As downtown L.A. grows trendier, Spring Street Arcade is left behind

The salesmen at the Spring Street Arcade spend their day gazing out at a city that's passing them by.

All around, a trendy downtown is on the rise — pet stores selling gourmet dog chews, chic bars with ginger and juniper soda cocktails, a new generation of mostly young residents jogging in spandex and cruising on bikes.

But inside the 88-year-old shopping arcade, with its giant curved skylight, arched Spanish Renaissance entryways and Beaux Arts exterior, many of the stores are vacant, and the remaining merchants seem stuck in another era. Bargain-rate clothes, toys, suitcases and DVDs share shelf space with dusty boomboxes and T-shirts from '90s rock bands like Korn and Nirvana.

Mohad Azimi lingers through the morning outside his kitchen appliance shop, chatting with the Taiwanese salesman at the toy store next to him. These days, the jokes focus on a new Starbucks that's just opened at Spring and 6th streets. Maybe that's where all the people are going now, the merchants say.

"Look around here — business is dead," Azimi says as he looks across the arcade's empty corridor, which stretches from Spring to Broadway. "Nobody comes inside."

Azimi opened his business in the early 1990s, after emigrating from Afghanistan. Back then, Los Angeles was still enjoying a boom in immigration from places like Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador, and the mall was so busy on the weekends that you could barely walk inside. Broadway was a bustling promenade, with shoppers pouring in on bus lines from all over the city.

Families would come to buy kitchenware at Azimi's shop, sometimes shipping the products back to relatives in Latin America. And while they were there, he says, they'd pick up toys and clothes for their children.

Azimi still stacks the same goods on a white plastic table at the front of his shop — toaster ovens, blenders and microwaves in battered cardboard boxes. Inside the cluttered shop, there are old keyboards, calculators and Nintendo GameCube consoles.

But he makes only a few sales each week, he says, and he's not sure he can make it to the end of the year.

"The new residents, they don't have a family, they don't have anyone to cook for," Azimi says. "They just have a dog."

::

When the Spring Street Arcade opened in 1924, it was hailed as Los Angeles' premier shopping center — and celebrated with a bash that brought out Will Rogers and Charlie Chaplin.

Back then, the area was filled with department stores, high-end shops and rows of movie palaces. Even as downtown faded after World War II and the department stores and movie houses closed down, the small merchants along Broadway, Main and other downtown streets managed to find new customers.

By the 1980s, hundreds of them were making a good living catering to the city's rising Latino immigrant community, both new immigrants and Mexicans who would cross the border for shopping runs.

The retail economy was so strong that Broadway storefronts famously commanded rents similar to those of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

But changes in immigration patterns, improved economic conditions in Mexico, competition in other communities and the recession have left many downtown merchants fighting to survive. While new, "500 Days of Summer" residents are frequenting bars and restaurants and coffeehouses, they have little need for the bargain shops that line the arcade.

Joel Kotkin, an urban studies fellow at Chapman University, says the shift is evident all around downtown.

It's the "gradual dissolution of one economy — a really vibrant, unique economy — and an attempt to replace it with another," he says. "The question is, are we just seeing the death of something that will be replaced, or will we have this parallel universe of yuppies alongside the decline?"

::

Inside the arcade, merchants are quick to reminisce about the prosperous years — and lament how it went so wrong.

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Scanadu Scout Wants to Be Your Personal Health Tricorder

You know in Star Trek when Bones runs a mobile scanning device over some poor red-shirted schlub and comes back seconds later with a diagnosis? Well, that futuristic Star Trek tricorder is a step closer to reality today thanks to the Scanadu Scout, a handheld medical scanning device that works in conjunction with a smartphone to take all five vital signs in just 10 seconds. It will cost $150 and you can get it by the end of 2013.

Wired had the opportunity to play with a working prototype this week and it was, frankly, amazing. Hold the Scout to your temple and it registers pulse transit time (for blood pressure monitoring), heart rate, electrical heart activity, temperature, heart rate variability and blood oxygenation. The tracker then transmits that data to a smartphone app that clocks how those variables change over time. It’s meant to give people greater control over their own health data and insights on how it might be changing.

For example, although 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is the commonly accepted figure for human body temperature, that’s an average and not standard across individuals. For some, 99 degrees might indicate a fever, while for others it’s perfectly normal. By taking regular readings, and charting them automatically, the Scanadu Scout can help people understand what’s normal for their own bodies.

The device, designed by Yves Behar, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and is approximately the size of a makeup compact. But while the hardware is nice, what’s truly exciting is the software back end.

The extensible software platform is meant to be opened up to input from other tracking and monitoring devices. Two immediate examples, both of which will be available in 2013, are the ScanaFlo and ScanaFlu. ScanaFlo is a small plastic wand with a row of urine test strips that can check for pregnancy complications, pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, kidney failure, and urinary tract infections. ScanaFlu has a small tray that you spit into and it checks for one of five respiratory diseases: Strep A, Influenza A, Influenza B, Adenovirus or RSV. While pricing hasn’t been set for either, both are planned to cost less than a trip to the clinic.

Scanadu was the vision of heavyweight technologist Walter De Brouwer, who previously ran Emotiv and the European arm of One Laptop per Child, among many other things. De Brouwer began looking for a better way to understand personal medical data when one of his children was hospitalized for a year after falling from a window.

His solution to this was Scanadu, which is an entrant in the Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize. De Brouwer describes it as the most difficult thing he has ever done, not only on the software side, but also on the back end, developing algorithms to crunch numbers and deliver insights. And still much has to be done — for example, it will have to gain FDA clearance. But if it works, it could prove to be a powerful marriage of molecular diagnostic information with body sensors that could give patients an unprecedented control over their own health data.

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R&B star Mary J. Blige sued for defaulting on $2.2 million loan

(Reuters) – R&B star Mary J. Blige was hit with a lawsuit on Wednesday alleging the Grammy winner and her husband defaulted on a $ 2.2 million bank loan.

According to court documents filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Signature Bank is seeking to recoup the original loan plus $ 58,000 in interest.

Blige, 41, who has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, and her husband Martin Isaacs took out the loan in October 2011 and defaulted in July 2012, the suit alleges.

Blige’s publicist declined comment on the lawsuit. The singer’s attorney did not immediately return a request to comment.

The lawsuit also names Blige’s production company, Mary Jane Productions Inc.

The lawsuit is the latest financial headache for the New York City native. The “Family Affair” singer’s charity, The Mary J. Blige and Steve Stoute Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now Inc, was accused earlier in this year of mishandling funds and cheating scholarship students.

Blige acknowledged the problems in a June interview.

“The lives of young women are at stake,” the singer told Reuters when asked about the allegations. “I feel what they feel. I don’t want them to suffer. I promised them something and I’m gonna deliver. Period.”

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Todd Eastham)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Cost of Brand-Name Prescription Medicines Soaring

The price of brand-name prescription medicines is rising far faster than the inflation rate, while the price of generic drugs has plummeted, creating the largest gap so far between the two, according to a report published Wednesday by the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts.

The report tracked an index of commonly used drugs and found that the price of brand-name medicines increased more than 13 percent from September 2011 to this September, which it said was more than six times the overall price inflation of consumer goods. Generic drug prices dipped by nearly 22 percent.

