Attorneys for former Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona — who is now serving 66 months in federal prison for witness tampering — are asking that the former lawman's sentence be cut by nearly half, potentially freeing him.
In a motion, Carona's attorneys argued that the sentence handed down in 2009 by U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford should be adjusted after changes in the law.
His attorneys contend that the judge sentenced Carona on the witness tampering charge by "cross-referencing" charges on which he was acquitted, a practice his attorneys argue that the U.S. Supreme Court overruled in a case involving former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling.
"Carona seeks relief on the ground that the court erred in determining his sentence by using honest services fraud as the 'underlying offense' under United States sentencing guidelines," his lawyers wrote in the motion filed earlier this month. They added that "the conduct at issue did not constitute honest services fraud or any other federal offense."
His lawyers, according to the motion, are seeking to reduce his time to a term of 24 months to 30 months.
Brett Sagel, the federal prosecutor on the case, said in an emailed statement Thursday that the government contends "Carona's filing lacks merit both factually and legally."
Carona was acquitted in 2009 on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and one count of witness tampering. But the jury found him guilty on another count of witness tampering after he was recorded as he tried to persuade his former assistant sheriff to lie to a grand jury investigating allegations of corruption.
Carona, 57, was widely considered to be a rising political star at the time of his indictment.
The former sheriff began serving his 51/2 -year prison sentence in January 2011 at Englewood Federal Correctional Institution in Littleton, Colo., where he joined other prominent criminals — including Skilling, who is serving a 24-year sentence; and disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
When Carona's sentence began, officials at the prison — dubbed by Forbes magazine as one of the "12 best places to go to prison" — said the former sheriff would put in 71/2-hour days doing landscaping, plumbing, painting or food service.
But he could have access to the low-security prison's amenities, including college courses and the use of indoor and outdoor recreational facilities with a running track, bicycle court and exercise bicycles.
Carona's lawyers said that he had exhausted his appeals when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his conviction shortly before he reported to the prison.
Sure, the gear may look like it came straight out of Avatar or Battlestar Galactica. But all of the laser weapons, robots, sonic blasters and puke rays pictured here are real. Some of these weapons have already found their way onto the battlefield. If the rest of this sci-fi arsenal follows, war may soon be unrecognizable.
Read on for a look at some of these futuristic weapons being tested today.
Above:
The XM-25 grenade launcher is equipped with a laser rangefinder and on-board computer. It packs a magazine of four 25mm projectiles, and programs them to detonate as they pass by their targets. That feature will allow soldiers to strike enemies who are taking cover. By 2012, the Army hopes to arm every infantry squad and Special Forces unit with at least one of the big guns.
In August, a lucky soldier got to pull the trigger, and fire off a HEAB, or High Explosive Air Burst, round at the Aberdeen Testing Ground in Maryland. Those projectiles pack quite a punch. They are purportedly 300 percent more effective than normal ammo, and will be able to strike targets as far as 700 meters (2,300 feet) away.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Lindsay Lohan so wanted to play Elizabeth Taylor in the upcoming film “Liz & Dick” that she cut out the middle man and went straight to the producer herself, the tabloid-favorite star said in an interview on Friday.
Lohan, 26, plays Taylor in an upcoming television movie that dramatizes the long love affair between the late Hollywood legend and actor Richard Burton.
“It’s a funny story, actually. I had seen that they were going to be making the movie and I got the producers’ numbers and started harassing (producer) Larry Thompson,” Lohan said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“I didn’t even care if my agents were going to do it or not, I just did it myself, too,” the “Mean Girls” actress said. “Because I was like, ‘No one else is going to play this role, I have to do this.’”
Early reviews of “Liz & Dick,” which premieres on U.S. cable channel Lifetime on November 25, have ranged from middling to poor. But TV critics noted the similarities between Lohan and Taylor, both often-troubled actresses who started life as child stars.
“‘Liz & Dick’ truly drags,” said the Hollywood Reporter. “Luckily, you can’t take your eyes off of Lohan playing Taylor, which the producers clearly thought would work because they share similar back stories.”
Lohan’s acting alongside New Zealand’s Grant Bowler as Burton was described by Variety on Friday as “adequate, barring a few awkward moments, thanks largely to the fabulous frocks and makeup … she gets to model.”
Lohan’s reputation, much like Taylor’s, has been built from her tabloid persona more than on-screen performance.
In and out of legal trouble, jail and rehab since 2007, Lohan faced media blow-back this week after canceling an in-depth interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters, who said she suspected the actress’ publicity team pulled the plug knowing Walters would ask tough questions.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; editing by Jill Serjeant and Matthew Lewis)
Three retired N.F.L. players received at least $2 million in disability payments as a result of brain trauma injuries from their playing days, according to an article by ESPN and the PBS series “Frontline.”
The payments were made in the 1990s and early 2000s by the Bell/Rozelle N.F.L. Player Retirement Plan, a committee comprising representatives of the owners, players and the N.F.L. commissioner.
The N.F.L. is being sued by several thousand retired players who accuse the league of concealing a link between head hits and brain injuries. The league denies the accusation and has said it did not mislead its players.
The article, however, cites a letter written in 2000 from the director of the retirement plan who stated that Mike Webster, who retired in 1990, had a disability that was “the result of head injuries he suffered as a football player with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Kansas City Chiefs.”
Webster died in 2002. The article cites similar payments to Gerry Sullivan, a Browns lineman, and a third, unnamed player.
The article provides more details than were known about Webster’s case; his fight for disability benefits was known. The retired players say in their complaint that “the N.F.L.’s own physician independently examined Webster and concluded that Webster was mentally ‘completely and totally disabled as of the date of his retirement and was certainly disabled when he stopped playing football sometime in 1990.’ ”
However, Greg Aiello, an N.F.L. spokesman, said that the ESPN report “underscores that we have had a system in place with the union for many years to address player injury claims on a case-by-case basis.” The disability plan, he said, was “collectively bargained with the players.”
“All decisions concerning player injury claims are made by the disability plan’s board, not by the N.F.L. or by the Players Association,” Aiello said.
The board has seven members: three owner representatives, three player representatives and one nonvoting representative of the commissioner.
The disclosures in the article came a day after Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he trumpeted the league’s efforts to increase the safety of its players and proclaimed that “medical decisions override everything else.”
Jeffrey Standen, a law professor at Willamette University in Oregon, said the details about Webster’s disability payments did not amount to a smoking gun. The plan’s determination that Webster sustained head injuries is not the same as the N.F.L. making that decision.
“The problem is the N.F.L. didn’t make the admission; it was the board,” Standen said. “They’re not the same body. As a legal matter, the fact that they paid Webster is not going to matter much in legal terms. But it’s evidence to throw in front of a jury.”
What might be the last Twinkie in America — at least for a while — rolled off a factory line Friday morning. It was just like the millions that had come before it, golden, cream-filled empty calories, a monument to classic American junk food.
But it is likely to be the last under the current management. After not one but two bankruptcies, Hostess Brands, the beleaguered purveyor of Twinkies, Ho Hos, Sno Balls and Wonder bread, announced plans to wind down operations and sell off its brands.
Since filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January, Hostess has been trying to renegotiate its labor contracts in a bid to cut costs. But the talks fell apart, and last week one union went on strike.
The so-called liquidation will probably spell the end of Hostess, an 82-year-old company that has endured wars, countless diet fads and even an earlier Chapter 11 filing. Although the company could theoretically negotiate a last-minute deal with the union, Hostess is moving to shut factories and lay off a large majority of its 18,500 employees.
But Twinkies and the other well-known brands could eventually find new life under a different owner. As part of the process, Hostess is looking to auction off its assets, and suitors could find value in the portfolio.
“The potential loss of iconic brands is difficult,” said the company’s chief executive, Gregory F. Rayburn. “But it’s overshadowed by the 18,500 families that are out of work.”
The company’s current problems stem, in part, from the legacy of its past.
