Surgeon infected patients during heart procedure, Cedars-Sinai admits

A heart surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center unwittingly infected five patients during valve replacement surgeries earlier this year, causing four of the patients to need a second operation.

The infections occurred after tiny tears in the latex surgical gloves routinely worn by the doctor allowed bacteria from a skin inflammation on his hand to pass into the patients' hearts, according to the hospital. The patients survived the second operation and are still recovering, hospital officials said.

The outbreak led to investigations by the hospital and both the L.A. County and California departments of public health. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was also consulted.

Hospital officials called it a "very unusual occurrence" probably caused by an unfortunate confluence of events: the nature of the surgery, the microscopic rips in the gloves and the surgeon's skin condition. Valve replacement requires the surgeon to use thick sutures and tie more than 100 knots, which can cause extra stress on the gloves, they said.

Nevertheless, the hospital's goal is to have zero infections, said Harry Sax, vice chairman of the hospital's department of surgery. "Any hospital-acquired infection is unacceptable," he said.

The infections raise questions about what health conditions should prevent a surgeon from operating and how to get the best protection from surgical gloves. Surgeons with open sores or known infections aren't supposed to operate, but there is no national standard on what to do if they have skin inflammation, said Rekha Murthy, medical director of the hospital's epidemiology department. She added that there were also no national standards on types of gloves used, whether to wear double gloves or how many times surgeons should change those gloves during a procedure.

Healthcare-acquired infections are very common throughout the United States. Each year, infections cause 99,000 deaths in the country, including about 12,000 in California. Hospitals in the state are required to report certain infections to the California Department of Public Health. That reporting makes the public more aware of the quality of care provided at local hospitals and is an important tool for reducing infections, said Debby Rogers, deputy director of the department's Center for Health Care Quality.

Cedars-Sinai has low rates for hospital-acquired infections compared with the state and national average but has not performed as well on other surgical quality measures recently, according to the Leapfrog Group, an employer-backed nonprofit focused on healthcare quality. The organization gave the hospital a C rating last month on its national report card, down from an A in June, though it was not related to the infection outbreak.

"Clearly this hospital is making attempts to reduce infections, but they have more work to do," said Leah Binder, Leapfrog's chief executive.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center conducts about 360 valve replacement surgeries each year and said infections occur in fewer than 1% of its cases — lower than the national average.

The hospital learned about the problem in June after three patients who had undergone valve replacement surgery showed signs of infection. Doctors diagnosed the patients with an infection called endocarditis. Concerned there might be a connection among the cases, epidemiologists analyzed the bacteria, staphylococcus epidermidis, and determined that it was an identical strain and therefore must have come from a single source. "It led to the question of gee, I wonder where it came from?" Murthy said.

Epidemiologists homed in on the surgeon with the skin inflammation. The bacteria matched, and then they made a surprising discovery: microscopic tears in the gloves typically worn by surgeons after performing valve replacement surgery. The surgeon, whose name was not released, was not allowed to operate again until he healed. He is still a member of the medical staff but no longer performs surgeries at the hospital.

The hospital soon found the same infection in two more patients. Officials also reached out to 67 patients who had heart valve replacements with the same surgeon but didn't find any other cases. One of the five infected patients was treated with antibiotics, and the other four had new valve replacement surgeries. Sax said the hospital apologized to the patients and has continued to monitor their health. The hospital has also covered the cost of their care, including follow-up treatment and all the related surgeries.

All surgeons doing valve replacements are now required to change gloves more frequently, officials said. Some surgeons are wearing double gloves during the operations, Sax said.

Following the outbreak, Cedars-Sinai did the proper follow-up to ensure the safety of their patients, said Dawn Terashita, a medical epidemiologist with L.A. County, who was notified in September. What occurred at Cedars-Sinai was an unintentional consequence of the surgery, she said.

"There is no way to keep a room entirely sterile and all the people in it sterile," she said. "You will always have risk of infection."

anna.gorman@latimes.com

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15 Agonizing Automotive Atrocities

Yugo.

There, we got it out of the way. When you read the headline, of course an image of a tiny Cold War-era hatchback popped into your head. We bet you also shuddered at the thought of a Pontiac Aztek.

We love to poke fun at failure, and no failure made a punchline better than the Yugo. We found that out while talking with Jason Vuic, author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Vuic was aware that the Yugo fell far short of being a good car, but what truly amazed him was how many people who had never driven a Yugo knew just how bad it was. In failure, it became a wild viral marketing success.

Not all cars rose to level of infamy embodied by the Yugo. To paraphrase Shakespeare, some cars were born awful while others had awfulness thrust upon them. Some automotive atrocities were the result of automakers trying something new and falling far short of the mark, while other cars failed from a lack of effort. Still others were perfectly adequate cars but came to represent a regrettable moment in time.

Here we display all three kinds of auto-trocities, highlighting famous failures and digging deep to dredge up detritus better off forgotten. Yes, we know there are many, many more automotive atrocities and this list only scratches the surface of the heap. You’ll have a chance to list your favorite heaps tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Above: Peel Trident 1965-1966

Famous from appearances on Top Gear and Monster Garage, the Peel Trident was a “shopping car” built on the Isle of Man. Along with the bubblelicious BMW Isetta and the fiberglass Reliant Robin, the Trident was ridiculed for its small size and three wheels.

Photo: Casaflamingo/Flickr

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Reinhold Weege, creator of “Night Court,” dies at 63

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Reinhold Weege, the creator of the hit NBC sitcom “Night Court,” has died, a spokeswoman for the family told TheWrap. He was 63 years old.

He also wrote for other notable television shows, including “Barney Miller” and “M*A*S*H.”

However, it was “Night Court,” a show that poked gentle fun at bureaucratic absurdity, that would become his signature work. The series centered on a young judge (Harry Anderson) saddled with handling the bottom of the barrel cases that come into Manhattan’s night court and featured a breakout performance by John Larroquette as a skirt-chasing lawyer.

The show started out tackling serious legal issues, but over the course of its nine seasons, slowly expunged commentary in favor of broad humor.

Weege might never have entered show business had he not been fired from a job in journalism. In a 1994 piece in the Chicago Tribune, he wrote that he was working as a reporter and editor of a tiny suburban paper when he reported on a secret meeting, between the town and the Pritzker hotel chain about a proposal to build a monorail, hotels and a 60-story office building.

After his paper was less than thrilled with the piece he copyrighted it and had it picked up by a larger paper — the result was he got canned.

“Shortly after that, I sold our couch, the only asset my wife and I had, got in the car and headed toward Hollywood,” Weege wrote.

The rest is history.

Weege is survived by his ex-wife Shelley, two daughters and a granddaughter.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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7.3 quake off Japan prompts tsunami warning

TOKYO—

A strong earthquake struck Friday off the coast of northeastern Japan in the same region that was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami last year. A city in the region reported that a small tsunami had hit, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said the earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.3 and struck in the Pacific Ocean off Miyagi prefecture at 5:18 p.m. (0818 GMT). The epicenter was 6.2 miles beneath the seabed.

After the quake, which caused buildings in Tokyo to sway for at least several minutes, authorities issued a warning that a tsunami potentially as high as 2.19 yards could hit. Ishinomaki, a city in Miyagi, reported that a tsunami of 1 yard hit at 6:02 p.m. (0902 GMT).

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no risk of a widespread tsunami.

Miyagi prefectural police said there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries from the quake or tsunami, although traffic was being stopped in some places to check on roads.

Shortly before the earthquake struck, NHK television broke off regular programming to warn that a strong quake was due to hit. Afterward, the announcer repeatedly urged all near the coast to flee to higher ground.

The magnitude-9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami that slammed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, killed or left missing some 19,000 people, devastating much of the coast. All but two of Japan's nuclear plants were shut down for checks after the earthquake and tsunami caused meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant in the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Immediately following Friday's quake, there were no problems at any of the nuclear plants operated by Fukushima Dai-Ichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., said a TEPCO spokesman, Takeo Iwamoto.

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Apple Builds a New Home on Facebook's Back Porch

We knew that Apple was building a pair of new data centers close to Facebook’s operation in Prineville, Oregon. But we didn’t realize just how close they were until we spent a plane over Oregonian high desert.

The notoriously secretive Apple is especially secretive about its data centers. So while Google and Facebook have opened up their doors to Wired reporters over the past year, Apple has not only rolled up the welcome mat. They’ve disconnected the front doorbell.

That’s what forced us to take to the skies. In April, we published our first overhead shots of Apple’s Maiden, North Carolina, data center, and a few weeks ago, we sent our iSpy plane over Prineville, where Apple has just broken ground on a $68 million data center, just down the road from Facebook.