The drop in the price of generics “represents low-hanging fruit for the country to save money on health care,” said Dr. Steve Miller, the chief medical officer of Express Scripts, which manages the drug benefits for employers and insurers and also runs a mail-order pharmacy.

The report was based on a random sample of six million Express Scripts members with prescription drug coverage.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade group representing brand-name manufacturers, criticized the report, saying it was skewed by a handful of high-priced specialty drugs that are used by a small number of patients and overlooked the crucial role of major drug makers.

“Without the development of new medicines by innovator companies, there would be neither the new treatments essential to progress against diseases nor generic copies,” Josephine Martin, executive vice president of the group, said in a statement.

The report cited the growth of specialty drugs, which treat diseases like cancer and multiple sclerosis, as a major reason for the increase in spending on branded drugs. Spending on specialty medicines increased nearly 23 percent during the first three quarters of 2012, compared with the same period in 2011. All but one of the new medicines approved in the third quarter of this year were specialty drugs, the report found, and many of them were approved to treat advanced cancers only when other drugs had failed.

Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota, said the potential benefits of many new drugs did not always match the lofty price tags. “Increasingly it’s going to be difficult for drug-benefit programs to make decisions about coverage and payment and which drugs to include,” said Mr. Schondelmeyer, who conducts a similar price report for AARP. He also helps manage the drug benefit program for the University of Minnesota.

“We’re going to be faced with the issue that any drug at any price will not be sustainable.”

Spending on traditional medicines — which treat common ailments like high cholesterol and blood pressure — actually declined by 0.6 percent during the period, the report found. That decline was mainly because of the patent expiration of several blockbuster drugs, like Lipitor and Plavix, which opened the market for generic competitors. But even as the entry of generic alternatives pushed down spending, drug companies continued to raise prices on their branded products, in part to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of an ever-shrinking portfolio, Dr. Miller said.

Drug makers are also being pushed by companies like Express Scripts and health insurers, which are increasingly looking for ways to cut costs, said C. Anthony Butler, a pharmaceuticals analyst at Barclays. “I think they’re pricing where they can but what they keep telling me is they’re under significant pressure” to keep prices low, he said.

Express Scripts earns higher profits from greater use of generic medicines than brand name drugs sold through their mail-order pharmacy, Mr. Butler said. “There’s no question that they would love for everybody to be on a generic,” he said.

Dr. Miller acknowledged that was true but said that ultimately, everyone wins. “When we save people money, that’s when we make money,” he said. “We don’t shy away from that.”

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The Next War: In Federal Budget Cutting, F-35 Fighter Jet Is at Risk

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Vice Adm. David Venlet was named to lead the Joint Strike Fighter program in 2010 after problems had left it behind schedule and over budget.

LEXINGTON PARK, Md. — The Marine version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, already more than a decade in the making, was facing a crucial question: Could the jet, which can soar well past the speed of sound, land at sea like a helicopter?

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

An F-35B, the Marine Corps version of the Joint Strike Fighter.

On an October day last year, with Lt. Col. Fred Schenk at the controls, the plane glided toward a ship off the Atlantic coast and then, its engine rotating straight down, descended gently to the deck at seven feet a second.

There were cheers from the ship’s crew members, who “were all shaking my hands and smiling,” Colonel Schenk recalled.

The smooth landing helped save that model and breathed new life into the huge F-35 program, the most expensive weapons system in military history. But while Pentagon officials now say that the program is making progress, it begins its 12th year in development years behind schedule, troubled with technological flaws and facing concerns about its relatively short flight range as possible threats grow from Asia.

With a record price tag — potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars — the jet is likely to become a target for budget cutters. Reining in military spending is on the table as President Obama and Republican leaders in Congress look for ways to avert a fiscal crisis. But no matter what kind of deal is reached in the next few weeks, military analysts expect the Pentagon budget to decline in the next decade as the war in Afghanistan ends and the military is required to do its part to reduce the federal debt.

Behind the scenes, the Pentagon and the F-35’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin, are engaged in a conflict of their own over the costs. The relationship “is the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in some bad ones,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Bogdan of the Air Force, a top program official, said in September. “I guarantee you: we will not succeed on this if we do not get past that.”

In a battle that is being fought on other military programs as well, the Pentagon has been pushing Lockheed to cut costs much faster while the company is fighting to hold onto a profit. “Lockheed has seemed to be focused on short-term business goals,” Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said this month. “And we’d like to see them focus more on execution of the program and successful delivery of the product.”

The F-35 was conceived as the Pentagon’s silver bullet in the sky — a state-of-the art aircraft that could be adapted to three branches of the military, with advances that would easily overcome the defenses of most foes. The radar-evading jets would not only dodge sophisticated antiaircraft missiles, but they would also give pilots a better picture of enemy threats while enabling allies, who want the planes, too, to fight more closely with American forces.

But the ambitious aircraft instead illustrates how the Pentagon can let huge and complex programs veer out of control and then have a hard time reining them in. The program nearly doubled in cost as Lockheed and the military’s own bureaucracy failed to deliver on the most basic promise of a three-in-one jet that would save taxpayers money and be served up speedily.

Lockheed has delivered 41 planes so far for testing and initial training, and Pentagon leaders are slowing purchases of the F-35 to fix the latest technical problems and reduce the immediate costs. A helmet for pilots that projects targeting data onto its visor is too jittery to count on. The tail-hook on the Navy jet has had trouble catching the arresting cable, meaning that version cannot yet land on carriers. And writing and testing the millions of lines of software needed by the jets is so daunting that General Bogdan said, “It scares the heck out of me.”

With all the delays — full production is not expected until 2019 — the military has spent billions to extend the lives of older fighters and buy more of them to fill the gap. At the same time, the cost to build each F-35 has risen to an average of $137 million from $69 million in 2001.

The jets would cost taxpayers $396 billion, including research and development, if the Pentagon sticks to its plan to build 2,443 by the late 2030s. That would be nearly four times as much as any other weapons system and two-thirds of the $589 billion the United States has spent on the war in Afghanistan. The military is also desperately trying to figure out how to reduce the long-term costs of operating the planes, now projected at $1.1 trillion.

“The plane is unaffordable,” said Winslow T. Wheeler, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group in Washington, said Pentagon officials had little choice but to push ahead, especially after already spending $65 billion on the fighter. “It is simultaneously too big to fail and too big to succeed,” he said. “The bottom line here is that they’ve crammed too much into the program. They were asking one fighter to do three different jobs, and they basically ended up with three different fighters.”

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Twin car bombs in Damascus kill at least 34 people

AMMAN, Jordan—

Dozens of people were killed Wednesday morning in four consecutive explosions that rocked a pro-regime suburb of the Syrian capital.

Twin car bombings first struck Jaramana around rush hour near the town’s main square. An eyewitness told activists that the first bomb went off near the entrance of a building and as people gathered to help the injured a nearby Mercedes also exploded. Witnesses reported many bodies lying in the street and photos from the scene showed damaged buildings and cars under rubble.

Soon after planted explosives were set off on the nearby Qariyat highway, said Damascus activist Alexia Jade.

The Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the last two explosions happened in Damascus in the Nahda and Qerayyat neighborhoods.

