of our knowledge, has gotten sick.”
The first nerve gas traces were detected in an unused bunker at the Karshi Khanabad base on Friday, and more extensive inspection of the former Soviet site turned up contamination at the hangar that has been reconstructed to serve as office space, King said. Mustard gas traces were detected in another hangar at the base Saturday.
King and the medical and hazardous-substance experts sought to tamp down fears of terrorist involvement, with Kemp noting that the discoveries were made in secure areas. But with determined Al Qaeda terrorists openly targeting U.S. forces in the hostile aftermath of Sept. 11, none of the officers was willing to rule out the possibility that the nerve agents were planted to endanger U.S. personnel.
On the other hand, Soviet troops were notoriously lax in safeguarding even the most dangerous weapons and compounds and left behind toxic wastelands at many of the bases they occupied during the Communist era. The Karshi Khanabad base was used by Soviet troops as a launch pad for their 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan, during which they were accused of using chemical weapons against resistance forces.
How much of the substances are present at the base is unknown, said Kemp, who added that the vapors could be coming from buried chemical weapons that are leaking. Coalition forces were attempting over the weekend to find Soviet and Uzbek officers who might know more about what was stored at the base before U.S. troops took it over in October.
Liening said that too little is known about the risks of low-level exposure to such compounds, but he speculated that “the effects would be more pronounced after exposure” than months or years later. Symptoms would probably first be similar to those of the common cold, he said, but could escalate to include dilated pupils, muscular twitching and shortness of breath.
Asked if he feared a recurrence of the still-unexplained Gulf War syndrome, which has afflicted some veterans of that 1991 conflict with comparable symptoms of chemical or biological substance exposure, Liening dismissed the claims of a systematic problem as just “theories.”
King said that the exact size of the U.S. deployment at Karshi Khanabad is classified but that the troop strength peaked at about 1,000 and is now slightly lower. Many of the personnel sent to the Uzbek base spent only a few weeks there before moving on to units elsewhere in the war theater.
In another indication of dangers still facing coalition troops waging war against the remnants of Al Qaeda and the deposed Taliban regime, U.S. troops arrested six heavily armed men before dawn Sunday in a village in Afghanistan’s volatile southeastern region.
Two vehicles carrying the men, plus loaded AK-47 assault rifles, pistols, rocket launchers and ammunition, were stopped at a roadblock at 3 a.m. near the village of Shkin, King said.
U.S. troops were trying to identify the men and determine their motives, King said.
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c1d3d5caa2d6b159b4b93dcc46f383df | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-10-me-tequila10-story.html | Tequila to Rattle the Innards | Tequila to Rattle the Innards
Dropping into Francisco Dario’s cantina in a remote canyon southeast of this tourist resort can be perilous.
As the gray-haired jack-of-all-trades invites visitors into the establishment built in the shadow of Mt. Pico del Diablo, he warns them not to tap on a jar containing an angry rattlesnake.
But he doesn’t seem too nervous about filling a shot glass with a wooden ladle full of the crude and fiery spirit tequila con vibora. Rattlesnake tequila.
Dario’s hideaway may be the last in northern Baja California to serve this most elemental form of Mexico’s national spirit--a folk remedy to many natives and a cross-cultural dare for hard-partying college kids.
In a country where much of the tequila industry has turned sophisticated--with handblown bottles and years of aging in oak casks--Dario offers a whole coiled rattlesnake soaking in every reclaimed juice jar on his bar.
There is nothing subtle about this rough elixir he serves up at the Rancho Agua Caliente, an 800-acre natural hot spring at the end of a dirt road off Baja’s Highway 3, roughly two hours south of San Diego.
Sliding a brimming shot glass across his dark Formica-topped bar, the 46-year-old ranch manager smiles and urges: “Try it. It calms the nerves, and is a fine remedy for arthritis, kidney problems and cancer.”
Laden with pinkish scales and snake pulp, it goes down like liquid fire.
Dario was taught how to make the stuff, which goes for about a buck a shot, by a previous manager who reportedly learned the process from a Japanese business partner.
