Dinosaur statue in San Juan Capistrano not loved by all

Down the narrow corridor that runs through one of California's oldest neighborhoods, behind the perfectly preserved 200-year-old houses, the source of a heated debate in San Juan Capistrano pokes out his leathery neck with a goofy smile.

The city resting amid south Orange County's green-covered hills is known for its tight embrace of a rich history: Hundreds of horses march through the streets each year to welcome the swallows' expected return to the mission; an old-world Spanish motif of stucco walls and terra cotta roofs includes even burger joints and banks; and on historic Los Rios Street, there are strict rules about what belongs and what doesn't.

And the 40-foot-long apatosaurus cast off by a Romanian shopping mall? A group of neighbors and historical advocates think not, and are fighting a petting zoo to evict the dinosaur statue that has gripped the city's attention for months.

"Never in a million years — or 165 million years — did I think it would turn into such a frenzy," said Carolyn Franks, the owner of Zoomars Petting Zoo, who paid $12,000 for the faux Jurassic creature to join the menagerie of floppy-haired alpacas, rabbits, horses and a couple of zebra-donkey hybrids called zedonks.

"I brought this statue in with the best of intentions," she said, noting that her recent addition of a fossil hunt had been a hit at the zoo and that she'd wanted more prehistoric fare to please her clientele. She got a Tyrannosaurus rex skull first, then found the apatosaurus — now dubbed Juan the Capistrano Dinosaur — sitting in an Anaheim warehouse.

He — or at least they think he's a he — has been at the zoo since June, but his Los Rios Street abode is notably sparse: There's none of the greenery that an herbivore like his ancestors would have munched, and the sandboxes intended for more fossil digging are bare. The placard introducing him to visitors is stamped "Pending City Approval."

Although the city's Cultural Heritage Commission gave Juan a stamp of approval in a close vote, his fate remains anything but determined, with city officials still to weigh in on the matter.

Juan's opponents say he threatens the integrity of a neighborhood listed on the National Register of Historic Places. For starters, they say, he's an eyesore. And considering that the region was probably underwater when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, no apatosaurus, T. rex or other outsized lizard would have come through San Juan Capistrano unless lost at sea. Nor did the foes take too well to Juan's arriving without previous approval or city permits.

(Even Juan's arrival is murky: Critics contend Franks sneaked him in during dark of night. She says he came by truck in half a dozen pieces on a sunny afternoon.)

"You're not putting a merry-go-round in the Vatican or a big slide in the White House," said historian Ilse Byrnes, who worked to have Los Rios added to the national registry. "It's destroying the historical integrity of the area if she gets to keep it."

Jan Siegel, a Cultural Heritage commissioner, said the Los Rios enclave — described by one business owner as "the soul of San Juan" — has been protected as a quaint, mostly residential area by the rules that Franks appears to be flouting. Proposed businesses, such as a wine and beer garden, have been kept out; businesses have to close shop by 5 p.m.; and the number of visitors who stroll the narrow street each year is regulated.

"It's a unique, fragile area, in my opinion, and it needs to be preserved in a special way," Siegel said.

Juan's opponents have no problem with the petting zoo, saying it's an example of the livestock that would have been around centuries ago (except for the zedonks). Once known as the Jones Family Minifarm, it has been on Los Rios for three decades, sitting alongside the Historical Society, a nursery that's been in business since 1970 and the Rios Adobe that dates to the 1790s.

The dinosaur, Siegel said, arrived as a "kind of slap in the face."

But supporters counter that Juan is hardly a neighborhood disturbance and his presence doesn't violate the effort to maintain the surrounding history.

"It's a statue!" said Rhonda deHaan, Cultural Heritage Commission chairwoman. "It can't be more passive than that."

She said the statue is difficult to spot from the street, camouflaged in his green-gray skin, and that trees will be planted to further obscure Juan's long, skinny neck. He's no more of a distraction, she said, than the delivery trucks or cars clogging the street that, in some places, is about as wide as a sidewalk.

On a recent afternoon, Franks, who has owned the site for eight years, stood beside her statuesque acquisition, boasting that he had become almost as much of a draw as the pony rides. She said attendance nearly doubled over the summer, and often there was a line of visitors snapping pictures of the friendly faced apatosaurus. Children, she said, gravitate to him.

"They make it sound like this Godzilla that's coming to destroy the town," she said of Juan's critics.

Moments later, though, a group of children playing a few feet from the apatosaurus shrieked. "A dinosaur! A dinosaur!"

Then the bravest of them dashed over in her red cowgirl boots and stared the creature down: "Get out of my town, you beast!"

rick.rojas@latimes.com

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New Crowdfunding Site Seeks to Protect Backers of Industrial Design

Entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff wants to build more credibility into crowdfunding — so he’s launching a new platform that takes responsibility for ensuring the viability of new projects.

The crowdfunding process, pioneered by sites like Kickstarter, has had its share of huge successes, as well as failures. The problem, says Siminoff, is that when a venture fails, the funders are left holding the bag. That’s all well and good if you were investing in an artist’s crazy project. It’s much more of a problem if you thought you were pre-ordering a nearly finished gadget.

The biggest culprit for these kinds of issues are physical products. Witness the anger unleashed when Kickstarter darling Pebble announced a further delay alongside underwhelming color choices.

This kind of issue is why Kickstarter recently made some changes, undertaking a combination of education and rule revision. They reminded consumers that Kickstarter is not a store while requiring that all projects disclose risks and challenges, as well as forbidding renderings and concept videos in hardware products.

Siminoff’s answer is Christie Street, a crowdfunding site devoted exclusively to physical products. The promise of Christie Street is that it will vet the projects that it launches carefully, and provide guarantees of progress along the way. The idea is that these protections will make consumers feel safer about the products they’re backing. “We built something that we felt we needed,” he says.

Christie Street, named for the New Jersey road where Edison’s workshop was located, will require that all funders go through an auditing process before they are allowed to go live. Siminoff says that the idea will be to check for basic viability, a kind of sanity test.

“You look at the chips they say they want to use, the size of components that will need to fit in, and so on,” he says, “You check that things conform to what’s available on the market.” From there, they also perform third-party audits of the places where the product will be manufactured, and look at things like production cost and likely shipping time, to ensure that all of this seems realistic.

It’s an all-or-nothing audit. Either the new project meets Christie Street’s approval or it doesn’t. “Our feeling is that the customer that’s buying doesn’t have the sophistication to make the right decision [about whether a design's production targets are reliable],” says Siminoff, “The only way is create a place where you can trust to buy.”

Even after the initial approval, Christie Street stays involved in the project. Successfully funded projects get their money in stages, with Christie Street holding the rest in escrow. Inventors get one-third of the money on funding, one-third of the money once they have a production-ready prototype, and the final one-third when they have a golden prototype, which means they are ready for full manufacturing.

If at any time along the way the project fails, Christie Street will can the project and refund the remaining money to investors.

What constitutes failure? Siminoff ticks off four conditions.

First, the inventor could for whatever reason announce that they couldn’t finish.

Second, if the project ends up more than six months late. “This forces people to be more careful with their delivery dates,” says Siminoff.

Third, if the product falls short of what was promised. “If the pre-production sample is more than 15 percent worse than what was promised, we will not allowed you to manufacture the product,” says Siminoff. (For example, if you promised me 512GB and only delivered 256.)

Last, says Siminoff there are other nuances that they’ll have to work out as the site develops. For example, if a product ends up requiring significant redesign, then Christie Street might end up withholding funds. “Design is a tougher one to quantify,” he says, “but it’s important that the design overall fits what was promised to the customer.”

For the extra cautious, Christie Street goes even further than the refund of remaining money. For 10 percent of their pledge value, backers can insure their entire pledge. If the project goes wrong they’ll get all of it back. Combine that with a pledge from inventors that the product will retail for at least 10 percent more than the pledge amount, and you can either take a 10 percent discount for some additional risk or pay full retail, with a money-back guarantee.

In effect, Christie Street is navigating a space between crowfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which expect backers to handle a lot of their own due diligence while allowing the inventors to be entrepreneurs, and crowdsourcing design sites like Quirky, which handles all of the business elements in-house.