The opposition reported 45 people were killed, mostly civilians, and state media said the death toll was 34. Many more are injured, some in critical condition.

Jaramana is a mostly pro-government town but has also become a safe haven for many refugees fleeing violence in nearby areas. But this was not the first time the town has been attacked.

State media blamed the bombings on “terrorists,” the catch-all term the government has used to describe the opposition since the beginning of the uprising last year.

Opposition activists said no rebel group had claimed responsibility for the bombings and they pinned the blame on the government. Ambulances and state media were on the scene almost immediately, they said.

“Checkpoints surround Jaramana from all sides and are manned by the People’s Committee, so where did the car bombs enter from?” Jade said. “It is just a message of fear for the residents of Jaramana.”

Jaramana's hospital was inundated with victims and many had to be transferred elsewhere.

Schools that were already in session closed for the day and parents rushed to pick up their children, Jade said.

Roads around the town were closed in the wake of the bombings and security forces and members of the pro-regime People’s Committee were patrolling throughout the area, activists reported.

“Till this moment indications are that the regime was behind it,” Jade said. “And if (a rebel group) claims responsibility I’m going to be angry, because there are civilians lying in the street.”

ALSO:

Yasser Arafat's grave dug up in poisoning probe 

Egyptians pour into Tahrir Square to protest presidential decree

Kim Jong Un 'sexiest man,' Onion says; China's People's Daily buys it

-- Los Angeles Times staff in Amman, Jordan

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Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers

When you’re starting off as an anthropologist, you aim is to explore a subculture your peers have yet to uncover, spending years living with the locals and learning their ways.

That’s what Gabriella Coleman did. She went to San Francisco and lived with the hackers.

Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years living in the Bay Area, studying the community that builds the Debian Linux open source operating system and other hackers — i.e., people who pride themselves on finding new ways to reinvent software. More recently, she’s been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief.

When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group’s monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco’s Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out.

Now, she’s written a book on her experiences: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. It’s a scholarly work of anthropology that examines the question: What does it mean to be a hacker?

Earlier this month, she dropped by Wired’s offices to talk about the book. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation:

Wired: What made you decide to live with the hackers?

Gabriella Coleman: I did want to be somewhere with a high density of hackers. I didn’t want to just do online research — which a lot of my Anonymous research has been. I was like: “No, there are hackers and they’re in places, so let me go to San Francisco. There seem to be a lot of them here.”

What I quickly discovered was that there is a lot going on in hacking which has very little to do with open source. You know, like Infosec, and the transgressive tradition, and — a little later on — the hardware explosion. And that became the focus of my teaching. Because while the book is on open source, I wanted to grapple with and grasp the different dimensions of hacking, and I got really interested in what divided hackers.

It was interesting when I started hanging out with info security hackers in New York. That’s a really different beast. They’re like, if you’re a builder, you’re not a hacker. You’ve got to be breaking something. But the Infosec really tend to police their boundaries quite a bit.

Wired: What did your peers in the academic world think about your work?

Coleman: They, I think, thought that it was interesting and kind of great that someone was moving forward. But I think there was this idea that the geek hacker world, especially in the context of the west, was culturally thin and anemic. “Oh very interesting politically — they’re coming up with these alternative licenses — but isn’t it just about white men tinkering with their computers?”

And in some ways, I think I thought that too. But then, I was like, wait a minute, when it comes to the culture of computer hacking and the aesthetics of hacking, I was blown away by how culturally deep it was.

There’s a whole chapter on joking, humor and cleverness among hackers. And that, to me, was one of the fascinating areas. And I feel that I’ve just scratched the surface with that chapter — to how deep and complex their oral histories are and their folklore is. And how they record it in everything from how they name pieces of software, which are often historical references to the past, to just the enormous amount of writing that computer hackers do in the non-technical sense: manifestos and zines and science fiction, you know

And I was just kind of astounded by that at some level. And astounded by the way in which on the one hand the hacker world was the place where the culture of civil liberties was on fire. And that’s something that anyone can relate to because people beyond the hacker world know about free speech and privacy. And on the other hand, there was this aesthetic world that was intensely focused on itself and was very difficult to translate to the general public.

And so that kind of melding of the deep pleasures of hacking and the cultures of civil liberties were something that I thought was quite anthropological. But my peers were really unconvinced of it.

Wired: Did you get grief for not traveling to somewhere exotic?

Coleman: Yes. All the time. They just kind of laughed at it. They were like, ‘You’re so lucky. You get to be in San Francisco going to cafes and hanging out with hackers. I had to really sweat it out and be in the jungle. It was really difficult.’

It’s funny because my committee loved my dissertation, and it did very well and won all these prizes, but I always had trouble getting job talks in anthropology departments. Even today, I rarely get invited to give talks in anthropology departments.

Wired: What is the funniest hacker joke you know?

Coleman: I absolutely love the Mutt flea one. The man page for Mutt, in the man page, the bug category is flea, because fleas are on mutts.

Wired: It’s hard to tell a good geek joke because there are all these layers to them.

Often, the humor you talk about is used as a way of identifying like-minded people. I think that a lot of people from that community spend a lot of their time not being understood or talking to people who don’t care about the same things that they do. So they need a shorthand to figure out, “OK we can have a conversation.”

It’s actually a hack that allows you to connect with people who it’s worth your time time talk to.

Coleman: One of the things in that chapter that I argue is that hackers, first of all, are good at joking because to hack is to rearrange form. That’s what jokes are. That’s a pragmatic utilitarian argument, but they really culturally value it for all sorts of reasons.

Even a wonderful piece of code is up for debate, but a very funny joke, it gets affirmed with laughter and then it’s kind of indisputable.

Wired: Do you think that it’s possible to convey what’s interesting about hackers in film?

Coleman: I have generally thought that it’s really difficult. And I was pretty impressed with We Are Legion. He [Director Brian Knappenberger] did a very good job. And one of the reasons why he did a good job is because the world of Anonymous has a very rich visual vocabulary that they’ve created through their artifacts. They come from the meme world.

But let’s just say that you’re trying to convey the open source geeks and the transgressive hackers. Man, I have thought about this and I think it would take a kind of genius filmmaker to do it. I’ve talked to a lot of filmmakers to try to kind of inspire them to do it, and to spend time at CCC and the camps to get a sense of what it’s like and be, like, ‘Can you convert it?’” Because I haven’t seen any film yet that I think does it well.

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Leads, director of Motown musical visit Hitsville

DETROIT (AP) — The stars of the upcoming Broadway musical about Motown Records have read pretty much every book about and listened to every song from that golden era of American music.

The research only took them so far, so they decided to come and see Hitsville, U.S.A., for themselves.

Brandon Victor Dixon, who portrays the label’s founder, Berry Gordy, and Valisia LeKae, who plays its signature songstress, Diana Ross, visited the Motown Museum on Tuesday, taking a lengthy tour of the two-level home that produced the soundtrack of a generation.

“I’m trying not to get emotional,” LeKae said as she methodically inspected the hundreds of mementos — posters, gold records, clothing and more — on display at the Motown Museum.

LeKae, a Broadway veteran who has appeared in “The Book of Mormon” and “Ragtime” among others, worried about losing her composure when it came time to visit Studio A, the famed space in which Gordy and his army of artists, writers, producers and engineers signed, sealed and delivered hit after hit throughout the 1960s.