So here’s the world’s first look at the future home of the West Coast iCloud:

You can see Apple’s mini data center — they call it a tactical data center — up in the northeast corner of the property. Here’s a close-up shot:

Apple finished this building earlier this year, but just south of it, you can see what will be the site of its much larger 338,000-square-foot data center. Apple wants to eventually build two of these monster data centers on the 160-acre site, but right now, there’s no sign of the second facility.

When it goes fully online, Prineville will be fully powered by alternative energy. That might help cut it some slack from Greenpeace, which has been known to launch unexpected protests on Apple property armed with window-washers and black balloons.

Apple showed up in Prineville only after Facebook had built its own 330,000-square-foot data center just outside of town. The internet giants love locations like this, primarily because of their cheap real estate, local tax breaks, cool climates, and reliable and abundant power supplies.

Facebook’s first data center was up and running a year ago. The company is now putting the finishing touches on a second data center (at the bottom of the photo below) and has also broken ground on a new cold-storage facility, which is designed to save power by icing backup data on servers that are only rarely switched on. That smoothed-out rectangular patch just beneath the second data center is the future site of cold storage:

Apple operates three other data centers: in Newark, California; in Maiden, North Carolina; and at the company’s Cupertino headquarters. Earlier this year, it started work on a fifth facility in Reno, Nevada.

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Deportation looms for tech guru McAfee after heart drama

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Software guru John McAfee, fighting deportation to Belize, was rushed to a hospital in Guatemala on Thursday shortly after his asylum request was rejected, but a suspected heart attack turned out to be stress in a fresh twist to the saga.

The 67-year-old U.S. computer software pioneer was taken swiftly from a hospital in a police car out of the sight of media, after earlier arriving in an ambulance lying on a stretcher.

His lawyer said he was being taken back to an immigration department cottage where he has been detained since crossing illegally into Guatemala from neighboring Belize, where police want to question him in connection with his neighbor’s murder.

“He never had a heart attack, nothing like that,” said Telesforo Guerra, a former attorney general who had earlier said McAfee had two mild heart attacks.

“I’m not a doctor. I’m just telling you what the doctors told me,” he added. “He was suffering from stress, hypertension and tachycardia (an abnormally fast heartbeat).”

McAfee was posting on his blog www.whoismcafee.com in the morning, the time he suffered the stress attack.

“I don’t think a heart attack prevents one from using one’s blog,” Guerra had said at the time.

Guerra’s assistant, Karla Paz, earlier said she found McAfee lying on the ground and unable to move his body or speak.

McAfee was detained by Guatemalan police on Wednesday for illegally sneaking across the border with his 20-year-old girlfriend to escape authorities in Belize. He has said he fears authorities in Belize will kill him if he returns.

Guatemala’s foreign minister, Harold Caballeros, said earlier McAfee’s request for asylum was rejected.

Constitutional lawyer Gabriel Orellana, a former foreign minister, said the government should have given more weight to the asylum request rather than rush to a decision.

“We should take into account the fact that McAfee has not been accused of any crime in Belize,” he said.

QUARRELED WITH FELLOW AMERICAN

Police in Belize want to quiz McAfee as “a person of interest” in the killing of a fellow American, Gregory Faull, with whom he had quarreled. But they say he is not a prime suspect in the probe.

McAfee says he has been persecuted by Belize’s ruling party because he refused to pay around $ 2 million he says it is trying to hustle out of him, he said.

Belize’s prime minister denies this and said McAfee, who made millions from the Internet anti-virus software that bears his name, was “bonkers.” McAfee later lost much of his fortune and turned to a life of semi-reclusion by the Belizean beach.

McAfee spent Wednesday night reading his blog and posting his thoughts on a laptop he said was lent to him by the warden of the cottage where he was staying.

One person asked him if he felt like committing suicide.

“I enjoy living, and suicide is absurdly redundant,” he wrote. “The world, from the very beginning, hurls viruses, accidents, hungry animals, defective DNA – and uncountable more – in an attempt to kill us. It always succeeds. Suicide is simply aiding and abetting.”

McAfee’s earlier posts spoke of his relief at arriving in Guatemala, thinking he had found a way out of his troubles.

One of his readers posted a message offering him just that.

“John. I have a special ops team near the La Aurora International Airport. I can get you out of jail and provide safe passage back to the States for a fee. Please let me know if this interests you.”

DRUG PAST

Guatemala’s government originally said the eccentric tech entrepreneur, who loves guns and young women and has tribal tattoos covering his shoulders, would be expelled to Belize within hours. But it later rowed back.

The U.S. State Department said it was aware of McAfee’s arrest and its embassy was providing “appropriate consular services,” but could not comment further.

On the island of Ambergris Caye, where McAfee has lived for about four years, residents and neighbors say he is eccentric and at times unstable. He was seen to travel with armed bodyguards, sporting a pistol tucked into his belt.

The predicament of the former Lockheed systems consultant is a far cry from his heyday in the late 1980s, when he started McAfee Associates. McAfee has no relationship now with the company, which was sold to Intel Corp.

McAfee was previously charged in Belize with possession of illegal firearms, and police had raided his property on suspicions that he was running a lab to produce illegal synthetic narcotics. He says he has not taken drugs since 1983.

“I took drugs constantly, 24 hours of the day. I took them for years and years. I was the worst drug abuser on the planet,” he told Reuters just before his arrest. “Then I finally went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that was the end of it.”

(With reporting by Andrew Quinn in Washington; Writing by Simon Gardner and Dave Graham; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Philip Barbara)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Economix Blog: Uwe E. Reinhardt: How Medicare Is Misrepresented

Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.

A common phrase in the current debate over the so-called fiscal cliff is “Medicare needs to be restructured.” The term serves as code for policies unlikely to be appealing to voters, a term that can mean everything and, thus, nothing.

The question is what problem restructuring is to solve in traditional Medicare, which remains one of the most popular health insurance programs in this country. People who use this vague term should always be challenged to explain exactly why and how Medicare should be changed.

Critics of traditional Medicare – even those who should know better – often accuse it of being “fee for service.” It is a strange accusation. After all, fee-for-service remains the dominant method of paying the providers of health care under private insurance, including Medicare Advantage, the option of private coverage open to all Medicare beneficiaries.

Describing Medicare as fee-for-service insurance is about as thoughtful as describing a horse as “an animal that has four legs,” a characteristic shared by many other animals. The practice is particularly odd, given that traditional Medicare as early as the 1970s was the first program to develop so-called “bundled payments” for hospital inpatient care – the diagnostically related groupings, known as D.R.G. – in place of fee-for-service payment of hospitals, an innovation that has since been copied around the globe.

A more descriptive term for traditional Medicare would be “free choice of providers” or “unmanaged care” insurance. These features, of course, would hardly be viewed as shortcomings among people covered by traditional Medicare or their families. Neither term would be a good marketing tool among voters for proposals to abandon traditional Medicare.

In this regard, it may be helpful to list the various contractual relationships that can exist between the insured and insurers, on the one hand, and the various methods of paying the providers of care, on the other:

Indemnity Insurance: This is the oldest form of health insurance. It offers the insured free choice of health care provider and of treatment, which is why such policies tend to be expensive.

Under indemnity insurance, providers of care are typically paid on a fee-for-service basis. Insurers usually pay a stipulated fraction (say 80 percent) of the providers’ bills for covered services. Patients absorb the rest in the form of deductibles and coinsurance (e.g., 20 percent of the providers’ bill). Under some policies, insurers ask patients to pay providers first and then seek reimbursement from the insurer.

Managed-Care Contracts: The other three insurance contracts shown in the display – H.M.O., P.P.O. and P.O.S. contracts – are generally lumped together under the generic term “managed care.” It is another ill-defined term that can mean a host of specific limitations on the insured’s freedom of choice.

Doctors may assert that it is they who manage the medical treatments. But in health-policy circles, the term managed care means that the doctor’s medical treatments are subject to external constraints imposed by a private regulator — the patient’s health insurer — although, in principle, public insurers could “manage” care as well, if legislators permitted it.

These externally imposed constraints may take the form of formularies for prescription drugs or prior authorization by the insurer for specific procedures – e.g., expensive imaging or elective surgery – before the insurer agrees to pay for the procedures. They may mean exclusion from coverage of procedures deemed by the insurer to have a low expected benefit-cost ratio. While Congress forbids Medicare to let cost-benefit analysis guide its coverage decisions, private insurers are not subject to that constraint.