An amalgam of brands and businesses, the company has evolved over the years through acquisitions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the company, then called Interstate, bought more than a dozen regional bakeries scattered across the country. A couple of decades later, it paid $330 million for the Continental Baking Company, picking up a portfolio of brands like Wonder and Hostess.
As the national appetite for junk food waned, the company fell on hard times, struggling against rising labor and commodity costs. In 2004, it filed for bankruptcy for the first time.
Five years later, the company emerged from Chapter 11 as Hostess Brands, so named after its most prominent division. With America’s new health-conscious attitude, it sought to reshape the business to changing times, introducing new products like 100-calorie Twinkie Bites.
But the new private equity backers loaded the company with debt, making it difficult to invest in new equipment. Earlier this year, Hostess had more than $860 million of debt.
The labor costs, too, proved insurmountable, a situation that has been complicated by years of deal-making. The bulk of the work force belongs to 12 unions, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union.
The combination of debt and labor costs has hurt profits. The company posted revenue of $2.5 billion in the fiscal year 2011, the last available data. But it reported a net loss of $341 million.
With profits eroding, the company filed for Chapter 11 in January. It originally hoped to reorganize its finances, seeking lower labor costs, including an immediate 8 percent pay cut.
The negotiations have been contentious.
The Teamsters, which has 6,700 members at Hostess, said it played an instrumental role in ousting Hostess’s previous chief executive, Brian J. Driscoll, this year after the board tripled his compensation to $2.55 million. The union also hired a financial consultant, Harry J. Wilson, who had worked on the General Motors restructuring.
While highly critical of management missteps, the Teamsters agreed in September to major concessions, including cuts in wages and company contributions to health care. As part of the deal, the union was to receive a 25 percent share of the company’s stock and a $100 million claim in bankruptcy.
“The objective was to preserve jobs,” said Ken Hall, the Teamsters’ general secretary-treasurer. “When you have a company that’s in the financial situation that Hostess is, it’s just not possible to maintain everything you have.”
But Hostess reached an impasse with the bakery union. Frank Hurt, the union’s president, seemed to lose patience with Hostess’s management, upset that it was in bankruptcy for the second time despite $100 million in labor concessions. He saw little promise that management would turn things around.
“Our members decided they were not going to take any more abuse from a company they have given so much to for so many years,” said Mr. Hurt. “They decided that they were not going to agree to another round of outrageous wage and benefit cuts and give up their pension only to see yet another management team fail and Wall Street vulture capitalists and ‘restructuring specialists’ walk away with untold millions of dollars.”
About a month ago, Mr. Rayburn said, the bakers union stopped returning the company’s phone calls altogether. For its part, the bakery union said the company had taken an overly aggressive approach. David Durkee, the union’s secretary-treasurer, said Hostess had given an ultimatum. “They said, ‘If you do not ratify this, we are going to liquidate based on your vote.’ ”
With the company standing firm, the bakery union struck last week, affecting nearly two-thirds of the company’s factories across the country. The Teamsters drivers honored the picket line, further shutting down the operations. The company gave union members until 5 p.m. on Thursday to return to work.
Mr. Rayburn said the financial strain of the strike was too much for the company, which had already reached the limits of its bankruptcy financing. Over the last week, Hostess lost tens of millions of dollars as many customers’ orders went unfilled. And its lenders would not open their wallets one more time.
By Thursday morning, Hostess’s executives were ensconced in the company’s headquarters in Irving, Tex., still hoping that enough employees would return to work to resume production. A small number of workers had already crossed the picket lines that had sprung up at most of the baker’s factories, but more than 10 plants remained well below their necessary capacity.
Mr. Rayburn’s deadline of 5 p.m. passed without either side backing down. Soon after, executives asked the company’s legal advisers to finish the court motions that would begin the liquidation. Papers had been drawn up well before that afternoon.
Around 7 p.m., Mr. Rayburn had his final discussions with the company’s board and his senior managers and made the call to begin winding down.
“We were trying to focus on where people were having success, but I had to make a call,” Mr. Rayburn said.
After spending much of his life putting people behind bars, a veteran L.A. County sheriff's deputy stood in handcuffs Thursday, charged with gunning down a former neighbor who apparently got into a fight with his son.
Francisco Gamez, 41, is accused of shooting Armando "Cookie" Casillas, a well-known figure in his blue-collar neighborhood in Sylmar.
Gamez was off duty, sitting in his car, when he allegedly fired two shots on the night of June 17, killing Casillas and narrowly missing a second man, prosecutors said.
Gamez, a 17-year veteran who worked as a detective in West Hollywood, was allegedly furious over a fight between his 20-year-old son and Casillas, 38, prosecutors said. The younger Gamez had called his father to the scene, authorities said.
Casillas was later found by relatives lying near his home, and died later at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center.
Gamez was removed from duty in July after witnesses and evidence tied the detective to the slaying, authorities said. He was arrested Wednesday and led handcuffed from his San Fernando home by his former co-workers.
On Thursday he was formally charged with murder, attempted murder and discharging a firearm from an occupied vehicle. Gamez could face 75 years to life in prison if convicted of all charges.
In court, where he stood handcuffed in a plexiglass cage, sheriff's deputies peeked into the room to gawk at their former colleague. Sheriff Lee Baca described the whole thing as "deeply disturbing."
Gamez is being held on $4-million bail.
On Beaver Street in Sylmar, where the shooting occurred, Casillas' photo sat in a frame in the midst of a makeshift memorial, along with a cross and a potted plant with U.S. and Mexican flags and candles.
"He was a sweetheart, and very generous," said Patsy Telles-Cabrera, who lived across the street from Casillas for years. "He would check in on my parents." She left a box of chocolates at the growing shrine.
"It never should have happened," said one neighbor. "This is a family neighborhood."
sam.quinones@latimes.com
richard.winton@latimes.com
Times staff writer Wesley Lowery contributed to this report.
Russia’s T-50 stealth fighter prototype, the first radar-evading warplane outside the U.S. when it debuted in January 2010, is slightly less stealthy than the American F-22 and about equal to the smaller F-35. But in several other respects the new warplane from the Russian Sukhoi design bureau is actually superior to the American models.
That’s the surprising conclusion of the first-ever public scientific analysis of the T-50′s Radar Cross-Section (RCS), completed this week by Dr. Carlo Kopp, an analyst with the independent think tank Air Power Australia.
“The shaping of the T-50 is inferior to that of the F-22 Raptor,” Kopp writes in his dense, jargon-heavy report. But the F-35 and T-50, he adds, exhibit “similar … RCS behavior.”
But Kopp’s assessment of the T-50 comes with caveats. Quite a few of them, actually. To match the stealthiness of the Lockheed Martin F-35 — to say nothing of the company’s F-22 — Sukhoi’s engineers will have to, among other changes, modify the T-50′s engines to a less obtrusive fitting and add a layer of radar-absorbing material to the plane’s skin.
With the revised engines and skin, the T-50′s “specular RCS performance will satisfy the Very Low Observable (VLO) requirement that strong specular returns are absent in the nose sector angular domain,” Kopp writes. Translated into plain English, Kopp’s saying that an optimized version of the Russian jet could be very, very difficult to detect by most radars as it’s bearing down on them.
Major refinements are standard practice as stealth prototypes go through development, it’s worth noting. The F-22 and the F-35 underwent big design changes as each was developed over 15 years or more. The T-50, only four of which have been built, has been flying for just under three years and isn’t scheduled to enter frontline service until 2016 at the earliest. There’s time for the Russians to finesse the design, just as the Chinese are doing with their stealth planes.
Granted, by 2016 the Americans could possess hundreds of combat-ready F-35s plus the roughly 180 F-22s already in service. The T-50 could make up for its lateness with impressive performance that in some ways exceeds even the F-22′s vaunted capabilities.
One Russian advantage is what Kopp calls “extreme plus agility” — a consequence of the T-50′s “advanced aerodynamic design, exceptional thrust/weight ratio performance and three dimensional thrust vectoring integrated with an advanced digital flight control system.”
