A delicate new balancing act in senior healthcare

When Claire Gordon arrived at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, nurses knew she needed extra attention.

She was 96, had heart disease and a history of falls. Now she had pneumonia and the flu. A team of Cedars specialists converged on her case to ensure that a bad situation did not turn worse and that she didn't end up with a lengthy, costly hospital stay.

Frail seniors like Gordon account for a disproportionate share of healthcare expenditures because they are frequently hospitalized and often land in intensive care units or are readmitted soon after being released. Now the federal health reform law is driving sweeping changes in how hospitals treat a rapidly growing number of elderly patients.

The U.S. population is aging quickly: People older than 65 are expected to make up nearly 20% of it by 2030. Linda P. Fried, dean of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, said now is the time to train professionals and test efforts to improve care and lower healthcare costs for elderly patients.

"It's incredibly important that we prepare for being in a society where there are a lot of older people," she said. "We have to do this type of experiment right now."

At Cedars-Sinai, where more than half the patients in the medical and surgical wards are 65 or older, one such effort is dubbed the "frailty project." Within 24 hours, nurses assess elderly patients for their risk of complications such as falls, bed sores and delirium. Then a nurse, social worker, pharmacist and physician assess the most vulnerable patients and make an action plan to help them.

The Cedars project stands out nationally because medical professionals are working together to identify high-risk patients at the front end of their hospitalizations to prevent problems at the back end, said Herb Schultz, regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"For seniors, it is better care, it is high-quality care and it is peace of mind," he said.

The effort and others like it also have the potential to reduce healthcare costs by cutting preventable medical errors and readmissions, Schultz said. The federal law penalizes hospitals for both.

Gordon, an articulate woman with brightly painted fingernails and a sense of humor, arrived at Cedars-Sinai by ambulance on a Monday.

Soon, nurse Jacquelyn Maxton was at her bedside asking a series of questions to check for problems with sleep, diet and confusion. The answers led to Gordon's designation as a frail patient. The next day, the project team huddled down the hall and addressed her risks one by one. Medical staff would treat the flu and pneumonia while at the same time addressing underlying health issues that could extend Gordon's stay and slow her recovery, both in the hospital and after going home.

To reduce the chance of falls, nurses placed a yellow band on her wrist that read "fall risk" and ensured that she didn't get up on her own. To prevent bed sores, they got her up and moving as often as possible. To cut down on confusion, they reminded Gordon frequently where she was and made sure she got uninterrupted sleep. Medical staff also stopped a few unnecessary medications that Gordon had been prescribed before her admission, including a heavy narcotic and a sleeping pill.

"It is really a holistic approach to the patient, not just to the disease that they are in here for," said Glenn D. Braunstein, the hospital's vice president for clinical innovation.

Previously, nurse Ivy Dimalanta said, she and her colleagues provided similar care but on a much more random basis. Under the project, the care has become standardized.

The healthcare system has not been well designed to address the needs of seniors who may have had a lifetime of health problems, said Mary Naylor, gerontology professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. As a result, patients sometimes fall through the cracks and return to hospitals again and again.

"That is not good for them and that is not good for society to be using resources in that way," Naylor said.

Using data from related projects, Cedars began a pilot program in 2011 and expanded it last summer. The research is continuing but early results suggest that the interventions are leading to fewer seniors being admitted to the intensive care unit and to shorter hospital stays, said Jeff Borenstein, researcher and lead clinician on the frailty project. "It definitely seems to be going in the right direction," he said.

The hospital is now working with Naylor and the University of Pennsylvania to design a program to help the patients once they go home.

"People who are frail are very vulnerable when they leave the hospital," said Harriet Udin Aronow, a researcher at Cedars. "We want to promote them being safe at home and continuing to recover."

In Gordon's case, she lives alone with the help of her children and a caregiver. The hospital didn't want her experiencing complications that would lengthen the stay, but they also didn't want to discharge her before she was ready. Under the health reform law, hospitals face penalties if patients come back too soon after being released.

Patients and their families often are unaware of the additional attention. Sitting in a chair in front of a vase of pink flowers, Gordon said she knew she would have to do her part to get out of the hospital quickly. "You have to move," she said. "I know you get bed sores if you stay in bed."

Gordon said she was comfortable at the hospital but she wanted to go back to her house as quickly as she could. "There's no place like home," she said.

Two days later, that's where she was.

anna.gorman@latimes.com

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DC Comics Turns the Occupy Movement Into a Superhero Title

Eighteen months after the phrase first entered the collective public consciousness, the plight of the 99 percent is coming to mainstream superhero comics — via a new series from the second biggest publisher in the American comic industry, which just happens to be a subsidiary of a multi-national corporation that makes around $12 billion a year. Irony, anybody?

In May, DC Comics will launch two new series taking place in their mainstream superhero universe that offer different insights into the class struggle in a world filled with superheroes, alien races and inexplicable events. The Green Team, written by Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures creators Art Baltazar and Franco, with art by Ig Guara, revives an obscure 1975 concept about teenage rich kids who try to make the world a better place with their outrageous wealth. In an interview promoting the series, Franco promised that it would address questions like “Can money make you happy?” and “If you had unlimited wealth, could you use that to make the lives of people better?”

Obviously, this is one of the more fanciful series DC will be publishing.

But while DC is promoting The Green Team series as the adventures of the “1%,” its companion title, The Movement, is teased as a chance for us to “Meet the 99%… They were the super-powered disenfranchised — now they’re the voice of the people!”

“It’s a book about power,” explained The Movement writer Gail Simone. “Who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse. As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it’s nearly impossible to shut it all down.”

“The thing I find fascinating and a little bit worrisome is, what happens when a hacktivist group whose politics you find completely repulsive has this same kind of power and influence,” she elaborated in an interview at Big Shiny Robot. “What if a racist or homophobic group rises up and organizes in the same manner?”

While the concept is ambitious, the idea that a comic capable of living up to the book’s populist inspiration could come from DC Entertainment still strikes some as unlikely. Matt Pizzolo, the editor of the Occupy Comics anthology, told Wired that “though DC Comics did help launch Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s seminal anarchist epic V For Vendetta over two decades ago, it’s unlikely they would do so today. Between dismantling Vertigo and frankensteining Watchmen, the past year has demonstrated DC isn’t a safe place for bold creators who want to tell the kinds of stories that would inspire things like Occupy, rather than just cash in on them.”

Still, Simone says that the use of the iconography and language of a real-world populist movement is deliberate, promising that the book will reflect today’s decentralized political world and offer ”a slice of rarity that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books.”

This wouldn’t the first time that DC has attempted to offer pre-packaged populist rebellion, of course; in addition to the aforementioned publication of the anti-establishment V For Vendetta, the company’s Vertigo imprint also published Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, a series centering around an international organization struggling against forces of authority and repression that included anti-corporate themes.

