Deasy wants 30% of teacher evaluations based on test scores

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced Friday that as much as 30% of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student test scores, setting off more contention in the nation's second-largest school system in the weeks before a critical Board of Education election.

Leaders of the teachers union have insisted that there should be no fixed percentage or expectation for how much standardized tests should count — and that test results should serve almost entirely as just one measure to improve instruction. Deasy, in contrast, has insisted that test scores should play a significant role in a teacher's evaluation and that poor scores could contribute directly to dismissal.

In a Friday memo explaining the evaluation process, Deasy set 30% as the goal and the maximum for how much test scores and other data should count.

In an interview, he emphasized that the underlying thrust is to develop an evaluation that improves the teaching corps and that data is part of the effort.

"The public has been demanding a better evaluation system for at least a decade. And teachers have repeatedly said to me what they need is a balanced way forward to help them get better and help them be accountable," Deasy said. "We do this for students every day. Now it's time to do this for teachers."

Deasy also reiterated that test scores would not be a "primary or controlling" factor in an evaluation, in keeping with the language of an agreement reached in December between L.A. Unified and its teachers union. Classroom observations and other factors also are part of the evaluation process.

But United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher expressed immediate concern about Deasy's move. During negotiations, he said, the superintendent had proposed allotting 30% to test scores but the union rejected the plan. Deasy then pulled the idea off the table, which allowed the two sides to come to an agreement, Fletcher said. Teachers approved the pact last month.

"To see this percentage now being floated again is unacceptable," the union said in a statement.

Fletcher described the pact as allowing flexibility for principals, in collaboration with teachers, first to set individual goals and then to look at various measures to determine student achievement and overall teacher performance.

"The superintendent doesn't get to sign binding agreements and then pretend they're not binding," Fletcher said.

When Deasy settled on 30%, his decision was in line with research findings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has examined teacher quality issues across the country. Some experts have challenged that work.

The test score component would include a rating for the school based on an analysis of all students' standardized test scores. Those "value-added" formulas, known within L.A. Unified as Academic Growth Over Time, can be used to rate a school or a teacher's effectiveness by comparing students' test scores with past performance. The method takes into account such factors as family income and ethnicity.

After an aggressive push by the Obama administration, individual value-added ratings for teachers have been added to reviews in many districts. They make up 40% of evaluations in Washington, D.C., 35% in Tennessee and 30% in Chicago.

But Los Angeles will use a different approach. The district will rely on raw test scores. A teacher's evaluation also may incorporate pass rates on the high school exit exam and graduation, attendance and suspension data.

Deasy's action was met Friday with reactions ranging from guarded to enthusiastic approval within a coalition of outside groups that have pushed for a new evaluation system. This coalition also has sought to counter union influence.

Elise Buik, chief executive of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, said weighing test scores 30% "is a reasonable number that everyone can be happy with."

The union and the district were under pressure to include student test data in evaluations after L.A. County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant ruled last year that the system was violating state law by not using test scores in teacher performance reviews.

A lawsuit to enforce the law was brought by parents in Los Angeles, with support from the Sacramento-based EdVoice advocacy organization.

If the "actual progress" of students is taken into account under Deasy's plan, "it's a historic day for LAUSD," said Bill Lucia, the group's chief executive.

All of this is playing out against the backdrop of the upcoming March 5 election. The campaign for three school board seats has turned substantially into a contest between candidates who strongly back Deasy's policies and those more sympathetic toward the teachers union. Deasy supporters praise the superintendent for measures they say will improve the quality of teaching. The union has faulted Deasy for limiting job protections and said he has imposed unwise or unproven reforms.

In the upcoming election, the union and pro-Deasy forces are matched head to head in District 4, with several employee unions behind incumbent Steve Zimmer and a coalition of donors behind challenger Kate Anderson.

Anderson had high praise for Deasy's directive, saying it struck the right balance and that teachers and students would benefit.

Zimmer said that although he understands that principals need guidance, "I worry about anything that would cause resistance or delay in going forward. I hope this use of a percentage won't disrupt what had been a collaborative process."

howard.blume@latimes.com

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The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California

Team Truckee entered the competition late, after Team Russia was unable to get visas in time. Their sculpture: "Rising Tide."

The weekend at Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, is beautiful, sunny, and in the 30s. For eight teams of snow carvers from around the world, though, it’s terrible — the melty snow is sloppy, hard to carve, and even dangerous.

Teams of three from Finland, Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. were selected from more than 40 applicants for the inaugural Carve Tahoe, a five-day competition to hew works of art from 14-foot-high, 20-ton blocks of snow. But despite the bad snow, the teams rely on decades of experience, handcrafted tools, and creative techniques to fashion their massive sculptures. The team members are sculptors and artists and designers, but also doctors and lawyers. Though they spend weeks each year carving, nobody makes a living doing it.

“Everyone seems to have their own method of doing things,” says Team Wisconsin’s Mark Hargarten. “It’s amazing how different they are.”

The Wisconsin team uses a grid system for their carving — a Native American wearing an eagle costume, its feathers turning to flames, called “Dance of the Firebird.” The polyurethane model they built is scaled so 1/2 inch equals one foot on the finished snow sculpture. They cut a copy of the model in four, and covered each section with clay, sectioned in 1/2 inch increments. They etch corresponding lines in the snow, one foot to a side, and they peel off one piece of clay, carve the part of the sculpture they can see, and move on to the next.

“You never get lost using the method,” says Dan Ingebrigtson, a professional sculptor from Milwaukee. “Three or four guys can work from different angles, and meet in the middle.”

Wisconsin’s got several other strategies behind their carving as well. From the south, it looks like they haven’t even started; they left the southern side of the block intact to protect the rest of it from the sun, and the wall has been decimated by the heat. More than 20 percent of its thickness has melted by Sunday night, three days in. After the sun goes down, the team is hollowing out the interior of the structure, so it will freeze faster overnight.

Other teams are relying on nighttime freezing as well. A team partly from the U.S. and partly from Canada carves spires from blocks they removed from the sculpture, and plans to attach them to the top of their sculpture, “The Stand,” which incorporates four interwoven trees. They’ll use melty snow pulled from the middle of the block right when the sun goes down to cement the tops onto the trees, says team member Bob Fulks from the top of a stepladder as he cuts away at the sculpture with an ice chisel.

Fulks’ team is leaving Tahoe after the competition to go straight to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, for another competition, where he anticipates no problems with warm weather.

“It’s a good gig, you can travel all over the world doing it,” he says. “You go around and see the same people.”

Many of the carvers know each other from previous competitions.

“We’ve sculpted with almost everybody here before,” says Team Idaho-Dunham’s Mariah Dunham, who is working on “Sweet House (of Madness)” with her mother, Barb. The creation is a beehive, with the south side as the exterior, and the north side (intentionally placed out of the sun) as a representation of the comb, including hexagonal holds that perforate all the way to the hollow interior.