The second advantage: “exceptional combat persistence, the result of an unusually large 25,000-pound internal fuel load,” Kopp writes. The T-50 could keep flying and fighting long after the F-22 and F-35 have run out of gas.
Moreover, the T-50 will dodge certain radars better than others, according to Kopp — and U.S. sensors are among the worst at detecting the T-50′s unique shape, he contends. Kopp’s breakdown of T-50 RCS by radar type shows Chinese “counter-VLO radars,” specifically designed to spot American stealth planes, detecting the T-50 best.
The next best sensors to use against the Russian fighter is the UHF radar aboard the U.S. Navy’s E-2 early-warning planes. American fighter radars, including those aboard the F-22 and F-35, are of middling effectiveness against the T-50, Kopp asserts.
“No fundamental obstacles exist in the shaping design of the T-50 prototype which might preclude its development into a genuine Very Low Observable design,” Kopp concludes.
In other words: Watch out, America! You’re now only one of three countries with a truly radar-evading warplane in the air.
(Reuters) – NBC is expected to name Alexandra Wallace, a senior vice president of the network’s news division, as the executive in charge of “The Today Show,” the latest reshuffling of the show’s personnel after it slipped to second in ratings this year behind “Good Morning America.”
Wallace, who would be the first woman in charge of the long-running NBC show that pioneered early morning TV in the United States, will be named along with a producer to replace Jim Bell, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Bell, who has headed the show since 2005, was blamed this year for the controversial firing of Ann Curry as anchor alongside Matt Lauer.
Curry was replaced by Savannah Guthrie in June.
“Good Morning America” or GMA, produced by Walt Disney‘s ABC unit, closed the gap with “Today.”
“Today,” the top-rated morning show for 16 consecutive years, started the current TV season number two. In late October, NBC drew 7,000 more viewers than GMA among 25 to 54 year-old viewers, the age group advertisers most want to reach, its first lead since September 10. GMA still led among overall viewers.
The first two hours of “The Today Show,” from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., collected $ 485 million in ad revenues in 2011, up 6.6 percent from 2010, according to Kantar Media, which provides data to advertisers. GMA took in $ 299 million last year.
It is unclear when the changes at “The Today Show” will take effect, according to The New York Times, which first reported the shakeup.
Bell this summer produced NBC’s Summer Olympics coverage and is expected to become the full-time executive producer of the network’s ongoing Olympic coverage.
NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp., is also in the midst of layoffs at its entertainment unit, shedding 500 positions primarily at its cable channels. Jay Leno’s late night TV show cut about two dozen of its crew members about two months ago.
Awilda Jimenez got a scan for Alzheimer’s after she started forgetting things. It was positive.
When Awilda Jimenez started forgetting things last year, her husband, Edwin, felt a shiver of dread. Her mother had developed Alzheimer’s in her 50s. Could his wife, 61, have it, too?
He learned there was a new brain scan to diagnose the disease and nervously agreed to get her one, secretly hoping it would lay his fears to rest. In June, his wife became what her doctor says is the first private patient in Arizona to have the test.
“The scan was floridly positive,” said her doctor, Adam S. Fleisher, director of brain imaging at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix.
The Jimenezes have struggled ever since to deal with this devastating news. They are confronting a problem of the new era of Alzheimer’s research: The ability to detect the disease has leapt far ahead of treatments. There are none that can stop or even significantly slow the inexorable progression to dementia and death.
Families like the Jimenezes, with no good options, can only ask: Should they live their lives differently, get their affairs in order, join a clinical trial of an experimental drug?
“I was hoping the scan would be negative,” Mr. Jimenez said. “When I found out it was positive, my heart sank.”
The new brain scan technology, which went on the market in June, is spreading fast. There are already more than 300 hospitals and imaging centers, located in most major metropolitan areas, that are ready to perform the scans, according to Eli Lilly, which sells the tracer used to mark plaque for the scan.
The scans show plaques in the brain — barnaclelike clumps of protein, beta amyloid — that, together with dementia, are the defining feature of Alzheimer’s disease. Those who have dementia but do not have excessive plaques do not have Alzheimer’s. It is no longer necessary to wait until the person dies and has an autopsy to learn if the brain was studded with plaques.
Many insurers, including Medicare, will not yet pay for the new scans, which cost several thousand dollars. And getting one comes with serious risks. While federal law prevents insurers and employers from discriminating based on genetic tests, it does not apply to scans. People with brain plaques can be denied long-term care insurance.
The Food and Drug Administration, worried about interpretations of the scans, has required something new: Doctors must take a test showing they can read them accurately before they begin doing them. So far, 700 doctors have qualified, according to Eli Lilly. Other kinds of diagnostic scans have no such requirement.
In another unusual feature, the F.D.A. requires that radiologists not be told anything about the patient. They are generally trained to incorporate clinical information into their interpretation of other types of scans, said Dr. R. Dwaine Rieves, director of the drug agency’s Division of Medical Imaging Products.
But in this case, clinical information may lead radiologists to inadvertently shade their reports to coincide with what doctors suspect is the underlying disease. With Alzheimer’s, Dr. Rieves said, “clinical impressions have been misleading.”
“This is a big change in the world of image interpretation,” he said.
Like some other Alzheimer’s experts, Dr. Fleisher used the amyloid scan for several years as part of a research study that led to its F.D.A. approval. Subjects were not told what the scans showed. Now, with the scan on the market, the rules have changed.
Dr. Fleisher’s first patient was Mrs. Jimenez. Her husband, the family breadwinner, had lost his job as a computer consultant when the couple moved from New York to Arizona to take care of Mrs. Jimenez’s mother. Paying several thousand dollars for a scan was out of the question. But Dr. Fleisher found a radiologist, Dr. Mantej Singh Sra of Sun Radiology, who was so eager to get into the business that he agreed to do Mrs. Jimenez’s scan free. His plan was to be the first in Arizona to do a scan, and advertise it.
After Dr. Sra did the scan, the Jimenezes returned to Dr. Fleisher to learn the result.
Dr. Fleisher, sad to see so much plaque in Mrs. Jimenez’s brain, referred her to a psychiatrist to help with anxiety and suggested she enter clinical trials of experimental drugs.
But Mr. Jimenez did not like that idea. He worried about unexpected side effects.
“Tempting as it is, where do you draw the line?” he asks. “At what point do you take a risk with a loved one?”
At Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, Dr. Samuel E. Gandy found that his patients — mostly affluent — were unfazed by the medical center’s $3,750 price for the scan. He has been ordering at least one a week for people with symptoms ambiguous enough to suggest the possibility of brain plaques.
Most of his patients want their names kept confidential, fearing an inability to get long-term care insurance, or just wanting privacy.
As America careens toward the year-end "fiscal cliff" with Democrats pressing for tax hikes and Republicans demanding budget cuts, California voters have one firm word for their elected officials:
Compromise.
By that they mean: Make the other side compromise.
In a survey that confirms the difficulty of coming up with popular ways to do unpopular things, a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll found that 3 in 5 Californians want their elected officials to "compromise with the opposite party, even if that means giving up some long-held positions."
But things foundered on the details.
When Democrats were asked whether cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits should be offered to get Republican agreement on some tax hikes, or whether all reductions were off the table, they strongly opposed any benefit cuts.
When Republicans were asked whether some revenue hikes should be accepted to get Democrats to agree to benefit cuts, they just as firmly opposed any tax increases.
The independent voters in the middle sided with Democrats in saying that benefits should not be sacrificed for tax hikes. Only narrowly did they say that Republicans should agree to raise taxes as part of a budget deal that would also slice benefits.
In short, the state that is often cast as far out on the fringe of the nation's political thought demonstrated that it has at least this in common with everywhere else: defining compromise as a one-way street.
"People are in favor of compromise as long as other people are doing the compromising," said David Kanevsky of the Republican firm American Viewpoint, half of a bipartisan duo that conducted the poll for The Times and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
The poll also confirmed the outcome of last week's election, in which President Obama won a second romping victory in California. There was broad support for the president and his campaign proposal to raise taxes on incomes over $250,000 a year.