Only time will tell whether The Movement will live up to the subversive examples of these earlier books, or just end up a well-intentioned piece of topical super heroics that trades on, and commodifies, a real political movement.

The Movement #1 will be available in both print and digital formats on May 1, while The Green Team #1 will be released on May 22.

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA

John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?

And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?

For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.

By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.

But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.

The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.

Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.

A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.

“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”

Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.

John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.

Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.

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Big Bear locked down amid manhunt

The bustling winter resort of Big Bear took on the appearance of a ghost town Thursday as surveillance aircraft buzzed overhead and police in tactical gear and carrying rifles patrolled mountain roads in convoys of SUVs, while others stood guard along major intersections.

Even before authorities had confirmed that the torched pickup truck discovered on a quiet forest road belonged to suspected gunman Christopher Dorner, 33, officials had ordered an emergency lockdown of local businesses, homes and the town's popular ski resorts. Parents were told to pick up their children from school, as rolling yellow buses might pose a target to an unpredictable fugitive on the run.

By nightfall, many residents had barricaded their doors as they prepared for a long, anxious evening.

PHOTOS: A tense manhunt amid tragic deaths

"We're all just stressed," said Andrea Burtons as she stocked up on provisions at a convenience store. "I have to go pick up my brother and get him home where we're safe."

Police ordered the lockdown about 9:30 a.m. as authorities throughout Southern California launched an immense manhunt for the former lawman, who is accused of killing three people as part of a long-standing grudge against the LAPD. Dorner is believed to have penned a long, angry manifesto on Facebook saying that he was unfairly fired from the force and was now seeking vengeance.

Forest lands surrounding Big Bear Lake are cross-hatched with fire roads and trails leading in all directions, and the snow-capped mountains can provide both cover and extreme challenges to a fugitive on foot. It was unclear whether Dorner was prepared for such rugged terrain.

Footprints were found leading from Dorner's burned pickup truck into the snow off Forest Road 2N10 and Club View Drive in Big Bear Lake.

San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said that although authorities had deployed 125 officers for tracking and door-to-door searches, officers had to be mindful that the suspect may have set a trap.

"Certainly. There's always that concern and we're extremely careful and we're worried about this individual," McMahon said. "We're taking every precaution we can."

PHOTOS: A fugitive's life on Facebook

Big Bear has roughly 400 homes, but authorities guessed that only 40% are occupied year-round.

The search will probably play out with the backdrop of a winter storm that is expected to hit the area after midnight.

Up to 6 inches of snow could blanket local mountains, the National Weather Service said.

Gusts up to 50 mph could hit the region, said National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Moede, creating a wind-chill factor of 15 to 20 degrees.

Extra patrols were brought in to check vehicles coming and going from Big Bear, McMahon said, but no vehicles had been reported stolen.

"He could be anywhere at this point," McMahon said. When asked if the burned truck was a possible diversion, McMahon replied: "Anything's possible."

Dorner had no known connection to the area, authorities said.

Craig and Christine Winnegar, of Murrieta, found themselves caught up in the lockdown by accident. Craig brought his wife to Big Bear as a surprise to celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary. Their prearranged dinner was canceled when restaurant owners closed their doors out of fear.

"It's definitely scary," Christine Winnegar said.

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The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 12: The Present and Beyond

Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.

Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.

This week's installment takes us into the future, when cars drive themselves, we find out we're not alone and healthcare finally works.

We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.

It’s somewhere out there. The perfect planet. A world the same size, shape, distance, and composition as our own: Earth’s twin. Astronomers don’t know exactly when they’ll find it but chances are very good that it’ll be in the coming years. And it’s even more likely that they won’t just find one world like this, but instead hundreds.

NASA currently has the Kepler space telescope in orbit around the sun. Its mission is to discover strange new worlds and, even more importantly, determine the percentage of stars in our galaxy that could potentially host life. That is, the number of stars that have planets with the conditions that we know are conducive to developing organisms. This means they are about the same size as Earth and orbit at the right distance to have liquid water on their surface. Scientists don’t think that these are the only circumstances under which life arises, simply the only ones that we have an example where they do.

Hopefully, sometime before the end of the decade either Kepler or some other planet-hunting telescope will peer out and spot a solar system around a sun-like star that looks like our own. Orbiting within it in a period of around 300 days will be a tiny, rocky planet that looks very familiar. It will still be a very long time before we can determine whether or not such a world has life. But at least we’ll be able to gaze up and know that, out in the universe, there is some place like home.

Image: NASA

Since 2007, Wired.com’s This Day In Tech blog has reflected on important and entertaining events in the history of science and innovation, pursuing them chronologically for each day of the year. Hundreds of these essays have now been collected into a trivia book, Mad Science: Einstein’s Fridge, Dewar’s Flask, Mach’s Speed and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World. It goes on sale Nov. 13, and is available for pre-order today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online book stores.

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The New Old Age Blog: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

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

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U.S. Trade Deficit Shrinks

WASHINGTON — The trade deficit in the United States shrank in December to its narrowest in nearly three years, the Commerce Department said Friday, and the numbers suggested that the economy did much better in the fourth quarter than initially estimated.

The country’s trade gap narrowed to $38.5 billion during the month, the department said. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a deficit of $46 billion.

The lower gap means that the government could revise upward its advance reading for fourth-quarter gross domestic product, which showed the economy contracted at a 0.1 percent annual rate in part because of a decline in inflation-adjusted exports. The government had released its estimate for fourth-quarter G.D.P. before the December trade data was available.

Friday’s data showed American exports surged by $8.6 billion during the month, boosted by sales of industrial supplies, including a $1.2 billion increase of non-monetary gold. In a reflection of a boom in oil output driven by hydraulic fracturing technologies, petroleum exports rose by nearly $1 billion during the month to a record high level.

A fall in petroleum imports led overall purchases from abroad to decline $4.6 billion in December.

For all of 2012, the trade gap fell by 3.5 percent to $540.4 billion. A trade deficit of any size is still a drag on the domestic economy, but rising exports help lessen the effect. Exports last year rose 4.4 percent.

While the overall trade deficit shrank, it grew with China during the year. That will be sure to raise concerns from American manufacturers who want the United States to pressure the Asian giant more to strengthen its currency.

But even the figures on China had a silver lining. While imports last year from China increased to a record high, so did America’s exports to the country. America’s December trade deficit with China for goods, which was not seasonally adjusted, narrowed by $4.5 billion on a drop in imports.

The American trade deficit increased with the European Union last year but America’s surplus with Brazil rose.

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3 officers shot, 1 fatally; ex-LAPD cop sought

A massive manhunt was underway Thursday morning for an ex-Los Angeles Police Department officer suspected of shooting three police officers early Thursday, one fatally. He is also a suspect in the shooting of a couple in Irvine over the weekend.