Finally, managed care techniques might include the external coordination of medical treatments that involved multiple providers of health care, especially the treatment of chronic disease, often by subcontracted companies specializing in care coordination.

These are the major forms of managed care insurance contracts.

Health Maintenance Organizations (H.M.O.): These contracts represent the most restrictive form of managed care. The insurer provides covered health care benefits through a network of health care providers under contract to the insurer, with zero or very modest cost-sharing at point of service on the part of the insured.

In a staff model H.M.O., the insurer actually owns the health care facilities and health professionals are the insurer’s salaried employees. More commonly, the H.M.O. merely contracts with a set of otherwise independent providers that are paid negotiated fees or, for primary care, sometimes annual capitation payments per patient on the doctor’s list.

Usually, in an H.M.O., the insured is asked to select one from a roster of primary-care doctors who regulates referrals to specialists. In principle, under an H.M.O. contract the insured is confined to the H.M.O.’s network of providers for covered services and pays in full out-of-pocket for health care procured outside that network.

Preferred Provider Organizations (P.P.O.): A popular alternative to the strictly limited choice under H.M.O.’s is a Preferred Provider Organization. Under that contract, the insurer negotiates prices with a network of “preferred” providers of care and the insured can contact specialists without a required referral by a primary-care doctor.

For the most part these providers in the network are paid on a fee-for-service basis as well, often X times the Medicare fee schedule, where X could be smaller than 1 but usually exceeds 1, where X is negotiated between the insurer and providers. The insured usually faces an annual deductible and relatively modest copays (dollar amounts, not fractions of the fees) if they obtain care from a provider in the network.

If the insured obtains care from a provider outside the P.P.O.’s network, the insurer will reimburse the insured only at what the insurer considers a reasonable fee, leaving the insured to pay any billed fee above that reimbursement. According to a report by the American Health Insurance Plans, these out-of-network fees can be exorbitantly high, which serves as a natural constraint on the free choice of provider under P.P.O.’s.

Point of Service (P.O.S.) Contracts: These contracts are combinations of H.M.O. and P.P.O. contracts. The insured still must select a primary-care doctor who coordinates the insured’s overall medical care, but patients can procure covered care from providers outside the H.M.O.’s network, albeit at high rates of cost-sharing. In that regard the arrangement resembles a P.P.O.

High-Deductible Health Plans (H.D.H.P.): These contracts couple indemnity- or preferred-provider (P.P.O.) insurance with very high annual deductibles, sometimes exceeding $10,000 for a family. The theory is that by putting the insured’s skin in the game, these plans will give patients an incentive to shop around for cost-effective health care. Some call them “Consumer-Directed Health Plans” (C.D.H.P.’s), because in theory they elevate “consumers” (formerly “patients”) to act as the chief managers of their own health care. However, the requisite information for shopping around has not generally been available to patients, forcing them to function in health care as would blindfolded shoppers in a department store.

What the critics of traditional, government-run Medicare actually find wanting in traditional Medicare is that it basically is classic indemnity insurance. It offers its enrollees free choice of doctor, hospital and other providers, and doctors relatively free choice of treatments, while most private insurers typically no longer do.

In other words, the complaint is that health care rendered under traditional Medicare is unmanaged care. These features, of course, are precisely the reason why in the eyes of the public traditional Medicare is still one of the most popular insurance products.

A case can be made, on theoretical and sometimes empirical grounds, that properly managed or coordinated care can on average yield superior medical treatments, at lower cost, than completely unmanaged care under classical indemnity insurance.

The problem has been and continues to be that this is not the folklore among patients or doctors. The latter, as noted, generally believe they can manage their patients’ care properly without outside interference into their clinical decisions. Among patients and doctors, the term managed care is still not quite respectable.

This can explain why critics of traditional Medicare delicately but nonsensically prefer to decry it as being fee for service rather than as free-choice-of-providers insurance or unmanaged-care insurance.

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Baca shifts course on compliance with deportation program

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has reversed his support for a controversial deportation program, announcing Wednesday that he will not comply with federal requests to detain suspected illegal immigrants arrested in low-level crimes.

The sheriff's dramatic turnaround came a day after California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris issued a legal directive advising that compliance with the requests is discretionary, not mandatory.

Until then, Baca had insisted that he would honor the requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold some defendants for up to 48 hours. He was an outspoken opponent of the Trust Act, which would have required California law enforcement officials to disregard the requests in many cases, declaring that he would defy the measure if it passed.

Baca has also been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union for allegedly denying bail to immigration detainees.

Now, he appears ready to do more or less what was proposed in the Trust Act, which was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September.

The change of heart from Baca, a Republican in a heavily Democratic county, comes as GOP leaders are warming to immigration reform in an effort to counteract dismal support from Latino voters. Last month, Baca closed the 1,100-bed Mira Loma immigration detention center, which earned his agency up to $154 a day for each detainee, after contract negotiations with ICE broke down.

None of those considerations were at play, a Baca spokesman said. The sheriff's reversal was prompted solely by Harris' opinion, which contradicted advice from Los Angeles County attorneys that the requests were mandatory, said the spokesman, Steve Whitmore.

Baca joins Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck, who announced a similar policy in October. San Francisco and Santa Clara counties also decline to honor some types of ICE holds.

The change may not take effect until early next year. Baca's staff must first flesh out the details of the new policy, which would apply only to those arrested in misdemeanors who do not have significant criminal records. The department would still honor federal detention requests for those accused of serious or violent crimes.

Under the federal Secure Communities program, all arrestees' fingerprints are sent to immigration officials, who flag suspected illegal immigrants and request that they be held for up to 48 hours until transfer to federal custody.

Secure Communities has come under fire for ensnaring minor offenders when its stated purpose is to deport dangerous criminals and repeat immigration violators. According to federal statistics, fewer than half of those deported in Los Angeles County since the program's inception in 2008 have committed felonies or multiple misdemeanors. Critics say immigrants have become fearful of cooperating with police.

"The last thing we want is victims to be frightened to come forward," Whitmore said.

ICE officials said Baca's new policy is in line with federal priorities and will affect only a "very small number" of cases.

"The identification and removal of criminal offenders and other public safety threats is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's highest enforcement priority," the agency said in a statement.

Immigrant rights advocates called Baca's announcement a long overdue breakthrough.

"This will send a very strong message nationwide that in ... the most multicultural city in the nation, the sheriff is there to protect and to serve, not to deport," said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, communications director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Supporters of the Trust Act, which was reintroduced in modified form by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) earlier this week, said it is still necessary because detention policies should not vary by jurisdiction.

"It's imperative that California have a uniform statewide policy. It's essential that people not receive different treatment under the law as they're driving up and down the 5," said Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Baca has not taken a position on the new Trust Act, which is likely to evolve during the legislative process, Whitmore said.

cindy.chang@latimes.com

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Step to the Beat

Going out for a run used to just be about lacing up your sneakers. Now when you head out, you can feel like you’re drowning in tech: GPS watches, sports bands, sweat-proof earbuds, smartphone apps with cadence-matching playlists. And that’s before we even talk about what’s on your feet.

But we wouldn’t subject ourselves to this mountain of gadgetry if it didn’t really help. As our goals become more minute and more ambitious, training “by feel” doesn’t cut it anymore — you need the hard performance data and sophisticated tracking abilities only things like wearable sensors can provide.

Wahoo Fitness, a longtime favorite among plugged-in fitness freaks, has recently introduced a few new activity-monitoring gadgets. I tested the company’s latest real-time pace monitor, called the Stride sensor ($55), as well as a couple of heart-rate monitors. I also tested the Wahoo Key, a $60 dongle for your iPhone that links up to your sensors and passes the data along to your favorite fitness-tracking apps.

I started by setting up the Wahoo Key, which plugs into an iPhone’s 30-pin dock connector. According to Wahoo, iPhone 5 users will need to use a Lightning adapter until the company makes a new design. Setup is pretty easy, but the app guides you through the process, making the instruction manual (which is annoyingly reliant on QR codes) mostly redundant. Once the key was plugged in, I had the Wahoo Fitness app running smoothly in less than a minute. Links to download all the major compatible apps, such as MapMyRun and RunKeeper, were displayed as well.

Although a “keychain” is available for the Wahoo Key, it’s small enough to lose easily. Also, I was nervous about how it protrudes awkwardly from the end of my phone, and I bet it would snap right off if I dropped the phone.

Next, I strapped on the Stride Sensor, which you attach to your shoelaces. I clipped the sensor onto my shoe and it stayed comfortably in place through an entire half-marathon.