Though Carve Tahoe is new, snow carving is not. Many of the sculptors have been at it for more than 20 years, traveling around the world and meeting and competing against many of the same people — though each competition demands unique new designs from all the sculptors. Kathryn Keown discovered snow carving while Googling something completely different, and decided she wanted to host an international event.

“First we fell in love with the sculptures, then we fell in love with the sculptors,” says Keown, who founded the competition with Hub Strategy, the ad agency where she works.

Keown contacted several ski areas before Northstar, but the resort was on board right away; its owner, Vail Resorts also owns Breckenridge, where one of the biggest and most prestigious snow carving competitions is held.

But Keown wanted to commit to the design of the competition, not just the sculptures. Applicants submitted their designs last summer, and Keown enlisted Lawrence Noble, chair of the School of Fine Art at the Academy of Art University to help choose modern, complex, realist designs. She wanted no artsy, kitschy snowmen.

Then she chose a design-friendly logo and judges. In addition to Noble, the panel of judges features a sushi chef from Northstar, two interior designers, a photographer from nearby Squaw Valley, and Bryan Hyneck, vice president of design at Speck, which makes cases for mobile devices and was one of the event’s sponsors.

“The level of complexity and sophistication in this type of sculpture is just amazing,” says Hyneck, who has judged industrial and graphic design competitions, but never snow carving. “It’s amazing how organic some of the shapes can be.”

As a judge, Hyneck says he’ll focus on the craft and the execution of the sculptures, and how the sculptors use particular techniques to take advantage of the snow’s properties. But he adds that subject matter, point of view, message, and relationship to a theme are all important points as well.

“Anybody that is really going to push the limits of the capabilities of the media is going to get a lot of my attention,” he says.

For some, like the Germans, that means suspending massive structures made completely of snow. Their sculpture, titled “Four Elements”, features four large spires encircled by a tilted disc. Despite a trickle of melted snow dripping off the bottom edge, one — or even two — of the German carvers frequently stand atop the sculpture, using saws or chisels to shape the towers.

Sunday evening, after the sun has gone down and the temperature dropped, Josh Knaggs, bearded, with a cigarette in his mouth, is sitting in the curve made by the largest bear from the Team Idaho-Bonner’s Ferry sculpture, “Endangered Bears.” Wearing a blue event-issued jacket, he’s brushing out the hollow loop made by mama and papa bear.

Three days later, the judges award Knaggs and his team third prize, with Japan’s modern work, “Heart to Heart” coming in second and Germany’s gravity-defying “Four Elements” taking first. The teams disperse, and after a few more sunny days, Northstar tears down the structures before they get too soft and fall — all except the German piece, which can’t bear its own weight and collapses after judging is complete. But the ephemeral nature of the snow is part of what attracts the competitors.

“It’s for the moment, and it’s a beauty all in itself, creating something that’s gonna be disappearing, you know, it’s okay that it disappears,” says Team Truckee’s Ira Kessler. “We are making it for the moment.”

All Photos: Bryan Thayer/Speck

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Group of 20 Pledges to Let Markets Set Currency Values

MOSCOW — In a concerted move to quiet fears of a so-called currency war, finance officials from the world’s largest industrial and emerging economies expressed their commitment on Saturday to “market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility.”

In a statement issued at the conclusion of a conference here of the Group of 20, the finance ministers from the Group of 20 promised: “We will refrain from competitive devaluation. We will not target our exchange rates for competitive purposes.”

In its statement, the group also vowed to “take necessary collective actions” to discourage corporate tax evasion, particularly by preventing companies from shifting profits to avoid tax obligations. For instance, a number of big American companies, including Apple and Starbucks, have come under scrutiny recently for seeking out the friendliest tax jurisdictions.

Over all, the statement largely echoed one last week by seven top industrial nations pledging to let market exchange rates determine the value of their currencies. Currency devaluation can be used to gain competitive advantage because it makes a country’s exports cheaper.

“We all agreed on the fact that we refuse to enter any currency war,” the French finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, told reporters at the conference, which was held in a meeting center just a short walk from the Kremlin and Red Square.

In the statement on Saturday, the Group of 20 pointedly avoided any criticism of Japan, where stimulus programs backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have kept interest rates near zero and flooded the economy with money — leading to a roughly 15 percent drop in the value of the yen against the dollar over the last three months.

The Japanese policies, which have reduced the cost of Japanese products around the world, were the primary cause of fears of a currency war.

In essence, the Group of 20 expressed a view that loose monetary policy, including steps that weaken currency values, are acceptable when used to stimulate domestic growth but should not be used to benefit in global trade.

Critics of that view say that it amounts to a distinction without a difference because loose monetary policies stimulate growth and bolster exports at the same time.

The United States has also used a loose monetary approach to aid in the economic recovery, in the form of “quantitative easing” by which the Federal Reserve buys tens of billions of dollars in bonds each month.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, who attended the conference in Moscow, gave brief remarks on Friday indicating support for Japan’s efforts.

Faster-growing, developing countries like Brazil and China have expressed concerns about the loose monetary policies of more established economies like Japan and the United States. The money created by policies like the Fed’s quantitative easing can prove destabilizing as it enters faster-growing economies.

The Group of 20 acknowledged this concern in its statement, saying: “Monetary policy should be directed toward domestic price stability and continuing to support economic recovery according to the respective mandates. We commit to monitor and minimize the negative spillovers on other countries of policies implemented for domestic purposes.”

As the three-day conference drew to a close, participants did not reach any new agreement on debt-cutting targets. Efforts to reach such a pact will continue at the annual Group of 20 summit meeting to be attended by President Obama and other world leaders in St. Petersburg in September.

But while the debt agreement was elusive, the Group of 20 leaders reiterated efforts to work together, promising to “resist all forms of protections and keep our markets open.”

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AMC Aims to Repeat <em>Walking Dead</em> Success With New <em>Terror</em> Series

And the first cable network looking to capitalize on the massive mainstream success of The Walking Dead TV show is … Walking Dead network AMC. After proving that modern horror can draw audiences to rival — and, in some cases, beat — the big broadcast networks with the adaptation of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s long-running zombie comic, the network is developing a second horror drama based on Dan Simmons’ aptly named 2007 novel The Terror.

The Terror offers a fictionalized version of the real-life “lost expedition” of British Royal Navy officer Captain Sir John Franklin in 1845, in which two vessels, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, became trapped in ice in the Canadian Arctic, leading to the eventual deaths of both ships’ crews. While the true story of what happened to the expedition is both mysterious and grisly, Simmons’ take on it is far more ready-for-television, featuring a mythological beast hunting the crews and continually fracturing alliances and relationships between the human survivors.