The suspect wrote an online manifesto threatening to harm police officials and their families. 

Photos: Memorial for slain basketball coach

The three shootings Thursday morning occurred in Riverside County.

One LAPD officer was grazed in the Corona area, law enforcement sources said.

Then sometime later, two Riverside Police Department officers were shot in Riverside. One of those officers died, sources said. That shooting occurred at Magnolia and Arlington avenues. The officers were taken to Riverside Community Hospital.

Officials warned that Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33. is armed and dangerous. Law enforcement sources said police have placed security at the homes of LAPD officials named in the manifesto and believe Dorner has numerous weapons.

Hundreds of officers were swarming around the Riverside shooting scene looking for the gunman.

The California Highway Patrol issued a "Blue Alert" to law enforcement:

*THE SUSPECT IS CONSIDERED ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS*

A BLUE ALERT HAS BEEN ACTIVATED IN THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES: KERN, SANTA BARBARA, VENTURA, LOS ANGELES, SAN BERNARDINO, ORANGE, RIVERSIDE, SAN DIEGO, AND IMPERIAL.

ON FEBRUARY 7, 2013, AT APPROXIMATELY 0122 HOURS, THE SUSPECT WAS INVOLVED IN MULTIPLE SHOOTINGS WITH MULTIPLE AGENCIES IN THE RIVERSIDE CHP AREA.

THE SUSPECT IS CHRISTOPHER JORDAN DORNER, A 33 YEAR OLD, BLACK MALE, 6 FEET TALL, 270 POUNDS, WITH BLACK HAIR, BROWN EYES, WITH AN UNKNOWN CLOTHING DESCRIPTION.

THE SUSPECT WAS LAST SEEN DRIVING A 2005 BLUE OR GRAY NISSAN TITAN, WITH A CA LICENSE PLATE OF 8D83987 or 7X09131 - THE SUSPECT MAY BE SWTICHING BETWEEN THE TWO LICENSE PLATES.
THE VEHICLE ALSO HAS SKI RACKS ON ITS ROOF.

Irvine police Wednesday night named  Dorner as the suspect in the double slaying in the parking lot of an upscale Irvine apartment complex Sunday.

In the online postings, Dorner specifically named the father of Monica Quan, the Cal State Fullerton assistant basketball coach who was found dead Sunday, along with her fiance, Keith Lawrence.

Her father, Randy Quan, a retired LAPD captain, was involved in the review process that ultimately led to Dorner’s dismissal.

A former U.S. Navy reservist, Dorner was fired in 2009 for allegedly making false statements about his training officer.

Dorner said in his online postings that being a police officer had been his life’s ambition since he served in the Police Explorers program. Now that had been taken away from him, he said, and he suffered from severe depression and was filled with rage over the people who forced him from his job.

Dorner complained that Quan and others did not fairly represent him at the review hearing.

“Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family. There will be an element of surprise where you work, live, eat, and sleep,” he wrote, referring to Quan and several others.

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Apple Should, And Will, Make a Smartwatch

It isn’t a matter of “if” Apple creates a smartwatch, but rather “when.” And “why.”

Moving into the hot “wearables” market with a smartwatch would allow Apple to compete against upstarts like Pebble and seasoned stalwarts like Sony and capitalize on a trend that is sweeping the industry — as shown by the vast number of “wearable” computing devices seen at CES this year. Companies like Nike, Adidas and Motorola are expected to ship 90 million wearables by 2017, and there’s no way Apple would miss out on a piece of that action. A smartwatch would also help complete Apple’s product lineup since the company abandoned the wrist-wearable, square-shaped iPod nano in favor of a larger-screened version.

“The overall trend is that computing is diversifying, and the body is the next frontier for computing,” said Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. “It would seem strange for Apple to have no goal in shaping what that next phase of computing looks like.”

There’s been a number of signs suggesting Apple is hard at work on a gadget to revolutionize the smartwatch space. There are reports that Apple may be working with Intel to develop a smartwatch with a 1.5-inch PMOLED display. Apple’s investment in curved display technology also would work beautifully on a wearable product. And don’t forget that countless people wore the iPod Nano as a wristwatch — using third-party bands sold in Apple stores.

A smartwatch-size display certainly would fit nicely into Apple’s product lineup, which features mobile and desktop devices in a wide a variety of form factors. At the small end, you’ve got the display-less iPod shuffle, followed by the rest of Apple’s iPod and iPhone lineup, up to the 4-inch iPhone 5. With a hole in the 5- to 6-inch “phablet” area, the 8-inch iPad mini and full-size iPad models round out Apple’s offerings on the mobile front. Then you’ve got the 11-, 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air and Pro laptops, followed by the largest-screened iMacs and Cinema Display.

Besides the aforementioned phablet space, which would be an evolutionary addition like the iPad mini, Apple could add something a bit more “revolutionary” at either end of the spectrum — something small and wearable, or large, like an Apple television. But there are a number of difficulties associated with debuting the sort of game-changing TV we’d expect from Apple, and given the recent surge of wearable technologies, a wrist-worn computer makes much more sense in the near term.

How so?

Apple doesn’t typically invent a new market segment, but enter established ones where it sees great opportunity. There are plenty of iOS-compatible wearable devices already out there now — the Kickstarter-backed Pebble smartwatch is a notable newcomer, and with Martian watches and Metawatches are other options. Sony’s smartwatch is currently an Android-only model. So the time is right for Apple to jump in the pool.

“Apple tends not to be the first,” Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini of the Nielsen Norman Group, told Wired. He’s an expert in human-computer interaction, and spent 14 years at Apple in human interface design. “Apple tends to let other people make the mistakes, then wait till the technology is ready and come out with a product that really solves the problem.”

He believes current smartwatches fail in a couple of key areas: in overall design, with charging, and the need for buttons and menu trees on-device. With Jony Ive at the helm of Apple, we can expect sleek, unobtrusive hardware that meshes with current products. Apple’s previous experience with small devices like the iPod paired with Siri’s voice control will eliminate the need for complicated onscreen menus, or anything more than basic touch controls. Device charging is perhaps the most problematic area. People who wear watches tend to wear them all the time, and the tiny batteries needed to power them keep them going for years. Some wearables last a week, tops, but most need to be charged daily.

Rotman Epps surmises Apple could differentiate itself from competitors in two important ways: display technology and multifunctionality. Apple has made a name for itself with stunning displays, particularly the spectacular Retina Display devices, while providing better battery that meets or exceeds that of its competitors. That will be an advantage in the wearable space.

