Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist, Dead at 26

We often say, upon the passing of a friend or loved one, that the world is a poorer place for the loss. But with the untimely death of programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, this isn’t just a sentiment; it’s literally true. Worthy, important causes will surface without a champion equal to their measure. Technological problems will go unsolved, or be solved a little less brilliantly than they might have been. And that’s just what we know. The world is robbed of a half-century of all the things we can’t even imagine Aaron would have accomplished with the remainder of his life.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide Friday in New York. He was 26 years old.

When he was a 14 years old, Aaron helped develop the RSS standard; he went on to found Infogami, which became part of Reddit. But more than anything Aaron was a coder with a conscience: a tireless and talented hacker who poured his energy into issues like network neutrality, copyright reform and information freedom.  Among countless causes, he worked with Larry Lessig at the launch of the Creative Commons, architected the Internet Archive’s free public catalog of books, OpenLibrary.org, and in 2010 founded Demand Progress, a non-profit group that helped drive successful grassroots opposition to SOPA last year.

“Aaron was steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world,” writes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. “He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation. I am crushed by his loss, but will continue to be enlightened by his work and dedication.”

In 2006 Aaron was part of a small team that sold Reddit to Condé Nast , Wired’s parent company. For a few months he worked in our office here in San Francisco.  I knew Aaron then and since, and I liked him a lot — honestly, I loved him. He was funny, smart, sweet and selfless. In the vanishingly small community of socially and politically active coders, Aaron stood out not just for his talent and passion, but for floating above infighting and reputational cannibalism.  His death is a tragedy.

I don’t know why he killed himself, but Aaron has written openly about suffering from depression. It couldn’t have helped that he faced a looming federal criminal trial in Boston on hacking and fraud charges, over a headstrong stunt in which he arranged to download millions of academic articles from the JSTOR subscription database for free from September 2010 to January 2011, with plans to release them to the public.

JSTOR provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals online. MIT had a subscription to the database, so Aaron brought a laptop onto MIT’s campus, plugged it into the student network and ran a script called keepgrabbing.py that aggressively — and at times disruptively — downloaded one article after another. When MIT tried to block the downloads, a cat-and-mouse game ensued, culminating in Swartz entering a networking closet on the campus, secretly wiring up an Acer laptop to the network, and leaving it there hidden under a box. A member of MIT’s tech staff discovered it, and Aaron was arrested by campus police when he returned to pick up the machine.

The JSTOR hack was not Aaron’s first experiment in liberating costly public documents. In 2008, the federal court system briefly allowed free access to its court records system, Pacer, which normally charged the public eight cents per page. The free access was only available from computers at 17 libraries across the country, so Aaron went to one of them and installed a small PERL script he had written that cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from Pacer every three seconds, and uploading it to the cloud. Aaron pulled nearly 20 million pages of public court documents, which are now available for free on the Internet Archive.

The FBI investigated that hack, but in the end no charges were filed. Aaron wasn’t so lucky with the JSTOR matter. The case was picked up by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann in Boston, the cybercrime prosecutor who won a record 20-year prison stretch for TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez. Heymann indicted Aaron on 13 counts of wire fraud, computer intrusion and reckless damage. The case has been wending through pre-trial motions for 18 months, and was set for jury trial on April 1.

Larry Lessig, who worked closely with Aaron for years, disapproves of Aaron’s JSTOR hack. But in the painful aftermath of Aaron’s suicide, Lessig faults the government for pursuing Aaron with such vigor. “[Aaron] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying,” Lessig writes. “I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.”

Update: Aaron’s parents, Robert and Susan Swartz, his two brothers and his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, have established a memorial website for him, and released this statement.

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

—

Quinn Norton: My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved

Corey Doctorow: RIP, Aaron Swartz

Alex Stamos: The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”

Photo: Flickr/Creative Commons

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Sony Pictures executive: “Zero Dark Thirty” “does not advocate torture”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Sony Pictures executive Amy Pascal lashed out on Friday at a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) who accused Osama bin Laden film “Zero Dark Thirty” of promoting torture and urged fellow Academy members not to vote for it in the Oscars race.