Christie Street is an effort at drawing the lines of trust in a new way, one tied directly to the realities of post-industrial product design. Rather than a blanket ban on renderings and early designs, or a Wild West ‘anything goes’ approach, they instead seeks to tame the parts where production can go really wrong, in the devilish details of prototyping and manufacturing. It leaves questions of whether or not the thing is cool to the wisdom of the crowds, while taking on the question of whether or not the thing is possible.

This is obviously a lot more intervention between middleman and inventor than you’d see on a site like Indigegogo or Kickstarter. Siminoff says that they can still take the same 5 percent cut as their competitors because physical products tend to be involved higher dollar-value projects from the start. “If all goes well, we’ll be doing 10 to 15 live projects a months a year from now,” he says, “We think we can be profitable in the product world.”

“We’re not trying to make it where inventors are just be a name on a product,” says Siminoff, “We still want them to be entrepreneur and build this thing. We just want to make sure that they don’t fail in a way that hurts the customer.”

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New Whitney Houston book recalls singer’s musical magic

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A new book on Whitney Houston by her early producer seeks to tell the story of the rise to stardom of the pop diva who died nine months ago.

Emmy and Grammy-winning producer Narada Michael Walden, who produced many of Houston‘s early hits, like “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” appeared at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles on Wednesday to discuss the book and perform some of the songs he collaborated on.

“Her death was so shocking and sudden that I wanted to create something to keep alive the beautiful aspects of her life. The media was lashing out on the addiction and ignoring her musical genius,” Walden told Reuters.

Since she drowned in a bathtub on February 11 after taking cocaine, Houston‘s music and life have generated a TV tribute with Jennifer Hudson, Usher and others, a greatest hits CD, a coffee table book of photos and a TV reality show starring family members.

Walden’s book “Whitney Houston: The Voice, the Music, the Inspiration,” co-written with Richard Buskin, describes how Walden first met the singer when she was 13 and accompanied her mother to the studio. Walden was working on a record with her mom, soul and gospel singer Cissy Houston.

Walden said he all but forgot the young pretty girl until he got a call from Arista records in 1984, while working on an Aretha Franklin record, and was told to “make the time” to work on Houston‘s debut album.

Walden said Janet Jackson‘s management turned down the chance to record “How Will I Know” and that he rewrote it to make it catchier for Houston, who with her five-octave vocal range, recorded the 1985 No.1 song in only one take.

“The first take was the keeper. Instead of laboring on it for the better part of a day or even longer, we were done in a matter of minutes,” he said, noting Houston always worked fast.

Walden, who also produced for Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Barbra Streisand, collaborated with Houston on “So Emotional,” “One Moment in Time” and “I’m Every Woman” from the film, “The Bodyguard.”

Walden and Houston went in different directions by the late 1990s, but he would see her at the annual pre-Grammy party hosted by her long-time mentor, record industry mogul Clive Davis.

At the 2011 Davis party, Houston sat with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina – then 17 – who exclaimed she wanted to sing and work with Walden. “But Whitney gave me a look that said ‘Slow down. I’ve been down that road….and I’m not sure I want to curse her with that’,” he said.

Walden said he would now welcome the opportunity to work with Houston‘s daughter, who has become a fixture of gossip blogs and tabloids.

“If she wants to, I’d love to produce her and keep alive the professional image of her mother and focus on the positive,” he said.

(Reporting By Susan Zeidler, editing by Jill Serjeant and Andrew Hay)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Doping at U.S. Tracks Affects Europe’s Taste for Horse Meat

PARIS — For decades, American horses, many of them retired or damaged racehorses, have been shipped to Canada and Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter horses, and then processed and sold for consumption in Europe and beyond.

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times

A slaughterhouse in Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, where meat is processed for sale in Europe.

Lately, however, European food safety officials have notified Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses of a growing concern: The meat of American racehorses may be too toxic to eat safely because the horses have been injected repeatedly with drugs.

Despite the fact that racehorses make up only a fraction of the trade in horse meat, the European officials have indicated that they may nonetheless require lifetime medication records for slaughter-bound horses from Canada and Mexico, and perhaps require them to be held on feedlots or some other holding area for six months before they are slaughtered.

In October, Stephan Giguere, the general manager of a major slaughterhouse in Quebec, said he turned away truckloads of horses coming from the United States because his clients were worried about potential drug issues. Mr. Giguere said he told his buyers to stay away from horses coming from American racetracks.

“We don’t want them,” he said. “It’s too risky.”

The action is just the latest indication of the troubled state of American racing and its problems with the doping of horses. Some prominent trainers have been disciplined for using legal and illegal drugs, and horses loaded with painkillers have been breaking down in arresting numbers. Congress has called for reform, and state regulators have begun imposing stricter rules.

But for pure emotional effect, the alarm raised in the international horse-meat marketplace packs a distinctive punch.

Some 138,000 horses were sent to Canada or Mexico in 2010 alone to be turned into meat for Europe and other parts of the world, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Organizations concerned about the welfare of retired racehorses have estimated that anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the population sent for slaughter may have performed on racetracks in the United States.

“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian on the faculty of Tufts University and a co-author of a 2010 article that sought to raise concerns about the health risks posed by American racehorses. He said it was reckless to want any of the drugs routinely administered to horses “in your food chain.”

Horses being shipped to Mexico and Canada are by law required to have been free of certain drugs for six months before being slaughtered, and those involved in their shipping must have affidavits proving that. But European Commission officials say the affidavits are easily falsified. As a result, American racehorses often show up in Canada within weeks — sometimes days — of their leaving the racetrack and their steady diets of drugs.

In October, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers found serious problems while auditing the operations of equine slaughter facilities in Mexico, where 80 percent of the horses arrive from the United States. The commission’s report said Mexican officials were not allowed to question the “authenticity or reliability of the sworn statements” about the ostensibly drug-free horses, and thus had no way of verifying whether the horses were tainted by drugs.

“The systems in place for identification, the food-chain information and in particular the affidavits concerning the nontreatment for six months with certain medical substances, both for the horses imported from the U.S. as well as for the Mexican horses, are insufficient to guarantee that standards equivalent to those provided for by E.U. legislation are applied,” the report said.

The authorities in the United States and Canada acknowledge that oversight of the slaughter business is lax. On July 9, the United States Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to an Ohio feedlot operator who sells horses for slaughter. The operator, Ronald Andio, was reprimanded for selling a drug-tainted thoroughbred horse to a Canadian slaughterhouse.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had tested the carcass of the horse the previous August and found the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone in the muscle and kidney tissues. It also discovered clenbuterol, a widely abused medication for breathing problems that can build muscle by mimicking anabolic steroids.

Because horses are not a traditional food source in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration does not require human food safety information as it considers what drugs can be used legally on horses. Patricia El-Hinnawy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said agency-approved drugs intended for use in horses carried the warning “Do not use in horses intended for human consumption.”

She also said the case against Mr. Andio remained open.

“On the warning letter, the case remains open and no further information can be provided at this time,” Ms. El-Hinnawy said.

Read More..

Doping at U.S. Tracks Affects Europe’s Taste for Horse Meat

PARIS — For decades, American horses, many of them retired or damaged racehorses, have been shipped to Canada and Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter horses, and then processed and sold for consumption in Europe and beyond.

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times

A slaughterhouse in Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, where meat is processed for sale in Europe.

Lately, however, European food safety officials have notified Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses of a growing concern: The meat of American racehorses may be too toxic to eat safely because the horses have been injected repeatedly with drugs.

Despite the fact that racehorses make up only a fraction of the trade in horse meat, the European officials have indicated that they may nonetheless require lifetime medication records for slaughter-bound horses from Canada and Mexico, and perhaps require them to be held on feedlots or some other holding area for six months before they are slaughtered.

In October, Stephan Giguere, the general manager of a major slaughterhouse in Quebec, said he turned away truckloads of horses coming from the United States because his clients were worried about potential drug issues. Mr. Giguere said he told his buyers to stay away from horses coming from American racetracks.