And in each of the areas Apple has recently “revolutionized” — the iPod, with MP3 players; the iPhone, with the smartphone space; and the iPad, with tablets — the major thing Apple accomplished, besides delivering a product with an easy-to-use interface and slick industrial design, was create a product that was multifunctional. Apple’s established a rich third-party developer ecosystem that can enhance a product far beyond its initially imagined capabilities. Creating an app ecosystem is a challenge for smaller smartwatch makers, like Pebble, who must partner with other hardware companies like Twine or app-makers like Runkeeper.

This is why current smartwatches stick to a fairly predictable repertoire of abilities, including relaying notifications from your phone (like voicemails, e-mails, tweets, and texts), tracking basic health and fitness stats using an accelerometer and gyroscope, and providing information on the weather. Bluetooth 4.0 lets these devices integrate with your mobile device using very low power. But with deep iOS integration, Siri, and third-party apps, Apple’s smartwatch could go so much further down the rabbit hole and truly bring computing to your wrist.

Tognazzini notes in a blog post that the smartwatch could act as a passcode for your iPhone — rather than needing to manually enter some digits to unlock your handset or adjust settings, the watch’s proximity would let your iDevice know that it is you, and not an impostor, trying to access the device. Similarly, the smartwatch could integrate with the Find My iPhone feature to make finding your misplaced phone or tablet as simple as issuing a command into your wrist-worn computer. A watch could also act as a portal to Passbook, he said, with the Apple-made app’s alerts and barcodes popping up on your wrist instead of on your handset. When you’re hustling through the airport, for example, that means one less thing you’ve got to dig out of your pocket in order to get through security.

We also could see an Apple smartwatch controlling third-party accessories and devices, like a Bluetooth toy car, the temperature and conditions inside your home, or household appliances. It could also act as a remote control — for that rumored Apple television, perhaps? — or even be used in correcting Apple Maps.

While the smartwatch space has been slowly growing since around 2006, when Metawatch first started creating Bluetooth watches, it’s only just begun to mature in recent years. When will Apple join the fray? Based on the maturity of the space, and the lack of prototype leaks, I would expect we’d see it late this year or next year.

“Apple has excelled at creating multifunctional experiences that consumers love,” Rotmann Epps said. The smartwatch will be the next frontier for that.

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The Wanted take music to television with E! reality show

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After storming the U.S. pop charts with their infectious dance songs last year, British-Irish boy band The Wanted are set to invade television screens with a new reality show on the E! channel this summer, the network announced on Wednesday.

“The Wanted Life,” co-produced by Ryan Seacrest Productions, will follow the band members as they move into a house in the Hollywood Hills and work on their anticipated album, due for release later this year.

The Wanted – Max George, Siva Kaneswaran, Nathan Sykes, Tom Parker and Jay McGuiness – formed in 2009 in England, and was signed by Justin Bieber‘s manager Scooter Braun for its U.S. endeavors.

The five, aged 19 to 24, are known for their raucous behavior and are often pictured out drinking and partying with girls.

“We’ve always tried to show who we are. We haven’t hid much,” band member George said in an interview with E! Online.

“I don’t think there’s anything off limits to be honest … We’ll let everything be exposed,” Kaneswaran added.

The band have accumulated a strong following of fans on Twitter after hit singles such as “Glad You Came” and “Chasing the Sun” became radio and pop chart staples last year.

The band also opened for Bieber at various tour dates including his sold-out Madison Square Gardens gig in New York last December.

They will be embarking on their own headlining tour in the United States and Britain in the fall, with details to be released in summer.

George has also grabbed headlines for his friendship with troubled actress Lindsay Lohan, who has been traveling to the UK with the band in the last few months.

George did not say whether Lohan would appear on the show, which is set to premiere in June.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Eric Kelsey and Eric Walsh)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Think Like a Doctor: A Confused and Terrified Patient

The Challenge: Can you solve the mystery of a middle-aged man recovering from a serious illness who suddenly becomes frightened and confused?

Every month the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to sift through a difficult case and solve a diagnostic riddle. Below you will find a summary of a case involving a 55-year-old man well on his way to recovering from a series of illnesses when he suddenly becomes confused and paranoid. I will provide you with the main medical notes, labs and imaging results available to the doctor who made the diagnosis.

The first reader to figure out this case will get a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” along with the satisfaction of knowing you solved a case of Sherlockian complexity. Good luck.

The Presenting Problem:

A 55-year-old man who is recovering from a devastating injury in a rehabilitation facility suddenly becomes confused, frightened and paranoid.

The Patient’s Story:

The patient, who was recovering from a terrible injury and was too weak to walk, had been found on the floor of his room at the extended care facility, raving that there were people out to get him. He was taken to the emergency room at the Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut, where he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection and admitted to the hospital for treatment. Doctors thought his delirium was caused by the infection, but after 24 hours, despite receiving the appropriate antibiotics, the patient remained disoriented and frightened.

A Sister’s Visit:

The man’s sister came to visit him on his second day in the hospital. As she walked into the room she was immediately struck by her brother’s distress.

“Get me out of here!” the man shouted from his hospital bed. “They are coming to get me. I gotta get out of here!”

His blue eyes darted from side to side as if searching for his would-be attackers. His arms and legs shook with fear. He looked terrified.

For the past few months, the man had been in and out of the hospital, but he had been getting better — at least he had been improving the last time his sister saw him, the week before. She hurried into the bustling hallway and found a nurse. “What the hell is going on with my brother?” she demanded.

A Long Series of Illnesses:

Three months earlier, the patient had been admitted to that same hospital with delirium tremens. After years of alcohol abuse, he had suddenly stopped drinking a couple of days before, and his body was wracked by the sudden loss of the chemical he had become addicted to. He’d spent an entire week in the hospital but finally recovered. He was sent home, but he didn’t stay there for long.

The following week, when his sister hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days, she forced her way into his home. There she found him, unconscious, in the basement, at the bottom of his staircase. He had fallen, and it looked as if he may have been there for two, possibly three, days. He was close to death. Indeed, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, his heart had stopped. Rapid action by the E.M.T.’s brought his heart back to life, and he made it to the hospital.

There the extent of the damage became clear. The man’s kidneys had stopped working, and his body chemistry was completely out of whack. He had a severe concussion. And he’d had a heart attack.

He remained in the intensive care unit for nearly three weeks, and in the hospital another two weeks. Even after these weeks of care and recovery, the toll of his injury was terrible. His kidneys were not working, so he required dialysis three times a week. He had needed a machine to help him breathe for so long that he now had to get oxygen through a hole that had been cut into his throat. His arms and legs were so weak that he could not even lift them, and because he was unable even to swallow, he had to be fed through a tube that went directly into his stomach.