Much as it did with The Walking Dead, which was originally the product of producer Gail Anne Hurd (Alien, Terminator) and writer/director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption),  AMC is relying on well-regarded genre veterans to usher the show into reality. Blade Runner and Prometheus director Ridley Scott will be executive producer for the series, while his production company, Scott Free, pairs with Television 360 (Game of Thrones) to bring the show to screen. A pilot script is currently being written by David Kajganich, a screenwriter whose previous credits include 2007′s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, The Invasion.

Considering the record-breaking success The Walking Dead has had, the real surprise isn’t that AMC wants to try and repeat its successful formula with a new series; it’s that other cable networks aren’t doing exactly the same thing already.

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Work starts on Seaside Heights, NJ, boardwalk

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. (AP) — The sounds shaking the ground in Seaside Heights aren’t from nightclubs.

The town featured in the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” has started rebuilding the boardwalk that was destroyed by Superstorm Sandy.

Heavy equipment began drilling holes in the sand and pounding pilings into the ground Friday. It’s the first phase of a project that could ultimately cost $ 6 million to $ 7 million.

Mayor Bill Akers says the mile-long walkway should be done by May 10, but amenities like railings, lighting and ramps will come after that.

Many residents turned out to see the start of the work. They expressed hope that the place where they vacationed as children and came to settle down will recapture what made it so special to them.

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Fat Dad: Baking for Love

Fat Dad

Dawn Lerman writes about growing up with a fat dad.

My grandmother Beauty always told me that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and by the look of pure delight on my dad’s face when he ate a piece of warm, homemade chocolate cake, or bit into a just-baked crispy cookie, I grew to believe this was true. I had no doubt that when the time came, and I liked a boy, that a batch of my gooey, rich, chocolaty brownies would cast him under a magic spell, and we would live happily ever.

But when Hank Thomas walked into Miss Seawall’s ninth grade algebra class on a rainy, September day and smiled at me with his amazing grin, long brown hair, big green eyes and Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, I was completely unprepared for the avalanche of emotions that invaded every fiber of my being. Shivers, a pounding heart, and heat overcame me when he asked if I knew the value of 1,000 to the 25th power. The only answer I could think of, as I fumbled over my words, was “love me, love me,” but I managed to blurt out “1E+75.” I wanted to come across as smart and aloof, but every time he looked at me, I started stuttering and sweating as my face turned bright red. No one had ever looked at me like that: as if he knew me, as if he knew how lost I was and how badly I needed to be loved.

Hank, who was a year older than me, was very popular and accomplished. Unlike other boys who were popular for their looks or athletic skills, Hank was smart and talented. He played piano and guitar, and composed the most beautiful classical and rock concertos that left both teachers and students in awe.

Unlike Hank, I had not quite come into my own yet. I was shy, had raggedy messy hair that I tied back into braids, and my clothes were far from stylish. My mother and sister had been on the road touring for the past year with the Broadway show “Annie.” My sister had been cast as a principal orphan, and I stayed home with my dad to attend high school. My dad was always busy with work and martini dinners that lasted late into the night. I spent most of my evenings at home alone baking and making care packages for my sister instead of coercing my parents to buy me the latest selection of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans — the rich colored bluejeans with the swan stitched on the back pocket that you had to lay on your bed to zip up. It was the icon of cool for the popular and pretty girls. I was neither, but Hank picked me to be his math partner anyway.

With every equation we solved, my love for Hank became more desperate. After several months of exchanging smiles, I decided to make Hank a batch of my homemade chocolate brownies for Valentine’s Day — the brownies that my dad said were like his own personal nirvana. My dad named them “closet” brownies, because when I was a little girl and used to make them for the family, he said that as soon as he smelled them coming out of the oven, he could imagine dashing away with them into the closet and devouring the whole batch.

After debating for hours if I should make the brownies for Hank with walnuts or chips, or fill the centers with peanut butter or caramel, I got to work. I had made brownies hundreds of times before, but this time felt different. With each ingredient I carefully stirred into the bowl, my heart began beating harder. I felt like I was going to burst from excitement. Surely, after Hank tasted these, he would love me as much as I loved him. I was not just making him brownies. I was l showing him who I was, and what mattered to me. After the brownies cooled, I sprinkled them with a touch of powdered sugar and wrapped them with foil and red tissue paper. The next day I placed them in Hank’s locker, with a note saying, “Call me.”

After seven excruciating days with no call, some smiles and the usual small talk in math class, I conjured up the nerve to ask Hank if he liked my brownies.

“The brownies were from you?” he asked. “They were delicious.”

Then Hank invited me to a party at his house the following weekend. Without hesitation, I responded that I would love to come. I pleaded with my friend Sarah to accompany me.

As the day grew closer, I made my grandmother Beauty’s homemade fudge — the chocolate fudge she made for Papa the night before he proposed to her. Stirring the milk, butter and sugar together eased my nerves. I had never been to a high school party before, and I didn’t know what to expect. Sarah advised me to ditch the braids as she styled my hair, used a violet eyeliner and lent me her favorite V-neck sweater and a pair of her best Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

When we walked in the door, fudge in hand, Hank was nowhere to be found. Thinking I had made a mistake for coming and getting ready to leave, I felt a hand on my back. It was Hank’s. He hugged me and told me he was glad I finally arrived. When Hank put his arm around me, nothing else existed. With a little help from Cupid or the magic of Beauty’s recipes, I found love.

---

Fat Dad’s ‘Closet’ Brownies

These brownies are more like fudge than cake and contain a fraction of the flour found in traditional brownie recipes. My father called them “closet” brownies, because when he smelled them coming out of the oven he could imagine hiding in the closet to eat the whole batch. I baked them in the ninth grade for a boy that I had a crush on, and they were more effective than Cupid’s arrow at winning his heart.

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing the pan
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped, or semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs at room temperature, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Fresh berries or powdered sugar for garnish (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grease an 8-inch square baking dish.

3. In a double boiler, melt chocolate. Then add butter, melt and stir to blend. Remove from heat and pour into a mixing bowl. Stir in sugar, eggs and vanilla and mix well.

4. Add flour. Mix well until very smooth. Add chopped walnuts if desired. Pour batter into greased baking pan.

5. Bake for 35 minutes, or until set and barely firm in the middle. Allow to cool on a rack before removing from pan. Optional: garnish with powdered sugar, or berries, or both.

Yield: 16 brownies

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Dawn Lerman is a New York-based health and nutrition consultant and founder of Magnificent Mommies, which provides school lectures, cooking classes and workshops. Her series on growing up with a fat father appears occasionally on Well.

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Supreme Court to Hear Monsanto Seed Patent Case

With his mere 300 acres of soybeans, corn and wheat, Vernon Hugh Bowman said, “I’m not even big enough to be called a farmer.”