And she succeeded, descending a small flight of stairs into the square, smallish room and calmly checking out the famed studio affectionately called the “Snake Pit.” LeKae marveled at an oversized black-and-white snapshot on the wall of Ross singing with a smiling Gordy looking on.

It wasn’t until later, while visiting the home’s upstairs, that LeKae’s emotions kicked in.

Standing underneath the “echo chamber,” a hole cut in the upper level’s ceiling designed to create unique sounds for the recording process, LeKae belted out the first few lines of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go.”

“Baby, baby / Baby, don’t leave me,” she wailed, before the tears began to well up and she had to stop singing.

“This is, like, amazing,” she said.

LeKae and Dixon, who earned a Tony nomination for his work in “The Color Purple” and bears more than a passing resemblance to a Motown-era Gordy, will be front and center when the show debuts this spring.

“Motown: The Musical” begins its run of preview performances March 11 ahead of the official opening on April 14 at New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

That gives Dixon, LeKae, Gordy (who’s producing and writing the book) and director Charles Randolph-Wright four months to bring the show to the stage.

To that end, Randolph-Wright also was at Hitsville on Tuesday, seeing prospective actors during a callback session in Studio A. He’s still looking for understudies and others to play smaller parts.

It wasn’t Randolph-Wright’s first visit to Motown’s birthplace as it was for his two leads, but for the 56-year-old who proclaims that “Motown’s in my DNA,” it was no less special.

“What a joy to be a part of (the Motown) movement and what a responsibility to try and place that in the world,” Randolph-Wright said, sitting on a piano bench in Studio A. “So, I’ve been very careful about trying to do that the right way.”

And he has, working for the past three years on “Motown: The Musical,” holding a nationwide casting call and working with Gordy and the other producers to identify which of the overwhelming number of songs from the Motown catalog to include on stage.

“The show is 15 hours,” Randolph-Wright joked.

The first version had 100 songs in it, he said, and “I wanted every song.”

While he said the show’s decision-makers are still deliberating about which songs make the final cut, one thing is certain about the musical selections: A few numbers in the show will be Gordy originals, written specifically for it.

“It’s so interesting to see him go back to being a songwriter after all these years,” said Randolph-Wright, who described one Gordy-penned song as having “all the textures of what Motown is and was, but it’s new.”

As for the man playing the man, Dixon spent his Tuesday walking through the halls of the Motown Museum, taking in every word tour guide Eric Harp and the other docents offered and, as he put it, “soaking it all in.”

At one point, he kneeled down and softly touched the cushion of a red-orange couch upstairs on which Marvin Gaye would take the occasional slumber.

Dixon burst out laughing, then leaped up and continued the tour.

Asked what was so funny, he quickly responded: “Because Marvin Gaye slept on this couch!”

All three of the Hitsville visitors spoke of their great respect and admiration for Gordy and the history of Motown and how important they felt it was to do it justice on stage.

“There’s an energy here that is palpable still,” Randolph-Wright said. “And it remains in this space. I think more than anything, the second I walked in here, it told me that I have to be honest” in telling the Motown story.

The first time he visited the museum, Randolph-Wright remembered walking into the gift shop, where he “bought everything,” including a Temptations T-shirt that read: “Live It Again.”

“I love that, because that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

___

Online:

http://www.motownthemusical.com

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: Doctor's Orders? Another Test

It is no longer news that Americans, and older Americans in particular, get more routine screening tests than they need, more than are useful. Prostate tests for men over 75, annual Pap smears for women over 65 and colonoscopies for anyone over 75 — all are overused, large-scale studies have shown.

Now it appears that many older patients are also subjected to too-frequent use of the other kind of testing, diagnostic tests.

The difference, in brief: Screening tests are performed on people who are asymptomatic, who aren’t complaining of a health problem, as a way to detect incipient disease. We have heard for years that it is best to “catch it early” — “it” frequently being cancer — and though that turns out to be only sometimes true, we and our doctors often ignore medical guidelines and ongoing campaigns to limit and target screening tests.

Diagnostic tests, on the other hand, are meant to help doctors evaluate some symptom or problem. “You’re trying to figure out what’s wrong,” explained Gilbert Welch, a veteran researcher at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

For these tests, medical groups and task forces offer many fewer guidelines on who should get them and how often — there is not much evidence to go on — but there is general agreement that they are not intended for routine surveillance.

But a study using a random 5 percent sample of Medicare beneficiaries — nearly 750,000 of them — suggests that often, that is what’s happening.

“It begins to look like some of these tests are being routinely repeated, and it’s worrisome,” said Dr. Welch, lead author of the study just published in The Archives of Internal Medicine. “Some physicians are just doing them every year.”

He is talking about tests like echocardiography, or a sonogram of the heart. More than a quarter of the sample (28.5 percent) underwent this test between 2004 and 2006, and more than half of those patients (55 percent) had a repeat echocardiogram within three years, most commonly within a year of the first.

Other common tests were frequently repeated as well. Of patients who underwent an imaging stress test, using a treadmill or stationery bike (or receiving a drug) to make the heart work harder, nearly 44 percent had a repeat test within three years. So did about half of those undergoing pulmonary function tests and chest tomography, a CAT scan of the chest.

Cytoscopy (a procedure in which a viewing tube is inserted into the bladder) was repeated for about 41 percent of the patients, and endoscopy (a swallowed tube enters the esophagus and stomach) for more than a third.

Is this too much testing? Without evidence of how much it harms or helps patients, it is hard to say — but the researchers were startled by the extent of repetition. “It’s inconceivable that it’s all important,” Dr. Welch said. “Unfortunately, it looks like it’s important for doctors.”

The evidence for that? The study revealed big geographic differences in diagnostic testing. Looking at the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, it found that nearly half the sample’s patients in Miami had an echocardiogram between 2004 and 2006, and two thirds of them had another echocardiogram within three years — the highest rate in the nation.

In fact, for the six tests the study included, five were performed and repeated most often in Florida cities: Miami, Jacksonville and Orlando. “They’re heavily populated by physicians and they have a long history of being at the top of the list” of areas that do a lot of medical procedures and hospitalizations, Dr. Welch said.

But in Portland, Ore., where “the physician culture is very different,” only 17.5 percent of patients had an echocardiogram. The places most prone to testing were also the places with high rates of repeat testing. Portland, San Francisco and Sacramento had the lowest rates.

We often don’t think of tests as having a downside, but they do. “This is the way whole cascades can start that are hard to stop,” Dr. Welch said. “The more we subject ourselves, the more likely some abnormality shows up that may require more testing, some of which has unwanted consequences.”

Properly used, of course, diagnostic tests can provide crucial information for sick people. “But used without a good indication, they can stir up a hornet’s nest,” he said. And of course they cost Medicare a bundle.

An accompanying commentary, sounding distinctly exasperated, pointed out that efforts to restrain overtesting and overtreatment have continued for decades. The commentary called it “discouraging to contemplate fresh evidence by Welch et al of our failure to curb waste of health care resources.”

It is hard for laypeople to know when tests make sense, but clearly we need to keep track of those we and our family members have. That way, if the cardiologist suggests another echocardiogram, we can at least ask a few pointed questions:

“My father just had one six months ago. Is it necessary to have another so soon? What information do you hope to gain that you didn’t have last time? Will the results change the way we manage his condition?”