“We don’t want them,” he said. “It’s too risky.”

The action is just the latest indication of the troubled state of American racing and its problems with the doping of horses. Some prominent trainers have been disciplined for using legal and illegal drugs, and horses loaded with painkillers have been breaking down in arresting numbers. Congress has called for reform, and state regulators have begun imposing stricter rules.

But for pure emotional effect, the alarm raised in the international horse-meat marketplace packs a distinctive punch.

Some 138,000 horses were sent to Canada or Mexico in 2010 alone to be turned into meat for Europe and other parts of the world, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Organizations concerned about the welfare of retired racehorses have estimated that anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the population sent for slaughter may have performed on racetracks in the United States.

“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian on the faculty of Tufts University and a co-author of a 2010 article that sought to raise concerns about the health risks posed by American racehorses. He said it was reckless to want any of the drugs routinely administered to horses “in your food chain.”

Horses being shipped to Mexico and Canada are by law required to have been free of certain drugs for six months before being slaughtered, and those involved in their shipping must have affidavits proving that. But European Commission officials say the affidavits are easily falsified. As a result, American racehorses often show up in Canada within weeks — sometimes days — of their leaving the racetrack and their steady diets of drugs.

In October, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers found serious problems while auditing the operations of equine slaughter facilities in Mexico, where 80 percent of the horses arrive from the United States. The commission’s report said Mexican officials were not allowed to question the “authenticity or reliability of the sworn statements” about the ostensibly drug-free horses, and thus had no way of verifying whether the horses were tainted by drugs.

“The systems in place for identification, the food-chain information and in particular the affidavits concerning the nontreatment for six months with certain medical substances, both for the horses imported from the U.S. as well as for the Mexican horses, are insufficient to guarantee that standards equivalent to those provided for by E.U. legislation are applied,” the report said.

The authorities in the United States and Canada acknowledge that oversight of the slaughter business is lax. On July 9, the United States Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to an Ohio feedlot operator who sells horses for slaughter. The operator, Ronald Andio, was reprimanded for selling a drug-tainted thoroughbred horse to a Canadian slaughterhouse.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had tested the carcass of the horse the previous August and found the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone in the muscle and kidney tissues. It also discovered clenbuterol, a widely abused medication for breathing problems that can build muscle by mimicking anabolic steroids.

Because horses are not a traditional food source in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration does not require human food safety information as it considers what drugs can be used legally on horses. Patricia El-Hinnawy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said agency-approved drugs intended for use in horses carried the warning “Do not use in horses intended for human consumption.”

She also said the case against Mr. Andio remained open.

“On the warning letter, the case remains open and no further information can be provided at this time,” Ms. El-Hinnawy said.

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Supreme Court to rule on Prop. 8 ban on gay marriage

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court set the stage Friday for a historic decision on gay rights, announcing it would hear appeals of rulings striking down California's Proposition 8 and the federal law denying benefits for legally married same-sex couples.

The court could decide in the Proposition 8 case whether the Constitution's promise of equal treatment gives gays and lesbians a right to marry. But the justices also left themselves the option to rule narrowly or even to duck a decision.

In 2008, California voters approved the measure limiting marriage to a man and a woman. Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the proposition had illegally taken away a right to marry that gays had won in the state courts.

MAP: How gay marriage has progressed in the U.S.

This 9th Circuit decision, though limited to California, was the first by federal judges to reject a state's marriage law.

Ted Olson and David Boies, two nationally prominent attorneys who launched the legal attack on Proposition 8, served notice they would seek a broad ruling national in scope at a time when public opinion has turned in favor of gay marriage rights.

"We are going to address all the issues, focused on the fundamental constitutional right to marry of all citizens," Olson said Friday.

"We ought to have marriage equality as a constitutional right everywhere," Boies added.

Q&A: Prop. 8, gay marriage and the Supreme Court

They maintained they were not concerned that the decision to hear the case puts in jeopardy their court victory for California gays who wish to marry. If the justices had simply turned down the appeal, gay marriage would have once again been legal in the state.

John Eastman, a California law professor and chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, which supports traditional marriage, saw the court's announcement as a sign that Proposition 8 would be upheld. If so, gay marriage would remain illegal in California, barring another voter initiative.

"It's a strong signal that the justices are concerned with the rogue rulings that have come out of San Francisco. We believe the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn this exercise in judicial activism," said Eastman, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

TIMELINE: Gay marriage since 2000

In a second case, the justices will review the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and its provision denying federal benefits to same-sex couples who are legally married. Judges in New York, New England states and California have ruled this law denies gays and lesbians the equal protection of the laws.

The court agreed to hear the case of Edith Windsor, an 83-year-old widow who was given a $363,000 tax bill by the Internal Revenue Service after her female spouse died in 2009. The two had lived together for 44 years and were married in Canada in 2007. The U.S. government said Windsor did not qualify as a "surviving spouse" under the federal law. A married heterosexual couple would not have had to pay any tax.

A ruling on this issue could affect more than 100,000 gays and lesbians who are married in the United States.

The justices will have at least four options before them in the California case.

First, they could reverse the 9th Circuit and uphold Prop. 8, thereby making clear that the definition of marriage will be left to the discretion of each state and its voters. The defenders of Prop. 8 argue that federal courts should allow this divisive social issue to be resolved over time by voters and state legislatures.

A second possibility would be for the justices to agree with Olson and Boies and rule broadly that denying gays and lesbians the fundamental right to marry violates the Constitution. This would be a historic pronouncement, akin to the 1967 ruling in Loving vs. Virginia, which struck down the laws against interracial marriages.

A third option would be to follow the approach set by the 9th Circuit and strike down Proposition 8 in a way that limits the ruling to California.

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Feds Charge Anonymous Spokesperson for Sharing Hacked Stratfor Credit Cards

A Dallas grand jury has brought charges against Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown stemming from the 2011 hack of intelligence vendor Stratfor Global Intelligence.

Brown isn’t charged with committing the hack; just with possessing and transmitting credit card numbers that were stolen in the incident.

He has been in prison since he was arrested in dramatic and public fashion three months ago after posting a threatening video to YouTube. Brown was talking with acquaintances during a Sept. 12 TinyChat session when the feds burst in and took him away. The chat session was later posted to the internet.

The Anonymous spokesman was charged the next day with threatening a federal officer.

This time the charges are are related to a different incident: the 2011 Stratfor hack where credit card numbers and internal e-mail messages were stolen.

According to the grand jury indictment, dated Tuesday, Brown posted a link to a zipped version of the documents stolen in the Stratfor hack on Christmas day 2011 — that counts as trafficking in “stolen authentication features,” the indictment claims. He’s also charged with possessing stolen credit card numbers, Card Verification Values, and other information related to those credit card numbers.

Brown, 31, has been in custody since his Sept. 12 arrest, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday in a press release announcing the 12-count indictment. He could face a maximum of 15 years in prison if convicted on the most serious of these charges.

The self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman said he was expecting to face fraud charges after his apartment was raided back in March. He mentioned them in a long, rambling video posted to YouTube the day on the same day he was arrested in September. “I bring in no money. I have $25,000 I brought in the last year from this fucking book deal. that’s it.” he said. “A fucking fraud charge for a fucking writer activist who has no fucking money.”

Later in the video, Brown railed against FBI Agent Robert Smith, saying that he was going to “ruin” Smith’s life “and look into his fucking kids.” The Anonymous activist said he was angry that feds were contemplating obstruction of justice charges against his mother.

The indictment is below.

Gov.uscourts.txnd.226354.1.0

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Viral rapper PSY apologizes for anti-US protests

South Korean rapper and Internet sensation PSY is apologizing to Americans for participating in anti-U.S. protests several years ago.

Park Jae-sang, who performs as PSY, issued a statement Friday after reports surfaced that he had participated in concerts protesting the U.S. military presence in South Korea during the early stages of the Iraq war.

At a 2004 concert, the “Gangnam Style” rapper performs a song with lyrics about killing “Yankees” who have been torturing Iraqi captives and their families “slowly and painfully.” In another protest, he smashed a model of a U.S. tank on stage.