In a strongly worded statement, Pascal said the “attempt to censure one of the great films of our time should be opposed.”

“We are outraged that any responsible member of the Academy would use their voting status in AMPAS as a platform to advance their own political agenda,” said Pascal, who is co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and chairman of its Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group.

“This film should be judged free of partisanship,” she said, adding that the film “does not advocate torture.”

Pascal’s comments came in response to Academy member David Clennon’s remarks at a rally against the torture of terror suspects in Los Angeles on Friday.

“I believe that the film clearly promotes a tolerance for torture,” Clennon told local ABC TV news affiliate KABC, adding “I hope that my fellow members of the Academy will consider the morality of each nominee.”

Clennon, an actor who appeared in 1980s TV series “thirtysomething,” also wrote an opinion piece earlier this week criticizing the film.

“At the risk of being expelled for disclosing my intentions, I will not be voting for ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ – in any Academy Awards category,” Clennon wrote on progressive news website Truth-out.org in a January 9 posting.

“‘Zero’ never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal. It does portray torture as getting results,” he added.

The 6,000 members of the Academy are urged not to reveal who they cast their votes for. Academy Award winners are revealed at a ceremony in February, the highlight of Hollywood’s award season.

The Academy on Friday declined to comment on Clennon’s remarks.

“Zero Dark Thirty” won five Oscar nominations, including a nod for best picture, despite coming under attack in Washington over its source material and claims by politicians that it depicts torture as helping the United States find and kill the al Qaeda leader in May 2011.

Among the film’s nominees were actress Jessica Chastain and screenwriter Mark Boal, but director Kathyrn Bigelow surprisingly failed to make the Oscar best director shortlist.

Sony Pictures Entertainment is a unit of Sony Corp.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Walsh)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Treasury Will Not Mint $1 Trillion Coin to Raise Debt Ceiling

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Saturday that it will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to head off an imminent battle with Congress over raising the government’s borrowing limit.

“Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” Anthony Coley, a Treasury spokesman, said in a written statement.

The Obama administration has indicated that the only way for the country to avoid a cash-management crisis as soon as next month is for Congress to raise the “debt ceiling,” which is the statutory limit on government borrowing. The cap is $16.4 trillion.

“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”

In recent weeks, some Republicans have indicated that they would not agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agreed to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.

The White House has said it would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for Congressional authority to borrow more, and it has insisted that Congress raise the ceiling as a matter of course, to cover expenses already authorized by Congress. In broader fiscal negotiations, it has said it would not agree to spending cuts without commensurate tax increases.

The idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin drew wide if puzzling attention recently after some bloggers and economic commentators had suggested it as an alternative to involving Congress.

By virtue of an obscure law meant to apply to commemorative coins, the Treasury secretary could order the production of a high-denomination platinum coin and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, where it would count as a government asset and give the country more breathing room under its debt ceiling. Once Congress raised the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could then order the coin destroyed.

Mr. Carney, the press secretary, fielded questions about the theoretical tactic at a news conference last week. But the idea is now formally off the table.

The White House has also rejected the idea that it could mount a challenge to the debt ceiling itself, on the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that the “validity of the public debt” of the United States “shall not be questioned.”

The Washington Post earlier published a report that the Obama administration had rejected the platinum-coin idea.

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DWP will allow customers to sell back excess solar energy

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers for the first time will be able to sell back excess solar energy created on rooftops and parking lots under a new program approved Friday by the city utility's board of commissioners.

Described as the largest urban rooftop solar program of its kind in the nation, the so-called feed-in-tariff program would pay customers 17 cents per kilowatt hour for energy produced on their own equipment. The DWP has already accepted more than a dozen applicants and will be taking dozens more as it accepts contracts for up to 100 megawatts of solar power through 2016.

Environmentalists, business supporters and solar vendors were thrilled by the vote. Feed-in-tariff programs help generate jobs and economic activity while decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, they say.

"Today's vote is a major step forward for the economic and environmental sustainability of Los Angeles," said Mary Leslie, President of the Los Angeles Business Council, a group advocating the Clean LA Solar program since 2009.