Leaning on the bar, he said, “I catch a snake myself with a special stick. Then I drop it into a jar [alive] and fill it with a gallon or so of cheap white tequila.”
In its death throes, the snake emits minute amounts of compounds with certain medicinal properties, Dario contends.
“After it’s dead, I gut the snake and put it back in the jar,” he said. “Then I put the jar in the sun for three months, then in the shade for three months.”
“After all that, it’s ready to serve,” he added. “One snake is good for three years [of soaking]. I prefer red diamondbacks.”
The fact that Dario’s customers--who come from across Mexico as well as from Korea, China, Italy, San Francisco and Los Angeles--don’t keel over on the spot may have to do with the product’s exposure to sunlight. Rattlesnake venom breaks down in high temperatures, according to experts.
In any case, Dario’s product is not unique. Alcoholic drinks featuring poisonous serpents are common “cure-alls” in rural areas throughout the world, said Russ Smith, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Los Angeles Zoo.
“In India, they use cobras. In Japan, pit vipers,” he said. “These are relatively safe mixtures because the venom has to be injected into the bloodstream to be harmful.”
Don Boyer, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the San Diego Zoo, is more concerned with the fate of the snakes.
“I’ve actually been to Rancho Agua Caliente and talked to the owners,” he said. “I told them, ‘I like tequila as much as anyone. But, gee, do you really have to kill rattlesnakes?’ ”
Locals, however, say tequila con vibora is disappearing from the cultural scene in Baja California, where the biggest cities are being rapidly transformed by new high-tech businesses, seaside developments and waves of retirees from the United States.
“In years past, every local cantina had a pickle jar full of it stashed somewhere; not anymore,” said John Bragg, who keeps one of the world’s largest collections of tequila, North America’s first distilled spirit, at his Pancho’s restaurant in Cabo San Lucas.
Among his more than 500 tequilas is tequila con vibora.
“We sell over 50 gallons a year of it at $4 a shot to mostly American college kids, who make a big deal out of it,” he said. “Sometimes they make me haul the snake out so they can get a picture holding it.”
Added Bragg: “That beat up old snake looks like a ragged piece of inner tube.”
In the Ensenada area, however, rattlesnake elixirs are no laughing matter.
At the Centro Botanicas de Ensenada herbal shop, clerk Martha Saldivar said, “Some people eat rattlesnake meat to purify their blood. Others use rattlesnake oil to cure baldness. Some musicians put rattlers inside their guitars to improve the sound.”
Occasionally, she said, her store sells rattlesnake corpses to customers who make personal batches of tequila con vibora.
Ricardo de Alba, who runs a business in Ensenada selling top-of-the-line tequilas to tourists, is among hundreds of locals who prefer to leave the production process up to Dario.
“Much of Mexico still believes in the healing powers of herbs and plants and other natural products, and Francisco is part of that tradition,” he said. “I see him at least once each summer for a shot or two myself.”
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863569861c7ce2fa4cafe40252c4fb1d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-10-na-phoenix10-story.html | Terrorism Was Job 4 in Phoenix | Terrorism Was Job 4 in Phoenix
Months before an FBI agent here warned of extremists attending U.S. flight schools, anti-terrorism efforts in the Phoenix office had virtually ground to a halt when a surveillance unit was disbanded and agents assigned to counter-terrorism were diverted to an arson case, according to current and former FBI agents.
The actions reflected the low-priority status given by FBI management here to anti-terrorism investigations before the Sept. 11 attacks on the East Coast, agents said in recent interviews.
Even now, some say, the office’s attention and resources to preventing terrorism remain inadequate.
“If people only knew,” said one agent who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They think [agents] are really out there making progress, but they are not being allowed to do what they need to do.”
Guadalupe Gonzalez, special agent in charge of the Phoenix FBI office, acknowledged Friday that, before Sept. 11, international terrorism ranked fourth in his office’s list of priorities behind organized crime and drugs, white-collar crime and crime on Indian reservations. That clearly has changed since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with international terrorism seen as the priority, he said.