“While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted,” he wrote in the statement. “I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.”

The 34-year-old rapper says the protests were part of a “deeply emotional” reaction to the war and the death of two Korean school girls, who were killed when a U.S. military vehicle hit them as they walked alongside the road. He noted antiwar sentiment was high around the world at the time.

PSY attended college in the U.S. and says he understands the sacrifices U.S. military members have made to protect South Korea and other nations. He has recently performed in front of servicemen and women.

“And I hope they and all Americans can accept my apology,” he wrote. “While it’s important that we express our opinions, I deeply regret the inflammatory and inappropriate language I used to do so. In my music, I try to give people a release, a reason to smile. I have learned that thru music, our universal language we can all come together as a culture of humanity and I hope that you will accept my apology.”

His participation in the protests was no secret in South Korea, where the U.S. has had a large military presence since the Korean War, but was not generally known in America until recent news reports.

PSY did not write “Dear American,” a song by The N.E.X.T., but he does perform it. The song exhorts the listener to kill the Yankees who are torturing Iraqi captives, their superiors who ordered the torture and their families. At one point he raps: “Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers/Kill them all slowly and painfully.”

PSY launched to international acclaim based on the viral nature of his “Gangnam Style” video. It became YouTube’s most watched video, making him a millionaire who freely crossed cultural boundaries around the world. Much of that success has happened in the U.S., where the rapper has managed to weave himself into pop culture.

He recently appeared on the American Music Awards, dancing alongside MC Hammer in a melding of memorable dance moves that book-end the last two decades. And the Internet is awash with copycat versions of the song. Even former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, the 81-year-old co-chairman of President Barack Obama‘s deficit commission, got in on the fun, recently using the song in a video to urge young Americans to avoid credit card debt.

It remains to be seen how PSY’s American fans will react. Obama, the father of two pop music fans, wasn’t letting the news change his plans, though.

Earlier Friday, the White House confirmed Obama and his family will attend a Dec. 21 charity concert where PSY is among the performers. A spokesman says it’s customary for the president to attend the “Christmas in Washington” concert, which will be broadcast on TNT. The White House has no role in choosing performers for the event, which benefits the National Children’s Medical Center.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: A Son Lost, a Mother Found

My friend Yvonne was already at the front door when I woke, so at first I didn’t realize that my mother was missing.

It was less than a week after my son Spencer died. Since that day, a constant stream of friends had been coming and going, bringing casseroles and soup, love, support and chatter. Mom hated it.

My 94-year-old mother, who has vascular dementia, has been living in my home in upstate New York for the past few years. Like many with dementia, mom is courteous but, underneath, irascible. Pride defines her, especially pride in her Phi Beta Kappa intellect. She hates to be confronted with how she has become, as she calls it, “stupid.”

The parade of strangers confused her. She had to be polite, field solicitous questions, endure mundane comments. She could not remember what was going on or why people were there. It must have been stressful and annoying.

That night, like every night since the state troopers brought the news, I woke hourly, tumbling in panic. As if it were not too late to save my son. Mom knew something was wrong, but she could not remember what. As I overslept that morning, she must have decided enough was enough. She was going home.

In a cold sky, the sun blazed over tall pines. As I opened the door, the dogs raced out to greet Yvonne and her two housecleaners. Yvonne often brags about her cleaning duo. They were her gift to me. They were going to clean my house before the funeral reception, which was scheduled for later that week. This was a very big gift because, like my mother before me, I am a very bad housekeeper.

Mom’s door was shut. I cautioned the housecleaners to avoid her room as I showed them around. Yvonne went to the kitchen to listen to the 37 unheard messages on my answering machine; the housecleaners went out to their van to get their instruments of dirt removal.

I ducked into Mom’s room to warn her about the upcoming noise. The bed was unmade; the floor was littered with crumpled tissues; the room was empty.

Normally, I would have freaked out right then. I knew Mom was not in the house, because I had just shown the whole house to the cleaners. Although Mom doesn’t wander like some dementia patients, she does on occasion run away. But I could not muster a shred of anxiety.

“Yvonne,” I called, “did you see my mother outside?”

Yvonne popped her head into the living room, eyebrows raised.“Outside? No!” She was alarmed. “Is she missing?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily, “I’ll look.” I stepped out onto the front porch, tightening the belt of my bathrobe and turning up the collar. Maybe she had walked off into the woods. The dogs danced around my legs, wanting breakfast.

I had no space left in my body to care. Either we would find her, or we would not. Either she was alive, or she was not. My child was gone. How could I care about anything ever again?

Then I saw my car was missing. My mouth fell open and my eyeballs rolled up to the right, gazing blindly at the abandoned bird’s nest on top of the porch light: What had I done with the keys?

Mom likes to run away in the car when she is angry. She used to do it a lot when my father was still alive — every time they fought. Since Mom took off in my car almost a year ago, after we had had a fight, I’d kept the keys hidden. Except for this week; this week, I had forgotten.

I was reverting to old habits. I had left the doors unlocked and the keys in the cupholder next to the driver’s seat. Exactly like Mom used to do.

“Uh-oh,” I said aloud. Mom was still capable of driving, even though she did not know where she was going. I just really, really hoped that she didn’t hurt anybody on the road. I pulled out my cellphone, about to call the police.

“Celia!” Yvonne shouted from the kitchen. She hurried up behind me, excited. “They found your mother. There are two messages on your machine.”

At that very moment, Mom was holed up at the College Diner in New Paltz, a 20-minute drive over the mountain, through the fields, left over the Wallkill River and away down Main Street.

Yvonne called the diner. They promised to keep the car keys until someone arrived. By that time, Yvonne had to go to work. She drove my friend Elizabeth to the diner, and Elizabeth drove Mom home in my car.

Half an hour later, they walked in the front door. Mom’s cheeks were rouged by the chill air and her eyes sparkled, her white hair riffing with static electricity. “Hello, hello,” she sang out. “Here we are.” She was wearing the flannel nightgown and robe I had dressed her in the night before. It was covered by her oversized purple parka, and her bare feet were shoved into sneakers.

I started laughing as soon as I saw her. I couldn’t help it. Elizabeth and Mom started laughing too. “You had a big adventure,” I said, hugging them both. “How are you?”

“I’m just marvelous,” said my mother. Mom always feels great after doing something rakish. We settled her on the sofa with her feet on the ottoman. By the time I got her blanket tucked in around her shoulders, she had fallen asleep.

Elizabeth couldn’t stop laughing as she described the scene. “Your mother was holding court in this big booth. She was sitting there in her nightgown and her parka, talking to everybody, with this plate of toast and coffee and, like, three of the staff hovering around her.”

The waitress said Mom seemed “a little disoriented” when she got there. Mom said she was meeting a friend for breakfast, but since she was wearing a nightgown and didn’t know whom she was meeting or where she lived, the staff thought there might be a problem. They convinced Mom to let them look in the glove compartment of the car, where they found my name and number.

It was then that I realized I was laughing – something I’d thought I would never be able to do again. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I’m laughing,” I said.

“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Elizabeth, holding her belly.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I laughed, rolling on the floor.

And she who gave me life, who had suffered the death of my child and the extinction of her own intellect, snoozed on: oblivious, jubilant, still herself, still mine.

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Your Money: Deciding How to Slice Your Charitable Pie

Each year at this time, out of some combination of generosity and procrastination, millions of Americans rush to make donations to the causes and institutions important to them.

It is a beautiful thing, but it is also something of a scramble. The solicitations pile up. The holiday to-do list is already long. There are last-minute tax moves to make. And somewhere along the way, people find a few minutes to make a series of hasty decisions and dash off a bunch of checks.

This year, I was determined that my family would be a bit more deliberate. We already automatically give modest amounts each month, via credit card, to institutions and causes that we have a personal connection to and educational or religious institutions that shaped us or shape us still.

But I wanted us to have a true charitable asset allocation — an actual pie chart so that we could be more deliberate about how we split things up. We also had a goal of giving more to people who are lacking in basic needs.

