Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.

“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”

Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”

The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”

“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”

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Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales

The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.

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Academy doesn't follow the script in directors' race

Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow were behind two of the most acclaimed movies of 2012, the fact-based pictures "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty." The smart money in Hollywood had both vying for directing honors at next month's Academy Awards.

Yet when the Oscar nominations were announced Thursday, Affleck and Bigelow were passed over. Instead, two of the five slots went to longshot Hollywood outsiders: a 30-year-old New Orleans artist making his feature debut and an Austrian auteur who has worked almost exclusively outside the English language.

The nominations for Benh Zeitlin and Michael Haneke — whose Louisiana coming-of-age-story "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and French-language old-age drama "Amour," respectively, have grossed only a combined $12 million in the U.S. — had much of Hollywood baffled and buzzing, and trying to come up with an explanation.

PHOTOS: Top Oscar nominees

"I have no theory for it," said Amy Pascal, co-chair of Sony Pictures, which released "Zero Dark Thirty." "I don't understand it — everybody is like, 'What?' She [Bigelow] is the center of gravity of the movie." The director Ang Lee, who did land a spot on the list for his 3-D adventure "Life of Pi," joining Steven Spielberg ("Lincoln") and David O. Russell ("Silver Linings Playbook"), said, "It's shocking. Normally there's a pattern. There's no pattern this year."

Even Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which released "Amour," called it "incomprehensible" that Bigelow wasn't nominated. Bigelow and Affleck had earned nominations in nearly every other major awards group.

Many voters, pundits and Oscar nominees offered up possible explanations for what Oscar watchers regard as one of the more surprising upsets in recent years. Theories included controversy over the accuracy of "Zero Dark's" torture scenes to voters turning to other movies because they thought Affleck and Bigelow were locks, much in the way a political candidate ahead in the polls will generate a low voter turnout.

Some felt that Affleck and Bigelow, whose movies, about the Iran hostage drama of 1979 and the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, were both based on shattering moments in recent history, split the vote; others thought the list reflected a desire for fresh voices. The politics of Hollywood and the peculiarities of awards voting also came in for consideration.

The slight to Bigelow was especially noteworthy because she is the only woman to have won a directing Oscar, for "The Hurt Locker." She may have been damaged by a controversy in which lawmakers, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), said the film erroneously suggested torture helped lead to the capture of Bin Laden.

The academy's nominees deviated sharply from the selections of the Directors Guild of America, announced earlier in the week. The DGA is usually a strong indicator of Oscars but only overlapped on two of the five choices (Spielberg and Lee).

LIST: Complete list of Oscar nominees

In past years, academy members often took their cues from the DGA, but this year Oscar voting closed several weeks earlier, before the DGA announced its selections.

It was also hard to avoid the quirks of academy voting. Although the Oscars are considered an overarching seal of quality, the nominations for all but best picture are decided by a small group, known as a branch.

So even though the Directors Guild of America is composed of nearly 15,000 members, the academy's director branch is far smaller, made up of about 360 people. Voters list their five choices in what is known as a preferential balloting system, with every member being credited with only one vote.

According to Steve Pond, an Oscar pundit with the industry website the Wrap, a director needs just 62 votes to land a nomination — a startlingly small total that can lead to surprising choices.

The median age of the director's branch, according to a study conducted last year by The Times, is 64, making it the second-oldest branch in the academy. That possibly helped "Amour" make the cut because the film deals with aging.

But there were cultural factors at work too.

One Oscar voter, the writer-director Keith Gordon, said in an interview that he put Zeitlin on the top of his ballot because of what he saw as "a trend toward smaller, more offbeat films." Also omitted from the list was Tom Hooper, the winner for "The King's Speech" two years ago, who helmed 2012's splashy "Les Miserables."

OSCARS 2013: Complete list | Snubs & surprises | Ballot | Oscar Watch | Timeline

Joe Cavalier, a TV veteran and member of the branch, said that he was "so tired of the same people getting nominated." He added, "I think people should go for dark horses, and other people that I talk to in the academy feel the same way."

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Canadian Tax Collectors Solve Mystery of Open Source Government

When you think of hotbeds of open source innovation, Canada’s Treasury Board typically doesn’t make the cut. But over the past three years, coders at this slightly obscure Canadian tax-collecting agency have produced something that’s pretty rare in government: a hit open source project.

We’re not talking about the next Linux here, but this summer, the Treasury Board of Canada hosted a CodeFest to invite hackers — mostly government staffers — to hack its Web Experience Toolkit, or WET — a set of open-source tools that the Treasury Board uses for building websites.