But Gonzalez rejected the notion that his office’s anti-terrorism efforts have been compromised by staffing decisions involving surveillance or the local arson case.
“I don’t think those events were detractors in any way from what we were able to do in Phoenix,” Gonzalez said.
In recent interviews, however, current and former FBI agents criticized the decision to assign the office’s international terrorism squad to the full-time investigation of an “eco-arsonist” who torched luxury homes in the Phoenix and Scottsdale areas from April 2000 to January 2001.
“This was not terrorism,” one agent said. “This was some [guy] burning down homes.”
Among the half a dozen or so international terrorism agents assigned for months to the arson investigation was Kenneth Williams, who wrote the July warning memo to FBI headquarters.
Although Williams declined to comment Friday, sources say his memo last year was the result of months of monitoring Islamic extremists attending flight schools in Arizona beginning in early 2000. Records and interviews also show that at least one of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, Hani Hanjour, was living in the state as early as 1996 and returned in January 2001. At that time, the arson investigation still was underway.
Current and former agents say it was stunning that agents assigned to international terrorism--or IT, as they call it--would be diverted to an arson investigation.
“Kenny’s expertise is in international terrorism, not arson or general property crimes,” former agent Jim Hauswirth said. “And it is just unbelievable that we would take one of the premier IT investigators in the bureau and put him on a local arson case with the history of Islamic terrorism here in Phoenix.”
A current agent added: “There were no terrorism investigations taking place for several months during 2000 and 2001. Cases were open, but nothing was being done.”
Gonzalez insisted Friday that the Joint Terrorism Task Force agents assigned to the arson case were not prevented from continuing work on their other cases.
“They were part of our counter-terrorism squad and that is what the squad does,” he said, describing the arson case as a type of counter-terrorism investigation into what was a “very significant crime.”
Critics contend that Phoenix FBI management also erred in disbanding its so-called Special Operations Group surveillance squad in May 2001.
After Sept. 11, surveillance of potential terrorists resumed, using agents borrowed from Tucson.
“If you have a surveillance team, it is traditionally assigned to headquarters division,” said former agent Hauswirth, who spent 16 of his 27 years with the FBI assigned to Special Operations Groups in Phoenix and Philadelphia. “And it doesn’t make sense not to have your surveillance assets assigned to the headquarters.”
In December, Hauswirth wrote a scathing letter to FBI headquarters in Washington complaining that management of the Phoenix office had given anti-terrorism “the lowest investigative priority.”
Gonzalez defended the decision to disband the Phoenix surveillance team, saying that budget cuts last year forced the office to reduce staffing by 10 positions.
Critics counter that the FBI has been spending thousands of extra dollars a day to house and feed the agents from the Tucson office.
“Ever since 9/11, these poor guys have been taken out of Tucson, moved away from their families, and assigned to Phoenix at great expense to the taxpayers,” said Susan Via, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Arizona whose husband is an FBI agent.
“I am not saying they should always have kept the surveillance team intact. But once Sept. 11 happened and it became apparent they would need a full-time surveillance team back, why would you drag up agents from Tucson to work that assignment?” said Via, who began her career as a federal prosecutor in Boston with now-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.
Gonzalez said he doesn’t believe that the decision to do away with the surveillance team hurt counter-terrorism efforts in Phoenix.
Still, he said, the Phoenix surveillance squad may be reassembled soon.
Several current and former Phoenix agents say it will take far more to turn the office around.
“The morale here is as bad as I’ve ever seen it anywhere,” said a veteran FBI agent who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
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d78dd6b2265642f5275f1b413eee06f0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-12-me-passings12.3-story.html | Elizabeth Shanov, 49; Radio Reporter Known for Her Sports Coverage | Elizabeth Shanov, 49; Radio Reporter Known for Her Sports Coverage
Elizabeth Shanov, 49, a radio reporter known for her coverage of such sports events as the 1984 Olympics, the 2002 Rose Bowl and various all-star games, died Sunday in her Monrovia home of cancer.
The native New Yorker was educated at Fordham University and began her broadcast career with New York’s all-news radio station WCBS-AM. For the last 27 years, she had worked as a reporter and producer for the CBS, ABC and Associated Press radio networks. She also wrote for the Wall Street Journal and Newsday.