Fred Pickel, the city's ratepayer advocate, told commissioners that 17 cents per kilowatt hour was above market rates and could force significant rate increases on DWP customers. Higher DWP bills could drive jobs away, Pickel told the board.

But the board unanimously decided to move ahead, and to reassess the program at regular intervals.

In March, the commission will decide whether to add an additional 50 megawatts of energy to the buyback program. The full 150-megawatt program would create enough solar energy to power 34,000 Los Angeles homes, advocates say.

Once qualified, DWP customers with large multi-family dwellings, warehouses, school facilities and parking lots can sell solar energy at 17 cents per kilowatt hour. The DWP is offering a tiered-pricing schedule that drops to 13 cents per kilowatt hour as energy contracts are reserved, DWP officials said.

Single-family homes generally don't produce enough energy to qualify.

Some of the contracts will be set aside for smaller solar producers to give them a better shot at winning slots, officials said. Customers participating in other solar-incentive initiatives, such as net-metering, do not qualify for the buyback contracts, DWP officials said.

Environmental groups have long pushed for a feed-in-tariff, arguing that it would spur more commercial property owners to go solar. Sacramento and San Diego have their own versions, and Florida is experimenting with buybacks.

Evan Gillespie, campaign representative for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, said the vote will allow the DWP to curtail its dependence on out-of-state energy generators. In addition, it promises 4,500 jobs and $500,000 in new economic activity for the city, he said.

"In the 21st century, it is simply unacceptable for 40% of L.A.'s energy to come from aging out-of-state polluting coal-fired power plants,'' Gillespie said.

Following the vote, Toronto-based Solar Provider Group announced that it would expand its operations in Los Angeles by opening an office and hiring 30 people. The company plans to invest up to $50 million by the end of 2016, said president Christian Wentzel.

"This program provides us with the stability we need to enter the U.S. solar market,'' he said.

DWP staffers recommended a 17-cents-per-kilowatt-hour rate as a starting point to reflect the relatively higher cost of buying solar energy compared to other commodities. The cost of getting the program up and running will raise the average residential monthly electric bill by about 4 cents, according to a staff report.

The DWP will hire an administrator and about 30 other people to operate the program, but most of those costs will be reimbursed by program participants, the report said.

Expanding local solar power is a key strategy for the DWP to meet the state-mandated renewable energy level of 33% by 2020.

catherine.saillant@latimes.com

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Student Appeals Suspension for Refusing to Wear RFID Tracker

A Texas high school student on Friday asked a federal appeals court to overturn a lower court’s order upholding her school suspension for refusing to wear around her neck an RFID-chip student ID she claims is the “Mark of the Beast.”

The Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-laden student-body cards when the semester began in the fall. The ID badge has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number. The chip monitors pupils’ movements on campus, from when they arrive until when they leave.

Sophomore Andrea Hernandez was notified in November by the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio that she would not be able to continue attending John Jay High unless she wears the badge around her neck like all students. The district said the girl, who objects largely on religious grounds, would have to attend another high school that does not employ the RFID tags.

The devout Christian sued, and on Tuesday a Texas federal judge concluded the 15-year-old’s right of religion was not breached. That’s because the district, the court ruled, eventually agreed to accommodate the girl and allow her to remove the RFID chip while still demanding that she wear the identification like the other students.

U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia’s ruling gave the girl and her family until Jan. 18 to decide whether to go to a different school or comport. She appealed Friday, arguing that adorning herself with the ID card, even one without an RFID chip, amounted to discriminating against her “sincerely held beliefs.”

“To Andrea, this ‘accommodation’ is similar to allowing a religious adherent who must eat a pork-free diet to have his pork-free diet, but to require him to wear a shirt advocating pork,” the girl’s attorney, Jerry Lynn Ward of the Rutherford Institute, wrote the New Orleans-based appeals court. (.pdf) The lower court’s decision, Ward added, “unquestionably constitutes a substantial burden upon her free exercise of religion.”

David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.

Read more by David Kravets

Follow @dmkravets and @ThreatLevel on Twitter.