The sensor tracks your running pace using a pair of 3-axis accelerometers. It easily links to the phone (via the Wahoo Key), where all the data is displayed and recorded. There’s a slight delay in pace monitoring of only a few seconds, which is totally acceptable. Also, Wahoo lets you program your height to make its readings more accurate. It only lets you go up to 7 feet, so very few runners are going to feel left out.

The collected data could be very helpful to runners trying to teach themselves what various paces feel like. The stats of distance, time and pace are all displayed on the iPhone in large enough text to make them easy readable at the gym or mid-race.

Not content to stop there, I also strapped on a couple of the company’s heart-rate devices: the Wahoo Blue HR Heart Rate Strap ($80), and the Wahoo Soft Heart Rate Strap ($50). The biggest difference between them is that the Blue HR is Bluetooth-enabled (hello, iPhone 5 people!) while the other strap requires the Wahoo Key, in all of its last-generation technological glory.

Of all the goodies Wahoo currently offers, the ability to monitor your heart rate and have your BPM displayed on your phone is the most useful. Target heart rates are essential to a well-structured training program, so this is critical data, and Wahoo delivers it with great accuracy.

According to the Wahoo website, the Blue HR will connect to the iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, the latest-generation iPads and the iPad mini. Be warned: The sensors only talk to each other for a distance of up to 10 feet, and carrying an iPad around the gym could get awkward. I could see a paired iPad being useful on a treadmill, or if you work with a trainer who’s holding one while hovering nearby.

The straps that hold the heart-rate monitors against your chest are also comfortable and shouldn’t bother runners (or cyclists) on even their longer workouts. Wahoo also offers an armband to carry your iPhone while you sweat ($30). The longest run I completed while testing the band was 4 miles long, and the neoprene never chaffed or got uncomfortable, but it kept my iPhone 4 very stable.

For athletes who devour tech like GU on mile 10, Wahoo Fitness is a well-known name. If you’re just getting into tracking your runs or bike rides, the company’s gear is a good place to start. I’d recommend looking at the Bluetooth stuff first, since it works with the newer devices via wireless pairing, and you can avoid the annoyance of the protruding 30-pin dongle.

WIRED Real-time pace monitoring is valuable for undertaking tempo runs. Heart-rate sensors give the number junkies the accuracy and reporting they crave. Gear is comfortable and keeps everything in place without fuss.

TIRED Everything is iOS-centric. Wahoo Key sticks out too far, and doesn’t work with newer Apple devices unless you have an adapter. The Wahoo Key could easily be lost. Uploading music to the Wahoo app isn’t worth the hassle.

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UK’s Kate leaves hospital after morning sickness

LONDON (Reuters) – Prince William‘s pregnant wife Kate left the King Edward VII hospital in central London on Thursday where she had spent four days being treated for acute morning sickness.

Accompanied by her husband, Kate, 30, appeared at the steps of the hospital smiling and holding a bouquet of yellow flowers. Neither she nor William spoke to waiting reporters before being driven way.

Kate, who married the second-in-line to the throne in April last year, has been suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum, an acute morning sickness which causes severe nausea and vomiting and requires supplementary hydration and nutrients.

There has been no announcement about when the baby is due, although the prince’s spokesman has said Kate is less than 12 weeks pregnant.

(Reporting by Stephen Addison; Editing by Tim Castle)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: How the 'Death With Dignity' Law Failed in Massachusetts

On election night, Jim Carberry and others who had worked to put a “Death With Dignity” law on the Massachusetts ballot gathered in the back room of a Waltham restaurant and watched their effort go down to narrow defeat.

“We were disheartened,” Mr. Carberry recalled. “For a lot of us, it was personal.”

His wife Margie, diagnosed with a rare brain tumor in 1995, had sought aggressive treatment for years – many surgeries and procedures, lots of radiation – hoping to see her younger daughter graduate from high school in 2011. She survived long enough to attend the ceremony. Then, with no medical options remaining, she asked to have her feeding tube removed. It took her five weeks to die. She was 51.

“I made her a promise that I would do whatever I could to keep other people from going through what we did,” said Mr. Carberry, who is 56. He gave endless media interviews and appeared in a TV ad with his mother-in-law, urging a yes vote on Question 2.

Question 2, which would have allowed doctors to prescribe drugs with which terminally ill patients could end their lives, drew less national attention than Elizabeth Warren’s Senate victory. But for those concerned with end-of-life decisions, Massachusetts was a major battle in an ongoing campaign.

Heading into election season, the volunteers and staffers who had collected signatures to put the law on the ballot could point to solid public approval. In August and September, polls by the Boston Globe, Suffolk University and others found 60 percent support or more.

By late October, however, Question 2 could no longer claim a majority. It lost by about 68,000 votes, a 51 to 49 percent defeat.

This was a fight its opponents felt they couldn’t afford to lose. “If the proponents could pass this in 40-percent-Catholic Massachusetts, they’d be running through the other states within five years,” said Joe Baerlein, whose public relations and lobbying firm Rasky Baerlein marshaled the opposition.

Its early research showed that Massachusetts residents believed in individual choice, and respect for others’ choices, about death and dying, Mr. Baerlein said. So the anti-Question 2 forces didn’t attack on direct moral or ethical grounds; instead, its ads took aim at certain provisions and how they were worded.

For instance, the proposed law — which included multiple safeguards and waiting periods to prevent impulsive requests, coercion or abuse — required a physician to “recommend” that a terminally ill patient notify his next of kin of his intent.

But it didn’t “require” family notification. “How would you feel if you came home and your mother had decided to take her life?” Mr. Baerlein said. “Voters couldn’t get their arms around that.”

The law also required a prescribing physician to refer a patient to a psychiatrist or psychologist “if the physician believes the patient may have a disorder causing impaired judgment,” like depression. But opposition ads criticized it for not mandating that a psychiatrist be one of the two physicians a patient had to consult.

Opponents also pointed out that medical prognoses — the law required that a patient be within six months of death — can be wrong. One ad, almost a counter to Dignity 2012’s spot featuring Mr. Carberry, showed a young widow whose husband lived a year and a half longer than expected. She was grateful he hadn’t “made a terrible decision based upon a doctor’s guess.”

“In the end, even if you believed you should control your end of life decision-making, there are too many flaws in the language,” Mr. Baerlein said.

To supporters, however, none of this parsing mattered nearly as much as money. They were vastly outspent.

The two groups pushing for Question 2 spent a little over $1 million this year, state finance records show, the bulk of which came from national groups like the Compassion and Choices Action Network and the Death With Dignity National Center.

The two major opposition groups spent close to $5 million, mostly on TV and radio ads in the campaign’s final weeks. “It’s a tactic they’ve used in other states, to blitz the airwaves with commercials,” said Peg Sandeen, who heads the Death With Dignity National Center.

Though some opposition money came from anti-abortion groups and the conservative American Principles Project (it gave $175,000, and its board chairman personally contributed $523,000), most came from Catholic organizations and archdioceses around the country, including $450,000 from the Knights of Columbus and $250,000 from the Archdiocese of Boston.

Supporters of Question 2 couldn’t counter that onslaught. “It’s so easy to scare people on this issue; that’s what happened in Massachusetts,” Ms. Sandeen said. “Fear-based arguments work.”

Data from the two states where physician-assisted suicide is legal shows that “slippery-slope” fears are probably overblown. Very few patients take advantage of death with dignity laws: Last year, just 114 people received lethal prescriptions in Oregon and 103 in Washington. In both states, about a third of those patients ultimately didn’t use the drugs.

It seems unlikely that any change in language could make an assisted-suicide law acceptable to the Catholic leadership.

But the campaign continues and so, undoubtedly, will the opposition. In neighboring Vermont, Gov. Peter Shumlin said last week he believes the legislature will pass a death with dignity law this session. In Massachusetts, Ms. Sandeen said, since supporters must wait until after 2016 to put the law on the ballot again, they will take their case to the legislature.

Mr. Carberry was ready to re-enlist. “I’d like to think that it’s not over,” he said.

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

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California's gay-conversion ban up in air after 2 judges disagree

SACRAMENTO — The fate of the state's new law banning gay-conversion therapy for underage Californians is uncertain after a federal judge said it may infringe on free-speech rights — and a second jurist disagreed.

U.S. District Judge William Shubb said Monday the law, set to take effect Jan. 1, may inhibit the 1st Amendment rights of therapists who oppose homosexuality. He issued an injunction barring the state from enforcing the measure against three plaintiffs who sued to block it, until he can make a broader ruling on its merits.