Among the national stories Shanov covered as a freelance reporter for various radio networks were the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles, and the Academy Award, Emmy and Grammy shows. In recent years, she had concentrated primarily on sports events.
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d0a65aa17e2c471846fcef87ce6c9c04 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-18-fg-bones18-story.html | A Tale of Two Royal Gravesites | A Tale of Two Royal Gravesites
Fanciful log churches sprout like mushrooms in the deep woods outside this industrial city. Anatoly Kozhayev shuffles between them, his bushy gray hair and beard giving him a more than passing resemblance to a troll.
The pilgrim and tour guide surveys the churches’ curvy green roofs and shiny copper domes and sighs with satisfaction. “Isn’t this a fairy tale?” he asks.
Just three years ago, this wood held little more than mosquitoes and secrets. Here, in two abandoned mine shafts, Bolshevik gunmen first buried the remains of the murdered Romanov royal family--Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, his wife, five children and four companions.
The Russian Orthodox Church has canonized the Romanovs and is building a monastery in the woods to commemorate their burial. Seven churches are planned to honor the seven royal victims; five of the structures are already built. The largest of them, St. Nicholas, has 17 onion domes, in honor of July 17, the day the royals died.
But some visitors, especially those with a secular bent, might be confused by a second Romanov burial memorial just a mile or so away at a spot known as Porosyonkov Log. The second site, alongside a railway track and marked by a modest black cross, has a marble plaque declaring that the czar and his family were buried there.
The competing burial sites demonstrate that when it comes to the executed Romanovs, secular politics and religious politics have yet to make their peace.
For those who put their faith in science, there is little doubt that the skeletons pulled from a watery hole at Porosyonkov Log are those of the Romanovs. DNA from the skeletons, tested by several Western laboratories with a reliability higher than 99%, was linked to the Russian royal family.
Moreover, the site and condition of the remains were consistent with descriptions written by the royal family’s killers. They said they took the bodies and put them in a mine shaft in a place called Ganina Yama but exhumed them the next day for fear locals would find the spot. They found a more obscure site, Porosyonkov Log, burned two of the corpses to ash and buried the rest.
The remains were discovered there by amateur sleuths in 1979 and exhumed in 1991. The Russian government buried them in the royal crypt in St. Petersburg in 1998.
Four years later, the Russian Orthodox Church’s position on the bones remains unchanged.
“They still don’t accept the results of our investigation and prefer to wait for some new evidence to materialize,” says Vladimir N. Solovyov, the senior prosecutor who headed the government investigation. “But frankly, I don’t see what else can emerge in the case which would make them change their decision.”
Indeed, the enormous woodland Monastery of the Royal Passion Sufferers is being built on the basis of a far earlier probe--that of Nikolai Sokolov, a pro-monarchist investigator, who discovered Ganina Yama after anti-Bolshevik troops took the area in 1918. Sokolov concluded that the bodies had been all but destroyed at the site and if there were any remaining ash and bones, they were tossed into the mine shafts or scattered in the woods.
Consistent with the Sokolov conclusion, the centerpieces of the new monastery are the mine shafts--now just grassy depressions--encircled by a roofed viewing platform. Pilgrims kneel at crosses placed randomly through the woods, because, according to this version of events, the royal family’s remains may be anywhere.
“I think the church has a perfect right to build a monastery at this location commemorating the death of the czar’s family, because the earth there was also stained with the royal family’s blood,” Solovyov says.
Kozhayev and other believers are little bothered by the DNA evidence suggesting that the Romanov remains were buried elsewhere. He finds faith far more persuasive.
Standing near the shafts, the tour guide points to a tall, thick birch and a lithe pine tree growing near the holes. “Those are the czar and czarina,” he says. Then he points to an immature birch and a small stand of four birches on the opposite side. “The czarevitch and the four daughters,” he says. “The landscape itself testifies that this is a holy place.”