Given a choice of three options loudly debated in the campaign, 51% of Californians said the George W. Bush administration tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year should be left in place for those making less than that amount. Only 28% took the position espoused by Republican leaders that all of the tax cuts should remain in place. A smaller group still, 17%, said everyone's taxes should be raised to help cut the nation's deficit.
"This is a difficult problem to solve, but the president's agenda came out of this in a strong position in California," said Drew Lieberman of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, the Democratic poll partner of American Viewpoint.
When budget options for the fight now brewing in Washington were proposed separately, California was generally in line with voters elsewhere in the nation. Voters took a measured approach to taxes, weren't keen on cutting the defense budget and objected strenuously to cuts in social programs, Medicare and Social Security. Essentially, they endorsed the stalemate that has blocked both parties from attacking the federal deficit.
Asked whether taxes should be raised wholesale, Californians objected, 54% to 43%. Anti-tax feelings were shared by unusual bedfellows: 79% of Republicans, 65% of Latinos, 60% of those making less than $50,000 a year.
Sentiment flipped when it came to raising taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year, an option supported by 67% of respondents; 31% opposed it. Most major demographic and ideological groups, except for Republicans, strongly backed such a move. Even those most directly affected — those making more than $100,000 — favored a tax hike by a 24-percentage-point margin.
When it came to budget cuts, Californians were split on whether to cut defense spending by $600 billion, as required in the budget deal agreed to by Obama and Republicans last year. Democrats backed the cuts by almost 2 to 1, while independent voters gave it narrow support and Republicans strongly objected.
No substitute cuts passed muster, however. Seventy percent of Californians rejected replacing the defense cuts with ones to spending on education and healthcare. All major groups but Republicans shared that view; Republicans were split on domestic cuts.
Objections ran even stronger to proposed reductions in Medicare and Social Security benefits, part of the turf on which the presidential campaign was fought. At least 4 in 5 white voters, Latinos and Democrats rejected such cuts, as did 75% of Republicans and independent voters.
"You have to feel bad for voters," said poll director Dan Schnur of the Jesse M. Unruh School of Politics at USC. "After a yearlong presidential campaign, no one has bothered to tell them that raising taxes on people making over $250,000 does not balance the federal budget. No one on either side.
It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.
Your email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of your kids or, worse, of yourself, naked. The precise location where you’re sitting right now as you read these words. Since the dawn of the information age, we’ve bought into the idea that a password, so long as it’s elaborate enough, is an adequate means of protecting all this precious data. But in 2012 that’s a fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated sales pitch. And anyone who still mouths it is a sucker—or someone who takes you for one.
No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.
Look around. Leaks and dumps—hackers breaking into computer systems and releasing lists of usernames and passwords on the open web—are now regular occurrences. The way we daisy-chain accounts, with our email address doubling as a universal username, creates a single point of failure that can be exploited with devastating results. Thanks to an explosion of personal information being stored in the cloud, tricking customer service agents into resetting passwords has never been easier. All a hacker has to do is use personal information that’s publicly available on one service to gain entry into another.
This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well—but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their way into one, they had them all. They really just wanted my Twitter handle: @mat. As a three-letter username, it’s considered prestigious. And to delay me from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter.
The age of the password is over. We just haven’t realized it yet.
Since that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online security. And what I have found is utterly terrifying. Our digital lives are simply too easy to crack. Imagine that I want to get into your email. Let’s say you’re on AOL. All I need to do is go to the website and supply your name plus maybe the city you were born in, info that’s easy to find in the age of Google. With that, AOL gives me a password reset, and I can log in as you.
First thing I do? Search for the word “bank” to figure out where you do your online banking. I go there and click on the Forgot Password? link. I get the password reset and log in to your account, which I control. Now I own your checking account as well as your email.
This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for, say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones are discovered every day.
The common weakness in these hacks is the password. It’s an artifact from a time when our computers were not hyper-connected. Today, nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a truly dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet.
Passwords are as old as civilization. And for as long as they’ve existed, people have been breaking them.
In 413 BC, at the height of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general Demosthenes landed in Sicily with 5,000 soldiers to assist in the attack on Syracusae. Things were looking good for the Greeks. Syracusae, a key ally of Sparta, seemed sure to fall.
But during a chaotic nighttime battle at Epipole, Demosthenes’ forces were scattered, and while attempting to regroup they began calling out their watchword, a prearranged term that would identify soldiers as friendly. The Syracusans picked up on the code and passed it quietly through their ranks. At times when the Greeks looked too formidable, the watchword allowed their opponents to pose as allies. Employing this ruse, the undermatched Syracusans decimated the invaders, and when the sun rose, their cavalry mopped up the rest. It was a turning point in the war.
The first computers to use passwords were likely those in MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, developed in 1961. To limit the time any one user could spend on the system, CTSS used a login to ration access. It only took until 1962 when a PhD student named Allan Scherr, wanting more than his four-hour allotment, defeated the login with a simple hack: He located the file containing the passwords and printed out all of them. After that, he got as much time as he wanted.
During the formative years of the web, as we all went online, passwords worked pretty well. This was due largely to how little data they actually needed to protect. Our passwords were limited to a handful of applications: an ISP for email and maybe an ecommerce site or two. Because almost no personal information was in the cloud—the cloud was barely a wisp at that point—there was little payoff for breaking into an individual’s accounts; the serious hackers were still going after big corporate systems.
So we were lulled into complacency. Email addresses morphed into a sort of universal login, serving as our username just about everywhere. This practice persisted even as the number of accounts—the number of failure points—grew exponentially. Web-based email was the gateway to a new slate of cloud apps. We began banking in the cloud, tracking our finances in the cloud, and doing our taxes in the cloud. We stashed our photos, our documents, our data in the cloud.
Eventually, as the number of epic hacks increased, we started to lean on a curious psychological crutch: the notion of the “strong” password. It’s the compromise that growing web companies came up with to keep people signing up and entrusting data to their sites. It’s the Band-Aid that’s now being washed away in a river of blood.
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Michael Jackson has been dead for more than three years now – but apparently he lives on in the halls of America’s legal system.
Jackson’s former assistant, Michael Amir Williams, filed a class-action lawsuit against concert promoters AEG Live in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday, claiming he and others hired to attend to the “Beat It” singer during his would-be “This Is It” tour at London’s O2 Arena were deprived of at least $ 7.5 million dollars in pay.
According to the suit, AEG was responsible for the financial loss because it hired Dr. Conrad Murray — who was found guilty of causing the singer’s death – to care for Jackson.
The suit claims that Jackson “bargained for the addition of Class to help Michael Jackson give the ‘first class performance’ as required by Contract. The express terms of the Contract allowed for class to be paid by AEG up to $ 7.5 million and any amount over $ 7.5 million to be paid for by Michael Jackson.”
Unfortunately, AEG also hired Murray, who administered a fatal dose of Propofol to Jackson in June 2009, before the concerts could take place. (Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for Jackson’s death in November 2011.)
AEG’s lawyer, Marvin Putnam of O’Melveny & Myers, calls the lawsuit “frivolous” and “truly unfortunate.”
“This lawsuit is clearly frivolous; it is literally barred by at least four different legal doctrines,” Putnam said in a statement provided to TheWrap. “The easiest is that Mr. Williams was a personal employee of Michael Jackson’s, and was never a beneficiary of Mr. Jackson’s contract with AEG Live. As such he has no legal standing to sue on that contract. Nor can he legally bring a claim for Mr. Jackson’s wrongful death. The idea that Mr. Williams purports to sue on behalf of the many persons who did enter into relationships with AEG Live and Jackson in connection with the This Is It Tour, and with whom AEG Live parted ways with the utmost friendship and respect, is disgraceful. It is truly unfortunate that so many see Mr. Jackson’s demise as an opportunity to grab as much for themselves as possible. This is just the latest wrongful death lawsuit with someone hoping to profit from Michael Jackson’s tragic death in the same way they profited from his life.”