Within 24 hours, a second federal judge declined to interfere with the law in a separate case brought by other therapists and parents, who asserted that it violated free-speech, parental and religious rights. That action was immediately appealed.

Unless the appeal is granted, the law will take effect as scheduled, exempting the two therapists and aspiring therapist who won the injunction, according to the state attorney general's office.

Gay-rights groups defended the first-in-the-nation law that prohibits minors from being subject to therapies aimed at changing their sexual orientation from gay to straight.

"There are a number of other states looking to follow California's example with this law,'' said Shannon Minter, an attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Minter's group is working with activists in New Jersey to make it the next state to ban controversial conversion practices, which employ techniques such as aversion therapy.

Clinton Anderson of the American Psychological Assn., among others, said there is no evidence that conversion therapy works. "Some of the people who went through it say the therapy made their lives worse,'' said Anderson, who added that depression increased for some.

Anderson said he did not know of other therapies banned by law. The practice of lobotomy was discontinued, but that was by a consensus of the profession, he said.

California's conversion-therapy ban, approved amid an intense lobbying campaign by gay-rights advocates, was one of the signature bills passed by the Legislature this year. Under the law, therapists who practice conversion therapy on minors risk loss of their licenses or other discipline by the state.

State Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris said she would continue to "vigorously'' defend the law as courts weigh its merits.

It is rare that two federal judges on the same district bench reach opposite conclusions on the same issues, legal analysts said.

"If two district court judges come out opposite ways, ultimately the 9th Circuit is going to have to resolve it," said UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

He said the outcome would depend on how the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals views the conversion therapy law. Doctors can't be prohibited from expressing their views to patients, but government may ban a medical procedure or treatment it believes is ineffective or dangerous, Chemerinsky said.

The plaintiffs before Shubb's Sacramento court are a licensed marriage therapist and ordained minister, a psychiatrist, and a former conversion therapy client who is studying to practice the technique on others. They are represented by the conservative Pacific Justice Institute.

"This victory sends a clear signal to all those who feel they can stifle religious freedom, free speech and the rights of parents without being contested," said institute President Brad Dacus.

Shubb wrote in his 38-page ruling that the law, by state Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Los Angeles), "likely… bans a mental health provider from expressing his or her viewpoints about homosexuality as part of … treatment."

The judge also found fault with evidence cited by proponents of the law that conversion therapy puts clients at risk of suicide and depression. He wrote that it is "based on questionable and scientifically incomplete studies that may not have included minors."

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller in Sacramento rejected a petition from three other therapists and some of their clients to block enforcement of the law.

Citing the opinions of 10 groups that conversion therapy doesn't work, Mueller ruled that the Legislature and governor had sufficient grounds to enact the ban. A study by a task force of the American Psychological Assn., she noted, found that conversion therapy can "pose critical health risks'' to those who undergo it.

"The findings, recommended practices and opinions of 10 professional associations of mental health experts is no small quantum of information,'' she wrote.

Mueller also said there is no fundamental right to choose a specific mental health treatment the state has reasonably deemed harmful to minors. Besides, she said, parents are free to seek such counseling through religious institutions as long as licensed therapists are not involved.

"The court need not engage in an exercise of legislative mind-reading to find the California Legislature and the state's governor could have had a legitimate reason for enacting SB 1172,'' Mueller wrote.

That decision was immediately appealed by the plaintiffs, including Encino psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, represented by the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, which represents conservative causes.

Lieu said he expects both cases to be decided in favor of his law.

"On behalf of the untold number of children who can expect to be spared the psychological abuse imposed by reparative therapy, I'm thrilled that today's ruling by Judge Mueller will continue to protect our children from serious harm," Lieu said in a statement.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Times staff writers Evan Halper in Sacramento and Maura Dolan in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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Machine Gun Expo Is Down-Home Americana Gone Ballistic

There are thousands of gun shows in America each year, but machine gun shows are a rare spectacle. At the two-day hands-on shootfest that is the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot & Trade Show (OFASTS) exhibitors rent out fully automatic weapons to the public so that they may annihilate refrigerators, ovens and other household appliances.

Photojournalist Pete Muller recently scratched a years-long itch to visit OFASTS and documented his trip.

“I grew up in a congested and heavily regulated area of the northeast and consequently had little exposure to guns and gun culture,” says Muller. “What was happening at OFASTS was unlike anything I’d seen or experienced.”

Muller has seen a lot of guns. Between 2009 and 2012, he lived in Sudan documenting the tense transition from civil war to independence for the South — even now the peace agreement on which independence rests remains fragile and not without skirmish. While Muller pursued his long-term story in Sudan, he was also thinking of gun culture in the United States, specifically the recreational use of machine guns. That’s when OFASTS came on his radar.

Held annually in Wyandotte, Okla., OFASTS is — alongside the Knob Creek Machine Gun Show (Kentucky) and the Big Sandy Shoot Out (Arizona) – one of the largest machine gun shows in the country. Over a hundred vendors trade machine guns there, with prices in the thousands and sometimes in the tens of thousands. Though prices are high, the opportunity for machine gun enthusiasts to shoot others’ weapons is a big draw.

Whether your fancy is the M248 SAW, which fires 750 rounds per minute, or the FN M240B, which is the U.S. armed forces current-issue medium machine gun, there’s a firearm for everyone. There’s also a dynamite crew on hand to beef up the explosions. At $10 a day or $18 for the weekend (under-10s get in free), it’s good bang for your buck. Gun and magazine rental prices vary.

“Given the politicized nature of the gun discussion, I wanted to better understand this fundamental element of our national ethos,” says Muller, who was skeptical of others’ viewpoints on gun issues and wanted to see OFASTS for himself.

South Sudan and Oklahoma are extremely far apart in both geography and culture, yet Muller says that generally communities’ proximity to state security institutions shape their affinity for and possession of firearms. OFASTS is the type of exposition special to rural America; permits for machine gun shows aren’t very likely to be passed out in urban areas.

“People living in the periphery are often more likely to possess weapons as a means of insuring their personal security. This propensity increases, of course, if the isolation in which they live is, or is perceived to be, fraught with danger,” says Muller.

OFASTS culminates in “Kill the Car,” a moment when every gun-wielding attendee takes aim at a free-wheeling, explosives-packed car rolling down a hillside. Within a minute, tens of thousands of bullets pepper the condemned beater. Heaps of empty shells scatter the mainline shooting gallery.

During Muller’s stay, attendees ranged from lawyers and investors to IT experts and even an unnamed former Apple executive.

“Owning legal machine guns is an expensive hobby. Most of the gun owners are pretty well-heeled,” he says.

For those accustomed to guns, especially automatics, events like OFASTS can be as welcoming and innocuous as a state fair. For outsiders, the shows and the photos from them can be quite shocking and, in some cases, disturbing.

“I find it somewhat peculiar when people seem surprised by the ongoing American love affair with guns. The country was acquired in a way that required guns. Expansion of the American frontier was a severely violent process in which the gun played a central role, its sanitized memory has since become a pillar of white American nostalgia. It represents notions of freedom, individualism and valor and all of those things are tied to patriotism,” says Muller.

Follow Pete Muller on his blog on Twitter and Facebook.

All images: Pete Muller

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“Family Guy” executive producer lands animated cop series with Fox

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Despite – or perhaps because of – a robust cartoon slate that includes “The Simpsons,” “American Dad” and “Family Guy,” Fox apparently feels that it’s just not animated enough.

The network has given a 13-episode order to a new animated series, “Murder Police,” from “Family Guy” executive producer David Goodman and Jason Ruiz, Fox said Tuesday.

The series, which will be produced by Bento Box Animation (“Bob’s Burgers,” “Brickleberry”) via 20th Century Fox Television, centers around a dedicated, but inept detective and his colleagues – some perverted, some corrupt, some just plain lazy – in a twisted city precinct. Goodman and Ruiz created and wrote the series, with Goodman as executive producer and Ruiz as co-executive producer.

In addition to “Family Guy,” Goodman executive-produced Fox’s short-lived animated series “Allen Gregory,” which failed to receive a pickup after airing a handful of episodes last year.

Ruiz is one of the writers discovered through the network’s Fox Inkubation program. He will also voice the program, along with “MADtv” alum Will Sasso, Chi McBride, Horatio Sanz of “Saturday Night Live,” and other voice actors.

“David and Jason came to us with a really fresh take on law enforcement that we’ve never seen before,” said Kevin Reilly, Chairman of Entertainment, Fox Broadcasting Company. “With ‘Murder Police,’ these guys are taking a staple genre of television – the cop show – and turning it on its head by pushing the warped comedic boundaries that only animation can offer. It’s the kind of show our Animation Domination fans will absolutely love, and I can’t wait to introduce it next season.”