Believers such as Kozhayev have been very influential in the debate over the czarist remains. Sometimes swayed by nationalist or chauvinistic ideologies, they were suspicious of any investigation that they believed was tainted by Communist-era evidence.
For instance, Kozhayev offers the following explanation for the second burial site: “The czar had a double. So did the whole family, for security. Even the bodyguards didn’t know which was the right one. To get money from the West, [the government] had to find the czar’s remains. So they said the doubles were the real ones.”
Despite the prevalence of such views at Ganina Yama, the opinions of many in the church appear to be softening, says Sergei Chapnin, editor of Moskovsky Tserkovny Vestnik, an official church publication.
“With time, it is becoming more evident that the government investigation was conscientious and that the protests against it were based more on politics and ideology and were largely without merit,” Chapnin says.
The official church position, he says, is that only time will tell whether the exhumed bones are authentic royal remains.
“The church already has a significant number of people who consider the remains authentic, who believe the conclusion of the government commission and consider the bones buried in St. Petersburg to be holy relics,” Chapnin says. “It’s fully possible that we could return to this discussion in the future, perhaps even in the near future.”
Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.
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1e6033e5b098db99a43b99f6f4ff4eb6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-23-adfg-stpop23-story.html | In Peru, the Saint Who Isn’t Inspires a Cult | In Peru, the Saint Who Isn’t Inspires a Cult
Hundreds jam the sweltering courtyard outside Sarita Colonia’s graveyard shrine to thank her for the miracles she has granted them.
Cliques of drag queens strut through the crowd, clutching rose bouquets. Elderly women serve bean stew to anyone who is hungry. Fidgeting children wait in line with their parents to be rubbed with sacred flower petals.
It is a typical party for Sarita Colonia, a humble Andean migrant whose brief life has inspired the faith--and fantasies--of a curious flock of Peruvians, from prisoners and prostitutes to ordinary grandparents and schoolchildren.
Ofelia Fuentes can barely contain her glee as she bobs among the crowd at Colonia’s tomb.
“Look at all these people,” says the 59-year-old fish vendor. “There isn’t one person Sarita hasn’t done a miracle for. Isn’t that right?” she shouts to a half dozen listeners. All nod eagerly.
Fuentes’ eyes grow wide as she tells how her grandson, Roy, was stillborn 14 years ago but miraculously came back to life after she rushed to pray at Colonia’s shrine.
A faded reproduction of the only existing photograph of Colonia--a 1928 family snapshot--peers from Fuentes’ T-shirt.
Twelve years after that photo was taken, Colonia died of malaria at age 26 and was buried anonymously in a mass grave in this port city next to Lima.
Since then, Peru’s fervent Roman Catholicism and its vibrant pop culture have converged to turn the young woman who had dreamed of becoming a nun into a saint-like figure for Peru’s poor and outcast.
Today, Sarita Colonia is everywhere.
Her likeness dangles from the mirrors of Lima’s buses and taxis. Rock singers and pop crooners proclaim her beneficence. Novels and oil paintings, T-shirts and Web sites, even tattoos and a recent television miniseries have all exalted Colonia.
It’s a devotion pursued without the blessings of the Callao archbishop.
Colonia has not been canonized, a process that can take centuries. In the meantime, the church urges her followers not to “worship Sarita until it is permitted, and much less carry out acts that have the appearance of witchcraft.”
That warning came in a 1980 communique signed by then-Archbishop Ricardo Durand. The current archbishop’s office refused an interview about Colonia, instead handing out a copy of Durand’s letter.
Something like witchcraft hangs in the air at the mecca of Colonia’s following: a cramped, concrete-block shrine run by her siblings in a Callao cemetery.
There, Sarita devotees leave a few cents to rub themselves with murky water from flower vases on a black slab altar. Others take away the water in plastic bottles to keep as a sacred ointment for cuts and bruises.
Several thousand plastic plaques blanket the walls of the muggy shrine thanking Sarita for miracles. Some devotees tuck photos or letters into nooks or hang plastic rosaries on a ceramic bust of Colonia. Others crouch in the corner to light candles--depending on the color, they are believed to bring good health, luck, work or even revenge.