Questions are always a good idea. Especially in Florida.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Facebook Gift Store Urges Users to Shop While They Share

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is already privy to its users’ e-mail addresses, wedding pictures and political beliefs. Now the company is nudging them to share a bit more: credit card numbers and offline addresses.

James Best Jr./The New York Times

Facebook Gifts is a service that prompts users to buy things for friends on the social network.

Sharing Even More

What do you think about Facebook’s plan to have users buy gifts for their friends through the site using their credit cards?

A screenshot of Facebook Gifts.

The nudge comes from a new Facebook service called Gifts. It allows Facebook users — only in the United States for now — to buy presents for their friends on the social network. On offer are items as varied as spices from Dean & DeLuca, pajamas from BabyGap and subscriptions to Hulu Plus, the video service. This week Facebook added iTunes gift cards.

The gift service is part of an aggressive moneymaking push aimed at pleasing Facebook’s investors after the company’s dismal stock market debut. Facebook has stepped up mobile advertising and is starting to customize the marketing messages it shows to users based on their Web browsing outside Facebook.

Those efforts seem to have brought some relief to Wall Street. Analysts issued more bullish projections for the company in recent days, and the stock was up 49 percent from its lowest point, closing Tuesday at $26.15, although that is still well below the initial offering price of $38. The share price has been buoyed in part by the fact that a wave of insider lockup periods expired without a flood of shares hitting the market.

To power the Gifts service, Facebook rented a warehouse in South Dakota and created its own software to track inventory and shipping. It will not say how much it earns from each purchase made through Gifts, though merchants that have a similar arrangement with Amazon.com give it a roughly 15 percent cut of sales.

If it catches on, the service would give Facebook a toehold in the more than $200 billion e-commerce market. Much more important, it would let the company accumulate a new stream of valuable personal data and use it to refine targeted advertisements, its bread and butter. The company said it did not now use data collected through Gifts for advertising purposes, but could not rule it out in the future.

“The hard part for Facebook was aggregating a billion users. Now it’s more about how to monetize those users without scaring them away,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird.

He added: “Gifts should also contribute more to Facebook’s treasure trove of user data, which has the benefit of a virtuous cycle, driving more personalization of the site, leading to better and more targeted ads, which improves overall monetization.”

Facebook already collects credit card information from users who play social games on its site. But they are a limited constituency, and a wider audience may be persuaded to buy a gift when Facebook reminds them that a friend is expecting a baby or a cousin is approaching her 40th birthday.

The Gifts service, which grew out of Facebook’s acquisition of a mobile application called Karma, was introduced in September and expanded earlier this month on the eve of the holiday shopping season.

Magnolia Bakery, based in New York, was among Facebook’s early partners for Gifts. Its vice president for public relations, Sara Gramling, said the company had sold roughly 200 packages of treats since then. She counted it as a marketing success. The bakery, which gained fame thanks to “Sex and the City,” had only recently begun shipping its goods. “It was a great opportunity to expand our network,” she said.

Magnolia Bakery isn’t exactly catering to the masses. A half-dozen cupcakes cost $35, plus about $12 for shipping. Facebook, Ms. Gramling said, takes care of the billing. The bakery is eyeing Facebook’s global reach, too, as it opens outlets internationally, especially in the Middle East.

One of the appeals of Facebook Gifts is the ease of making a purchase. Facebook users are nudged to buy a gift (a gift-box icon pops up) for Facebook friends on their birthdays. They are offered a vast menu to choose from: beer glasses, cake pops, quilts, marshmallows, magazine subscriptions and donations to charity. They are asked to choose a greeting card. Then they are asked for credit card details. Facebook says it stores that credit card information, unless users remove it after making a purchase.

Facebook has declined to say how many users have bought gifts, only that among those who have, the average purchase is $25.

David Streitfeld contributed reporting.

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Program opens door to citizenship for immigrants

Ricardo Sepida gets emotional when he sees his son-in-law in a Navy uniform. Even aircraft carriers make him misty-eyed. There is no better country than the United States, says Sepida, an immigrant from the Philippines.

Yet despite possessing a green card for 40 years, Sepida has never become an American citizen. Life got in the way, as he raised two children, worked a full-time job as a biomedical technician and ran side businesses on the weekends.

"I was so busy at work, I had so many things to do and I'd forget about it," said Sepida, 61, of Sylmar. "I regret it now. I should have done it a long time ago."

Sepida is among the millions of immigrants who are eligible for citizenship but have postponed the milestone, whether because of the $680 fee, a busy schedule or fear of the English and civics exams. In 2011, about 750,000 immigrants applied for naturalization out of the 8.5 million who were eligible.

A $20-million effort is now under way to get more permanent residents to become citizens so they can vote, have access to a wider range of jobs and become fully American. The money for the New Americans Campaign comes from major foundations and is going mainly to nonprofits that have already been doing citizenship work. Two former commissioners of the Immigration and Naturalization Service have signed on as advisors.

"We're going to just grow the number of people who aren't really completely part of the American fabric, who aren't pitching their tent, unless we get them off the sideline and into the game," said Eric Cohen, executive director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which is the campaign's main coordinator.

The campaign is being touted as bipartisan — Doris Meissner and James Ziglar, the two former INS leaders, served under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively. Organizers chose to launch the effort after the November presidential election to avoid any association with partisan voter registration drives, Meissner said.

With the growing clout of Latinos and Asian Americans, who voted for Democrat Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney by a ratio of nearly three to one, an increase in naturalization rates could have an effect on local and national politics.

Los Angeles is among eight cities targeted by the New Americans drive, which will last three to five years. The cities, which also include Charlotte, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Miami, New York and San Jose, are home to about 40% of those who qualify for citizenship.

The money will pay for more workshops to help immigrants fill out the 10-page application and prepare for the exams. The New Americans project will also fund outreach efforts like the CitzenshipWorks website, which provides application guidance in English, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese.

Separately, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes applications and is a successor agency to INS, has worked with Los Angeles officials to install a "citizenship corner" in each of the city's 73 public libraries.

"It's one of those things where you don't know how good it is unless you experience it," said Phyllis Coven, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' Los Angeles office. "It's a great gift, an honor and a privilege to hold a U.S. passport and become a full member of this society."

At the Chinatown library, the most pressing issue is English fluency, said Shan Liang, the branch manager. Elderly Chinese immigrants flock to the library's free English and civics classes, but some have a long way to go before they can answer such questions as, "Why did the colonists fight the British?" The cost can also be an issue for retirees living on a fixed income, Liang said.

"It is an intimidating process. It is quite a lot of questions," said Joyce Noche, head of the citizenship and immigration project at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, one of the groups conducting workshops under the program. "Our attorneys can't actually answer all the questions themselves. It is not a walk in the park."

Typically, the naturalization process takes about five months from submitting the initial application to reciting an oath of allegiance at a group swearing-in ceremony.

On a recent Saturday morning, Sepida attended a New Americans workshop in North Hills with his wife, Sally, who has been a citizen for decades. Among a group of procrastinators, Sepida stood out.