Yet the 75-year-old farmer from southwestern Indiana will face off Tuesday against the world’s largest seed company, Monsanto, in a Supreme Court case that could deal a huge blow to the future of genetically modified crops, and also affect other fields from medical research to software.

At stake in Mr. Bowman’s case is whether patents on seeds — or other things that can self-replicate – extend beyond the first generation of the products.

It is one of two cases before the Supreme Court related to the patenting of living organisms, a practice that has helped give rise to the biotechnology industry but which critics have long considered immoral. The other case, involving a breast cancer risk test from Myriad Genetics, will determine whether human genes can be patented. It is scheduled to be heard on April 15.

Monsanto says that a victory for Mr. Bowman would allow farmers to essentially save seeds from one year’s crop to plant the next year, eviscerating patent protection. In Indiana, it says, a single acre of soybeans can produce enough seeds to plant 26 acres the next year.

Such a ruling would “devastate innovation in biotechnology,” the company wrote in its brief. “Investors are unlikely to make such investments if they cannot prevent purchasers of living organisms containing their invention from using them to produce unlimited copies.”

The decision might also apply to live vaccines, cells lines and DNA used for research or medical treatment, and some types of nanotechnology.

Many organizations have filed friend-of-the court briefs in support of Monsanto’s position — universities worried about incentives for research, makers of laboratory instruments, and some big farmer groups like the American Soybean Association, which say seed patents have spurred crop improvements. The Department of Justice is also supporting Monsanto’s argument.

BSA/The Software Alliance, which represents companies like Apple and Microsoft, said in a brief that a decision against Monsanto might “facilitate software piracy on a broad scale” because software can be easily replicated. But it also said that a decision that goes too far the other way could make nuisance software patent infringement lawsuits too easy to file.

Some critics of biotechnology say that a victory for Mr. Bowman could weaken what they see as a stranglehold that Monsanto and some other big biotech companies have over farmers, which they say has led to rising seed prices and the lack of high-yielding varieties that are not genetically engineered.

Patents have “given seed companies enormous power, and it’s come at the detriment of farmers,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, which co-authored a brief on the side of Mr. Bowman. “Seed-saving would act as a much needed restraint on skyrocketing biotech seed prices.”

Farmers who plant seeds with Monsanto’s technology must sign an agreement not to save the seeds, which means they must buy new seeds every year.

Monsanto has a reputation for vigorously protecting its intellectual property.

The Center for Food Safety, which has tracked the cases, said Monsanto has filed more than 140 patent infringement lawsuits involving 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, and has so far received $23.5 million in recorded judgments. The organization says there are numerous other cases in which farmers settle out of court or before a suit is filed.

Monsanto says it must stop infringers to be fair to the vast majority of farmers who do pay to use its technology.

But Monsanto typically exercises no control over soybeans or corn once farmers sell their harvested crops to grain elevators, which in turn sell them for animal feed, food processing or industrial use.

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Oscar Pistorius arrested in slaying of model Reeva Steenkamp

Paralympian Oscar Pistorius charged with murder

By Houston Mitchell

February 14, 2013, 6:35 a.m.

South African police Thursday arrested double amputee Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius and said he would be charged with murder after his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, was shot and killed at his home earlier in the morning.

Police spokesperson Brigadier Denise Beukes said that Pistorius was at his home after the death of the victim and that "there is no other suspect involved."

"There are witnesses and they have been interviewed this morning. We are talking about neighbors and people that heard things earlier in the evening and when the shooting took place," Beukes said.

Pistorius' court hearing was originally scheduled for Thursday afternoon but has been postponed until Friday to give forensic investigators time to carry out their work.

The athlete's father, Henke Pistorius, told South Africa's SABC radio news that he didn't know the facts. "If anyone makes a statement, it will have to be Oscar. He's sad at the moment."

Media in South Africa are reporting that Steenkamp was surprising Pistorius for Valentine's Day when he mistook her for a burglar and shot her. Steenkamp was shot in the arm and head and a 9-mm pistol was recovered at the scene.

"We have also taken cognizance of the media reports during the morning of an alleged break-in or that the young lady was mistaken to be a burglar," Beukes said. "Obviously our forensic investigation is still ongoing and we're not sure where this report came from.... Our detectives have been on the scene, our forensic investigators have been on the scene and the investigation is ongoing."

South African police said that there had been "previous incidents" of a domestic nature reported at Pistorius' home.

Pistorius, 26, was born without the fibula bone in both legs. He was known as the "Blade Runner" for his use of carbon fiber prosthetic blades. He was the first double amputee to run in the Olympics and reached the 400 meter semifinals in London 2012.

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SmartBall Keeps an Eye <em>Inside</em> the Ball

The old sports cliche “keep your eye on the ball” is getting a modern twist by an Australian sports tech company that’s putting an eye inside the ball.

Catapult Sports is rolling out the first major trial of ball-tracking technology this spring during the Australian Football League’s pre-season NAB Cup. SmartBall uses a tiny sensor inside the ball and fist-sized GPS trackers worn by players to produce a two-dimensional model of how the players and the ball move on the field.

There are two benefits to this. First, the player-worn devices send data to the sidelines, allowing trainers to determine who is working at peak levels, who is tiring and how changes in ball possession could be affecting their levels of effort. This type of sports-science approach is old hat for Catapult, which has long supplied its OptimEye monitors to professional, college, and Olympic teams around the world.

More on Sports Data Tracking:

SmartBall expands the benefits of data-tracking from health monitoring and to in-game strategy and analysis. The technology can track who’s had the ball and for how long, where it is on the field, how it got there and at what speed. By examining real-time data, coaches can see where their formations and plays work and where there are weak spots. This will allow changing tactics during the game and in practice sessions.

“There’s going to be a lot of learning this season,” Luke Millar, Catapult Sports’ global manager, said. “People know it’s an amazing tool, but they’re going to sit down and say, ‘How are we going to use this information?’”

Such data also could be broadcast to fans watching the action, providing new insights into gameplay.

Leagues have been hesitant to implement any tracking system that altered the primary tool of the game: the ball. No changes in dimensions were allowed, and anything that altered how the ball bounced, spun, flew, or felt was a non-starter.

Catapult solved that problem by removing the transmitter from the chip inside the ball. Now the chip weighs just over half an ounce, so the ball stays within the specified range of 17 to 18 ounces. The transmitter is in the small GPS units included with each player’s game-day equipment.

The in-ball module sits snugly inside a pouch with the ball’s interior bladder. Two beacons — one with a range of 16 to 47 inches and another with a range of 3 to 16 feet — pulse five times per second, sending data to the receiver. The receiver typically is strapped into a vest worn and sits comfortably between the player’s shoulders. The data recorder worn by the players can tell whether the player has the ball and can produce accurate measurements of possessions, speed, and distance.