“Murder Police” will premiere during the 2013-2014 season.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: For the Old, Less Sense of Whom to Trust

There’s a reason so many older people fall for financial scams, new research suggests. They don’t respond as readily to visual cues that suggest a person might be untrustworthy, and their brains don’t send out as many warning signals that ignite a danger ahead gut response.

The research, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show that older adults’ vulnerability to fraud may be rooted in age-related neurological changes.

Specifically, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that an area in the brain known as the anterior insula was muted when older people looked at photographs of suspicious-looking individuals. This part of the brain activates gut-level feelings that help individuals interpret the reliability of other people and assess potential risks and rewards associated with social interactions.

In one part of the U.C.L.A. study, both younger and older adults were asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of people portrayed in 60 photographs while undergoing brain scans. When the younger adults (21 altogether, from 23 to 46 years of age) labeled a person “not trustworthy,” their anterior insulas lit up. But this wasn’t true for older adults (23 altogether, age 55 to 80).

“The warning signals that convey a sense of potential danger to younger adults just don’t seem to be there for older adults,” said Shelley Taylor, the lead researcher and a psychology professor at U.C.L.A.

In another part of the study, researchers asked 119 older adults (55 to 84 years old) and 24 younger adults (age 20 to 42) to rate people in photographs as trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy. Signs they were potentially untrustworthy included people with insincere smiles, averted gazes and postures that “leaned away” rather than toward the camera, among others, Dr. Taylor said.

Older adults were equally adept at identifying people judged to be trustworthy or neutral, but much more likely to miss signs of those who may be untrustworthy and view suspicious-looking people as approachable, the study found.

“We believe what’s going on is that older adults have a bias toward positive emotional experience and this keeps them from recognizing negative cues,” Dr. Taylor said.

This so-called “positivity effect” has been documented through research by Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology and public policy at Stanford University, and it explains why older adults are, on the whole, happier than younger adults.

Asked to comment about the new study, Ms. Carstensen said in an e-mail that it was “very well done,” and observed that for older adults, “there are likely many benefits of looking on the bright side. However, there are likely some contexts where looking away from the negative and focusing on the positive is not good,” including financial scams and fraud.

Alexander Todorov, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, called the findings “interesting,” but warned that “there is an implicit assumption that these trustworthiness evaluations based on facial appearance are accurate. This is far from clear.”

Dr. Taylor became acutely aware of financial fraud practiced on the elderly almost 20 years ago when her elderly father handed $17,000 to two men who approached him on the street and walked with him to his bank.

“I got descriptions of the two men from someone who lived nearby — one had few teeth, both were dressed in a slovenly manner, and they’d been seen sleeping in doorways and were using the drug rehab center nearby,” the professor explained in an e-mail.

In other words, they would have been viewed skeptically by most people, but weren’t seen in that light by Dr. Taylor’s father.

Statistics show that financial exploitation of the elderly is on the rise. According to a study published last year by the MetLife Mature Market Institute and the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse, elder financial abuse — everything from fraudulent sweepstakes to bank accounts emptied out by guardians — totaled $2.9 billion in 2010, a 12 percent increase from only two years before.

Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office weighed in on the issue, noting the inadequacy of existing safeguards and calling for a new national strategy to address the problem.

On Tuesday my colleague Paula Span wrote about a just-published consumer guide, “Protect Your Pocketbook,” intended for older adults and families who wanted to understand what put them at risk, how to prevent fraud, and where to turn for help.

As for Dr. Taylor, she advises that seniors never agree on the spot to a phone offer or a pitch from a door-to-door salesman. “Either hang up or wait and get someone else involved in your life to evaluate what’s being presented,” she said.

With financial fraud, almost half the time seniors end up being taken in by a caretaker or someone posing as a friend. “Make absolutely sure that you’ve carefully checked out the people taking care of an older relative,” or any “surprising new friend” that you’ve never heard of before that’s now on the scene, she tells family members.

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Los Angeles and Long Beach Ports to Reopen After Strike

LOS ANGELES — After an eight-day strike that crippled the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, clerical workers from a local office of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on Tuesday night agreed to a new contract with the terminal operators at the ports. Union members will return to work Wednesday morning.

Nick Ut/Associated Press

Trucks waited in long lines to load at the Port of Long Beach, Calif. on Tuesday.

As the strike dragged into its second week, both sides had come under increasing pressure from local officials to end the dispute, which had threatened to derail the Southern California economy during the holiday season. Officials from the Port of Long Beach estimated that $650 million in trade has been idled each day of the strike and a federal mediator arrived on Tuesday to help broker a deal.

“I am pleased to announce that an agreement has been reached between labor and management that will bring to an end the eight-day strike that has cost our local economy billions of dollars,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in a statement released Tuesday night. “With the strike now ending, we must waste no time in getting the nation’s busiest port complex’s operations back up to speed.”

Although only about 600 clerical workers had been participating in the strike, they managed to shut down 10 of the 14 shipping container terminals at the two ports, because thousands of longshoremen from the union would not cross the picket lines.

“This victory was accomplished because of support from the entire family of 10,000 members” of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the harbor community, Robert McEllrath, the president of the union, said in a statement announcing the agreement.

Neither the union nor the terminal operators offered details of the new contract agreement on Tuesday night.

Steve Getzug, a spokesman for the Harbor Employers Association, which represents the terminal operators, said the union voted on the proposal from the employers on Tuesday shortly before the federal mediator arrived. He added that the deal included “some compromise on staffing issues that were important to the employers.”

“And, importantly, a deal has been reached,” Mr. Getzug said. “The longshoremen expected to return 7 a.m., ready to get the cargo moving again.”

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Chino Hills seeks to close home used by pregnant Chinese women

A Chino Hills residence allegedly housing women from China who want to give birth to U.S.-citizen children is on the verge of being shut down by the city after complaints about traffic and a sewage spill.

The home is on a hilltop at the end of a long driveway on Woodglen Drive, an area zoned for single family houses. City officials have issued a cease and desist order, alleging that the site is being used as a hotel in a rural residential zone. They plan to take the property owner to court.

"Who the customer base is, is not our concern," said city spokeswoman Denise Cattern. "Our concern is that it's a hotel."

A website that city officials believe is associated with the business describes a full range of services, from shopping trips for pregnant women to assistance obtaining American passports for newborns.

A 30-day stay at the Chino Hills facility, along with a month of prenatal care, costs $10,500 to $11,500, according to the Chinese-language website, www.asiamchild.com.

Asiam Child is based in Shanghai, with branches in Anhui province and Nanjing, the website says.

The property owner, Hai Yong Wu, did not return a call seeking comment. A man who left the hotel in a black BMW on Monday afternoon would not speak to reporters.

So-called birth tourism appears to be an active but largely under-the-radar industry in Southern California. One local Chinese phone book has five pages of listings for birthing centers, where women from China and Taiwan stay for a month or so before going home with their U.S.-citizen babies. When the children get older, they may return here to study, perhaps paving the way for the rest of the family to immigrate more easily.

In San Gabriel last year, code enforcement officials shut down a facility where about 10 mothers and seven newborns were staying.

Federal immigration officials say there is no law prohibiting pregnant women from entering the U.S. But obtaining a visa through fraud would be a crime, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Chino Hills officials have notified federal authorities about the residence. Kice said she could not confirm whether ICE is investigating.

Neighbors report seeing groups of pregnant women walking along the quiet cul de sac. Cars from the residence sometimes drive down the street at unsafe speeds, they said.

In addition to the single-family zoning violation, the city has cited the owner for allegedly constructing additional rooms without a permit. A sewage spill estimated at 2,000 gallons also prompted a cease and desist order.

"It would be nice to have my neighborhood back. It was a quiet little street," said neighbor Sonya Valez.

On Saturday, a group called Not in Chino Hills staged a street-corner protest against the site.

"They go back," said Rossana Mitchell, a co-founder of the group. "They don't pay taxes, they don't assimilate."

cindy.chang@latimes.com

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Meet the Dancing Otter That Helped Obama Win the Presidency

It would happen a couple of times each month at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. Ben Hagen would giggle and then send out a web link to his coworkers, the geeks who ran the technology operation for the Obama reelection campaign.

Soon, the sound of Kenny Loggins’ inspirational 1979 hit “This Is It” would fill the office, and the dancing Otter would pop up on machine after machine. It was Hagan’s way of telling the team he’d found another bug in their web code.