One hundred and fifty people came. Many of them were young developers, excitedly swapping code and sharing ideas across tables. To Lucia Harper, a communications consultant at the event who has worked for the Canadian government, it wasn’t your federal coder snoozefest. It looked like the kind of hackathon that you’d see at private companies. There “were pods of people gathered in groups all sporting laptops; giant screens on the walls with Twitter feeds, code demonstrations, style guides and the like,” she wrote in a blog post about the event. “There was a hubbub people. There was a buzz of anticipation and solutions.”

2012 was the year that the U.S. government put the full court press on software developers. As we reported earlier this week, the federal CIO Steven VanRoekel has a vision of a more hackable, more accessible government where code-sharing is far more common — and far more useful.

And this vision is starting to pay off. Over the past few years, government use of the social-coding website, GitHub, has skyrocketed. Today, there are more than 350 government projects hosted there. But the sad truth is that most of this code hasn’t been able to attract a wide group of developers, outside of the folks who were paid to write the original code. That kind of crossover success is the hallmark of a really successful open source effort.

And that’s what’s starting to happen with WET. It already has contributors from 34 federal agencies, but now that’s starting to branch out. “We’ve had contributions from business and even academia,” says Paul Jackson, a web project officer with the Treasury Board. There’s a contributor in Spain, and another who works as a contractor for the City of Ottawa. There are close to 200 contributors in all, but the real number of people who have now participated in the project is surely much larger as many of those official contributors are simply passing along code that others on their team have developed.

With about 30 private sector participants, the project is getting contributions that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

That means that, for example, the Treasury Board gets the benefits of someone else’s user interface testing. “We’re still evolving with learning how to do user experience and improving the useability of our website,” Jackson says. “But there are a lot of firms out there that are dedicated to that very purpose. And if they can share their testing results and get involved and help us with improving our designs, it can make the product better as a whole.”

Down in New York State, Luke Charde says he’s using the success of WET to try to sell his colleagues on the idea of doing more open source development. “That’s my vision for what I want to do across different agencies in New York,” says Charde, a user-interface design lead with New York’s Office of IT Services. As he sees things, WET is a runaway success. Among GitHub’s government pages, at least, it’s “one of the first examples of massive collaboration happening and savings,” he says.

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‘Argo,’ ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ win at Critics Choice

(Reuters) – Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage drama “Argo,” “Lincoln” star Daniel Day-Lewis and “Zero Dark Thirty”‘s Jessica Chastain were among big winners at the Critics Choice Movie Awards on Thursday, taking honors for best picture, actor and actress, with Affleck nabbing the prize for best director.

The all-star “Silver Linings Playbook” swept the comedy awards, winning best comedy film, best comedy actor for Bradley Cooper and best comedy actress, which went to Jennifer Lawrence.

The 250-member Broadcast Film Critics Association, the largest film critics organization in the United States and Canada, also gave the film its best acting ensemble prize at the event in Santa Monica, California.

Affleck, known mostly as actor and who was overlooked for directing “Argo” earlier on Thursday when the Academy Award nominations were announced, began his acceptance with the quip: “I would like to thank the academy,” before adding “I’m kidding. This is the one that counts.”

Day-Lewis won for his acclaimed performance in the title role of Steven Spielberg’s historical drama “Lincoln,” while Chastain took the prize for “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

It was one of only two awards for “Lincoln,” which led the Oscar nominations with 12. The Oscar runner-up, “Life of Pi,” won only two technical awards.

Lawrence took home two awards, also winning best actress in an action movie for “The Hunger Games.”

“Critics aren’t so bad,” she said as she accepted the award, later riffing on the line when she won her second award, for “Silver Linings Playbook,” saying “Seriously, I love critics.”

Many stars who were nominated just hours earlier for Oscars, Hollywood’s top honors, were on hand, including “Les Miserables” star Hugh Jackman, Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, who won the award for best supporting actress for “Les Miserables.”

Best supporting actor went to Philip Seymour Hoffman for “The Master.”

Director David O. Russell dedicated the “Silver Linings” award to his son, saying “I made it to give him hope,” adding, “That’s my silver lining.”

European director Michael Haneke’s drama “Amour,” about an aging couple struggling with failing health and mortality and which scored several major Oscar nominations on Thursday, won the award for best foreign language film.

The prize for best sci-fi/horror film went to “Looper,” while “Searching for Sugarman” won best documentary.