Perched on a stool selling candles and other Sarita kitsch, Ester Colonia, 85, recounts the story of her sister--"a very sweet, very human girl.”
In the 1920s, the family moved from the Andean Mountains to Callao in search of a better life. As it has been for many of the millions of poor rural migrants since then, the search was filled with frustration.
At 15, Sarita had to abandon her dreams of becoming a nun when her mother died. The eldest child, she toiled at odd jobs such as cleaning houses or selling fish to support the family.
Through the hardship, her siblings say, Sarita maintained a devout piety, giving her last pennies and clothes off her back to street beggars. She also became known for praying to God on behalf of anyone who asked.
“After she died, all those people came to her tomb and began praying to her. From there, it became a chain reaction,” Ester said.
According to popular folklore, for years after her death Colonia’s devotees came mostly from Callao’s port-city underworld--sailors, dockworkers, thieves and prostitutes.
The cult persevered in relative obscurity until the 1970s, says Alejandro Ortiz, an anthropologist at Lima’s Catholic University.
That was when Peruvians from impoverished rural areas began flocking to Lima in search of work. Most found themselves in tough times, jobless, desperate and packed into shantytowns that sprang up around the capital.
During those years, Ortiz says, soccer stars and other celebrities began openly discussing their devotion to Colonia--a woman who decades before had suffered the same fate as the disenfranchised migrants.
A pop hero was born.
Today, Peruvians of all ages and backgrounds revere Colonia.
But her following is still popularly associated with the marginalized and outcast, people like Gabriela Ventura, a 30-year-old drag queen.
Ventura--out of drag--has come to the shrine to leave Colonia flowers. He credits her with saving his life when an anti-gay gang chased and shot at him, their bullets “miraculously” whizzing by his side.
“I believe in God, a very great God,” Ventura says. “But I also believe in my Sarita.”
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9ce7886c3bd24925fd6375464f001fed | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-24-fi-sock24-story.html | Sock Puppet Finds a New Home | Sock Puppet Finds a New Home
It wasn’t his first job choice, but at least the Pets.com sock puppet hasn’t joined the high-tech unemployment line.
One of the most recognizable icons of the dot-com era has a new agent and has inked a new deal for a California financing company.
The puppet is now represented by Hakan & Associates Inc., the same company orchestrating the comeback of Taco Bell mascot Gidgey the Famous Chihuahua. The black-and-white spotted dog puppet has just signed on as the mascot for 1-800-Bar None, a Pleasanton-based company that provides car financing for consumers with bad credit.
The sock puppet has been out of work since online pet store Pets.com was forced to shut down for lack of funds in November 2000. Hakan Enterprises Inc. bought the rights to the icon in 2001 for $125,000 during the Pets.com liquidation.
“It is not often that a company will adopt the mascot of a defunct company,” said Christina Duffney of the Direct Marketing Assn. “Such a company runs the risk of being associated with a business that wasn’t a success.”
Duffney said the sock puppet may be a different case since it generated attention on its own and many consumers did not associate it with Pets.com. That could work in 1-800-Bar None’s favor, she said.
“It will be interesting to see how the business uses the puppet and if they succeed in associating the puppet with the company,” she said.
The sock puppet will be featured in a series of television ads for 1-800-Bar None beginning in July.
Jim Crouse, chief executive of 1-800-Bar None, said he hopes the sock puppet will send the company’s message--everyone deserves a second chance--"cleverly and with a touch of humor.”
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3a7823bc18d827661e4193062d87d59c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-27-na-gasmasks27-story.html | 20,000 ‘Escape Hoods’ Delivered to Capitol | 20,000 ‘Escape Hoods’ Delivered to Capitol
WASHINGTON, D.C.
*
Homeland security became more than an abstract concept this week with the delivery of 20,000 “escape hoods"--enough to protect every lawmaker, congressional employee, police officer and tourist from a chemical or biological attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Congressional staffers, some of whom were shut out of their offices for more than three months after last fall’s anthrax attacks, on Monday will begin learning how to use the loose-fitting respirator hoods.