The geeks who built Obama’s internet infrastructure sat side-by-side, in a long row in the campaign’s Chicago headquarters, and sometimes, you could hear Kenny Loggins echo down the line. “The laughing would kind of work its way down the row and you’d see people’s screens light up with dancing otters and the sound progressing down the row,” Hagen says. “It was a pretty gratifying experience.”

It was gratifying because Hagan — a security engineer with the campaign — was helping to lock down Obama’s websites, securing them from a common web programming error called a cross-site scripting bug. The otter was the campaign’s version of the RickRoll — an annoying internet joke — but it also carried a message. In essence, Hagan was publicly shaming people into writing better code.

“I think public embarrassment is a very important part of security,” Hagan said last week, at a conference in Las Vegas dedicated to Amazon’s cloud services. “Once you find a problem, embarrass the person who made it and then help them understand how to fix it.”

It’s an unusual method, but it seems to work — and it’s indicative of the campaign’s overall approach to technology. Traditionally, political campaigns are far from the cutting edge of tech, but Obama 2012 was different. The team operated very much like a Silicon Valley startup. They grew quickly, building an enormous code base using many of the popular open-source tools that underpin companies such as Google and Facebook and Twitter, and they built it atop Amazon’s cloud platform, unafraid to put their code on third-party servers.

Hagan chose the Kenny Loggins music because “This is it” was a popular sound sample in the team’s Campfire chat software, and he chose the dancing otter because, well, he just liked it. We laugh every time we see it. But make no mistake: it aimed to solve a serious problem for the campaign. Hagen was plugging security holes that could allow hackers to post anything they wanted on one of the campaign’s websites, which were used by tens of millions of Obama supporters.

Whenever he’d find a cross-site scripting flaw on a website being tested on the campaign’s staging network, he’d exploit the flaw and insert the otter. It was slightly humiliating to the web programmers, but they enjoyed it too. “You can only describe the otter dance as erotic,” said Scott VanDenPlas, the tech team’s development and operations lead, speaking last week at the same conference.

The move to AWS was equally unusual. VanDenPlas called it a first for a presidential campaign. “All of us came from a traditional ops world,” he said. “It was a little bit of a gamble in that we didn’t have the full experience at the time. We just kind of trusted that we would hire very smart people that would figure it out.”

It all worked out pretty well. While the Republican’s get-out-the-vote system bugged out on election night, the Obama campaign nailed it on the tech side. And thanks to Kenny Loggins and the dancing otter, they had more than a little fun too.

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Kutcher’s Steve Jobs, Gordon-Levitt among Sundance premieres

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ashton Kutcher‘s turn as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s directorial debut about a modern day Don Juan are leading a slew of star-studded premieres unveiled Monday for the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

Kutcher stars in “Jobs,” a biographical look at the career rise of Jobs from wayward hippie to charismatic inventor and entrepreneur, which Sundance said Monday will officially close the indie film festival backed by Robert Redford that runs January 17 to January 27.

The premiere lineup also features Gordon-Levitt directing, writing and starring in “Don Jon’s Addiction,” about a self-centered porn-addict attempting to reform his ways opposite Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore and Tony Danza.

Behind-the-scenes tales of pornography will also be explored in British director Michael Winterbottom‘s “The Look of Love,” starring Steve Coogan and based on British adult magazine publisher and entrepreneur Paul Raymond.

“Lovelace,” starring Amanda Seyfried and James Franco, tells the story of porn star Linda Lovelace famed for the film “Deep Throat.”

Sundance, the top U.S. film festival for independent cinema held in Park City, Utah, unveiled the premieres section – which typically feature more established directors – after it announced its competition films last week.

Adding to the premieres list is “Before Midnight,” director Richard Linklater’s third film collaborating with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy after “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” in which the audience encounters their characters nine years later in Greece.

New Zealand director Jane Campion will screen her new six-hour epic, “Top Of The Lake,” a haunting mystery about a pregnant 12-year-old girl who disappears, with Holly Hunter.

Other big-name actors in the lineup include Steve Carell and Toni Collette in “The Way, Way Back,” Naomi Watts and Robin Wright in “Two Mothers”, Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen in “Very Good Girls,” and Shia LaBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood in “The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman.”

Australian actresses Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Jacki Weaver star in psychological thriller “Stoker,” which marks South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut.

WIKILEAKS, POLITICS LEAD DOCUMENTARIES

Among documentaries premiering at Sundance in January is Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney’s insight on WikiLeaks, the power of the Internet and the beginning of an information war in “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks.”

Author and documentarian Sebastian Junger chronicles the life of late photojournalist Tim Hetherington in “Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?” after Hetherington’s death in Libya in 2011. The photojournalist had collaborated with Junger on the 2010 Oscar-nominated film “Restrepo” about the Afghanistan war.

“The World According to Dick Cheney” promises to examine the former vice president while “Anita” profiles how Anita Hill’s allegations in 1991 of sexual harassment against then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas brought sexual politics into the national consciousness for the next two decades.

“Linsanity” offers a portrait of basketballer Jeremy Lin and “Running From Crazy” follows actress Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, and her insights into her family’s mental illness and suicide.

“Pandora’s Promise” looks at a growing number of environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists changing their minds after decades of opposition to support nuclear power.

Continuing the rise of music documentaries in the last several years, Foo Fighters’ musician Dave Grohl looks at the history of Sound City studios in California, where Grohl’s former band Nirvana had recorded their classic 1991 album “Nevermind.”

Veteran Los Angeles rock band The Eagles will also showcase their past in “The History of the Eagles Part 1.”

(Reporting By Christine Kearney, editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Cynthia Osterman)

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The New Old Age Blog: On the Alert for Fraud

Unlike some forms of elder abuse, financial exploitation leaves no visible scars. It is under-reported and hard to prosecute. Adding to the tangled dynamics, the abuser is frequently a family member, increasing the victim’s humiliation and denial.

Better by far to try to prevent financial abuse before it wipes out an older person’s assets and hopes for a secure retirement. Though this has proved easier in theory than in practice — most authorities believe financial exploitation and abuse is actually increasing — vigilance represents a crucial first step.

The National Center on Elder Abuse and the Eldercare Locator (the federal service that helps older adults and caregivers find local programs and agencies) have just published “Protect Your Pocketbook,” a brief consumer guide for families and their older relatives. It maps out risk factors, warning signals and prevention strategies and tells where to turn for help.

You can download it from the Web  or order it online through the Eldercare Locator Web site. Or you can call the Locator at 1-800-677-1116 and ask to have a copy mailed to you.

Holidays, when so many adult children head “home,” tend to spur campaigns of this sort: attempts to integrate potentially painful conversations and questions with feasts and gifts.

I have always wondered about the timing of these discussions — first the pies, then the questions about unexplained bank withdrawals and credit card bills? But it is true that our elders can sound dandy during weekly phone calls, then surprise us with their frailty and their struggles when we are there in person to witness them.

Financial abuse, which I have written about before (see scam prevention advice here, along with a sad story), is only part of the picture, but it is a vital issue.

Apart from the advice in the brochure, we would appreciate hearing from readers who have tackled this problem and can tell us what has worked and what hasn’t.

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

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San Diego mayor leaves office with his legacy intact

SAN DIEGO — On his last full day as mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders did something Sunday that took him back four decades.

He rode with a police officer assigned to the 2 p.m. to midnight shift patrolling downtown. In the mid-1970s, fresh out of San Diego State, Sanders was a rookie officer assigned to that same beat.

"I came in in a police car, I'm going out in a police car," Sanders, 62, had said with a laugh last week as he stood outside one of his signature achievements of his seven years as mayor: a new central library under construction.

A Republican in a city where Democrats hold a voter-registration edge and control the City Council, Sanders, who rose from beat cop to chief in his 26 years at the Police Department, has governed through relentless attempts at consensus and a deceptively low-key style that leans on sharing credit whenever possible.

Ask about the library project and Sanders says, "The library commission wouldn't take no for an answer."

Ask about his role in calming civic nerves during the 2007 wildfire that raged for days and destroyed hundreds of homes — a mayoral effort that led the local newspaper to compare him favorably to Rudy Giuliani after 9/11 — and Sanders mentions the help provided by two county supervisors.

Ask about his management style and he says he prefers to hire good people and then stay out of their way, but some who have worked with him point out that he watches even tiny details of important efforts.

Outside San Diego, Sanders may be remembered best for breaking with the GOP to endorse same-sex marriage, explaining that his daughter, a lesbian, should be free to marry someone she loves. He then campaigned against Proposition 8 and later went to Washington to join other — mostly Democratic — mayors to lobby Congress to repeal a law that defines marriage as between a man and woman.