Tony Lu, who coordinates the CitizenshipWorks project for the Immigration Advocates Network, examined Sepida's permanent resident card. The pale blue document, dating from 1972, was so old that Lu had never seen that version of it. (Most versions are beige or pink; the agency returned to its original green hue in 2010).

Sepida sat down at a computer to work on his application. Others got one-on-one help with pen and paper, leaving with a completed application and free flashcards to practice English vocabulary and civics.

Elizabeth Lopez Perez, 45, who was brought across the Mexican border when she was 2, got her green card more than 25 years ago. As a single mother raising three children, she hardly had a spare moment.

Now, the impediment is the $680 application fee. The former nursing assistant, who has been unemployed for the last six years, hoped to qualify for a fee waiver for low-income applicants.

"Before, I didn't have the time, and I had the money," said Lopez Perez, of North Hills. "Now I have the time, and I don't have the money."

cindy.chang@latimes.com

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Munich Subway Photos Resemble Abandoned Kubrickian Spacecraft

Nick Frank likes to summarize his approach to photography with one phrase: “Reduce to the max.”

Get to the point. Remove all distractions. It’s a framework that lends itself well to Frank’s series on subway stations in Munich, Germany, where he lives.

“Pictures are often overloaded with information so what I’m doing is trying to flatten the image until you see the essence of the main subject,” he says.

The Munich subway, or U-Bahn, began running in 1971 right before the 1972 Olympics and is known for the bright color schemes and artistic designs that line many of the subway’s 100 stations. In a 1997 book by Christoph Hackelsberger, a member of the city’s subway planning council is quoted as saying that transit stations should “radiate a positive mood” and purposefully “help make a passenger’s wait more pleasant.”

Many of the stations are designed by well-known German architects and the subways themselves are used by hundreds of millions of people each year.

To avoid the crowds and get the kind of clean, empty shots that make up the series, Frank says he has to show up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning because that’s the only time the subways aren’t packed. Even then, he says he only has about an hour before things get busy.

Frank is also not shy about using Photoshop to clean things up even further. The gist of the photo is still present, but he’s not afraid to remove trash from the floors or cut a stray person from the background, all with the end goal of trying to create the kind of singular focus that makes his photos pop.

“My photos are not about reality,” he says. “It’s about what I’m seeing.”

He says he was originally drawn to subways not only because many of them are architecturally interesting but also because they tend to be places of creativity. Like many people who ride the trains to work, Frank says he does some of his best thinking on his morning and afternoon commute.

“You usually use the time in the subway to reflect on your day,” he says. “It’s not about talking to other people, it’s all about yourself. Most of my advertising ideas are developed in the subway.”

He hopes his photos, with their sharp lines, symmetry and clear focus, help people call up a similar visceral experience to the one they have while on the trains.

“I want to transport you back,” he says.

Frank will be starting a Kickstarter campaing to fund more subway shoots around the globe so please check his website in early December for more information

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New Zealand becomes Middle Earth as Hobbit mania takes hold

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – New Zealand‘s capital city was rushing to complete its transformation into a haven for hairy feet and pointed ears on Tuesday as stars jetted in for the long-awaited world premiere of the first movie of the Hobbit trilogy.

Wellington, where director Peter Jackson and much of the post production is based, has renamed itself “the Middle of Middle Earth“, as fans held costume parties and city workers prepared to lay 500 m (550 yards) of red carpet.

A specially Hobbit-decorated Air New Zealand jet brought in cast, crew and studio officials for the premiere.

Jackson, a one-time printer at a local newspaper and a hometown hero, said he was still editing the final version of the “Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey” ahead of Wednesday’s premiere screening.

The Hobbit movies are based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book and tell the story that leads up to his epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings“, which Jackson made into three Oscar-winning films about 10 years ago.

It is set 60 years before “The Lord of The Rings” and was originally planned as only two movies before it was decided that there was enough material to justify a third.

New Zealand fans were getting ready to claim the best spots to see the film’s stars, including British actor Martin Freeman, who plays the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Elijah Wood.

“It’s been a 10-year wait for these movies, New Zealand is Tolkien’s spiritual home, so there’s no way we’re going to miss out,” said office worker Alan Craig, a self-confessed Lord of the Rings “nut”.

The production has been at the centre of several controversies, including a dispute with unions in 2010 over labor contracts that resulted in the government stepping in to change employment laws, and giving Warner Brothers increased incentives to keep the production in New Zealand.

“The Hobbit did come very close to not being filmed here,” Jackson told Radio New Zealand.

He said Warners had sent scouts to Britain to look at possible locations and also matched parts of the script to shots of the Scottish Highlands and English forests.

“That was to convince us we could easily go over there and shoot the film … and I would have had to gone over there to do it but I was desperately fighting to have it stay here,” Jackson said.

Last week, an animal rights group said more than 20 animals, including horses, pigs and chickens, had been killed during the making of the film. Jackson has said some animals used in the film died on the farm where they were being housed, but that none had been hurt during filming.

The films are also notable for being the first filmed at 48 frames per second (fps), compared with the 24 fps that has been the industry standard since the 1920s.

The second film “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” will be released in December next year, with the third “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” due in mid-July 2014.

(Editing by Paul Tait)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.

Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.

This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.

Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.

But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.

The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all.

Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.”

The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?

Habits of Thought

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.

Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.

Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.

Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of “confounded identities” that are now considered personality disorders.

Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.

“These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired,” said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether.”

Several prototypes soon began to emerge. “A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character,” wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, “Character Analysis,” a groundbreaking text. “In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern.”

Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.

In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.

These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.

Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.

This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. “Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a catchall label meaning little more than “this person has problems” became the most common of the diagnoses.

It’s a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn’t have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.

Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.

“The diagnoses simply weren’t being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible,” Dr. Lenzenweger said.

Resisting Simplification 

It was easier said than done.

The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.

A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.

The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to “develop a coherent sense of self or identity.” Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.

Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.

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States crack down on campaigning nonprofits

WASHINGTON — Tax-exempt advocacy groups that played an aggressive role in this year's election are coming under increasing scrutiny from state regulators, who are cracking down on organizations seeking to engage in campaigns without revealing their financial backers.

The pressure in states with stringent campaign finance rules contrasts sharply with the federal level, where nonprofits that spent hundreds of millions of dollars to influence races this year have not been required to disclose their donors.

This month, California's Fair Political Practices Commission forced an Arizona-based group to reveal the source of $11 million it gave for two ballot initiative campaigns. The funds were traced to a Virginia nonprofit that also does not reveal its donors. That hasn't satisfied the commission, which has begun an investigation to uncover the original source.

Shortly before election day, judges in Idaho and Montana required the disclosure of contributors to two nonprofit organizations that had drawn the attention of state regulators with their political activity.

"Frankly, if we didn't take a stand on this, we might as well just pack up our campaign disclosure law and send it away," said Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa. "The fact that federal campaign laws are deficient or you've got a deadlocked Federal Election Commission — that doesn't mean the states are powerless."

Ysursa sued a group called Education Voters of Idaho, which gave more than $200,000 for ads backing three state ballot measures, accusing it of failing to comply with the state's sunshine law. After the court order, the organization revealed it had received money from New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Albertsons supermarket scion Joseph P. Scott, among others.