The NAB Cup will mark the first time the ball-tracking tech has been used in an official game, but a few teams, including Gold Coast, North Melbourne and Adelaide, have tested the system during preseason practice. If all goes well, Catapult co-founder and COO Igor van de Griendt said he foresees the SmartBall being used at a future Super Bowl.

“We see the ball tracking as having enormous potential for Australian football and rugby this year, but have our sights on soccer and (American) football in the near future,” he said. “We’re all pretty excited about where the technology is headed.”

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Bosnian Roma family plays itself in stark film

BERLIN (Reuters) – When Bosnian director Danis Tanovic learned about a Roma family refused emergency medical care because they could not pay for it, he not only decided to turn their story into a film but managed to convince the couple to play themselves.

The result is “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker”, a simple, powerful tale of one man’s struggle to provide for his partner and two daughters and of a society where money is apparently more important than human life.

The fact that Nazif Mujic and his partner Senada Alimanovic are Roma adds an extra dimension of injustice and alienation, but Tanovic’s tale is more universal.

“This story happens all around Europe to Roma people,” the award-winning director told Reuters in Berlin, where his movie is in competition at the film festival.

“In my country it happens to other people too. It is probably the poorest country in Europe. So this is an unfortunate reality of many, many people who live there … It really made me angry so I just went there and did this film.”

Tanovic first read about the case of the couple and their two children in a local newspaper in 2011.

He went to visit them in their run-down home in the village of Poljice, and after several days they finally agreed to appear as themselves in a kind of docu-drama.

Mujic had no regular job, but helped strip down cars to make a few Bosnian marks from a scrap dealer. Alimanovic was pregnant with their third child when she fell ill and miscarried.

The family was told she must have emergency surgery, but when doctors discovered they had no insurance they were sent away despite Mujic’s desperate and humiliating pleas.

Told it would cost 980 marks (around 500 euros) to pay for an operation, Mujic knew he could never raise the money, and so went back to the hospital and to charities, begging for help.

“BETTER IN THE WAR”

In the end the only way to succeed was to break the law.

“I really tried and struggled to get some help for Senada from all the different state institutions, but none of them would help, so it is tough,” Mujic said in Berlin, speaking through a translator.

“My biggest ambition is to have a job and be able to support the family, but unfortunately I don’t have any illusions or hopes that I will be able to get work anyway.”

Tanovic, best known for his 2001 Academy Award-winning debut feature “No Man’s Land”, said Bosnians too often turned their backs on the poor, despite many cases he knew where people risked lives to help a stranger during the 1992-95 war.

“I wish I lived in a country that took better care of their people but it is not the case,” he said.

“So when you open Bosnian newspapers … every day you see people asking for help, people begging for money to help operate somebody or something. It is terrible.”

At one point in the unscripted film, which cost just 30,000 euros ($ 40,000) to make, Mujic tells a charity worker that life was better during the war, and Tanovic said that to some extent he agreed.

“A lot of people actually lived better in the war, because in war you don’t see rich people driving cars around, you don’t see politicians having fun … All you see is people trying to survive and you are surviving too, so you are happy when you have one meal.”

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Afraid to Speak Up to Medical Power

The slender, weather-beaten, elderly Polish immigrant had been diagnosed with lung cancer nearly a year earlier and was receiving chemotherapy as part of a clinical trial. I was a surgical consultant, called in to help control the fluid that kept accumulating in his lungs.

During one visit, he motioned for me to come closer. His voice was hoarse from a tumor that spread, and the constant hissing from his humidified oxygen mask meant I had to press my face nearly against his to understand his words.

“This is getting harder, doctor,” he rasped. “I’m not sure I’m up to anymore chemo.”

I was not the only doctor that he confided to. But what I quickly learned was that none of us was eager to broach the topic of stopping treatment with his primary cancer doctor.

That doctor was a rising superstar in the world of oncology, a brilliant physician-researcher who had helped discover treatments for other cancers and who had been recruited to lead our hospital’s then lackluster cancer center. Within a few months of the doctor’s arrival, the once sleepy department began offering a dazzling array of experimental drugs. Calls came in from outside doctors eager to send their patients in for treatment, and every patient who was seen was promptly enrolled in one of more than a dozen well-documented treatment protocols.

But now, no doctors felt comfortable suggesting anything but the most cutting-edge, aggressive treatments.

Even the No. 2 doctor in the cancer center, Robin to the chief’s cancer-battling Batman, was momentarily taken aback when I suggested we reconsider the patient’s chemotherapy plan. “I don’t want to tell him,” he said, eyes widening. He reeled off his chief’s vast accomplishments. “I mean, who am I to tell him what to do?”

We stood for a moment in silence before he pointed his index finger at me. “You tell him,” he said with a smile. “You tell him to consider stopping treatment.”

Memories of this conversation came flooding back last week when I read an essay on the problems posed by hierarchies within the medical profession.

For several decades, medical educators and sociologists have documented the existence of hierarchies and an intense awareness of rank among doctors. The bulk of studies have focused on medical education, a process often likened to military and religious training, with elder patriarchs imposing the hair shirt of shame on acolytes unable to incorporate a profession’s accepted values and behaviors. Aspiring doctors quickly learn whose opinions, experiences and voices count, and it is rarely their own. Ask a group of interns who’ve been on the wards for but a week, and they will quickly raise their hands up to the level of their heads to indicate their teachers’ status and importance, then lower them toward their feet to demonstrate their own.

It turns out that this keen awareness of ranking is not limited to students and interns. Other research has shown that fully trained physicians are acutely aware of a tacit professional hierarchy based on specialties, like primary care versus neurosurgery, or even on diseases different specialists might treat, like hemorrhoids and constipation versus heart attacks and certain cancers.

But while such professional preoccupation with privilege can make for interesting sociological fodder, the real issue, warns the author of a courageous essay published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, is that such an overly developed sense of hierarchy comes at an unacceptable price: good patient care.

Dr. Ranjana Srivastava, a medical oncologist at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, recalls a patient she helped to care for who died after an operation. Before the surgery, Dr. Srivastava had been hesitant to voice her concerns, assuming that the patient’s surgeon must be “unequivocally right, unassailable, or simply not worth antagonizing.” When she confesses her earlier uncertainty to the surgeon after the patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava learns that the surgeon had been just as loath to question her expertise and had assumed that her silence before the surgery meant she agreed with his plan to operate.

“Each of us was trying our best to help a patient, but we were also respecting the boundaries and hierarchy imposed by our professional culture,” Dr. Srivastava said. “The tragedy was that the patient died, when speaking up would have made all the difference.”

Compounding the problem is an increasing sense of self-doubt among many doctors. With rapid advances in treatment, there is often no single correct “answer” for a patient’s problem, and doctors, struggling to stay up-to-date in their own particular specialty niches, are more tentative about making suggestions that cross over to other doctors’ “turf.” Even as some clinicians attempt to compensate by organizing multidisciplinary meetings, inviting doctors from all specialties to discuss a patient’s therapeutic options, “there will inevitably be a hierarchy at those meetings of who is speaking,” Dr. Srivastava noted. “And it won’t always be the ones who know the most about the patient who will be taking the lead.”