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Evan Rachel Wood expecting first child with actor Jamie Bell

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actress Evan Rachel Wood said on Friday that she and her husband, British actor Jamie Bell, are expecting their first child.

“Thanks for all your warm wishes,” Wood, 25, wrote on her Twitter account. “We are very happy. I’m gonna be a mama!”

Moments earlier, Wood posted a picture of the pregnancy book “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” on the social media site.

It will be the first child for both Wood and Bell, who wed in October.

Wood rose to Hollywood stardom for her roles in 2008′s “The Wrestler” and the 2003 coming-of-age drama “Thirteen.” She was nominated for an Emmy award for the 2011 television mini-series “Mildred Pierce.”

Bell, 26, found fame as the teen star of “Billy Elliot,” about a ballet dancer growing up in a tough coal mining town in northern England. He won a British BAFTA award for the role and has since appeared in adventure movies such as “The Eagle.”

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; editing by Philip Barbara)

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Makers of Violent Video Games Marshal Support to Fend Off Regulation

WASHINGTON — With the Newtown, Conn., massacre spurring concern over violent video games, makers of popular games like Call of Duty and Mortal Kombat are rallying Congressional support to try to fend off their biggest regulatory threat in two decades.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. meeting Friday with video game industry executives, a response to last month's massacre.

The $60 billion industry is facing intense political pressure from an unlikely alliance of critics who say that violent imagery in video games has contributed to a culture of violence. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with industry executives on Friday to discuss the concerns, highlighting the issue’s prominence.

No clear link has emerged between the Connecticut rampage and the gunman Adam Lanza’s interest in video games. Even so, the industry’s detractors want to see a federal study on the impact of violent gaming, as well as cigarette-style warning labels and other measures to curb the games’ graphic imagery.

“Connecticut has changed things,” Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican and a frequent critic of what he terms the shocking violence of games, said in an interview. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’re going to do something.”

Gun laws have been the Obama administration’s central focus in considering responses to the shootings. But a violent media culture is being scrutinized, too, alongside mental health laws and policies.

“The stool has three legs, and this is one of them,” Mr. Wolf said of violent video games.

Studies on the impact of gaming violence offer conflicting evidence. But science aside, public rhetoric has clearly shifted since the shootings, with politicians and even the National Rifle Association — normally a fan of shooting games — quick to blame video games and Hollywood movies for inuring children to violence.

“I don’t let games like Call of Duty in my house,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said this week on MSNBC. “You cannot tell me that a kid sitting in a basement for hours playing Call of Duty and killing people over and over and over again does not desensitize that child to the real-life effects of violence.”

Residents in Southington, Conn., 30 miles northeast of Newtown, went so far as to organize a rally to destroy violent games. (The event was canceled this week.) Mr. Biden, meeting with some of the industry’s biggest manufacturers and retailers, withheld judgment on whether graphic games fuel violence. But he added quickly, “You all know the judgment other people have made.”

Industry executives are steeling for a political battle, and they have strong support from Congress as well as from the courts.

Industry representatives have already spoken with more than a dozen lawmakers’ offices since the shootings, urging them to resist threatened regulations. They say video games are a harmless, legally protected diversion already well regulated by the industry itself through ratings that restricting some games to “mature” audiences.

With game makers on the defensive, they have begun pulling together scientific research, legal opinions and marketing studies to make their case to federal officials.

“This has been litigated all the way to the Supreme Court,” Michael Gallagher, chief executive of the industry’s main lobbying arm, said in an interview, referring to a 2011 ruling that rejected a California ban on selling violent games to minors on First Amendment grounds.

Twenty years ago, with graphic video games still a nascent technology, manufacturers faced similar threats of a crackdown over violent games. Even Captain Kangaroo — Bob Keeshan — lobbied for stricter oversight. The industry, heading off government action, responded at that time by creating the ratings labels, similar to movie ratings, that are ubiquitous on store shelves today.

This time, with a more formidable presence in Washington, the industry is not so willing to discuss voluntary concessions.

Game makers have spent more than $20 million since 2008 on federal lobbying, and millions more on campaign donations.