The screenwriting awards were won by Quentin Tarantino for his original screenplay for “Django Unchained” and Tony Kushner who adapted the screenplay for “Lincoln.”

British singer Adele’s song “Skyfall” from the James Bond film of the same name won best song, and star Daniel Craig was named best actor in a action film. The film also won best action movie.

Nine-year old Quvenzhane Wallis, star of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” who became the youngest best actress Oscar nominee in history on Thursday, was named best young actor or actress. She accepted her award clutching a pink-cased electronic device, from which she read her speech as she grinned broadly.

The awards were handed out ahead of Sunday’s Golden Globes and a slew of other award shows that narrow the field for the Oscars, which will be held on February 24.

Writer-producer-director Judd Apatow received a special “genius” award created to honor “an unprecedented demonstration of excellence in the cinematic arts.”

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Eric Walsh)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: Taking a Zen Approach to Caregiving

You try to help your elderly father. Irritated and defensive, he snaps at you instead of going along with your suggestion. And you think “this is so unfair” and feel a rising tide of anger.

How to handle situations like this, which arise often and create so much angst for caregivers?

Jennifer Block finds the answer in what she calls “contemplative caregiving” — the application of Buddhist principles to caregiving and the subject of a year-long course that starts at the San Francisco Zen Center in a few weeks.

This approach aims to cultivate compassion, both for older people and the people they depend on, said Ms. Block, 49, a Buddhist chaplain and the course’s lead instructor. She’s also the former director of education at the Zen Hospice project in San Francisco and founder of the Beyond Measure School for Contemplative Care, which is helping develop a new, Zen-inspired senior living community in the area.

I caught up with Ms. Block recently, and what follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Let’s start with your experience. Have you been a caregiver?

My experience in caregiving is as a professional providing spiritual care to individuals and families when they are facing and coping with aging and sickness and loss and dying, particularly in hospital and hospice settings.

What kinds of challenges have you witnessed?

People are for the most part unprepared for caregiving. They’re either untrained or unable to trust their own instincts. They lack confidence as well as knowledge. By confidence, I mean understanding and accepting that we don’t know all the answers – what to do, how to fix things.

This past weekend, I was on the phone with a woman who’d brought her mom to live near her in assisted living. The mom had been to the hospital the day before. My conversation with the daughter was about helping her see the truth that her mother needed more care and that was going to change the daughter’s responsibilities and her life. And also, her mother was frail, elderly, and coming nearer to death.

That’s hard, isn’t it?

Yes, because we live in a death-denying society. Also, we live in a fast-paced, demanding world that says don’t sit still — do something. But people receiving care often need most of all for us to spend time with them. When we do that, their mortality and our grief and our helplessness becomes closer to us and more apparent.

How can contemplative caregiving help?

We teach people to cultivate a relationship with aging, sickness and dying. To turn toward it rather than turning away, and to pay close attention. Most people don’t want to do this.

A person needs training to face what is difficult in oneself and in others. There are spiritual muscles we need to develop, just like we develop physical muscles in a gym. Also, the mind needs to be trained to be responsive instead of reactive.

What does that mean?

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re trying to help your mother, and she says something off-putting to you like “you’ve always been terrible at keeping house. It’s no wonder you lost my pajamas.”

The first thing is to notice your experience. To become aware of that feeling, almost like being slapped emotionally. To notice your chest tightening.

Then I tell people to take a deep breath. And say something to themselves like “soften” to address that tightness. That’s how you can stay facing something uncomfortable rather than turning away.

If I were in this position, I might say something to myself like “hello unhappiness” or “hello suffering” or “hello aging” to tether myself.

The second step would be curiosity about that experience. Like, wow, where do I feel that anger that rose up in me, or that fear? Oh, it’s in my chest. I’m going to feel that, stay with it, investigate it.

Why is that important?

Because as we investigate something we come to understand it. And, paradoxically, when we pay attention to pain it changes. It softens. It moves. It lessens. It deepens. And we get to know it and learn not to be afraid of it or change it or fix it but just come alongside of it.

Over hours, days, months, years, the mind and heart come to know pain. And the response to pain is compassion — the wish for the alleviation of pain.

Let’s go back to what mother said about your housekeeping and the pajamas. Maybe you leave the room for five minutes so you can pay attention to your reaction and remember your training. Then, you can go back in and have a response rather than a reaction. Maybe something like “Mom, I think you’re right. I may not be the world’s best housekeeper. I’m sorry I lost your pajamas. It seems like you’re having a pretty strong response to that, and I’d like to know why it matters so much to you. What’s happening with you today?”