It is the potentially disastrous repercussions for patients that make this overly developed awareness of rank and boundaries a critical issue in medicine. Recent efforts to raise safety standards and improve patient care have shown that teams are a critical ingredient for success. But simply organizing multidisciplinary lineups of clinicians isn’t enough. What is required are teams that recognize the importance of all voices and encourage active and open debate.

Since their patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava and the surgeon have worked together to discuss patient cases, articulate questions and describe their own uncertainties to each other and in patients’ notes. “We have tried to remain cognizant of the fact that we are susceptible to thinking about hierarchy,” Dr. Srivastava said. “We have tried to remember that sometimes, despite our best intentions, we do not speak up for our patients because we are fearful of the consequences.”

That was certainly true for my lung cancer patient. Like all the other doctors involved in his care, I hesitated to talk to the chief medical oncologist. I questioned my own credentials, my lack of expertise in this particular area of oncology and even my own clinical judgment. When the patient appeared to fare better, requiring less oxygen and joking and laughing more than I had ever seen in the past, I took his improvement to be yet another sign that my attempt to talk about holding back chemotherapy was surely some surgical folly.

But a couple of days later, the humidified oxygen mask came back on. And not long after that, the patient again asked for me to come close.

This time he said: “I’m tired. I want to stop the chemo.”

Just before he died, a little over a week later, he was off all treatment except for what might make him comfortable. He thanked me and the other doctors for our care, but really, we should have thanked him and apologized. Because he had pushed us out of our comfortable, well-delineated professional zones. He had prodded us to talk to one another. And he showed us how to work as a team in order to do, at last, what we should have done weeks earlier.

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DealBook: Anheuser-Busch InBev Revises Grupo Modelo Deal

11:38 a.m. | Updated

LONDON – Anheuser-Busch InBev moved on Thursday to rescue its $20.1 billion proposed takeover of Grupo Modelo of Mexico, the maker of Corona beer, by making concessions aimed at persuading American antitrust authorities to let the deal proceed.

Under the revised terms, Anheuser-Busch InBev offered to sell the rights to Corona and other Grupo Modelo brands in the United States to Constellation Brands, the world’s largest wine company, for $2.9 billion.

The agreement also would include the sale of a brewery close to the United States-Mexico border currently owned by Grupo Modelo, as well as the perpetual licensing rights to Grupo Modelo’s brands in the United States. If the revised deal goes through, Anheuser-Busch InBev will gain greater access to emerging markets like Mexico.

Anheuser-Busch InBev’s decision to sell Compañía Cervecera de Coahuila, the Mexican brewery that produces Corona, Corona Light and Modelo Especial, is an effort to satisfy regulators after the Justice Department sued last month to block the deal.

United States authorities had said the original merger proposal would increase Anheuser-Busch InBev’s control of the American beer market, enabling it to raise prices while reducing choice for local consumers.

Grupo Modelo is currently the third-largest beer company in the United States. Anheuser-Busch InBev is the largest, ahead of MillerCoors.

Analysts say that Anheuser-Busch InBev hopes the moves will address the antitrust issues raised by American authorities.

“We decided to restructure the transaction to address the concerns from the Justice Department,” Anheuser-Busch InBev’s chief executive, Carlos Brito, said in an interview with DealBook. “We are focused on getting this to the finish line.”

Mr. Brito declined to comment on the continuing negotiations with the Justice Department.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s efforts to reduce its operations in the United States, though she added that authorities would give any proposal serious consideration. “At the same time, we would continue to prepare for litigation,” she added.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, which is the world’s largest brewing company, was itself created in 2008 through the $52 billion merger of Anheuser-Busch and the Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev. The proposed $20.1 billion deal for Grupo Modelo would rank as the second-largest takeover in the beer industry after that merger, according to figures from the data provider Thomson Reuters.

In the last five years, Anheuser-Busch InBev also has announced more than 15 additional takeovers, according to the data provider Capital IQ. In a series of multibillion-dollar deals in the beer and liquor sector, a small number of companies like SABMiller and Diageo have gained control over many of top brands.

The move by the Justice Department to block the proposed takeover of Grupo Modelo is the first time in more than a decade that American regulators have tried to slow consolidation in the global beer industry.

The government’s lawsuit, announced last month, quoted internal company documents from Anheuser-Busch InBev to demonstrate that the company’s prices had been undercut by Grupo Modelo. Authorities contend that the proposed deal for Grupo Modelo would eliminate competition from the domestic beer market.

“This is the sort of product that matters to consumers,” William J. Baer, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, told reporters on Jan. 31. “If you have a very slight price increase that happens because of this deal, it could mean that consumers will pay billions of dollars more.”

The concessions also maintain Anheuser-Busch InBev’s focus on gaining access to the fast-growing Mexican market, which could help offset a slowdown in more mature markets like the United States and Western Europe.

“The quick settlement is no doubt surprising, but also shows practicality from the Anheuser-Busch InBev side,” Pablo Zuanic, an analyst at Liberum Capital, wrote in a note to investors on Thursday.

Anheuser-Busch InBev also said it had increased its projected annual cost savings from the Grupo Modelo deal by 66 percent, to $1 billion, from estimates provided when the deal was first announced last year. The terms of the original deal for Grupo Modelo remain unchanged, according to a company statement.

The brewing giant’s shares rose more than 6 percent in afternoon trading in Brussels on Thursday, while Constellation Brands’ stock price jumped almost 36 percent in trading in New York on Thursday morning.

For Constellation Brands, the agreement will give it greater access to the American beer market.

As part of the original terms of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s proposed takeover of Grupo Modelo, Constellation had agreed to pay $1.85 billion for the 50 percent stake that it did not already own in Crown Imports, a joint venture with the Mexican brewer.

Constellation would now gain control of the Corona brand across the United States, and plans to invest $400 million in the brewery that is being sold by Grupo Modelo to expand its business in the United States.

“This is a transformational acquisition,” Constellation’s chief executive, Robert S. Sands, said in a statement.

Lazard is advising Anheuser-Busch InBev on the deal, while Morgan Stanley is advising Grupo Modelo.

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Dorner manhunt: Investigators work to ID charred human remains

After what LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called "a bittersweet night," investigators Wednesday were in the process of identifying the human remains found in the charred cabin where fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner was believed to have been holed up after trading gunfire with officers, authorities said.

If the body is identified as Dorner’s, the standoff would end a weeklong manhunt for the ex-LAPD officer and Navy Reserve lieutenant suspected in a string of shootings following his firing by the Los Angeles Police Department several years ago. Four people have died in the case, allegedly at Dorner’s hands.