Our historical pie chart shows us to be a lot like other Americans, with a heavy tilt toward houses of worship and secondary or higher education. According to the annual Giving USA study of how Americans give, just 8 percent of donations go to international organizations, and not all of them work on basic issues like hunger and health.

Any serious discussion of this issue ought to include a careful consideration of “The Life You Can Save,” a brief and provocative book by Peter Singer, a Princeton University professor of bioethics. To lead a truly ethical life, he writes, we should be doing much more to help poor people in faraway places. Our money can go farther there, too, giving us more bang for our charitable buck.

It is hard to argue that there is anything more important than saving one additional child’s life. But where does that leave those of us who still have a strong affinity for causes and places closer to home?

EDUCATION Many of us would not be where we are were it not for the educational institutions that picked up the bill when we could not pay full freight. To my mind, that creates not just a debt of gratitude but a running tab that I hope to clear long before I die.

Mr. Singer sees no need for people like me to repay in full, though. “I think it’s open to you to say that the marginal difference my dollar can make to an organization that already has a large endowment is not as great as one given to an organization that helps people who have almost nothing,” he said.

Even some fund-raising professionals were willing to absolve me here. “If you think about what motivates the people who fund scholarships, their intention is not necessarily for you to pay it back,” said Melissa A. Berman, the president and chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. “The intention is for you to have a set of opportunities and to fulfill your potential without any strings attached.”

Strings or no, it would simply feel selfish not to give generously in this category. The one excuse Mr. Singer was willing to allow me was this one: The only way to justify giving something to educational institutions that are relatively well off (or to pay the $50,000-plus in costs for universities like his) is if they produce people and knowledge that will help solve the world’s problems.

It is hard to prove conclusively that any one institution has or will make a measurable difference. And what does he give to Princeton? “Not one cent,” he said, adding that he believes that he has talked many alumni into giving less than they might have otherwise.

HOUSES OF WORSHIP Many religious communities depend on their members for much or all of their annual budget. They would not exist but for our (still tax-deductible, for now) donations.

Mr. Singer, who is an atheist, doesn’t have much patience for this. “Maybe they could scale down a bit,” he said. “They don’t need such a comfortable place to worship while other people don’t have shelter from the elements.”

But many communities have inherited ornate buildings, which can feel like both blessings and curses from God when they start falling to pieces. Letting them rot isn’t really an option. Once they’re fixed up, however, Mr. Singer does offer a nod to the fact that people who pray there tend also to give a bit more to charity than non-God-fearing types.

If you offer financial support to your own house of worship, at the very least you have a duty to make sure that your religious community is making fellow members aware of the need to help people who have much less than you do.

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS Here, Mr. Singer is perhaps at his most blunt. “Philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious,” he writes in his book.

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An actor despairs in Tinseltown

Seth Burnham sat in a dim corner of Kaldi Coffee & Tea, clutching a mug as he tried to conjure some confidence.

Being here in L.A., I'm giving it everything, he thought.

But after three years of living in Los Angeles, he hadn't had a single role he could be proud of. In a cable TV comedy, he played Percy the Carjacker, a dimwit blown to shreds by an air hose. For an independent film, he had been the best friend of a beautiful woman — a role the script called Small Gay Man.

Hollywood is one big lottery. You have to play it if you want a career in movies or TV....You have to be here. You have to believe.

Sometimes that was tough. Take STARmeter, the entertainment insider's website that measures the popularity of Hollywood actors.

"I was No. 80,000," Burnham said, "for a while."

Frustrated and fatigued, he would retire to this worn, cave-like cafe in Atwater Village.

He had found his surrogate Los Angeles family here, a group of a dozen or so who eased his loneliness and shared his Hollywood ambition: Amy, the animator who had worked on "South Park," Nicholas, whose latest film was well received at the Sundance Film Festival, and Amad, a rising African American actor who worried about being typecast in criminal roles.

They stayed for hours, talking, typing, hunched hard over laptops, nursing lattes. They were actors, writers and directors; stragglers, success stories and hard-luck cases like Burnham.

Many days, he sat in a torn leather chair reading through newspapers and memorizing scripts. He seemed swallowed in the furniture — brown-haired, bearded, not much more than 5 feet tall, with worry lines marching from the corners of his eyes.

Time was against him. Asked his age back in February, Burnham paused. "Mid 30s-ish, early 40s-ish," he said.

Outside of the cafe, he had few Los Angeles friends. His wife, a medical student, moved to St. Louis last year for a residency, but he stayed here. They decided that if she was going to devote herself fully to her dream, then he would too.

But how much more rejection could he handle? And was the unrelenting struggle worth more to him than his marriage?

::

Since his college days in the early 1990s, the acting quest had taken Burnham to several cities. He lived in San Francisco and London, where he trained at a drama school in the classical English style and started a theater company. He lived in Portland, Ore., and Seattle, where he got good reviews for his role in a modern adaptation of Chekhov's "The Seagull."

Everywhere he put down roots he found a place like Kaldi. "The anti-Starbucks," he said. "Just my style."

In Los Angeles, he developed a cafe routine. Each morning, he awoke in his cramped apartment, fed kibbles to his cats, threw on his sneakers and walked across Glendale Boulevard.

He drank two iced coffees a day, no more. He couldn't afford more, not when he didn't have a job — he had to be free for auditions. He relied on credit cards and his wife's salary to pay his bills.

Burnham didn't want fame; he wanted to simply be a journeyman, a working actor, appreciated for his skill, making roughly the same yearly salary as a union electrician.

He sat in the cafe for entire mornings and sometimes entire days. "Wrestling demons," he said.

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<em>Apple v. Samsung</em> Judge: 'It's Time for Global Peace'

SAN JOSE, California — Everybody settle down. Sorting out the Samsung v. Apple verdict is gonna take awhile, even if the judge presiding over the trial might trim the $1.05 billion award and said it’s time for the tech giants to make peace.

The epic Apple v. Samsung patent-infringement case was back in San Jose Federal Court on Thursday, and federal judge Lucy Koh said she’s too busy with another patent trial to issue a sweeping ruling on the sales bans Apple is seeking and the question of whether Samsung should pay more, or less, than the $1.05 billion in damages a jury awarded in August. Instead, she’ll issue a series of rulings in the next few months and wrap this up.

“I think it’s time for global peace,” the judge said from the bench. “I think it’d be good for consumers, the industry, and the parties.”

It was the first time the two sides have been in court since a nine-member jury on Aug. 24 awarded Apple a $1.05 billion award after ruling that Samsung violated Apple product design and essential user interface elements. The hearing was largely procedural, with lawyers ponderously quibbling over intricacies. At one point, Koh called a particular point moot, prompting an Apple lawyer to reply, “It’s different shades of moot.”

At issue are three points: whether the damages were appropriate; whether as many as 26 Samsung products should be banned from sale in the U.S.; and whether the jury decision should be thrown out altogether because of alleged misconduct from the jury foreman, who failed to disclose his involvement in a lawsuit. Although only three of the products at issue in the case are still on the market, a sweeping ban would substantially hurt the Korean company financially, make an example of the Android handset maker, and could affect the types of products retailers are willing to put on their store shelves.

In a nutshell, Apple wants to tack another $500 million onto the verdict and additional Samsung products added to the injunction. “Hopefully after an injunction they will be deterred from getting this close to the line and we will not be back in front of you in the future,” Apple attorney Michael Jacobs told Judge Koh.

Samsung, of course, wants the verdict dissected after a few anomalous calculations were examined, including a seemingly exorbitant charge of $58 million on the Samsung Galaxy Prevail smartphone. “You should reverse-engineer (the damages), make sure jury verdict is causally related to the evidence based on legal theory,” Samsung lawyer Kathleen Sullivan said. “We’ve given you two legal errors that you can correct with mathematical certainty.”

Koh indicated that she might trim the award granted in the Prevail, noting the figure was “way beyond reasonable royalty or lost profit.”

Samsung feels Apple is actively engaging in a smear campaign and reiterated its point that the jury foreman in the trial had incentive to be vindictive against Samsung. Even so, Samsung counsel Charles Verhoeven said the company is willing to talk. “The ball’s in [Apple's] court,” he said. Koh was surely happy to hear that, as she appears exasperated by the growing length and complexity of the case.