Williams’ suit alleges breach of express terms of contract; breach of implied terms of contract; and breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The complaint seeks unspecified damages, plus court costs and attorneys’ fees.
Federal officials have received reports of 13 deaths over the last four years that cited the possible involvement of 5-Hour Energy, a highly caffeinated energy shot, according to Food and Drug Administration records and an interview with an agency official.
The disclosure of the reports is the second time in recent weeks that F.D.A. filings citing energy drinks and deaths have emerged. Last month, the agency acknowledged it had received five fatality filings mentioning another popular energy drink, Monster Energy.
Since 2009, 5-Hour Energy has been mentioned in some 90 filings with the F.D.A., including more than 30 that involved serious or life-threatening injuries like heart attacks, convulsions and, in one case, a spontaneous abortion, a summary of F.D.A. records reviewed by The New York Times showed.
The filing of an incident report with the F.D.A. does not mean that a product was responsible for a death or an injury or contributed in any way to it. Such reports can be fragmentary in nature and difficult to investigate.
The distributor of 5-Hour Energy, Living Essentials of Farmington Hills, Mich., did not respond to written questions about the filings, and its top executive declined to be interviewed. Living Essentials is a unit of the product’s producer, Innovation Ventures.
However, in a statement, Living Essentials said the product was safe when used as directed and that it was “unaware of any deaths proven to be caused by the consumption of 5-Hour Energy.”
Since the public disclosure of reports about Monster Energy, its producer, Monster Beverage of Corona, Calif., has repeatedly said that its products are safe, adding that they were not the cause of any of the health problems reported to the F.D.A.
Shares of Monster Beverage, which traded above $80 earlier this year, closed Wednesday at $44.74.
The fast-growing energy drink industry is facing increasing scrutiny over issues like labeling disclosures and possible health risks. Some lawmakers are calling on the F.D.A. to increase its regulation of the products and the New York State attorney general is investigating the practices of several producers.
Unlike Red Bull, Monster Energy and some other energy drinks that look like beverages, 5-Hour Energy is sold in a two-ounce bottle referred to as a shot. The company does not disclose the amount of caffeine in each bottle, but a recent article published by Consumer Reports placed that level at about 215 milligrams.
An eight-ounce cup of coffee, depending on how it is made, can contain from 100 to 150 milligrams of caffeine.
The F.D.A. has stated that it does not have sufficient scientific evidence to justify changing how it regulates caffeine or other ingredients in energy products. The issue of how to do so is complicated by the fact that some high-caffeine drinks, like Red Bull, are sold under agency rules governing beverages, while others, like 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy, are marketed as dietary supplements. The categories have differing ingredient rules and reporting requirements.
In an interview Wednesday, Daniel Fabricant, the director of the agency’s division of dietary supplement programs, said the agency was looking into the death reports that cited 5-Hour Energy. He said that while medical information in such reports could rule out a link with the product, other reports could contain insufficient information to determine what role, if any, a supplement might have played.
Mr. Fabricant said that the 13 fatality reports that mentioned 5-Hour Energy had all been submitted to the F.D.A. by Living Essentials. Since late 2008, producers of dietary supplements are required to notify the F.D.A. when they become aware of a death or serious injury that may be related to their product.
Currently, the agency does not publicly disclose adverse event filings about dietary supplements like 5-Hour Energy. Companies that market energy drinks as beverages are not required to make such reports to the agency, although they can do so voluntarily, Mr. Fabricant said.
Along with caffeine, 5-Hour Energy contains other ingredients, like very high levels of certain B vitamins and a substance called taurine.
Reached by telephone, the chief executive of the Living Essentials, Manoj Bhargava, declined to discuss the filings and said he believed an article about the reports would cast the company in a negative light.
“I am not interested in making any comment,” Mr. Bhargava said.
Subsequently, the company issued a statement that said, among other things, that it took “reports of any potential adverse event tied to our products very seriously,” adding that the company complied “with all of our reporting requirements” to the F.D.A.
The company also stated that it marketed 5-Hour Energy to “hardworking adults who need an extra boost of energy.” The product’s label recommends that it not be used by woman who are pregnant or by children under 12 years of age.
The number of reports filed with the F.D.A. that mention 5-Hour Energy appears particularly striking. In 2010, for example, the F.D.A. received a total of 17 fatality reports that mentioned a dietary supplement or a weight loss product, two broad categories that cover more than 50,000 products, according to Mr. Fabricant, the F.D.A. official.
He added that it was difficult to put the volume of 5-Hour Energy filings into context because he believed that some supplement manufacturers were probably not following the mandated reporting rules and that consumers and doctors might also be unaware that they can file incident reports with the agency. Last year, the F.D.A. received only 2,000 reports about fatalities or serious injuries that cited dietary supplements and weight loss products, he said.
Another federal agency, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, reported late last year that more than 13,000 emergency room visits in 2009 were associated with energy drinks alone.
Along with Living Essentials, The Times sent queries last week to several producers asking whether they had received reports linking fatalities or serious injuries to their products.
Representatives for two of those companies — Red Bull and Coca-Cola, which sells NOS and Full Throttle — said they were unaware of any such reports. A representative for PepsiCo, which makes Amp, also said it was unaware of any such reports.
In addition to Red Bull, NOS, Full Throttle and Amp are also marketed as beverages, rather than as dietary supplements.
Ursula M. Burns, chief of Xerox, said the president discussed few specifics of a potential agreement but emphasized that “we cannot go over the fiscal cliff.”
WASHINGTON — President Obama extended an olive branch to business leaders Wednesday, seeking their support as he prepared to negotiate with Congressional Republicans over the fiscal impasse in Washington.
If Congress and the president cannot reach a deal to reduce the deficit by January, more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will go into effect immediately — a prospect many chief executives and others warn could tip the economy back into recession.
Even so, Mr. Obama has some fence-mending to do before he can count on any serious backing from the business community.
“The president brought up that he hadn’t always had the best relationship with business, and he didn’t think he deserved that, but he understood that’s where things were and wanted it to be better,” said David M. Cote, chief executive of Honeywell. He was one of a dozen corporate leaders invited to meet Mr. Obama at the White House for 90 minutes Wednesday afternoon, after the president’s first news conference since the election.
While Mr. Obama did not present a detailed plan at Wednesday’s meeting or reveal what he would propose in terms of new corporate taxes, he strongly reiterated that he would not allow tax cuts for the middle class to expire. The president, according to attendees and aides, said he was committed to a balanced approach of reductions in entitlements and other government spending and increases in revenue.
With time running out, many people expect the president and Republican leaders in Congress to come up with a short-term compromise that prevents the full slate of tax increases and spending cuts from hitting in January. That would give both sides more time to come up with a far-reaching deal on entitlement spending, even as they work on a broad tax overhaul later next year.
One corporate official briefed on the meeting said that the chief executives came away with a sense that Mr. Obama was poised to present a more formal proposal in the next few days, but that he did not press them for support on particular policies. “It was more of a back and forth,” he said.
The chief executives from some of the country’s biggest and best-known companies, including Procter & Gamble and I.B.M., were not unified on everything, according to one who was interviewed after the meeting.
Many of the executives who described the meeting would speak only on condition of anonymity.
The outreach to business comes as both the White House and corporate America maneuver ahead of the year-end deadline, as well as the beginning of Mr. Obama’s second term. Many executives were put off by what they saw as antibusiness rhetoric coming from the White House in his first term, and many also oppose tax increases on the rich that Mr. Obama favors but would hit them personally.
Both sides have plenty to gain from a better relationship. Business leaders want to buffer their image after the recession and the financial crisis, while Mr. Obama would gain valuable leverage if he could persuade even a few chief executives to come out in favor of higher taxes on people with incomes over $250,000.
Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, publicly endorsed higher tax rates in an opinion article published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
“I believe that tax increases, especially for the wealthiest, are appropriate, but only if they are joined by serious cuts in discretionary spending and entitlements,” he wrote.