The clashes between state elections officials and advocacy groups are a byproduct of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which lifted the ban on direct political expenditures by corporations. That triggered a surge of election activity by groups incorporated under the tax code's section 501(c)4 as social welfare organizations, which are allowed to engage in issue advocacy.

At the federal level, political action committees are required to report their contributors, but so far the nonprofits are not.

The Federal Election Commission, which has six members split evenly between the major parties, is frozen in partisan gridlock on questions regarding nonprofit activity. The Internal Revenue Service said this summer that it had begun examining some of the groups, but had yet to take any public action. And efforts to pass new disclosure laws have so far foundered in Congress.

But the picture is different in many states, where lawmakers have toughened disclosure rules to require any organization making a political expenditure to report its financial backers.

Disclosure opponents have systematically challenged the state measures in court, arguing that the Supreme Court has said a group must have politics as its "major purpose" in order to be considered a political committee.

Advocates for more campaign finance reporting have countered — largely successfully — that the high court has repeatedly endorsed disclosure and has not limited it to political committees.

"If you look at the federal issue, you would be inclined to throw up your hands," said Derek Cressman, vice president for state operations at Common Cause, which advocates for more transparency. "The progress that some states are making proves that these disclosure issues are problems we can solve."

Take the case of Americans for Job Security, a Virginia-based nonprofit that has been a serious political player for at least a dozen years, spending millions on ads without disclosing its backers.

In 2008, the FEC's general counsel concluded the trade group met the definition of a political committee that is required to report its donors, and requested approval to pursue a formal investigation. But the commission deadlocked, and no action was taken.

Early this month, Americans for Job Security played a role in one of California's most closely watched election-year dramas — unmasked as the source of an $11-million donation to oppose Gov. Jerry Brown's tax increase measure and support another measure intended to curb the ability of unions to raise money for political activity.

The money had first been routed to an Arizona group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which sent it to another nonprofit also based in Arizona called Americans for Responsible Leadership, which in turn gave the money to the conservative Small Business Action Committee in California to run ads about the ballot measures.

State authorities called it "campaign money laundering."

Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, said the contribution may have violated a rule implemented in May to prevent donors from anonymously shuttling money through nonprofits with the intention of spending it on California campaigns. If found in violation, the nonprofits involved could face millions of dollars in fines.

The Small Business Action Committee could also be forced to pay $11 million to the state's general fund if authorities prove it knowingly failed to report the original source of its funds, Ravel said.

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Alt Text: How to Tell Real SEALs From Basement-Dwelling Posers

The White House recently congratulated the makers of Troop ID, a service designed to help online merchants securely identify members of the armed forces. This was a significant recommendation, the first software application to be publicly praised by the president since he canceled a 2009 press conference in order to play Doodle Jump.

While I’m happy that troops will be able to claim their 10 percent discount on water bottles and mock turtlenecks, I’m a bit disappointed that the service is apparently only being used in a retail context. After the whole Stolen Valor saga, you’d think there’d be a huge demand for a secure way to vet self-described vets.

Here’s a statistic: While there are only 2,500 active-duty Navy SEALs at any given time, there are approximately 4 million people claiming to be current or former Navy SEALs in various chat rooms and message boards on the internet. This is because any argument is 200 percent more convincing when presented by a Navy SEAL.

A couple of examples:

Unconvincing: “As a mall food court assistant supervisor, I believe that our mission in Afghanistan is necessary to the stability of the Middle East.”
Convincing: “As a Navy SEAL, I believe that our mission in Afghanistan is necessary to the stability of the Middle East.”

Unconvincing: “As a teaching assistant in comparative literature, I believe that The Silmarillion is vastly overrated by Tolkien fans.”
Convincing: “As a Navy SEAL, I believe that The Silmarillion is vastly overrated by Tolkien fans.”

With results like that, it’s no wonder that people are attempting to fraudulently win arguments by pretending to be members of elite military squads like the SEALs, the Green Berets, the Army Rangers and occasionally G.I. Joe. It seems to me that Troop ID could be used to distinguish the Special Forces from the basement-dwelling posers.

Once we have that technology in place, we could easily expand it to ferret out other internet pretenders. For instance, before you claim that you’re going to show up at someone’s house and beat them up, or argue that you’d have a mugger in a headlock before he could say “hand over the cash,” you’d be expected to use the ToughGuy ID service to certify that you have actually, at some point, won a fight that wasn’t against a sibling at least four years younger than you.

Our founding fathers created the First Amendment protections on free speech for a good reason: because it’s freaking hilarious.

Or before you can declare that the solution to the “fiscal cliff” crisis is obvious to anyone who knows anything about economics, you’d be expected to provide proof to Expert ID that your main credentials in economics aren’t limited to having seen both Atlas Shrugged movies.

I say “expected to” because I’m not saying that you would have to sign up for these services. Goodness no, my ludicrous and improbable fantasies aren’t that tyrannical. I believe that our founding fathers created the First Amendment protections on free speech for a good reason: because it’s freaking hilarious. There’s nothing more fun than watching someone weave ever-more-desperate lies to cover up their unwillingness to either put, or shut, up.

However, I do think there’s one vital concern that overrides the right to free speech: Before commenting on a humor column on the web, everyone should be required to take a simple test that would confirm that they have the basic human ability to recognize sarcasm and hyperbole.

- - -

Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become a commando, a commandant and a cormorant.

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Dog bite sidelines ‘Dirty Dozen’ trumpeter Towns

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Dirty Dozen Brass Band trumpeter Efrem Towns is recovering at home in New Orleans from a vicious attack by a Rottweiler at an Atlanta motel.

He missed performances in Colorado and New Orleans after the attack on Nov. 18, and doesn’t know if he’ll make the band’s next scheduled gig on Dec. 28, The Times-Picayune (http://bit.ly/XOJoNr) reported.

He and baritone sax player Roger Lewis said the dog surged from an open motel room door after Towns knocked on the door of Lewis’ room.

“I didn’t know if it was a dog, wolverine, bear, mongoose or what. I just knew something had me,” Towns said.

He said the dog‘s owner came out of the next room, and they were able to subdue it.

At Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, he received 30 stitches in his groin. Towns, who has health insurance through his wife, Tracie, said he will be seeing a urologist this week.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band formed in 1977, and is credited with creating the contemporary, funk-infused brass band sound. It’s been featured on albums with David Bowie, Elvis Costello and the Black Crowes.

Towns said he probably could practice while convalescing. “But I’m very uncomfortable right now,” he said Friday evening. “I’m basically immobilized — it’s hard getting around. I’m kind of miserable.”

The experience hasn’t soured Towns on dogs. He and his wife own three miniature schnauzers, a standard schnauzer and a mixed breed. On Friday, his daughter’s dachshund was visiting.

“I’m a dog person,” he said. “And even though I got bit, I hope they don’t put that dog to sleep.”

___

Information from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Agency Investigates Deaths and Injuries Associated With Bed Rails

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black’s mother died in her bed at a care facility.

In November 2006, when Clara Marshall began suffering from the effects of dementia, her family moved her into the Waterford at Fairway Village, an assisted living home in Vancouver, Wash. The facility offered round-the-clock care for Ms. Marshall, who had wandered away from home several times. Her husband Dan, 80 years old at the time, felt he could no longer care for her alone.