“When is this case going to resolve?” she asked at one point. “This is not a joke, I’m being serious.”

It may not end even when Koh signs off on it. The case is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

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Drug Makers Challenge Pill Disposal Law in California

Brand name drug makers and their generic counterparts rarely find themselves on the same side of an issue, but now they are making an exception. They have teamed up to fight a local law in California, the first in the nation, that makes them responsible for running — and paying for — a program that would allow consumers to turn in unused medicines for proper disposal.

Such so-called drug take-back programs are gaining in popularity because of a growing realization that those leftover pills in your medicine cabinet are a potential threat to public health and the environment.

Small children might accidentally swallow them and teenagers will experiment with them, advocates of the laws say. Prescription drug abusers can, and are, breaking into homes in search of them. Unused pills are sometimes flushed down the toilet, so pharmaceuticals are now polluting waterways and even drinking water. One study found the antidepressant Prozac in the brains of fish.

Most such take-back programs are run by local or other government agencies. But increasingly there are calls to make the pharmaceutical industry pay.

“We feel the industry that profits from the sales of these products should have the financial responsibility for proper management and disposal,” said Miriam Gordon, California director of Clean Water Action, an advocacy group.

In July, Alameda County, Calif., which includes Oakland and Berkeley, became the first locality to enact such a requirement. Drug companies have to submit plans for accomplishing it by July 1, 2013.

But the industry plans to file a lawsuit in United States District Court in Oakland on Friday, hoping to have the law struck down. The suit is being filed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, which represents brand-name drug companies, the Generic Pharmaceutical Association and the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

James M. Spears, general counsel of PhRMA, said the Alameda ordinance violated the Constitution in that a local government was interfering with interstate commerce, a right reserved for Congress.

“They are telling a company in New Jersey that you have to come in and design and implement and pay for a municipal service in California,” he said in an interview.

“This program is one where the cost is shifted to companies and individuals who are not located in Alameda County and who won’t be served by it.”

Mr. Spears, who is known as Mit, said that the program would cost millions of dollars a year to run and that pharmaceutical companies were “not in the waste disposal business.” He said it would be best left to sanitation departments and law enforcement agencies, which must be involved if narcotics, like pain pills, were to be transported.

Nathan A. Miley, the president of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and the champion of the legislation, said late Thursday, “It’s just unfortunate that PhRMA would fight this because it would be pennies for them.”

“We will win legally and will win in the court of public opinion as well,” Mr. Miley said.

The battle in Alameda could set the direction for other states and localities. Legislators in seven states have introduced bills to require drug companies to pay for take-back programs in the last few years, said Scott Cassel, founder and chief executive of the Product Stewardship Institute, a nonprofit group that advocates such programs. But none of the bills have passed.

Mr. Cassel said about 70 similar “extended producer responsibility” laws have been enacted in 32 states for other products, like electronic devices, mercury-containing thermometers, fluorescent lamps, paint and batteries. He said he was not aware that any had been struck down on constitutional grounds.

The pharmaceutical industry already pays for take-back programs in some other countries. The law in Alameda is modeled partly on the system in British Columbia and two other Canadian provinces. There, the industry formed the Post-Consumer Pharmaceutical Stewardship Association, which runs the programs.

Consumers can take unused drugs back to pharmacies, from which they are periodically collected. Drug companies pay for the program in proportion to their market share, said Ginette Vanasse, executive director of the association. The program for British Columbia, with a population over four million, costs about $500,000 a year, she said.

The extent of the problem of unused pills and how best to handle them are matters of debate.

The United States Geological Survey has found various drugs, including antidepressants, antibiotics, heart medicines and hormones, in waterways it has sampled. Sewage treatment plants and drinking water treatment plants are not meant to remove pharmaceuticals.

Still, it is not known what effect the chemicals might have. “It’s a hard-to-pin-down problem,” said Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst at the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group. It is thought that trace amounts in drinking water are probably not harmful. But larger amounts found in wastewater could be having an impact on wildlife.

It is also unclear whether take-back programs will help. Experts generally agree that the bigger source of pollution is urine and feces containing the remnants of drugs that are ingested, not the unused pills flushed down the toilet.

PhRMA also argues that take-back programs will not help much with the problem of drug abuse either. Mr. Spears said that it was better to have consumers tie up unused pills in a plastic bag and throw them in the trash. That is more effective, he said, because people would not have to travel to a collection point. Such collection points could become targets for thieves and drug abusers.

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In Shift of Jobs, Apple Will Make Some Macs in U.S.

Apple plans to join a small but growing number of companies that are bringing some manufacturing jobs back to the United States, drawn by the growing economic and political advantages of producing in their home market.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, introduced new products in October, including a thinner iMac.

On Thursday, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, who built its efficient Asian manufacturing network, said the company would invest $100 million in producing some of its Mac computers in the United States, beyond the assembly work it already does in the United States. He provided little detail about how the money would be spent or what kinds of workers might benefit.

Apple, which long manufactured parts in the United States but stopped about a decade ago, has been under pressure to create more jobs here given its market power. It sold 237 million iPods, iPads, Macs and other devices in the year ended in September.

“I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job,” Mr. Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek. “But I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs.”

Some analysts are hopeful that the move by a big, innovative company like Apple could inspire a broader renaissance in American manufacturing, but a number of experts remain skeptical.

“I find it hard to see how the supply chains that drive manufacturing are going to move back here,” said Andre Sharon, a professor at Boston University and director of the Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation. “So much of the know-how has been lost to Asia, and there’s no compelling reason for it to return. It’s great when a company says they want to create American jobs — but it only really helps the country if those are jobs that belong here, if it starts a chain reaction or is part of a bigger economic shift.”

Over the last few years, companies across various industries, including electronics, automotive and medical devices, have announced that they are “reshoring” jobs after decades of shipping them abroad. Lower energy costs in America, rising wages in developing countries like China and Brazil, quality control issues and the desire to keep the supply chain close to the gigantic American consumer base have all factored into these decisions.

“Companies were going abroad in pursuit of cost reduction, and it turns out there were a lot of unintended costs,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial. “America has been looking a lot more competitive lately.”

Even so, the impact on the American job market has been modest so far. Much of the work brought back has been high-value-added, automated production that requires few actual workers, which is part of the reason America’s higher wages are not scaring off companies.

American manufacturing has been growing in the last two years, but the sector still has two million fewer jobs than it had when the recession began in December 2007. Worldwide manufacturing appears to be growing much faster, even for many of the American-owned companies that are expanding at home. General Electric, for example, has hired American workers to build water heaters, refrigerators, dishwashers and high-efficiency topload washers, but continues to add more jobs overseas as well.

Apple has not announced plans to move the complex, faster-growing portions of its product lines. Macs now represent a relatively small part of Apple’s business, accounting for less than 20 percent of its nearly $36 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter. The company’s iPad and iPhone products, which amount to nearly 70 percent of its sales, will continue to be made in low-cost centers of manufacturing like China, mostly on contract with outside companies like Foxconn.

Mr. Cook’s statements suggested Apple was planning to build more of the Mac’s components domestically, but with partners. He told Bloomberg Businessweek that the plan “doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”

Whether Apple’s newly announced plan might help create other higher-paying jobs along the supply line depends on the nature of the manufacturing.

Other computer manufacturing has been trickling back to the United States after largely shifting overseas in the 1990s.

Charles Duhigg and Quentin Hardy contributed reporting.

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Obama resolute in showdown with GOP over 'fiscal cliff'

WASHINGTON — President Obama brushed off the latest Republican gambit to gain leverage in averting the so-called fiscal cliff, bluntly telling business chief executives in a speech Wednesday, "I'm not going to play that game."

That flash of swagger reflects growing White House confidence about its position in the year-end showdown over scheduled spending cuts and tax increases. With less than a month to act and the wind of an electoral victory at their back, White House officials think they are boxing in Republicans.