Beck said he would not consider the manhunt over until the body was identified as Dorner. Police remained on tactical alert and were conducting themselves as if nothing had changed in the case, officials said.

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

The latest burst of gunfire came Tuesday after the suspect, attempting to flee law enforcement officials, fatally shot a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy and seriously injured another, officials said. He then barricaded himself in a wooden cabin outside Big Bear, not far from ski resorts in the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, according to police.

"This could have ended much better, it could have ended worse," said Beck as he drove to the hospital where the injured deputy was located. "I feel for the family of the deputy who lost his life."

The injured deputy is expected to survive but it is anticipated he will need several surgeries. The names of the two deputies have not been released.

TIMELINE: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

Just before 5 p.m., authorities smashed the cabin's windows, pumped in tear gas and called for the suspect to surrender, officials said. They got no response. Then, using a demolition vehicle, they tore down the cabin's walls one by one. When they reached the last wall, they heard a gunshot. Then the cabin burst into flames, officials said.

Last week, authorities said they had tracked Dorner to a wooded area near Big Bear Lake. They found his torched gray Nissan Titan with several weapons inside, the said, and the only trace of Dorner was a short trail of footprints in newly fallen snow.

According to a manifesto that officials say Dorner posted on Facebook, he felt the LAPD unjustly fired him several years ago, when a disciplinary panel determined that he lied in accusing his training officer of kicking a mentally ill man during an arrest. Beck has promised to review the case.

DOCUMENT: Read the manifesto

The manifesto vows "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against law enforcement officers and their families. "Self-preservation is no longer important to me. I do not fear death as I died long ago," it said.

On Tuesday morning, two maids entered a cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive and ran into a man who they said resembled the fugitive, a law enforcement official said. The cabin was not far from where Dorner's singed truck had been found and where police had been holding news conferences about the manhunt.

The man tied up the maids, and he took off in a purple Nissan parked near the cabin, the official said. About 12:20 p.m., one of the maids broke free and called police.

FULL COVERAGE: Sweeping manhunt for ex-cop

Nearly half an hour later, officers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted the stolen vehicle and called for backup, authorities said. The suspect turned down a side road in an attempt to elude the officers but crashed the vehicle, police said.

A short time later, authorities said, the suspect carjacked a light-colored pickup truck. Allan Laframboise said the truck belonged to his friend Rick Heltebrake, who works at a nearby Boy Scout camp.

Heltebrake was driving on Glass Road with his Dalmatian, Suni, when a hulking African American man stepped into the road, Laframboise said. Heltebrake stopped. The man told him to get out of the truck.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Searching for suspected shooter

"Can I take my dog?" Heltebrake asked, according to his friend.

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Bowlus Travel Trailer Is So Retro-Cool It Hurts

Think there’s nothing better than a vintage Airstream, those old-school Twinkie-shaped campers that define Americana? Think again. The Bowlus Road Chief is even cooler, and it’s coming back.

The original Road Chief dates to the 1930s and was created by Hawley Bowlus, the aviation designer who brought us the Spirit of St. Louis. They’re also crazy expensive because they’re incredibly rare. Just 80 were built before World War II, when the company stopped production. John Long and Helena Mitchell, a husband-and-wife team of Canadian tech entrepreneurs, bought the rights and patents and are launching an update of the 1935 Vintage Bowlus Travel Trailer. They’ve made the first and have been driving around the United States. Four more are under construction, and they’re taking orders.

It’s got a vintage vibe, but the inside is thoroughly modern, with features like Wi-Fi and solar panels. There’s a full bathroom, a kitchen with two-burner stove, twin beds that can convert into a king, latch points to carry kayaks and paddle boards, polycarbonate seating fabric, and an awning. As for the lavatory, the toilet empties into a sealed container that can be emptied into a regular toilet — regular trailers use hoses that dump into special RV stations. Seals and filters keep the stink contained. The whole interior, down to the bedsheets, is fully customizable.

The whole thing stands almost eight feet tall, is 23.5 feel long, and weighs in at under 2,000 pounds. It’ll retail for around $100,000, but the price tag includes having your trailer’s name etched in the wheel skirts.

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Phys Ed: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

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Deal Professor: Unusual Moves in Confronting Apple's Huge Pile of Cash

The fight over Apple’s $140 billion cash pile is proving the adage that money can make people do strange things.

And it is not just Apple that is doing things it would not have done before. The hedge fund manager David Einhorn, famous for shorting stocks like Lehman Brothers, has gone long on Apple, betting heavily that Apple’s stock is undervalued — and blaming that eye-popping mountain of money.

While most of us would think that having tens of billions would be wonderful, it’s actually a problem for Apple. The money just sits there, not earning much in an environment of extremely low interest rates. And the problem is only getting worse. Apple is accumulating money at an enormous rate — more than $23 billion in the last quarter alone.

It was a more manageable issue when Apple was a rapidly growing stock, but since September Apple’s share price has fallen to roughly $470, from over $700.

According to Mr. Einhorn, roughly $145 of that share price represents Apple’s cash mountain. This means that the market is assigning a low multiple, about seven times earnings, to the rest of Apple’s business.

Multiples for Google are almost three times as much. Apple’s multiple is even less than Microsoft’s — a company whose revenue largely comes from PC operating software, which some people worry is a melting iceberg.

When it came to the buildup of cash, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive, simply ignored a problem he had helped create. Mindful of Apple’s past financial difficulties before his return in 1997, he wanted a fortress of cash to protect the company. So he drew a line in the sand, saying no to dividends. After his death, Apple caved a little, announcing a dividend and share repurchase program worth $45 billion.

It’s still not enough for shareholders who want to increase Apple’s multiple and stock price. The fundamental idea is that shareholders could put this money to better use than Apple can, and that its stock would trade higher without the cash.

The problem is that even if Apple wanted to return all its cash to shareholders, it can’t. Much of the cash is held abroad in foreign subsidiaries. If the company repatriates it to return to shareholders, it would have to pay taxes on it. Instead, the company is letting the cash sit there in the apparent expectation that there will be federal tax relief.

It’s here that Mr. Einhorn enters the picture. He has been buying Apple shares for a few years, and his fund owns more than 1.3 million shares. The hedge fund magnate wants Apple’s stock to earn a higher multiple by dealing with the cash problem.

But Mr. Einhorn is also impatient and unwilling to wait for federal tax relief. Instead, he has a clever idea. At an investment conference last May, Mr. Einhorn proposed that Apple issue $500 billion of perpetual preferred stock free to all shareholders. The preferred stock would yield 4 percent and be freely tradable.

So, how will this increase the value of the company? It’s financial wizardry. If Apple issued debt, the market would be expected to subtract this value from Apple’s worth. But the preferred stock would not be treated as debt, for accounting purposes at least.