Capitol Police officials said they did not buy the devices--at about $100 each--because of a specific terrorist threat. Nor is the timing of training sessions next week related to vague threats of terrorist attacks on or around the Fourth of July, they said.
Having the gear on hand--the hoods will be stored throughout the Capitol complex--is a prudent, protective measure, they said.
The State and Energy departments, as well as the Supreme Court police, the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and all branches of the military also have purchased the devices from Survivair, a Santa Ana-based company.
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82579283187b38b847031177bbda882f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-30-admn-therapy30-story.html | New-Age Treatments for the Four-Legged Set | New-Age Treatments for the Four-Legged Set
Brooke Front was weary.
Unsteady on his feet, his back drooped with stress from a long day at the Rocky Mountain Horse Expo until owner Bill Bormes dragged his thumb sharply along the chestnut show stallion’s spine, releasing tension and righting posture.
Bormes said he learned the acupressure technique from a veterinarian. “I just make a mild adjustment and Brooke’s posture is back to being near perfect,” he said.
Techniques such as acupuncture, acupressure and chiropractic treatments are becoming mainstream tools used to complement Western medicine in animal care, veterinarians say.
The number of vets involved in the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society has grown substantially from about a dozen to more than 1,400, spokesman Ed Boldt said. Formed in 1974, the Fort Collins, Colo.-based nonprofit teaches acupuncture courses and aims to create uniform international standards.
“We used to be the only place that offered courses in acupuncture, but now there are a bunch of schools offering classes,” Boldt said. “That’s a great sign.”
Among them: Tufts, Cornell, and Texas A&M; universities.
Acupuncture is designed to relieve pain or induce regional anesthesia by inserting needles into specific points of the body. It is also used to stimulate nerve function, hormone levels and blood circulation.
Dr. Narda Robinson, who performs acupuncture on animals at Colorado State University, said most patients suffer from muscular and skeletal pain, and head and neck pain.
“After we insert a needle into the body, there is a profound relaxation. Horses will start licking their lips, letting their heads drop down and dogs will lie down and sleep,” she said.
Acupressure and chiropractic techniques used on people have similar effects on animals. Vets use their hands to perform massage-like movements geared toward releasing endorphins and relieving muscle spasms.
Robinson recently treated a 5-year-old champion German shepherd named Sepp, who was suffering from a strained ligament that affected his showmanship. With acupuncture treatments, Sepp was able to overcome the lameness in his leg.
Colorado State horse expert Gayle Trotter said the best candidates for chiropractic work are horses with chronic back problems caused by their daily routine.
“We don’t have tools to treat certain problems, and some animals just won’t get better. This helps ease the pain,” he said.
Trotter stands on a stool while he carefully works to adjust a horse’s limb. Gentle movements calm the animals and make them more receptive to treatments.
Trotter said some vets are skeptical about the effects of chiropractic care, though most of the animal caretakers are pleased with the results.
“If I look at an animal and find a problem, I will do whatever I need to get the problem corrected,” Trotter said.
Some horse owners say the techniques are frivolous.
Jackie Dunn, who trains mustangs at stables near Elbert, about 40 miles southeast of Denver, said her animals don’t need the treatments because she already cares for their muscular pain by making sure saddles aren’t too tight, and by rubbing them down after they are worked.
“It’s just not an issue for my animals,” she said. “I try to make sure they aren’t overworked.”
Veterinarian Steve Long, who’s been in practice in Golden, Colo., for more than 20 years, said acupuncture can be helpful in some cases, but it shouldn’t be expected to replace traditional medicine.
“It does some good, but only in specific cases,” he said.
Long doesn’t perform the treatments, but sends some patients to acupuncturists.
“It’s not that it wouldn’t be nice to learn how it works, but it’s hard enough keeping up with all the regular tools we need to know.”
Robinson and Trotter stressed that the techniques are used to complement other medical procedures and cannot replace surgery.
Robinson started the university-based veterinary acupuncture course at Colorado State in 1998. Since then, about 60 vets per year from all over the world take the course, which reviews anatomy of the acupuncture points and teaches students how to insert needles.
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