Finally, after five weeks in the hospital, he was well enough to be moved to a short-term rehabilitation hospital to complete the long road to recovery. But he was still far from healthy. The laughing, swaggering, Harley-riding man his sister had known until that terrible fall seemed a distant memory, though she saw that he was slowly getting better. He had even started to smile and make jokes. He was confident, he had told her, that with a lot of hard work he could get back to normal. So was she; she knew he was tough.

Back to the Hospital:

The patient had been at the rehab facility for just over two weeks when the staff noticed a sudden change in him. He had stopped smiling and was no longer making jokes. Instead, he talked about people that no one else could see. And he was worried that they wanted to harm him. When he remained confused for a second day, they sent him to the emergency room.

You can see the records from that E.R. visit here.

The man told the E.R. doctor that he knew he was having hallucinations. He thought they had started when he had begun taking a pill to help him sleep a couple of days earlier. It seemed a reasonable explanation, since the medication was known to cause delirium in some people. The hospital psychiatrist took him off that medication and sent him back to rehab that evening with a different sleeping pill.

Back to the Hospital, Again:

Two days later, the patient was back in the emergency room. He was still seeing things that weren’t there, but now he was quite confused as well. He knew his name but couldn’t remember what day or month it was, or even what year. And he had no idea where he was, or where he had just come from.

When the medical team saw the patient after he had been admitted, he was unable to provide any useful medical history. His medical records outlined his earlier hospitalizations, and records from the nursing home filled in additional details. The patient had a history of high blood pressure, depression and alcoholism. He was on a long list of medications. And he had been confused for the past several days.

On examination, he had no fever, although a couple of hours earlier his temperature had been 100.0 degrees. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was sky high. His arms and legs were weak and swollen. His legs were shaking, and his reflexes were very brisk. Indeed, when his ankle was flexed suddenly, it continued to jerk back and forth on its own three or four times before stopping, a phenomenon known as clonus.

His labs were unchanged from the previous visit except for his urine, which showed signs of a serious infection. A CT scan of the brain was unremarkable, as was a chest X-ray. He was started on an intravenous antibiotic to treat the infection. The thinking was that perhaps the infection was causing the patient’s confusion.

You can see the notes from that second hospital visit here.

His sister had come to visit him the next day, when he was as confused as he had ever been. He was now trembling all over and looked scared to death, terrified. He was certain he was being pursued.

That is when she confronted the nurse, demanding to know what was going on with her brother. The nurse didn’t know. No one did. His urinary tract infection was being treated with antibiotics, but he continued to have a rapid heart rate and elevated blood pressure, along with terrifying hallucinations.

Solving the Mystery:

Can you figure out why this man was so confused and tremulous? I have provided you with all the data available to the doctor who made the diagnosis. The case is not easy — that is why it is here. I’ll post the answer on Friday.

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Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the comments section below.. The correct answer will appear Friday on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

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DealBook: Ireland to Liquidate Anglo Irish Bank

LONDON – The Irish government passed emergency legislation on Thursday to liquidate Anglo Irish Bank, one of the country’s largest financial institutions.

The legislation, which was signed into law after an all-night parliamentary session, came after negotiations with the European Central Bank over swapping so-called promissory notes, which were used to bail out the Irish lender in 2009, for long-term government bonds.

The move is an effort to reduce Ireland’s debt repayments at a time when the country is still struggling under a cloud of austerity measures and meager economic growth.

The Irish Parliament rushed through the legislation to liquidate Anglo Irish, which was renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation after its failure and bailout, because details of the debt-restructuring plan leaked on Wednesday. Politicians had hoped to announce the deal after agreeing on new terms with the European Central Bank.

“I would have preferred to be introducing this bill in tandem with a finalized agreement with the European Central Bank,” the Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, said in a statement.

The European Central Bank is considering the country’s latest proposals on Thursday, though European policy makers are concerned that a deal with Ireland could set a precedent for other indebted countries, like Spain, whose local banks also are facing mountains of debt.

As part of the deal to save Anglo Irish, Dublin injected more than 30 billion euros ($41 billion) into the local lender, of which around 28 billion euros is still outstanding.

The bailout has saddled the government with 3.1 billion euros in annual interest payments, or roughly the same amount Irish politicians have said they would cut in yearly government spending to reduce the country’s debt levels. The local government has been eager to reduce that multibillion-euro figure by swapping the high-interest debt into long-term government bonds that can be repaid over a longer period.

Ireland racked up huge debts in bailing out Anglo Irish and the rest of the country’s financial industry, eventually requiring a rescue package of 67.5 billion euros from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in 2010. The authorities have demanded that Irish politicians slash government spending to reduce the country’s debt burden.

Confusion reigned on Thursday at Anglo Irish’s headquarters in Dublin, a day after employees were sent home early in preparation for the government-mandated liquidation.

Some staff members had returned to work, but the atmosphere remained tense, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

“People have been told it’s business as usual, but it’s anything but that,” the person said.

The accounting firm KPMG has been appointed to oversee the liquidation.

Under the terms of the liquidation, Anglo Irish’s assets will be transferred to the National Asset Management Agency, the so-called bad bank set up by the government, or sold to outside investors.

Anglo Irish has been at the center of controversy since the beginning of the financial crisis. Three of its former executives, including its former chief executive, Sean FitzPatrick, are facing fraud charges in connection with loans that were improperly administered.

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Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid shot dead outside home

Authorities said Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid was shot as he left his house in the capital, Tunis. (Hassene Dridi / Associated Press / December 29, 2010)

By Jeffrey Fleishman

February 6, 2013, 3:41 a.m.

CAIRO -- A leading opponent of Tunisia's Islamist-led government was assassinated in front of his home Wednesday, raising fears of sharpening political turmoil in the country that ignited the Arab Spring movement but remains starkly divided between liberals and Islamists.

Chokri Belaid, head of the Unified Democratic Nationalist Party, was shot on his way to work in the capital, Tunis, according to authorities. No one claimed immediate responsibility for the attack, but it comes as Tunisia faces a troubled economy and a restive transition to democracy after decades of dictatorship.  

"This is a criminal act, and an act of terrorism not only against Belaid but against the whole of Tunisia," Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali told a radio station. Shortly after the killing, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Interior Ministry.

An outspoken liberal with a bushy mustache, Belaid often criticized Ennahda, the dominant moderate Islamist party, for failing to unite the country's political factions. He had accused Ennahda of not clamping down on increasingly violent ultraconservative Salafis from attacking movie houses, art galleries and institutions they deem as against Islam.

Belaid's family told Tunisian media that he had received repeated death threats.

"Chokri Belaid was killed today by four bullets to the head and chest ... doctors told us that he has died. This is a sad day for Tunisia," Ziad Lakhader, a leader of the opposition Popular Front, was quoted as saying to Reuters.

Tunisian President President Moncef Marzouki, who was traveling in France, said he would cancel a planned trip to Cairo on Thursday and return home.