Are other skills important?

Another skill is to become aware of how much we receive as well as give in caregiving. Caregiving can be really gratifying. It’s an expression of our values and identity: the way we want the world to be. So, I try to teach people how this role benefits them. Such as learning what it’s like to be old. Or having a close, intimate relationship with an older parent for the first time in decades. It isn’t necessarily pleasant or easy. But the alternative is missing someone’s final chapter, and that can be a real loss.

What will you do in your course?

We’ll teach the principles of contemplative care and discuss them. We’ll have homework, such as ‘Bring me three examples of someone you were caring for who was caring toward you in return.’ That’s one way of practicing attention. And people will train in meditation.

We’ll also explore our own relationship to aging, sickness, dying and loss. We’ll tell our stories: this is the situation I was in, this is where I felt myself shut down, this was the edge of my comfort or knowledge. And we’ll teach principles from Buddhism. Equanimity. Compassion. Deep inner connectedness.

What can people do on their own?

Mindfulness training is offered in almost every city. That’s one of the core components of this approach.

I think every caregiver needs to have their own caregiver — a therapist or a colleague or a friend, someone who is there for them and with whom they can unburden themselves. I think of caregiving as drawing water from a well. We need to make sure that we have whatever nurtures us, whatever supplies that well. And often, that’s connecting with others.

Are other groups doing this kind of work?

In New York City, the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care educates the public and professionals about contemplative care. And in New Mexico, the Upaya Zen Center does similar work, much of it centered around death and dying.

People who want to read about this might want to look at a new book of essays, “The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work” (Wisdom Publications, 2012).

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F.A.A. to Begin a Review of Boeing 787s

Federal authorities said Friday they would order a review of electrical systems in Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner following a spate of incidents, including a battery fire earlier this week in Boston, 15 months after the technologically advanced aircraft came into service.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it would examine critical systems on the Boeing 787, including the design, manufacture and assembly of the aircraft. More details were to be announced at a news conference Friday in Washington with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood; the administrator of the F.A.A., Michael P. Huerta; and Raymond L. Conner, the head of Boeing’s commercial airplane division.

The review was not expected to ground the 787 fleet, a Boeing spokesman said. Boeing has delivered 50 of the airplanes so far and has received orders for more than 800. But since their first commercial flight in November 2011, some 787s have had electrical fires, fuel leaks or other problems.

It is uncommon for the F.A.A. to open a review of an airplane it has already certified, but it points to increased concern by regulators.

A Boeing spokesman, Marc Birtel, declined to comment on any review on Thursday evening. But he said Boeing was working actively with the F.A.A. to understand and address “introductory issues” that might come up with the new aircraft.

“While we take each issue seriously, nothing we’ve seen in service causes us to doubt the capabilities of the airplane,” he said.

The review comes amid an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board into why a battery pack caught fire in a parked 787 at Logan International Airport in Boston on Monday. The fire occurred in a Japan Airlines plane from Tokyo after the passengers and crew had left the plane.

The battery, which powers the auxiliary power unit used when the plane is on the ground, sustained “severe fire damage,” according to the safety board.

But with the current focus on the 787’s problems, every incident, however small, is getting extra attention. Earlier on Friday, All Nippon Airlines of Japan reported cracks in the cockpit window of a 787 Dreamliner heading from Tokyo to Matsuyama, the third time that cracks had appeared in the windshield of one of the 17 787s operated by the airline.

The cracks were on the outermost of five layers that compose the cockpit windshield and did not endanger the aircraft, said Megumi Tezuka, a company spokeswoman.

Moreover, she said, cracks of this kind are not unique to the 787 Dreamliner; cracks have appeared in other aircraft types operated by All Nippon from time to time.

“We do not see this as a sign of a fundamental problem” with the aircraft, Ms. Tezuka said.

A bigger concern to investigators would be problems in the plane’s electric systems. The 787, which make extensive use of lightweight carbon composites, relies more on electric systems than previous generations of airplanes. Electrical systems, not mechanical ones, operate hydraulic pumps, de-ice the wings, pressurize the cabin and handle other tasks. The plane also has electric brakes instead of hydraulic ones.

This electric architecture helps cut energy consumption and makes the aircraft more efficient to operate.

In a move to quell the damage to the plane’s reputation, Boeing on Wednesday defended its program and said it stood by its engineering and design choices, including the use of lithium-ion batteries such as the one that apparently caught fire.