The White House credits its strategy crafted from painful lessons of past go-rounds with the Republican-led House. Rather than engaging intensely with the GOP leadership in high-profile meetings, Obama has sought to isolate Republicans and pump up the pressure from all sides. He has picked a red line and is sticking to it. And now he's waiting.

"The only time these guys have ever moved on something is when they have felt the outside pressure," said an Obama advisor who requested anonymity to discuss strategy.

Both sides say they are working to defuse the scheme of tax increases and budget cuts they enacted to force themselves to reach a larger deficit reduction deal. Experts say that if nothing is done, the double blow could send the economy back into recession.

For now, though, the president has reason to be resolute, even as Republicans call on him to counter their latest offer.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner underscored that position Wednesday in an interview on CNBC. The administration is "absolutely" ready to go over the "fiscal cliff" if Republicans refuse to raise tax rates on the wealthy, he said.

"There's no prospect in an agreement that doesn't involve those rates going up on the top 2% of the wealthiest Americans," he said.

Public polling shows a majority of Americans not only support the president's push to allow tax rates to rise on top earners but are prepared to hold the GOP responsible if negotiations fail. A new poll from the Washington Post and Pew Research Center found that 53% of Americans said Republicans should be blamed if there is no deal, compared with 27% who would blame the president.

Obama's stance has bred discord and frustration among Republicans on Capitol Hill who find themselves in the politically awkward position of threatening a tax increase for all to preserve lower taxes for the wealthy. Tension bubbled up this week as Republicans floated a new strategy that would involve reviving a threat to let the U.S. default on its debt payments.

Under that scenario, Republicans would agree to raise taxes on the wealthiest 2% of taxpayers, as the president has demanded, but would defer talks about a larger deficit reduction package until the new year, when Obama would need their votes to avoid a federal default on the debt. Republicans could then demand concessions on the federal budget in return for voting to raise the nation's debt limit.

"The debt ceiling is hanging out there, and the debt ceiling is the next point of leverage," said Rep. Steve King, a conservative Republican from Iowa. "The president does not fear the fiscal cliff. He's concerned about who's going to get the blame. But he doesn't fear the cliff."

A spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) also suggested that Republicans would try to extract spending cuts in return for a debt limit increase. "We agree there is no reason for drama surrounding a debt limit increase. All that is required is the president getting serious about spending cuts," said Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck.

In his CNBC interview, Geithner said the administration would insist that any agreement include an increase in the debt ceiling.

Obama and Boehner spoke on the phone Wednesday. Neither side disclosed details of the call.

Obama's strategy involves risks. His repeated attempts to bludgeon Republicans on taxes while offering no new concessions has engendered little goodwill, and he will need some Republican votes soon.

And his declaration that he won't play chicken with the vote to raise the debt ceiling? Though that is the tough talk that some Democrats have craved, it has little practical meaning. Unless Republicans agree to his request to largely cede authority to raise the limit, he will need Congress to do it.

For Obama, the lesson on how to gain and use leverage began with the summer of 2011, when a marathon of high-level bargaining sessions with Republicans failed to produce a grand bargain on the federal budget.

After that, Obama set out to negotiate on the campaign trail, announcing his terms publicly as he rallied people behind them.

The Obama team added social media campaigns and testimonials from middle-class Americans, and managed to pass an extension of the payroll tax break in February. That's when aides came to believe the president could shift the dynamic in talks with Capitol Hill.

Early signs are that the formula may be working again. The latest Twitter campaign has elicited more than 100,000 emails from people explaining how the middle-class tax increase would affect them.

And Obama's outreach to interested parties is showing progress. Business leaders are worrying openly about the uncertainty around the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling.

At the Business Roundtable on Wednesday, Boeing's chief executive introduced Obama by suggesting that business leaders could "serve a useful purpose in the dialogue."

To be sure, there's grousing about Obama's negotiating posture. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the chamber's Republican leader, has complained that Obama is campaigning rather than working out the issues with his negotiating partners.

But the strategy is worth the aggravation, administration officials think. The president isn't avoiding private negotiations, but doesn't plan to start them until there is some movement.

"Once Republicans acknowledge that rates are going up for top earners," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, "we believe that an agreement is very achievable."

christi.parsons@latimes.com

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

Melanie Mason, Michael A. Memoli and Lisa Mascaro in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

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Google Now Delivers Travel Forecasts, Boarding Passes Before You Search

Google’s Search App has received a travel-focused update just in time for the holidays. Wednesday’s update adds new capabilities to Google Now, the app’s feature set designed to deliver frequently searched-for information before you even think to search for it.

Previously, opening the Google Search App on any Android phone running Jelly Bean (versions 4.1 and newer), would pull up a Google Now card detailing the weather where you’re standing along with traffic routes to your home and office, sports scores, and package tracking info, among other things. The update adds into the mix new information centered around weather, plane flights and finding things to do in the new locale you’re visiting.

In the updated app, Google Now will still bubble up a card with local weather, but it will now also provide a card detailing the forecast for your upcoming destination about a day before you travel so you can pack and plan correctly. This can serve as a raincoat reminder for those headed to Seattle, or an alert for shorts if you’re vacationing in Melbourne, Australia.

If you’re flying for the holidays, the Search app will pull up a Google Now card with your boarding pass — if you’re flying United Airlines. Additional airlines will be added in coming weeks and months, said in Baris Gultekin, a Google Now product director. This feature, like all Google Now cards, requires a user’s permission to pull flight details from your Gmail account. If permission is granted, the app will serve up cards with restaurant and hotel reservations, translation help, and currency conversions too.

“Our goal is to figure out what the one thing you need right now is, and deliver that to you,” Gultekin told Wired. “A lot of our users need assistance the most when they’re traveling.”

With that in mind, Google Now also will provide suggestions on places to check out once you’ve reached your destination. The Search app already regularly offers recommendations on nearby restaurants and photo-worthy spots, but now it will list events taking place nearby and local websites that may be useful in figuring out what to do.

But not all the updates have to do with travel. The refresh also adds birthday reminders for those you’re connected to on Google+. And Google’s stellar voice assistant, also built into the Search app, received some new tricks today as well. Now, by speaking to the Google Search app, a user can post a text update to Google+, ask what song is playing in the background and launch a barcode scanner to retrieve product info while out shopping.

The updates hit the Google Search app today for Android owners — sorry iOS users.

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Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer dies, aged 104

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Oscar Niemeyer, a towering patriarch of modern architecture who shaped the look of modern Brazil and whose inventive, curved designs left their mark on cities worldwide, died late on Wednesday. He was 104.

Niemeyer had been battling kidney ailments and pneumonia for nearly a month in a Rio de Janeiro hospital. His death was confirmed by a hospital spokesperson.

Starting in the 1930s, Niemeyer’s career spanned nine decades. His distinctive glass and white-concrete buildings include such landmarks as the United Nations Secretariat in New York, the Communist Party headquarters in Paris and the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Brasilia.

He won the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the “Nobel Prize of Architecture” for the Brasilia cathedral. Its “Crown of Thorns” cupola fills the church with light and a sense of soaring grandeur despite the fact that most of the building is underground.

It was one of dozens of public structures he designed for Brazil’s made-to-order capital, a city that helped define “space-age” style.

After flying over Niemeyer’s pod-like Congress, futuristic presidential palace and modular ministries in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut and first man in space, said “the impression was like arriving on another planet.”

In his home city of Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer’s many projects include the “Sambadrome” stadium for Carnival parades. Perched across the bay from Rio is the “flying saucer” he designed for the Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art.

The collection of government buildings in Brasilia, though, remain his most monumental and enduring achievement. Built from scratch in a wild and nearly uninhabited part of Brazil’s remote central plateau in just four years, it opened in 1960.

While the airplane-shaped city was planned and laid out by Niemeyer’s friend Lucio Costa, Niemeyer designed nearly every important government building in the city.

BECAME NATIONAL ICON

An ardent communist who continued working from his Copacabana beach penthouse apartment in Rio until days before his death, Niemeyer became a national icon ranking alongside Bossa Nova pioneer Tom Jobim and soccer legend Pelé.

His architecture, though, regularly trumped his politics.