ALSO:

Bulgarian probe links Hezbollah to Israeli tourist bus attack

Bangladesh war crimes court jails Islamic party leader for life

Ahmadinejad ally linked to human rights abuses arrested in Iran

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

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Karen Russell's <em>Vampires in the Lemon Grove</em> Is a Darkly Surreal Treat

Karen Russell is one of America’s most lauded young writers. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has been optioned by HBO. Her fiction combines a literary sensibility with a generous helping of the weird and surreal, which has made her popular with both literary magazines and fantasy and science fiction fans. This cross-genre approach is one that she sees in the work of many of her favorite authors, such as Kelly Link.

“You’re going to sacrifice a mimetic representational realism to tell another kind of truth,” says Russell in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s like an optical trick to let you see something … that you might not be aware of if you were reading about the same plot set in a mall in New Jersey.”

Her first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, dealt largely with adolescents coming of age in a whimsical version of Russell’s native south Florida. Her second collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, ventures farther afield, with one story set in an Italian resort town and another set during the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The tone of the second book is darker, with several of the tales veering into outright horror, but stories about Antarctic tailgaters or U.S. presidents reincarnated as farm animals continue to revel in a joyful absurdism.

“Sometimes I wish you could just write the parody of whatever you’re writing,” says Russell. “It would probably be better in some ways.”

Listen to our complete interview with Karen Russell in Episode 79 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), in which she recalls her early days as a secret nerd, confesses to feeling like the Bernie Madoff of fiction, and reveals that she’s highly ticklish. Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Lynne M. Thomas joins hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley for a panel discussion on the weirdest stories ever.

Karen Russell on being a secret nerd:

“I was the kind of nerd that wasn’t even courageous. I couldn’t even courageously claim my identity as a nerd … I remember I loved this Stephen R. Donaldson book called The Mirror of Her Dreams. It’s a two-book series, and it’s about this woman who … uses mirrors to see other worlds, and then she can enter those other worlds, which is basically a lot like writing, so I had this very concrete way to think about art as creation … But I remember being so embarrassed — hot-in-the-face embarrassed — when somebody saw that I was reading that … In Miami there seemed to be a stigma just if you were reading generally — that was suspicious enough — but certain of those covers aren’t doing you any favors. You know, there’s a woman in front of a dragon on the cover of your book. I think that had certain connotations, at least in my Miami high school, that I was eager to avoid.”

Karen Russell on her short story “Reeling for the Empire”:

“There’s an argument that the birth of feminist consciousness in Japan begins at this moment, because these women bind together to revolt against these conditions. There are these factory protests — completely female factory protests — because these places were riddled with tuberculosis and they basically held the women hostage. They were essentially slaves, and they worked ten-hour days in many cases … It’s a real horror story, and I think that to do that conversion and make it about this monstrous metamorphosis, where these women become these hybridized animal/machines, I think that was a way for me to think through what that must have been like when production gets mechanized, and suddenly time ceases to function the way it did before, and the factory work day is in place, and these women’s bodies became cogs in the larger machine.”

Lynne M. Thomas on pushing the envelope:

“There’s a story that I bought from Rachel Swirsky that hasn’t come out yet where I’m basically going to have to put a trigger warning on it for every possible kind of trigger there is — a trigger warning is for stories with things like domestic violence or sexual assault where people who have been subject to those crimes in real life might have a PTSD sort of reaction. And with Rachel, I was having this conversation where I was saying I’ve never seen these three types of stories done successfully in a way that didn’t completely upset me in the wrong ways, and she was like, ‘Challenge accepted!’ And she wrote this story that … I can’t even … I read it and I was like, ‘This is the most amazing, disturbing thing that I have ever read,’ and I bought in on the spot. I couldn’t believe that she’d managed to take a whole bunch of things that are so collectively awful and turn them into art. It’s called ‘Abomination Rises on Filthy Wings.’ Yeah, it’s not messing around.”

John Joseph Adams on the editor’s responsibility:

“As an editor, it kind of feels like a betrayal of your readers a little bit if you publish something that you don’t fully understand yourself, because when you present it to them, they want to believe that it’s going to make some sense, if they’re a good enough reader, and as an editor I don’t feel that I can be like, ‘Well, I think I understand it, but not really, so let’s leave it out there for the readers.’ And so the M. Rickert story is really the only time I’ve ever made an exception to that rule, and only because I’m certain that it’s brilliant, and the whole point of it is to make you feel that sense of strangeness, and it definitely succeeds in that.”

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“Game of Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin lands overall deal with HBO

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – There just might be a lot more dragons and swords in HBO‘s future.

George R.R. Martin, whose “A Song of Fire and Ice” fantasy novel series served as the basis for HBO’s hit drama “Game of Thrones,” has entered an overall deal with the network.

The two-year agreement will retain Martin as a co-executive producer of the series, which begins its third season March 31, but will also have him developing and producing series for the network.

In addition to “Game of Thrones” – which he’s written a few episodes for – Martin served as a producer and writer on the 1980s series “Beauty and the Beast,” and penned a handful of episodes for the 1980s revival of “The Twilight Zone.”

News of Martin’s overall deal with HBO was first reported by Deadline.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be

Paul Nixon Photography

Paul Mason in 2012, two years after gastric bypass surgery stripped him of the unofficial title of “the world’s fattest man.”

IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift.

That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him “the world’s fattest man.”

Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business.

“My meals are a lot different now than they used to be,” Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. “Food is a necessity, but now I don’t let it control my life anymore,” he said.

But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair.

And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds.

As he waits to see if anyone will agree to perform the complex operation to remove the skin, Mr. Mason has plenty of time to ponder how he got to where he is. He was born in Ipswich and had a childhood marked by two things, he says: the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman turned security guard; and three years of sexual abuse, starting when he was 6, by a relative in her 20s who lived in the house and shared his bed. He told no one until decades later.

After he left school, Mr. Mason took a job as a postal worker and became engaged to a woman more than 20 years older than him. “I thought it would be for life, but she just turned around one day and said, ‘No, I don’t want to see you anymore — goodbye,’ ” he said.

His father died, and he returned home to care for his arthritic mother, who was in a wheelchair. “I still had all these things going around in my head from my childhood,” he said. “Food replaced the love I didn’t get from my parents.” When he left the Royal Mail in 1986, he said, he weighed 364 pounds.

Then things spun out of control. Mr. Mason tried to eat himself into oblivion. He spent every available penny of his and his mother’s social security checks on food. He stopped paying the mortgage. The bank repossessed their house, and the council found them a smaller place to live. All the while, he ate the way a locust eats — indiscriminately, voraciously, ingesting perhaps 20,000 calories a day. First he could no longer manage the stairs; then he could no longer get out of his room. He stayed in bed, on and off, for most of the last decade.