In San Diego, his legacy includes guiding the city back from the precipice of its worst financial debacle in history through a series of politically controversial cutbacks in city services and then hard bargaining with labor unions that led to a salary freeze, reduction in health benefits for retirees, increased payments by employees to the pension fund and the end to guaranteed-benefit pensions for new hires.

Although the city's financial future, like that of other cities, remains uncertain, San Diego appears to be ahead of other cities, including Los Angeles, in dealing with the common problem of spiraling pension deficits.

"He did steady the local ship of state," said Steve Erie, political science professor at UC San Diego. "Whether he actually turned it around is another question."

Sanders lists the new library, the planned expansion of the waterfront convention center and the plan to remodel the core of Balboa Park as among his proudest achievements. All three faced opposition; the convention center and park plans are being fought in court.

"This isn't a hard city to govern," he said, "but it's very hard to get consensus."

One of his disappointments is the failure to put together a project to build a new stadium for the San Diego Chargers and keep the NFL franchise from leaving the city.

The Chargers issue, in which the public wants the team to remain in San Diego but does not want to spend public money for a stadium, will now be left to Sanders' successor, Bob Filner, 70, a Democrat who left a safe seat in Congress to run to replace the termed-out Sanders. Filner will be sworn into office Monday.

Although he was reelected easily in 2008, voters in 2010 turned down his request for a half-cent boost in the sales tax, which Sanders said was desperately needed to avoid additional cuts in city services. "We gave voters the opportunity," he said.

In style, Filner and Sanders are opposites: Filner is confrontational; Sanders usually isn't. Sanders appears without ego; Filner is different.

"I tell Bob that he's the most obnoxious individual I've met and that's what I like about him," Sanders said.

Lest anyone think of him as a rhetorical milquetoast, it bears remembering that, during the 2008 reelection campaign, he turned to an opponent and directed a two-word obscenity at him.

Sanders was an anomaly as a politician when he was elected in 2005 to replace Dick Murphy, who resigned amid criticism over the pension deficit. Sanders had never before run for public office, although he was a well-known public figure after six years as the highly regarded police chief.

As chief, he expanded the city's "community oriented policing" style that emphasized close collaboration between the police and neighborhood groups.

Retiring from the city in 1999, he served as chief executive of the local United Way and as president of the local Red Cross chapter — arriving when both organizations were beset by personnel turmoil and financial problems.

Sanders and his wife, Rana Sampson, will soon depart for a long-delayed vacation to Italy. Sampson retired Friday as vice president for development and marketing for the San Diego Center for Children, which provides educational and mental health services for at-risk youth.

Upon the couple's return to San Diego, Sanders will become president and chief executive of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.

But first was that final shift as a beat cop downtown, asking people what help they need and providing a reassuring presence that says San Diego is a good place to live.

"Best job I ever had," Sanders said.

tony.perry@latimes.com

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Winter Is Coming — What's In Your 'Go-Bag?'

A go-bag is a duffle bag, backpack or very well-stocked purse that’s pre-packed with the basic necessities for a particular activity. Snowboarding, surfing, childbirth, zombie apocalypse, DEA raid — whatever the activity, you can be prepared to hit the road at a moment’s notice if you keep a well-stocked satchel at the ready.

Skiing and snowboarding are perfect examples of activities that call for a well-stocked go-bag. You can study all the weather reports on the web and still not know exactly when you’ll wake up to hear your favorite mountain has been freshly blanketed in a layer of soft, virgin powder.

My go-bag has the usual Gore-Tex winter clothing. In addition to jackets, pants and skin-tight base layers, I’ve added ibuprofen to help stave off sore muscles. (Insert standard check with your doctor before taking any medicine disclaimer.) I also pack extra socks in case I step in a puddle in the parking lot before putting my boots on. If I think of it before I jet out the door, I’ll toss in a banana to eat in the lot — it provides a quick dose of potassium to keep the horrors of a leg cramp from ruining a run.

Your pack may vary, but get it ready. Your friends don’t have time to wait for you gather your gear when they’re sitting outside your house at 4 a.m., engine running, eager to make first chair at the mountain.

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Letterman, Hoffman, Zeppelin honored by Obama

WASHINGTON (AP) — David Letterman‘s “stupid human tricks” and Top 10 lists vaulted into the ranks of cultural acclaim Sunday night as the late-night comedian received this year’s Kennedy Center Honors with rock band Led Zeppelin, an actor, a ballerina and a bluesman.

Stars from New York, Hollywood and the music world joined President Barack Obama at the White House on Sunday night to salute the honorees, whose ranks also include actor Dustin Hoffman, Chicago bluesman Buddy Guy and ballerina Natalia Makarova.

The honors are the nation’s highest award for those who influenced American culture through the arts. The recipients were later saluted by fellow performers at the Kennedy Center Opera House in a show to be broadcast Dec. 26 on CBS.

Obama drew laughs from his guests when he described the honorees as “some extraordinary people who have no business being on the same stage together.”

Noting that Guy made his first guitar strings using the wire from a window screen, he quipped, “That worked until his parents started wondering how all the mosquitoes were getting in.”

The president thanked the members of Led Zeppelin for behaving themselves at the White House given their history of “hotel rooms trashed and mayhem all around.”

Obama noted Letterman’s humble beginnings as an Indianapolis weatherman who once reported the city was being pelted by hail ‘the size of canned hams.’”

“It’s one of the highlights of his career,” he said.

All kidding aside, Obama described all of the honorees as artists who “inspired us to see things in a new way, to hear things differently, to discover something within us or to appreciate how much beauty there is in the world.”

“It’s that unique power that makes the arts so important,” he added.

Later on the red carpet, Letterman said he was thrilled by the recognition and to visit Obama at the White House.

“It supersedes everything, honestly,” he said. “I haven’t won that many awards.”

During the show, comedian Tina Fey said she grew up watching her mom laugh at Letterman as he brought on “an endless parade of weirdos.”

“Who was this Dave Letterman guy?” Fey said. “Was he a brilliant, subtle passive-aggressive parody of a talk show host? Or just some Midwestern goon who was a little bit off? Time has proven that there’s just really no way of knowing.”

Alec Baldwin offered a Top 10 reasons Letterman was winning the award, including the fact that he didn’t leave late night for a six-month stint in primetime — a not-so-subtle dig at rival Jay Leno.

Jimmy Kimmel, who will soon compete head-to-head with Letterman on ABC, said he fell in love with Letterman early in life and even had a “Late Night” cake on his 16th birthday.

“To me it wasn’t just a TV show,” Kimmel said. “It was the reason I would fail to make love to a live woman for many, many years.”

For Buddy Guy, singers Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Chapman and others got most of the crowd on its feet singing Guy’s signature “Sweet Home Chicago.”

Morgan Freeman hailed Guy as a pioneer who helped bridge soul and rock and roll.

“When you hear the blues, you really don’t think of it as black or white or yellow or purple or blue,” Freeman said. “Buddy Guy, your blue brought us together.”

Robert De Niro saluted Hoffman, saying he had changed acting, never took any shortcuts and was brave enough to be a perfectionist.

“Before Dustin burst on the scene, it was pretty much OK for movie stars to show up, read their lines and, if the director insisted, act a little,” De Niro said. “But then Dustin came along — and he just had to get everything right.”

By the end of the night, the Foo Fighters, Kid Rock and Lenny Kravitz got the crowd moving to some of Zeppelin’s hits at the Kennedy Center.

Jack Black declared Zeppelin the “greatest rock and roll band of all time.”

“That’s right. Better than the Beatles. Better than the Stones. Even better than Tenacious D,” he said. “And that’s not opinion — that’s fact.”

For the finale, Heart’s Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson sang “Stairway to Heaven,” accompanied by a full choir and Jason Bonham, son of the late Zeppelin drummer John Bonham.

Zeppelin front man Robert Plant and his bandmates John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page seemed moved by the show.

Meryl Streep first introduced the honorees Saturday as they received the award medallions during a formal dinner at the U.S. State Department hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton said ballerina Makarova “risked everything to have the freedom to dance the way she wanted to dance” when she defected from the Soviet Union in 1970.

Makarova made her debut with the American Ballet Theatre and later was the first exiled artist to return to the Soviet Union before its fall to dance with the Kirov Ballet.

Clinton also took special note of Letterman, saying he must be wondering what he’s doing in a crowd of talented artists and musicians.

“Dave and I have a history,” she said. “I have been a guest on his show several times, and if you include references to my pant suits, I’m on at least once a week.”

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Follow Brett Zongker on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DCArtBeat

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