While Mr. Blankfein and other Wall Street leaders have been speaking out about the dangers of the fiscal impasse, only one executive from the financial services industry, Kenneth I. Chenault of American Express, was at Wednesday’s meeting.
Afterward, the corporate leaders seemed pleased with the tone of the meeting but cautious about the prospect of finding common ground with the White House on the budget choices facing Congress and the president.
“I’d say everybody came away feeling pretty good about the whole discussion,” Mr. Cote said. “Now, all of us are C.E.O.’s, so we’ve learned not to confuse words with results. And that’s what we still need to see.”
Ursula M. Burns, chief executive of Xerox, who was also at the meeting, said afterward that it was clear that “we’re going to have to work through some sticking points.” But while “we didn’t get into too many specifics,” she said, it was also made clear that “we cannot go over the fiscal cliff.”
Ms. Burns’s comments about the potentially dire consequences of the fiscal impasse echoed those of other chief executives, including many in the Business Roundtable, which began an ad campaign Tuesday calling on lawmakers to resolve the issue quickly. The Campaign to Fix the Debt, a new group with a $40 million budget and the support of many Fortune 500 chiefs, began its own ad campaign on Monday.
Michael T. Duke, chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores, warned in a statement after the meeting that “before the end of the year, Washington needs to find an agreement to avoid the fiscal cliff.” He said Walmart customers “are working hard to adapt to the ‘new normal,’ but their confidence is still very fragile. They are shopping for Christmas now, and they don’t need uncertainty over a tax increase.”
Helene Cooper reported from Washington and Nelson D. Schwartz from New York. Jackie Calmes contributed reporting from Washington.
After two foreclosures and two bankruptcies, Hermes Maldonado is as surprised as anyone that he's getting a third shot at homeownership.
The 61-year-old machine operator at a plastics factory bought a $170,000 house in Moreno Valley this summer that boasts laminate-wood floors and squeaky clean appliances. He got the four-bedroom, two-story house despite a pockmarked credit history.
The last time he owned a home, Maldonado refinanced four times and took on a second mortgage. He put a Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz C300W in the driveway and racked up about $45,000 in credit card bills and other debts. His debt-fueled lifestyle ended only when he was forced into bankruptcy.
His reentry into homeownership three years later came courtesy of the Federal Housing Administration. The agency has become a major source of cash for so-called rebound buyers — a burgeoning crop of homeowners with past defaults who otherwise would be shut out of the market.
"After everything that happened, thank God I was able to buy another house," Maldonado said in Spanish. "Now, it's good because the interest rates are low and there are lots of homes."
The FHA, which backs nearly 8 million loans, is helping rebound buyers recapture the American dream, boosting the housing market in the process. But that's touched off a fierce debate about the financial and ethical wisdom of bankrolling borrowers who contributed to the last housing bubble — and the potential cost to taxpayers.
The agency has suffered deepening losses in the last three years that have put it under enormous scrutiny.
Created during the Great Depression to revive the devastated housing market, the FHA doesn't originate loans. It guarantees mortgages made by banks in exchange for insurance premiums. The agency now insures more than $1 trillion worth of homes. This year it has backed roughly 14% of all mortgage originations, according to the trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance.
Critics worry that the FHA is foolishly allowing marginal buyers to get loans just three years after foreclosure with as little as 3.5% down. What's more, the agency doesn't even track how many rebound borrowers it backs.
Exactly how much money is hemorrhaging from the agency could be revealed Thursday, when the agency files a self-evaluation report to Congress. Analysts say the FHA could request a bailout from the U.S. Treasury for the first time in its history.
What's unclear is how much money the agency needs to stay afloat. The Housing and Urban Development Department, however, projects $13 billion might be needed.
"It looks uglier and uglier for the FHA," said Anthony Yezer, a George Washington University economics professor.
At a minimum, the experiences of Maldonado and other rebound borrowers illustrate how fast the financial errors of the boom are being wiped clean by government policy that is eager to give the housing market a boost.
"If somebody goes through foreclosure or bankruptcy, or whatever, you don't allow them to jump back into the housing market as quickly as three years," said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "Aren't you setting yourself up for future losses ... if you make those loans to the same high-risk borrowers?"
Proponents say rebound lending is essential to the economy. This group has emerged as an unexpected source of strength for housing this year, particularly in badly scarred areas such as the Inland Empire.
Besides, advocates argue, giving people a second chance — or even a third chance — is as deeply ingrained in American culture as buying a home itself.
"It's happening quite a bit," said Doug Shepherd, owner of Shepherd Realty Group in Riverside. "It is something that is an important part of the coming market."
Home builders and real estate agents are capitalizing on this market.
Some even keep files on former homeowners who will become eligible to apply for new loans once past transgressions are cleared from their credit reports.
Greg McGuff, the Inland Empire division president for home builder Lennar Corp., said roughly 1 in 5 buyers in his region had either a previous short sale or a foreclosure. Many of them are eager to own again and often recognize the opportunity that declining prices and low-interest mortgage rates provide.
It doesn’t sound like much of a disguise, but John McAfee is doing his best to change his appearance as he continues to evade the police in Belize.
In a case that seems to get more bizarre by the day, the 67-year-old has continued to call me with semi-hourly updates. The latest disclosure: He claims to have dyed his hair, eyebrows, beard, and mustache jet black.
“I have modified my appearance in a radical fashion,” McAfee said, “I’ll probably look like a murderer, unfortunately.”
The American antivirus pioneer is wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Gregory Faull, 52, an American expatriate and neighbor of McAfee’s. They both have beachside properties on the island of Ambergris Caye, about 20 miles off the Belize coast. Faull was found dead, face up in a pool of blood, in his villa Sunday morning, shot once in the back of the head. Faull had complained about the barking of McAfee’s dogs — McAfee kept 11 at his beachside compound — and four of those dogs were poisoned Friday night.
When police arrived at McAfee’s property Sunday afternoon to question him, McAfee hid, he says, burying himself in sand and covering his head with a cardboard box. He says he spent 18 hours hiding on his property before slipping away.
He has been running ever since, he says, riding in boats, huddling on the floorboards of taxis, sleeping in a bed that he said was infested with lice.
Since going into hiding, McAfee has repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with Faull’s death. He says that he does not want to give himself up to authorities because he is afraid they will torture or kill him.
He’s convinced that, while he’s away from his compound, the police will plant incriminating evidence unrelated to Faull’s murder. “The police have been to my house seven times,” he said. “I expect them to uncover a cache of fully automatic weapons, four tons of cocaine. Maybe a Soviet submarine.”
The authorities, meanwhile appear to be trying to put pressure on McAfee by arresting friends and associates, according to two sources (who are not McAfee). Since Sunday, police have detained one of McAfee’s bodyguards, William Mulligan; his groundskeeper, Cassian Chavaria; and a local taxi driver, Cesar Trapp.
McAfee said he is outraged by the detentions: “This is exactly what happened to Soviet dissidents when Stalin took power. If they could not catch the man himself, they rounded up all of his friends.”
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The man who claimed he had underage sex with the puppeteer behind “Sesame Street” character Elmo recanted his claims on Tuesday, U.S. media reported.
The unnamed man, now 23, had claimed that Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash had a sexual relationship with him when the accuser was 16 years old, potentially engulfing one of the biggest childhood brands in an underage sex scandal.
“He wants it to be known that his sexual relationship with Mr. Clash was an adult consensual relationship,” the law firm Andreozzi and Associates, who represent the man, told U.S. media outlets in a statement.
Clash, 52, who had denied the allegations, said in a statement obtained by Reuters on Tuesday: “I am relieved that this painful allegation has been put to rest. I will not discuss it further.”
New York-based Sesame Workshop said on Monday that its own inquiry had concluded that the claims of underage sexual conduct against Clash were unsubstantiated.
“We are pleased that this matter has been brought to a close, and we are happy that Kevin can move on from this unfortunate episode,” Sesame Workshop said in a statement on Tuesday.