Social service workers did everything for him, including changing his incontinence pads. A network of local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants kept the food coming nonstop — burgers, french fries, fish and chips, even about $22 worth of chocolate bars a day.

“They didn’t deliver bags of crisps,” he said of potato chips. “They delivered cartons.”

His life became a cycle: eat, doze, eat, eat, eat. “You didn’t sleep a normal sleep,” he said. “You’d be awake most of the night eating and snacking. You totally forgot about everything else. You lose all your dignity, all your self-respect. It all goes, and all you focus on is getting your next fix.”

He added, “It was quite a lonely time, really.”

He got infections a lot and was transported to the hospital — first in a laundry van, then on the back of a truck and finally on the forklift. For 18 months after a hernia operation in 2003, he lived in the hospital and in an old people’s home — where he was not allowed to leave his room — while the local government found him a house that could accommodate all the special equipment he needed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article misstated Paul Mason’s current weight relative to what he weighed nearly a decade ago. He is now about one-third, not two-thirds, the weight he was then.

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DealBook: As Unit Pleads Guilty, R.B.S. to Pay $612 Million Over Rate Rigging

LONDON – The Royal Bank of Scotland on Wednesday struck a combined $612 million settlement with American and British authorities over accusations that it manipulated interest rates, the latest case to emerge from a broad international investigation.

In an embarrassing blow to the bank, its Japanese subsidiary also pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing in its settlement with the Justice Department. The R.B.S. subsidiary, a hub of rate-rigging activity, agreed to a single count of felony wire fraud to settle the case.

The settlement reflects the Justice Department’s renewed vigor for punishing banks ensnared in the rate manipulation case. In December, a Japanese subsidiary of UBS pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud as part of a larger settlement, representing the first unit of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.

As authorities built the R.B.S. case, they seized on a series of incriminating yet colorful e-mails that highlighted an effort to influence the rate-setting process, a plot that spanned multiple currencies and countries from 2006 to 2010. One senior trader expressed disbelief at reaping lucrative profits from the scheme, saying “it’s just amazing” how rate “fixing can make you that much money,” according to the government’s complaint. Another trader, after pressuring a colleague to submit a certain rate, offered a reward of sorts: “I would come over there and make love to you.”

In a statement on Wednesday, the American regulator leading the case slammed the bank for manipulating benchmarks like the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, noted that R.B.S. employees “aided and abetted” other banks in the rate-rigging scheme and continued to run afoul of the law, though more covertly, even after learning of a federal investigation.

“The public is deprived of an honest benchmark interest rate when a group of traders sits around a desk for years falsely spinning their bank’s Libor submissions, trying to manufacture winning trades. That’s what happened at R.B.S.,” David Meister, the enforcement director of the commission, said in the statement.

Libor Explained

The settlement represents the latest setback for Royal Bank of Scotland, which has struggled to shake the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. The British firm already has put aside $2.7 billion to compensate customers who were inappropriately sold loan insurance over recent years. On Jan. 31, British regulators also called on the bank and other local rivals to review the sale of interest-rate hedging products after more than 90 percent of a sample were found to have been sold improperly.

The broader rate-rigging case has centered on how much the Royal Bank of Scotland and a dozen other banks, including Citigroup and HSBC, charge each other for loans. Such benchmarks, including Libor, help determine the borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in financial products like corporate loans, mortgages and credit cards.

But the Royal Bank of Scotland, like many of its competitors, corrupted the process. Government complaints filed over the last year outlined a scheme in which banks reported false rates to lift trading profits and deflect concerns about their health during the crisis.

Authorities filed the first Libor case in June, extracting a $450 million settlement with the British bank Barclays. In December, UBS agreed to a record $1.5 billion settlement with European regulators, the Justice Department and the American regulator that opened the case, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Justice Department’s criminal division, which secured the guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese unit, also filed criminal charges against two former UBS traders.

Some of the world’s largest financial institutions remain caught in the cross hairs of the case. Deutsche Bank has set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties.

While foreign banks have received the brunt of the scrutiny to date, an American institution could be among the next to settle. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are under investigation.

The Royal Bank of Scotland case represents the second-largest fine levied in the multiyear investigation into rate manipulation.

The Justice Department imposed a $150 million fine as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement with R.B.S., while the trading commission’s financial penalty reached $325 million. The Financial Services Authority, the British regulator, also levied a £87.5 million ($137 million) fine against the firm, one of the largest financial penalties ever from British authorities.

R.B.S., based in Edinburgh, had aimed to avert the guilty plea for its Japanese subsidiary. But the Justice Department’s criminal division declined to back down, and the bank had little leverage to push back. If it had balked at a plea deal, the Justice Department could have moved to indict the subsidiary.

“Like with Barclays and UBS, the settlement with R.B.S. is much more than a slap on the wrist,” said Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the trading commission who is a critic of soft fines on big banks.

In the wake of the settlement, Royal Bank of Scotland is shaking up its management team as it moves to repair its bruised image. John Hourican, the firm’s investment banking chief, resigned on Wednesday, and agreed to forgo some of his past compensation.

Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the government holds an 82 percent stake after providing a $73 billion bailout in 2008, also plans to claw back bonuses totaling $471 million to help pay for the rate-rigging penalty.

“We condemn the behavior of the individuals who sought to influence some Libor currency settings at our bank from 2006 to 2010. There is no place at R.B.S. for such behavior,” Stephen Hester, the bank’s chief executive, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Libor manipulation is an extreme example of a selfish and self-serving culture that took hold in parts of the banking industry during the financial boom.”

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Friends, investigators seek answers in killing of O.C. couple

They met in college, two highly regarded basketball players who seemed to have the same winning touch on the court and off.

After blazing through high school and college with her outside shot, Monica Quan became the assistant women's basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton. Keith Lawrence, whose highlight shots are still there on his college website, became a campus officer at USC.

Now police in Irvine are scrambling for an explanation — and friends are looking for a way to express their shock — after Quan and Lawrence were found shot to death in their parked car on the top floor of a parking structure in an upscale, high-security condominium complex near UC Irvine.

The two had just announced their engagement and had recently moved into a condominium complex near Concordia University, where they played basketball and had gone on to earn their degrees.

Late Sunday, after a passerby noticed two people in the parked car, police said they found Lawrence slumped in the driver's side of his white Kia. Quan was next to him, also dead. The couple were shot multiple times, and authorities said they have tentatively ruled out the possibility of it being a murder-suicide or motivated by robbery. Nothing in the car, police said, seemed to be disturbed.

The couple's friends and family said they were shaken by the violent deaths of two people who seemed to have so much to offer.