Georges Pompidou, a right-wing Gaullist former French president, said Niemeyer’s design for the Communist Party of France headquarters in Paris “was the only good thing those commies ever did,” according to Niemeyer’s memoirs.

Prada, the fashion company known for providing expensive bags and wallets, thought the Communist Party building in Paris so cool it rented it for a fashion show.

Even the 1964-1985 Brazilian military government that forced Niemeyer into exile in the 1960s eventually found his buildings congenial to their dreams of making Brazil “the country of the future.”

His work is celebrated for innovative use of light and space, experimentation with reinforced concrete for aesthetic value and his self-described “architectural invention” style that produced buildings resembling abstract sculpture.

Initially influenced by the angular modernism of French-Swiss architect Le Cobusier, who worked with Niemeyer and Costa on a visit to Brazil in the 1930s, his style evolved toward rounded buildings that he said were inspired by the curves of Rio’s sunbathing women as well as beaches and verdant hills.

“That is the architecture I do, looking for new, different forms. Surprise is key in all art,” Niemeyer told Reuters in an interview in 2006. “The artistic capability of reinforced concrete is so fantastic – that is the way to go.”

Responding to criticism that his work was impractical and overly artistic, Niemeyer dismissed the idea that buildings’ design should reflect their function as a “ridiculous and irritating” architectural dogma.

“Whatever you think of his buildings, Niemeyer has stamped on the world a Brazilian style of architecture,” Dennis Sharp, a British architect and author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Architects and Architecture, once said of Niemeyer.

LIFELONG COMMUNIST

Niemeyer’s legacy is heavily associated with his communist views. He was a close friend of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and an enemy of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship.

“There are only two communists left in the world, Niemeyer and myself,” Castro once joked.

Niemeyer remained politically active after returning to Brazil, taking up the cause of a militant and sometimes violent movement of landless peasants. He said in 2010 that he was a great admirer of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former labor leader who was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010.

Niemeyer once built a house in a Rio slum for his former driver and gave apartments and offices as presents to others.

Despite his egalitarian views, Niemeyer had no illusions that his buildings were helping to improve social justice.

Far from the model city Niemeyer had envisioned, Brasilia today is in many ways the epitome of inequality. Planned for 500,000 people, the city is now home to more than 2.5 million and VIPs keep to themselves in fenced-in villas while the poor live in distant satellite towns.

“It seemed like a new era was coming, but Brazil is the same crap – a country of the very poor and the very rich,” he said in another Reuters interview in 2001.

In a 2010 interview in his office, he was quick to blame Costa for things many dislike about Brasilia, such as its rigid ordering into homogenous “hotel,” “government,” “residential” and even “mansion” and “media” districts that can make finding a newspaper or groceries a chore.

“I just did the buildings,” he said. “All that other stuff was Costa.”

Despite Niemeyer’s atheism, one of his first significant early works was a church built in homage to St. Francis, part of a complex of modern buildings in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

That work won the confidence of the city’s mayor Juscelino Kubitschek. When he became president, he tapped Niemeyer to help realize the dream of opening up Brazil’s interior by moving the capital from coastal Rio to the empty plains of central Brazil.

Despite years of bohemian living, Niemeyer remained married for 76 years to Annita Baldo, his first wife. He married his second wife, long-time aide Vera Lucia Cabreira, in 2006 at the age of 99. She survives him, as do four grandchildren.

Niemeyer’s only daughter, an architect, designer and gallery owner, Anna Maria, died on June 6 at the age of 82.

(Additional reporting by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Todd Benson and Kieran Murray)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Extended Use of Breast Cancer Drug Suggested

The widely prescribed drug tamoxifen already plays a major role in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. But a new study suggests that women should be taking the drug for twice as long as is now customary, a finding that could upend the standard that has been in place for about 15 years.

In the study, patients who continued taking tamoxifen for 10 years were less likely to have the cancer come back or to die from the disease than women who took the drug for only five years, the current standard of care.

“Certainly, the advice to stop in five years should not stand,” said Prof. Richard Peto, a medical statistician at Oxford University and senior author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Wednesday and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Breast cancer specialists not involved in the study said the results could have the biggest impact on premenopausal women, who account for a fifth to a quarter of new breast cancer cases. Postmenopausal women tend to take different drugs, but some experts said the results suggest that those drugs might be taken for a longer duration as well.

“We’ve been waiting for this result,” said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “I think it is especially practice-changing in premenopausal women because the results do favor a 10-year regimen.”

Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that even women who completed their five years of tamoxifen months or years ago might consider starting on the drug again.

Tamoxifen blocks the effect of the hormone estrogen, which fuels tumor growth in estrogen receptor-positive cancers that account for about 65 percent of cases in premenopausal women. Some small studies in the 1990s suggested that there was no benefit to using tamoxifen longer than five years, so that has been the standard.

About 227,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and an estimated 30,000 of them are in premenopausal women with estrogen receptor-positive cancer and prime candidates for tamoxifen. But postmenopausal women also take tamoxifen if they cannot tolerate the alternative drugs, known as aromatase inhibitors.

The new study, known as Atlas, included nearly 7,000 women with ER-positive disease who had completed five years of tamoxifen. They came from about three dozen countries. Half were chosen at random to take the drug another five years, while the others were told to stop.

In the group assigned to take tamoxifen for 10 years, 21.4 percent had a recurrence of breast cancer in the ensuing 10 years, meaning the period 5 to 14 years after their diagnoses. The recurrence rate for those who took only five years of tamoxifen was 25.1 percent.

About 12.2 percent of those in the 10-year treatment group died from breast cancer, compared with 15 percent for those in the control group.

There was virtually no difference in death and recurrence between the two groups during the five years of extra tamoxifen. The difference came in later years, suggesting that tamoxifen has a carry-over effect that lasts long after women stop taking it.

Whether these differences are big enough to cause women to take the drug for twice as long remains to be seen.

“The treatment effect is real, but it’s modest,” said Dr. Paul E. Goss, director of breast cancer research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tamoxifen has side effects, including endometrial cancer, blood clots and hot flashes, which cause many women to stop taking the drug. In the Atlas trial, it appears that roughly 40 percent of the patients assigned to take tamoxifen for the additional five years stopped prematurely.

Some 3.1 percent of those taking the extra five years of tamoxifen got endometrial cancer versus 1.6 percent in the control group. However, only 0.6 percent of those in the longer treatment group died from endometrial cancer or pulmonary blood clots, compared with 0.4 percent in the control group.

“Over all, the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Trevor J. Powles of the Cancer Center London, said in a commentary published by The Lancet.

Dr. Judy E. Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber, said many women have a love-hate relationship with hormone therapies.

“They don’t feel well on them, but it’s their safety net,” said Dr. Garber, who added that the news would be welcomed by many patients who would like to stay on the drug. “I have patients who agonize about this, people who are coming to the end of their tamoxifen.”

Emily Behrend, who is a few months from finishing her five years on tamoxifen, said she would definitely consider another five years. “If it can keep the cancer away, I’m all for it,” said Ms. Behrend, 39, a single mother in Tomball, Tex. She is taking the antidepressant Effexor to help control the night sweats and hot flashes caused by tamoxifen.

Cost is not considered a huge barrier to taking tamoxifen longer because the drug can be obtained for less than $200 a year.

The results, while answering one question, raise many new ones, including whether even more than 10 years of treatment would be better still.

Perhaps the most important question is what the results mean for postmenopausal women. Even many women who are premenopausal at the time of diagnosis will pass through menopause by the time they finish their first five years of tamoxifen, or will have been pushed into menopause by chemotherapy.

Postmenopausal patients tend to take aromatase inhibitors like anastrozole or letrozole, which are more effective than tamoxifen at preventing breast cancer recurrence, though they do not work for premenopausal women.

Mr. Peto said he thought the results of the Atlas study would “apply to endocrine therapy in general,” meaning that 10 years of an aromatase inhibitor would be better than five years. Other doctors were not so sure.

The Atlas study was paid for by various organizations including the United States Army, the British government and AstraZeneca, which makes the brand-name version of tamoxifen.

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