Mr. Gallagher’s group, the Entertainment Software Association, has five outside lobbying firms to push its interests in Washington. And the industry has enjoyed not only a hands-off approach from Congress, which has rejected past efforts to toughen regulations, but also tax breaks that have spurred sharp growth.

Game makers even have their own bipartisan Congressional caucus, with 39 lawmakers joining to keep the industry competitive.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

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Court Says Pfizer Can Be Sued by Man Who Took Generic

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a patient could sue a brand-name company for failing to warn about a drug’s risks even though he had taken a generic version of the product that the company did not make.

Although the decision applies only to Alabama, it is likely to be closely read by lawyers with similar cases pending around the country whose clients have been barred from suing generic companies because of a recent United States Supreme Court ruling.

“It has national implications,” said Bill Curtis, a Dallas lawyer who has filed hundreds of similar cases in several states. “I suspect that now, like most folks, if a client comes into my office, I’d be suing both the generic they took and the brand who’s responsible for the label.”

In the Alabama case, the plaintiff, Danny Weeks, claimed that he had developed a movement disorder known as tardive dyskinesia after taking generic versions of Reglan to treat his acid reflux. Mr. Weeks sued Actavis and Teva, the generic companies that made the drugs he took, as well as Wyeth, which developed the drug, for failing to adequately warn about Reglan’s risks.

In 2009, the Food and Drug Administration required all manufacturers of metoclopramide, the generic name for Reglan, to place stronger warnings on their labels detailing a link between long-term use of the drug and tardive dyskinesia. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed by patients who claim that Wyeth failed to properly warn about Reglan’s risks.

The chances of those claims against the generic companies succeeding are unclear after a 2011 Supreme Court decision, Pliva v. Mensing, which ruled that generic drug companies had no control over what their labels said and so could not be sued for failing to alert patients about the risks of taking their drugs. With few exceptions, generic manufacturers are required to use the same labels as the brand names.

The suit was filed in a federal court in Alabama because Mr. Weeks lives in Alabama and the drug companies are based elsewhere. The federal court asked the Alabama Supreme Court whether a branded company could be sued in such a case.

In its decision on Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that “an omission or defect in the labeling for the brand-name drug would necessarily be repeated in the generic labeling, foreseeably causing harm to a patient who ingested the generic product.”

Kevin Newsom, a lawyer for Pfizer, which acquired Wyeth in 2009, described the decision as an outlier. He said more than 70 court decisions, including four from federal appeals courts, had taken the opposite view. Representatives for brand-name companies have argued that they cannot be held liable for injuries caused by products they did not manufacture. “It comes as something of a surprise because it is contrary to the overwhelming weight of authority on this issue nationwide,” he said. He said two other decisions have held similar views as the Alabama court.

The court ruled that Mr. Weeks could go ahead with his lawsuit based on what Mr. Newsom described as a “unique wrinkle” in Alabama state law: that third parties like Wyeth can be held liable for a person’s injury if that third party provided false or misleading information that led to the injury. Mr. Weeks is arguing that Wyeth misinformed his doctor, not Mr. Weeks himself.

Sheldon Gilbert, a lawyer with the National Chamber Litigation Center, which advocates for the Chamber of Commerce and filed a brief in the case, said plaintiffs’ lawyers were likely to see the Alabama decision as a lucrative opening. “What we’ve seen again and again and again is that the trial lawyers get a decision that they think is good and they all flock to that jurisdiction,” he said.

Chris Hood, a lawyer for Mr. Weeks, said, “When someone’s hurt by a generic tablet and that injury can be laid at the feet of misinformation about the drug, then there’s only one party who can be held responsible,” he said, “the branded company.”

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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Top U.S. General Says Stopping a Syrian Chemical Attack Is 'Almost Unachievable'

If Syrian dictator Bashar Assad decides to use his chemical weapons, there won’t be a thing the U.S. military can do to stop him, America’s top military officer conceded on Thursday. Nor will the U.S. step into a “hostile” atmosphere, with or without Assad, to keep those chemicals under control.