Quan was a 2002 graduate of Walnut High School in the San Gabriel Valley, where she set school records for the most three-pointers in a season and a game. She played at Long Beach State and at Concordia, where she graduated in 2007. She went on to earn a master's degree before becoming the assistant coach at Fullerton.

Quan's father was the first Chinese American captain in the LAPD, and went on to become police chief at Cal Poly Pomona.

Quan was known for pulling students aside to offer encouragement, said Megan Richardson, a former player. Marcia Foster, the head basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton, described her assistant as a special person — "bright, passionate and empowering," she said.

Quan shared a love of basketball with her fiancee, Lawrence, whom she met at Concordia.

He too had been a standout basketball player, starting at Moorpark High, where he played point guard and shooting guard, said Tim Bednar, who coached Lawrence.

Bednar said that Lawrence, who came from a family of athletes, was talented, yet quiet and humble. After Lawrence graduated in 2003, he continued to participate in summer youth camps

When he returned for the camps, Bednar said, he was known as the "best basketball player that ever came through" the school.

"He was awesome with the kids," Bednar said. "They all wanted to be around Keith Lawrence."

Bednar heard from Lawrence when he needed a recommendation to become a police officer after graduating from the Ventura County Sheriff's Academy. In August, he was hired by USC's public safety department.

John Thomas, the executive director and chief of the department, said that Lawrence was an "honorable, compassionate and professional" member of the community.

"We are a better department and the USC campus community is a safer place as a result of his service," Thomas said in a statement.

On Monday night, Quan's friends gathered outside Walnut High School. One clutched a heart-shaped balloon, another carried a collage of her basketball playing days. Still another held a basketball.

Lawrence's friends and family put up a Facebook page. "RIP Keith Lawrence, you will be missed," it said simply. Within hours, 840 had left comments or indicated they "liked" it. Concordia put up a link to Lawrence's game-winning shot that carried the school into a post-season tournament.

Michelle Thibeault, 27, said in a Facebook message that she had known Quan for more than a decade. The two were on the same athletic teams and went to junior high and high school together. "Monica was loved by everyone," she said.

During a somber gathering at the Cal State Fullerton gymnasium Monday, Foster read a brief statement from Quan's brother Ryan.

"We just shared a moment of incredible joy on her recent engagement," he wrote, and then added: "A bright light was just put out."

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

kate.mather@latimes.com

lauren.williams@latimes.com

Times staff writer John Canalis contributed to this report.

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Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell

An excerpt from Exploding the Phone

by Phil Lapsley

“

Locke spent the next twenty-four hours in what felt like a scene from a 1940s detective movie: a barren room with nothing more than a wooden table, a chair for him, two chairs for his interrogators, and a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. Sitting across from him, the FBI agent and the telephone security man worked hard to get him to confess to using the blue box.

Before smartphones and iPads, before the internet or the personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. The following is an excerpt from the new book Exploding the Phone written by Philip D. Lapsley and published by Grove/Atlantic, which tells the story of the “phone phreaks.”

There it was again.

Jake Locke set down his cup and looked more closely at the classified ad. It was early afternoon on a clear spring day in Cambridge in 1967. Locke, an undergrad at Harvard University, had just gotten out of bed. A transplant from southern California, he didn’t quite fit in with Harvard’s button-down culture — another student had told him he looked like a “nerdy California surfer,” what with his black-framed eyeglasses, blond hair, blue eyes, and tall, slim build. Now in the midst of his sophomore slump, Locke found himself spending a lot of time sleeping late, cutting classes, and reading the newspaper to find interesting things to do. Pretty much anything seemed better than going to classes, in fact. (“John Locke” is a pseudonym).

It was a slow news day. The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, didn’t have much in the way of interesting articles, so Locke once again found himself reading the classified ads over breakfast. He had become something of a connoisseur of these little bits of poetry — people selling cars, looking for roommates, even the occasional kooky personal ad probably intended as a joke between lovers—all expressed in a dozen or so words.

But this ad was different. It had been running for a while and it had started to bug him.

WANTED HARVARD MIT Fine Arts no. 13 notebook. (121 pages) & 40 page reply K.K. & C.R. plus 2,800; battery; m.f. El presidente no esta aqui asora, que lastima. B. David Box 11595 St. Louis, MO 63105.

Locke had seen similar classified ads from students who had lost their notes for one class or another and were panicking as exams rolled around. They often were placed in the Crimson in the hopes that some kind soul had found their notes and would return them. Fine Arts 13 was the introductory art appreciation class at Harvard, so that fit.

But nothing else about the ad made any sense. Fine Arts 13 wasn’t offered at MIT. And what was all the gibberish afterward? 2,800? Battery? M.f., K.K., C.R.? What was with the Spanish? And why was somebody in St. Louis, Missouri, running an ad in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking for a notebook for a class at Harvard? Locke had watched the ad run every day for the past few weeks. Whoever they were, and whatever it was, they clearly wanted this notebook. Why were they so persistent?

One way to find out.

Locke looked around for a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote: “Dear B. David: I have your notebook. Let’s talk. Sincerely, Jake.”

He dropped the letter in the mail on his way into Harvard Square to find something interesting to do.

An envelope with a St. Louis, Missouri, postmark showed up in Locke’s mailbox a week later. Locke opened the envelope and read the single sheet of paper. Or rather, he tried to read it. It wasn’t in English. It seemed to be written in some sort of alien hieroglyphics. It was brief, only a paragraph or so long. The characters looked familiar somehow but not enough that he could decipher them.

Locke showed the letter to everyone he saw that day but nobody could read it. Later that evening, as Locke sat at the kitchen table in his dorm room and stared at the letter, trying to puzzle it out, one of his roommates came home. Shocked that Locke might actually be doing something that looked like homework, his roommate asked what he was working on. Locke passed the letter across the table and told him about it.

His roommate took one look and said, “It looks like Russian.”

Locke said, “That’s what I thought. But the characters don’t seem right.”

“Yeah. They’re not. In fact …” His roommate’s voice trailed off for a moment. “In fact, they’re mirror writing.”

“What?”

“You know, mirror writing. The letters are written backwards. See?”

Locke looked. Sure enough: backwards.

Locke and his roommate went to the mirror and transcribed the reversed lettering. It was Cyrillic — Russian letters. Fortunately, Locke’s roommate was taking a Russian class. They sat back down at the table and translated the letter.

“Dear Jake,” the letter read. “Thank you very much for your reply. However, I seriously doubt that you have what I need. I would strongly advise you to keep to yourself and not interfere. This is serious business and you could get into trouble.” Signed, B. David.

Locke sat back. Someone had put a cryptic ad in the newspaper. He’d responded. They sent him a letter. In mirror writing. In Russian. In 1967. During the cold war.

Spy ring.

It just didn’t get much cooler than this, Locke figured. Intriguing. Terrifying, even. And far, far better than going to class.

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