Boeing pointed out that the plane had multiple layers of redundant systems and emphasized that any new plane program suffered from glitches in its first few years of production.

So far, airlines that operate the plane have stood by Boeing. After years of production delays, airlines have been eager to fly an airplane that promises significant fuel savings.

This week’s events followed incidents with the plane last month. In December, the F.A.A. ordered inspections of fuel line connectors on all 787s, warning of a risk of fuel leaks and fires. That same day, a United Airlines 787 flying from Houston to Newark was diverted to New Orleans after one of its six electric generators failed in midflight.

Boeing said this week that those problems were not related to the fire incident in Boston. It traced the problem on the United flight to a defective electric panel. It added that the 787 proved during testing that it could fly for more than five hours with just one of its six electrical generators.

Some safety experts agreed that the problems with the 787 pointed more to teething problems than structural faults. But the issues are still an embarrassment for Boeing’s flagship program. The plane maker has said it expects to sell 5,000 787s in the next 20 years.

In a separate matter, Japan Airlines said that an incident on Tuesday involving a fuel leak on a 787 was because one of four fuel valves connecting two tanks had been left open. This caused fuel to flow into a surge tank near the wing tip and out a vent. The plane was towed back to its gate but eventually left Boston for Tokyo after a delay of nearly four hours.

Bettina Wassener contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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Darpa Open Sources Code for Building Your Own Amphibious Tank

Two years ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates killed off the Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle — a $13 billion misfire of an attempt to build an armored boat that could make landfall and still get around on the beach. But on Monday, the Department of Defense will give you the chance to design something better.

The DoD’s forward-thinking Darpa group plans to release open-source software that will let anyone design and run virtual tests on their own swimming tank. And more than that, it will kick off the first phase of a contest where you can pit your amphibious tank design against everyone else’s. The prize: $1 million.

Darpa’s software — built in part by researchers at Vanderbilt University — is called Meta. It’s an open source version of the same kind of complex design and simulation software that typically costs big corporations tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman, the Darpa program manager in charge of the challenge.

The code will be released Monday at noon EST, and the first phase of the contest — called the FANG (Fast, Adaptable, Next-Generation Ground Vehicle) challenge — will kick off. Contestants will use this code to build a drive train and mobility system, Wiedenman says.

Darpa plans to continue to refine the code as the FANG challenge evolves. And, eventually, it will also release the source code to the Vehicleforge.org website that it’s using to manage the contest.

Once the drive train is built, the field gets winnowed a little bit, and the top 20 contestants will then design more of their amphibious vehicle. Contestants will move forward based on how well they meet about 150 design goals of the drive system.

When the $1 million prize winner is finally selected a few years from now, Darpa will try to build out the top design. But of course, they won’t do this in a standard way. According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, they’re investing $3.5 million in Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh hacker spaces where Darpa employees will literally work by night, building a new kind of reconfigurable foundry where they’ll be able to quickly spit out prototypes of the parts they’re creating.

The goal, Wiedenman says, is to build “new infrastructure for systems design development from a set of requirements — an idea on a cocktail napkin — all the way to a final fielded product.”

You can watch Darpa’s FANG Challenge video below:

Screen grab: DARPA

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TNT Orders Dick Wolf Series “Cold Justice”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – TNT has ordered eight episodes of a new procedural from “Law & Order” boss Dick Wolf, the network said Wednesday.

The series bears the working title “Cold Justice” and is billed as an “unscripted procedural drama.” It will follow Texas prosecutor Kelly Siegler and Yolanda McClary, a crime-scene investigator for the Las Vegas Police Department, as they help local law-enforcement agencies in small towns across the country solve violent crimes that have sat cold because of lack of funding and proper forensic technology.

In each episode, Siegler and McClary will take on a different case, re-examining the evidence and questioning suspects and witnesses in an effort to finally solve the dormant cases.

The show is tentatively slated to premiere on TNT in late summer 2013.

Wolf will executive-produce the series, along with Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz (“Top Chef,” “Fashion Star”) and Tom Thayer (“Hitchcock”). The project comes to TNT from Wolf Films and Cutfort and Lipsitz’s Magical Elves production company.

“Cold Justice” will join other unscripted projects on TNT this year, including the Donnie Walhberg-produced “Boston’s Finest,” a Boston law-enforcement series, which premieres in February; and “The Hero,” a competition series starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, which premieres in the summer. Also premiering in the summer: “72 Hours,” a race-against-the-clock competition set in the wild.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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