Clash, 52, the voice of Elmo for nearly three decades, had acknowledged a past relationship with his accuser but said on Monday the pair were both consenting adults at the time. He termed the allegations “false and defamatory.”
“I am a gay man. I have never been ashamed of this or tried to hide it,” Clash said on Monday, saying he was taking a break from the TV show to deal with the situation.
Sesame Workshop said the allegations involving Clash came to its attention in June when the accuser first contacted the company by email. A company executive said it had found “absolutely no evidence that the allegations were true.”
The Elmo character debuted on “Sesame Street” in 1979. While Clash was the third performer to animate the child-like shaggy red monster, Sesame Workshop credits him with turning Elmo into the international sensation he became.
(Reporting By Eric Kelsey and Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Johnston)
In the wake of being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping, Lance Armstrong last week cut all official ties with Livestrong, the charity he founded 15 years ago while he was treated for testicular cancer.
On Nov. 4, he resigned from the organization’s board of directors; he had previously stepped down as the chairman of the board Oct. 17. He has distanced himself from the charity to try to protect it from any damage caused by his doping controversy, the new board chairman, Jeff Garvey, said in a statement.
“Lance Armstrong was instrumental in changing the way the world views people affected by cancer,” Garvey said. “His devotion to serving survivors is unparalleled, and for 15 years, he committed himself to that cause with all his heart.”
Garvey said that the Armstrong family had donated nearly $7 million to the foundation and that the organization under Armstrong had raised close to $500 million to serve cancer survivors.
Last month, the United States Anti-Doping Agency made public its evidence in its doping case against Armstrong, saying he had doped and encouraged his teammates to dope so they could help him win races. He was subsequently barred from Olympic sports for life and was stripped of all the cycling titles he won from August 1998 on.
Since then, Armstrong has spent several weeks in Hawaii, out of the public eye. On Saturday, though, he posted a photograph on Twitter showing him at home in Austin, Tex. He is lounging on a couch with his seven yellow Tour jerseys framed on the wall in the background.
In the post, he said, “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” The photograph had more than 400,000 page views as of Monday evening, with many people posting negative comments on the page.
“Lance, you have no moral conscious and it’s obvious many of your followers don’t either,” said one person who went by the Twitter handle “irobot,” who also posted that Armstrong needed “professional help.”
A person posting under the name “Aumann” said: “An art thief enjoying all his da Vincis.”
Other people posted words of support, including many who said they still thought Armstrong was the top cyclist in history.
“TomShelton” said of Armstrong’s seven Tour titles, “You earned all 7 of them no matter what is being said about you!”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 13, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated Jeff Garvey’s estimate of the sum the Livestrong charity had raised to serve cancer survivors. It was close to $500 million, not close to $300 million.
SACRAMENTO — An $11-million campaign donation that was secretly routed through an obscure Arizona group might have hurt the conservative effort in California on election day more than it helped, Republican operatives say.
The money went to oppose Gov. Jerry Brown's tax hikes, Proposition 30, and push a ballot measure to curb unions' political fundraising, Proposition 32. Voters approved the governor's tax plan and rejected the proposal to reduce labor's influence in California politics.
Some people behind the conservative campaigns now have second thoughts about the money's effect.
"At the end of the day, it was a significant distraction that took us off our campaign message," said Beth Miller, a spokeswoman for the Small Business Action Committee, which received the controversial $11 million.
Brown attacked the donation during many of his stump speeches, accusing "shadowy forces" of trying to undermine California's schools. If his tax plan failed, nearly $6 billion would have been cut from the budget, mostly from public schools.
Members of Brown's campaign team said the donation was something of a political gift. "They gave us the issue while hitting us in the nose," said Sean Clegg, a campaign advisor.
The furor over the money became one of the most closely watched sideshows in the final days before the Nov. 6 election.
State authorities sued the Arizona group, Americans for Responsible Leadership. The nonprofit group eventually named its contributors, but the mystery only deepened — the contributors were identified only as other nonprofits, which keep their donors secret.
Aaron McLear, a Republican strategist who worked against the tax plan, said Brown was successful in turning the controversy into a campaign issue.
"He was able to create a bigger boogeyman than Sacramento politicians, which is hard to do," he said.
Despite the $11-million cash infusion, conservatives still didn't have the money to match the Democrats and labor unions. Brown's campaign outspent its opponents, and unions flooded the airwaves to help sink Proposition 32.
Americans for Responsible Leadership did not admit any wrongdoing when it disclosed its contributors as other nonprofits. One of them, also located in Arizona, has been tied to Charles and David Koch, billionaire energy executives and Republican donors.
California officials are pushing forward with an investigation into who gave the money and are considering civil and criminal penalties for what they called "campaign money laundering."
"It ain't over," state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris said in a recent speech. "It wasn't over on election day and we're going to keep pushing it through."
chris.megerian@latimes.com
Times staff writer Ken Bensinger contributed to this report.
The 7-Eleven is starting to get a little crowded. In August, we reported that Amazon was installing lockers in the ubiquitous convenience stores where customers could have their orders delivered. Instead of waiting at home or at the office, you simply go by 7-Eleven and pick your package up.
And now, Amazon adversary ShopRunner announced it too is testing lockers in its home city of Philadelphia. One hundred such lockers, called PickUpPoints, will inhabit Toys”R”Us stores, a local chain called Ollys Shoes, and 7-Eleven. Of the three, 7-Eleven makes the most sense: It’s always open, which means you can pick up your package whenever works best for you. Amazon’s lockers are self-serve; you enter a PIN on a touchscreen, and the door to your order pops open. For ShopRunner pickups, you show a bar code on your smartphone to the clerk, who retrieves the package from the locker.
Led by former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, ShopRunner is a subscription-based service that offers members free two-day shipping from more than 60 retailers, as well as free returns. Stores on ShopRunner’s roster include Toys”R”Us, American Eagle Outfitters, PetSmart, and Calvin Klein.
At $79 per year, ShopRunner is taking obvious aim at Amazon’s identically priced Prime program, which also offers free two-day shipping. Smaller retailers who don’t want to invest in their own complex infrastructure to compete with Prime are turning to ShopRunner to handle the logistics of cheap, speedy delivery. ShopRunner’s lockers give those retailers yet more e-commerce infrastructure — ironically, in the form of a physical presence in brick-and-mortar stores.
Amazon’s lockers are striking because they’re the most visible step the world’s biggest e-commerce retailer has taken so far toward a physical presence that consumers are meant to see. ShopRunner’s lockers are striking because so many of the retailers represented by ShopRunner are themselves traditional offline stores. Their physical, non-virtual presence in malls across the country is still the core of what they do. Yet to compete in e-commerce, they now appear to need more than a website and a mobile app. They need little outposts in the backs of 7-Elevens to vie for the attention and dollars of shoppers who more than ever can expect to get what they want, when they want, where they want — and the shipping is free.
NEW YORK (AP) — Sandra Kyong Bradbury was star struck. She had just spied Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg a few feet away.
“How can you top that?” asked Bradbury, a New York City neonatal nurse who had helped evacuate infants from a hospital that lost power during the height of Superstorm Sandy. She was amazed that she was being honored at the same event as a Supreme Court justice — the annual Glamour Women of the Year awards, where stars of film, TV, fashion and sports share the stage with lesser-known women who have equally impressive achievements to their name.
Few events bring together such an eclectic group of honorees, not to mention presenters. At the Carnegie Hall ceremony Monday night, HBO star Lena Dunham, creator of “Girls” and a heroine to a younger generation, was introduced by Chelsea Handler and paid tribute in her speech to Nora Ephron, who died earlier this year. Ethel Kennedy was praised by her daughter, Rory, who has made a film about her famous mother. Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, 17, was honored along with swimming phenom Missy Franklin, also 17, and other Olympic athletes, introduced by singer Mary J. Blige and serenaded by American Idol winner Phillip Phillips. Singer-actress Selena Gomez was lauded by her friend, the actor Ethan Hawke.