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black, visiting her mother’s grave in Portland, Ore. She has documented hundreds of deaths associated with bed rails and said families should be informed of their possible risks.

But just five months into her stay, Ms. Marshall, 81, was found dead in her room apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed.

After Ms. Marshall’s death, her daughter Gloria Black, who lives in Portland, Ore., began writing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. What she discovered was that both agencies had known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them. Ms. Black conducted her own research and exchanged letters with local and state officials. Finally, a letter she wrote in 2010 to the federal consumer safety commission helped prompt a review of bed rail deaths.

Ms. Black applauds the decision to study the issue. “But I wish it was done years ago,” she said. “Maybe my mother would still be alive.” Now the government is studying a problem it has known about for years.

Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries. Officials at the F.D.A. and the commission said the data probably understated the problem since bed rails are not always listed as a cause of death by nursing homes and coroners, or as a cause of injury by emergency room doctors.

Experts who have studied the deaths say they are avoidable. While the F.D.A. issued safety warnings about the devices in 1995, it shied away from requiring manufacturers to put safety labels on them because of industry resistance and because the mood in Congress then was for less regulation. Instead only “voluntary guidelines” were adopted in 2006.

More warnings are needed, experts say, but there is a technical question over which regulator is responsible for some bed rails. Are they medical devices under the purview of the F.D.A., or are they consumer products regulated by the commission?

“This is an entirely preventable problem,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who first alerted federal regulators to deaths involving bed rails in 1995. The government at the time declined to recall any bed rails and opted instead for a safety alert to nursing homes and home health care agencies.

Forcing the industry to improve designs and replace older models could have potentially cost bed rail makers and health care facilities hundreds of million of dollars, said Larry Kessler, a former F.D.A. official who headed its medical device office. “Quite frankly, none of the bed rails in use at that time would have passed the suggested design standards in the guidelines if we had made them mandatory,” he said. No analysis has been done to determine how much it would cost the manufacturers to reduce the hazards.

Bed rails are metal bars used on hospital beds and in home care to assist patients in pulling themselves up or helping them out of bed. They can also prevent people from rolling out of bed. But sometimes patients — particularly those suffering from Alzheimer’s — can get confused and trapped between a bed rail and a mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.

While the use of the devices by hospitals and nursing homes has declined as professional caregivers have grown aware of the dangers, experts say dozens of older adults continue to die each year as more rails are used in home care and many health care facilities continue to use older rail models.

Since those first warnings in 1995, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred, a review by The New York Times of F.D.A. data, lawsuits, state nursing home inspection reports and interviews, found. Last year alone, the F.D.A. data shows, 27 people died.

As deaths continued after the F.D.A. warning, a working group put together in 1999 and made up of medical device makers, researchers, patient advocates and F.D.A. officials considered requiring bed rail makers to add warning labels.

But the F.D.A. decided against it after manufacturers resisted, citing legal issues. The agency said added cost to small manufacturers and difficulties of getting regulations through layers of government approval, were factors against tougher standards, according to a meeting log of the group in 2000 and interviews.

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Solar power plants burden the counties that host them

When it comes to attracting business to California's eastern deserts, Inyo County is none too choosy.

Since the 19th century the sparsely populated county has worked to attract industries shunned by others, including gold, tungsten and salt mining. The message: Your business may be messy, but if you plan to hire our residents, the welcome mat is out.

So the county grew giddy last year as it began to consider hosting a huge, clean industry. BrightSource Energy, developer of the proposed $2.7-billion Hidden Hills solar power plant 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, promised a bounty of jobs and a windfall in tax receipts. In a county that issued just six building permits in 2011, Inyo officials first estimated that property taxes from the facility would boost the general fund 17%.

But upon closer inspection, the picture didn't seem so rosy.

An economic consultant hired by the county found that property tax revenue would be a fraction of the customary amount because portions of the plant qualifiy for a solar tax exclusion. Fewer than 10 local workers would land permanent positions — and just 5% of the construction jobs would be filled by county residents. And construction workers are likely to spend their money across the nearby state line, in Nevada.

Worse, the project would cost the county $11 million to $12 million during the 30-month construction phase, with much of the money going to upgrade a historic two-lane road to the plant. Once the plant begins operation, the county estimates taxpayers will foot the bill for nearly $2 million a year in additional public safety and other services.

Two of California's other Mojave Desert counties, Riverside and San Bernardino, have made similar discoveries. Like Inyo, they are now pushing back against solar developers, asking them to cover the costs of servicing the new industry.

"Southern California is going to become the home to the state's ability to meet its solar goals," said Gerry Newcombe, public works director for San Bernardino County. "That's great, but where are the benefits to the county?"

Desert counties also are anticipating costly shifts in land use, including the conversion of taxable private property into habitat for endangered species. Solar developers are required to buy land to offset the loss of habitat caused by their projects. Once the property is acquired, it cannot be developed, which reduces its potential for tax revenue.

Two of the largest solar plants in the world are under construction in San Bernardino County. But county officials are not sure if revenue from the projects will offset the cost of additional fire and safety services, which analysts say will amount to millions of dollars a year.

For example, the $2.2-billion Ivanpah solar project at the county's eastern border has agreed to pay $377,000 annually, but that may not be enough to cover the county's new costs related to the plant. The county doesn't know how much solar plants will drain from its budget because the projects are being planned and approved too quickly for adequate analysis, officials say.

"We really support private development and generating jobs," Newcombe said. "On the other hand, I am concerned that it's going too fast. I don't know that we've had a chance to appreciate the long-term impacts."

The county is also worried because most of the land inside its borders is owned by the federal government, and up to 1 million acres of that — nearly 8% of the county — could be set aside for solar development, removing it from public access and recreational opportunities, Newcombe said.

Counties that object to the pace of development, however, have been scolded for standing in the way of progress. Not only is renewable energy a priority of the Obama administration, it is also the darling of California's chief executive.

Gov. Jerry Brown has vowed to "crush" opponents of solar projects. At the launch of a solar farm near Sacramento, the governor pledged: "It's not easy. There are gonna be screw-ups. There are gonna be bankruptcies. There'll be indictments and there'll be deaths. But we're gonna keep going — and nothing's gonna stop me."

Counties have little say because the state controls planning and licensing of large-scale projects. The California Energy Commission issues the permits for utility-scale solar farms, and counties depend on the commission's staff to look out for their interests.

To the extent that California counties are pushing back against industrial solar, the rebellion began in Riverside County more than a year ago.

Some 20 utility-scale solar farms are proposed in the eastern stretch of the county on 118,000 acres of federal land along the Interstate 10 corridor between Desert Center and Blythe.

The Riverside County Board of Supervisors considered charging companies a franchise fee to offset the effects on roads and public services and to compensate for the loss of recreation and tourism access to the 185 square miles of federal land. Local officials saw it as a matter of fairness. Public utilities pay 2% of gross receipts to the county, for example.

"The solar companies are the beneficiaries of huge government loans, tax credits and, most critically for me, property tax exemptions, at the expense of taxpayers," said county Supervisor John Benoit, referring to a variety of taxpayer-supported loans and grants available to large solar projects as part of the Obama administration's renewable energy initiative. "I came to the conclusion that my taxpayers need to get something back."

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