It’s been a month since U.S. intelligence learned that Assad’s forces were mixing some of their precursor chemicals for sarin gas, as Danger Room first reported. The Syrian military even loaded aerial bombs with the deadly agent. Assad hasn’t used the weapons — yet. Should he change his mind, there’s little chance the U.S. would know it before it’s too late to stop the first chemical attack in the Mideast in over 20 years.

“The act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. “You would have to have such clarity of intelligence, persistent surveillance, you’d have to actually see it before it happened. And that’s unlikely, to be sure.”

That explains the emphasis the Obama administration has given, from President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on down, to publicly warning Assad that using his chemical weapons would cross a “red line.” Dempsey said that “messaging” seeks to establish a deterrent, since Assad might think it would prompt outright U.S. or international intervention leading to his downfall. But that’s different from preemption.

American officials began strategizing months ago for how it should operate in a post-Assad Syria. And that includes scoping out plans for disposing of Assad’s stockpiles of nerve and mustard agents.

Today, however, Panetta shot down a related preventive step: sending U.S. troops into the chaos of the Syrian civil war to secure the chemical stocks.

U.S. military officials have previously speculated that an intervention to take hold of an estimated 500 tons of chemical precursors would require 75,000 troops, a force larger than the one currently in Afghanistan. Panetta said the international community needs to establish a “process and procedure” for keeping the stockpiles under control — but only after Assad falls, which is an uncertain proposition. U.S. intervention to lock down the chemicals, Panetta said, would depend on the establishment of new regime willing to invite the U.S. military in — another uncertain proposition.

“We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground,” Panetta said. If there’s a “peaceful transition,” then the U.S. might consider a request that a friendly successor government might make to secure the chemical stocks. “But in a hostile situation, we’re not planning for that.” It’s looking likely that the 400 U.S. soldiers sent to Turkey to man Patriot missile batteries could be the only uniformed troops that the Pentagon openly sends to handle the Syrian crisis.

The U.S. public has little appetite for throwing exhausted U.S. soldiers and marines into yet another bloody Mideastern conflict. But Panetta and Dempsey’s concession underscores the massive risks that the Syrian civil war poses for either the use or black market proliferation of chemical weapons. The revolution has  already claimed the lives of 60,000 Syrians. The longer it goes on, the greater the pressure Assad may feel to unleash his unconventional arms. Alternatively, various Syrian factions might be either unwilling or unable to secure the stocks, should they prevail, nor is there any guarantee they will give up the chemical weapons once victorious.

There is confusion about how long the sarin gas will remain usable once its precursors combine. Nerve agents are inherently unstable, but U.S. government sources have told Danger Room that Syrian sophistication with chemical weaponry may leave the combined, weaponized sarin deadly for up to a year. Dempsey and Panetta, however, believe that they’ll break down after 60 days. “That’s what the scientists tell us,” Dempsey said. “I’d still be reluctant to handle it myself.”

Disposing of (or “demilitarizing”) chemical weapons is extraordinarily difficult under any circumstances; Iraq’s former chemical bunkers are still toxic nearly  than a decade after Saddam’s overthrow, and the U.S. recently said it won’t be done disposing of its Cold War chemical weapon arsenal until 2023. Assad’s nerve agents will be no exception.

One of sarin’s main precursors – methylphosphonyl difluoride, or DF – can be turned into a somewhat non-toxic slurry, if combined properly with lye and water. The problem is that when DF reacts with water, it generates heat. And since DF has an extremely low boiling point — just 55.4 degrees Celsius — it means that the chances of accidentally releasing toxic gases are really high. “You could easily kill yourself during the demil,” one observer told Danger Room during the fall. That would explain Dempsey’s reluctance to touch it.

Naturally, this process could only begin once the DF and the rubbing alcohol (sarin’s other main precursor) was gathered up from Assad’s couple dozen storage locations. Then, they’d have to be carted far, far out into the desert — to make sure no bystanders could be hurt — along with the enormous stirred-tank reactors needed to conduct the dangerous chemistry experiments. And when it was all done, there would the result would be a whole lot of hydrofluoric acid, which is itself a poison.

It’s an operation that will take many months, many men, and many millions of dollars. No wonder the leaders of America’s overtaxed military won’t commit to the job until the Syrian civil war is done.

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