But the most moving moments of the Glamour awards, now in their 22nd year, are often those involving people of whom the audience hasn’t heard. This year, the most touching moment came when one honoree, Pakistani activist and filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, brought onstage a woman who’d been the victim of an acid attack in her native Pakistan. Obaid-Chinoy won this year’s documentary short Oscar for a film about disfiguring acid attacks on Pakistani women by the men in their lives.
The evening carried reminders of Superstorm Sandy, with Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker introducing some 20 women who’d been heavily involved in storm relief work. “They held us together when Sandy tried to blow us apart,” Booker said. The women worked for organizations like the American Red Cross, but also smaller volunteer groups like Jersey City Sandy Recovery, an impromptu group formed by three women in Jersey City, N.J., who wanted a way to help storm-ravaged communities.
Singer-rapper Pharrell Williams introduced one of his favorite architects, the Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, 62, who designed the aquatic center for the London Olympics and is now at work on 43 projects around the world.
Activist Erin Merryn was honored for her work increasing awareness of child sex abuse — a horror she had endured during her own childhood. A law urging schools to educate children about sex abuse prevention, Erin’s Law, has now passed in four states. “I won’t stop until I get it passed in all 50 states,” Merryn insisted in her speech.
Vogue editor Anna Wintour saluted a fellow fashion luminary, honoree Annie Leibovitz, the creator of so many iconic photographs over the years. Jenna Lyons, the president of J. Crew, got kind words from her presenter, former supermodel Lauren Hutton. Chelsea Clinton brought up a stageful of women from across the country who had been involved in politics this year, noting that, while there is still a long way to go, progress was made in 2012.
The lifetime achievement award went to Ginsburg, 79, who made a few quips about being honored by a fashion magazine. “The judiciary is not a profession that ranks very high among the glamorously attired,” the justice said. She also noted that although she was only the second female Supreme Court justice (Sandra Day O’Connor came first), she was the first justice to be honored by Glamour.
An affectionate tribute to the late Ephron followed, with three actresses — Cynthia Nixon, and two Meryl Steep daughters, Mamie and Grace Gummer, reading from a graduation speech she had given at Wellesley College.
Actress Dunham, in her speech, touched on politics and expressed her own relief that President Barack Obama had won re-election, saying she felt it was crucial for reproductive freedom and other issues of women’s rights. “I wanted control of my womb before I really knew what my womb was,” she quipped.
After the ceremony, which was presided over by Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive, honorees and presenters headed to a private dinner. There, Sandy volunteers mingled with the stars. One woman, Lynier Harper, had spent six nights during Sandy at the Brooklyn YMCA where she works, taking care of other people. “When I finally went back home, my house was totally destroyed,” she said. She has moved in with her sister while she seeks a new home.
A group of seven nurses came from New York University’s Langone Medical Center, which lost power during the storm. The neonatal intensive care nurses had to carry the babies down nine flights of stairs, in the dark, squeezing oxygen into their lungs, to get them to safety.
And there were the three women from Jersey City Sandy Recovery, sinking in the proximity to the so many impressive people.
“I just shook Ruth Bader Ginsburg‘s hand,” exulted one of them, Candice Osborne. “How awesome!”
In the wake of being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping, Lance Armstrong last week cut all official ties with Livestrong, the charity he founded 15 years ago while he was treated for testicular cancer.
On Nov. 4, he resigned from the organization’s board of directors; he had previously stepped down as the chairman of the board Oct. 17. He has distanced himself from the charity to try to protect it from any damage caused by his doping controversy, the new board chairman, Jeff Garvey, said in a statement.
“Lance Armstrong was instrumental in changing the way the world views people affected by cancer,” Garvey said. “His devotion to serving survivors is unparalleled, and for 15 years, he committed himself to that cause with all his heart.”
Garvey said that the Armstrong family had donated nearly $7 million to the foundation and that the organization under Armstrong had raised close to $300 million to serve cancer survivors.
Last month, the United States Anti-Doping Agency made public its evidence in its doping case against Armstrong, saying he had doped and encouraged his teammates to dope so they could help him win races. He was subsequently barred from Olympic sports for life and was stripped of all the cycling titles he won from August 1998 on.
Since then, Armstrong has spent several weeks in Hawaii, out of the public eye. On Saturday, though, he posted a photograph on Twitter showing him at home in Austin, Tex. He is lounging on a couch with his seven yellow Tour jerseys framed on the wall in the background.
In the post, he said, “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” The photograph had more than 400,000 page views as of Monday evening, with many people posting negative comments on the page.
“Lance, you have no moral conscious and it’s obvious many of your followers don’t either,” said one person who went by the Twitter handle “irobot,” who also posted that Armstrong needed “professional help.”
A person posting under the name “Aumann” said: “An art thief enjoying all his da Vincis.”
Other people posted words of support, including many who said they still thought Armstrong was the top cyclist in history.
“TomShelton” said of Armstrong’s seven Tour titles, “You earned all 7 of them no matter what is being said about you!”
SAN FRANCISCO — The Facebook page for Gaston Memorial Hospital, in Gastonia, N.C., offers a chicken salad recipe to encourage healthy eating, tips on avoiding injuries at Zumba class, and pictures of staff members dressed up at Halloween. Typical stuff for a hospital in a small town.
But in October, another Facebook page for the hospital popped up. This one posted denunciations of President Obama and what it derided as “Obamacare.” It swiftly gathered hundreds of followers, and the anti-Obama screeds picked up “likes.” Officials at the hospital, scrambling to get it taken down, turned to their real Facebook page for damage control. “We apologize for any confusion,” they posted on Oct. 8, “and appreciate the support of our followers.”
The fake page came down 11 days later, as mysteriously as it had come up. The hospital says it has no clue who was behind it.
Fakery is all over the Internet. Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and has been used to spread false rumors, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.
Gaston Memorial’s experience is an object lesson in the problem of fakery on Facebook. For the world’s largest social network, it is an especially acute problem, because it calls into question its basic premise. Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”
Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.
Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It’s pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook.
The fakery problem on Facebook comes in many shapes. False profiles are fairly easy to create; hundreds can pop up simultaneously, sometimes with the help of robots, and often they persuade real users into friending them in a bid to spread malware. Fake Facebook friends and likes are sold on the Web like trinkets at a bazaar, directed at those who want to enhance their image. Fake coupons for meals and gadgets can appear on Facebook newsfeeds, aimed at tricking the unwitting into revealing their personal information.
Somewhat more benignly, some college students use fake names in an effort to protect their Facebook content from the eyes of future employers.
Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company’s now one billion plus users were fake. The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.
Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members to weed out fraud.
Flags are raised if a user sends out hundreds of friend requests at a time, Mr. Sullivan explained, or likes hundreds of pages simultaneously, or most obvious of all, posts a link to a site that is known to contain a virus. Those suspected of being fakes are warned. Depending on what they do on the site, accounts can be suspended.
In October, Facebook announced new partnerships with antivirus companies. Facebook users can now download free or paid antivirus coverage to guard against malware.
“It’s something we have been pretty effective at all along,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Facebook’s new aggressiveness toward fake “likes” became noticeable in September, when brand pages started seeing their fan numbers dip noticeably. An average brand page, Facebook said at the time, would lose less than 1 percent of its fans.
But the thriving market for fakery makes it hard to keep up with the problem. Gaston Memorial, for instance, first detected a fake page in its name in August; three days later, it vanished. The fake page popped up again on Oct. 4, and this time filled up quickly with the loud denunciations of the Obama administration. Dallas P. Wilborn, the hospital’s public relations manager, said her office tried to leave a voice-mail message for Facebook but was disconnected; an e-mail response from the social network ruled that the fake page did not violate its terms of service. The hospital submitted more evidence, saying that the impostor was using its company logo.
Eleven days later, the hospital said, Facebook found in its favor. But by then, the local newspaper, The Gaston Gazette, had written about the matter, and the fake page had disappeared.
Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
The election season seems to have increased the fakery.