The only change would be that Apple’s income would be reduced by the amount of the interest paid on $500 billion, or $20 billion a year. If Apple stays at the same multiple, it would give the company a net worth of $300 billion or so. But now the $500 billion in preferred stock would be added, making the company worth $800 billion.

How can one plus one equal four? It depends on whether the market thinks that the $500 billion is not debt and never has to be repaid. If so, then this amount will not be deducted from Apple’s worth. It’s something that may work in theory in our sometimes puzzling financial markets, but no company has ever tried it.

Some experts are skeptical. Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, has called the plan financial alchemy and written that it would “not add value to the company, not one cent.” When asked to comment, Mr. Einhorn said, “Professor Damodaran’s analysis brings to memory the old joke about the economist who refused to pick up a $100 bill on the street because in an efficient economy, there can’t be $100 bills lying around.”

Apple’s response to Mr. Einhorn has been equally clever. One would think that the maker of the iPad would just sit above the fray and do what it has traditionally done — ignore its shareholders. But with a declining stock price, that may no longer be a luxury Apple can afford. So, it has engaged with Mr. Einhorn to discuss his proposal. And the notoriously shareholder-unfriendly company has turned strangely in favor of good corporate governance.

In its latest proxy statement, Apple proposes to amend its charter to allow for election of directors only by a majority of shareholders. It also proposes to eliminate a provision called “blank check preferred,” which allows a company to issue preferred shares in unlimited number and type. Almost every company has this provision, but shareholder activists hate it because it can be used as a takeover defense, allowing a company to issue preferred stocks with significant voting rights to a friendly party.

While the proposal to eliminate the preferred shares appears worthy and has been endorsed by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the giant pension fund, this proposal is really about Mr. Einhorn.

The amendment has the convenient effect of eliminating the board’s ability to adopt the hedge fund magnate’s plan. Apple says that it just wants to be a good corporate citizen and shareholders can still vote to adopt Mr. Einhorn’s plan. But let’s face it, Apple would be one of the few companies in the United States to ever abolish its blank check preferred provision.

Apple has not been a paragon of corporate governance. That may not be surprising, given that its board has directors like Millard S. Drexler of J. Crew, who surreptitiously took his company private. And Apple has received negative marks in recent years from proxy advisory firms like Institutional Shareholder Services for giving its chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, almost $400 million in stock options in one year.

It’s an odd state of events.

By all accounts, it would appear to be a topsy-turvy world. Apple has turned defensive, while Mr. Einhorn is picking a public fight with a company he is betting on, instead of betting against.

Perhaps this column should have instead started with an adage from the movie “Wall Street” that money “makes you do things you don’t want to do.”

Yet Apple is not doing itself any favors by trying to do an end run around Mr. Einhorn.

He has sued Apple, claiming that the company’s proposal violates the securities laws, but the dispute is “a silly sideshow,” as Mr. Cook put it on Tuesday. Even if Mr. Einhorn wins, it would only force Apple to have a separate vote on the preferred share issue, something it is likely to win.

Even so, it might be better if Apple simply addressed Mr. Einhorn’s proposal head-on. After all, his proposal is clever, but untested. It may work, but it may not. Why should the world’s most valuable company be run as an experiment in finance?

Still, the world is changing. Apple may be a highflier, but its growth prospects are not as exciting as they seemed to be a year ago. Its stock may simply be deflating from an overheated place.

And that’s the oddest thing of all. Despite Apple’s growing cash pile, the company’s value is shrinking. But instead of focusing on making Apple an even better business, shareholders are trying to rescue their bubblelike bets with financial gimmickry, and Apple is engaging in its own gimmicks to defeat them. Even Apple can be consumed by the strange world of Wall Street.

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A version of this article appeared in print on 02/13/2013, on page B7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Unusual Moves in Confronting Apple’s Mountain of Cash.

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Ex-Bell officials defend themselves as honorable public servants

Less than three years ago, they were handcuffed and taken away in a case alleged to be so extensive that the district attorney called it "corruption on steroids."

But on Monday, two of the six former Bell council members accused of misappropriating money from the small, mostly immigrant town took to the witness stand and defended themselves as honorable public servants who earned their near-$100,000 salaries by working long hours behind the scenes.

During her three days on the stand, Teresa Jacobo said she responded to constituents who called her cell and home phone at all hours. She put in time at the city's food bank, organized breast cancer awareness marches, sometimes paid for hotel rooms for the homeless and was a staunch advocate for education.

"I was working very hard to improve the lives of the citizens of Bell," she said. "I was bringing in programs and working with them to build leadership and good families, strong families."

Jacobo, 60, said she didn't question the appropriateness of her salary, which made her one of the highest-paid part-time council members in the state.

Former Councilman George Mirabal said he too worked a long, irregular schedule when it came to city affairs.

"I keep hearing time frames over and over again, but there's no clock when you're working on the council," he said Monday. "You're working on the circumstances that are facing you. If a family calls … you don't say, '4 o'clock, work's over.' "

Mirabal, 65, said he often reached out to low-income residents who didn't make it to council meetings, attended workshops to learn how to improve civic affairs and once even made a trip to a San Diego high school to research opening a similar tech charter school in Bell.

"Do you believe you gave everything you could to the citizens of Bell?" asked his attorney, Alex Kessel.

"I'd give more," Mirabal replied.

Both Mirabal and Jacobo testified that not only did they perceive their salaries to be reasonable, but they believed them to be lawful because they were drawn up by the city manager and voted on in open session with the city attorney present.

Mirabal, who once served as Bell's city clerk, even went so far as to say that he was still a firm supporter of the city charter that passed in 2005, viewing it as Bell's "constitution." In a taped interview with authorities, one of Mirabal's council colleagues — Victor Bello — said the city manager told him the charter cleared the way for higher council salaries.

Prosecutors have depicted the defendants as salary gluttons who put their city on a path toward bankruptcy. Mirabal and Jacobo, along with Bello, Luis Artiga, George Cole and Oscar Hernandez, are accused of drawing those paychecks from boards that seldom met and did little work. All face potential prison terms if convicted.

Prosecutors have cited the city's Solid Waste and Recycling Authority as a phantom committee, created only as a device for increasing the council's pay. But defense attorneys said the authority had a very real function, even in a city that contracted with an outside trash company.

Jacobo testified that she understood the introduction of that authority to be merely a legal process and that its purpose was to discuss how Bell might start its own city-run trash service.

A former contract manager for Consolidated Disposal Service testified that Bell officials had been unhappy with the response time to bulky item pickups, terminating their contract about 2005, but that it took about six years to finalize because of an agreement that automatically renewed every year.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller questioned Mirabal about the day shortly after his 2010 arrest that he voluntarily told prosecutors that no work was done on authorities outside of meetings.

Mirabal said that if he had made such a statement, it was incorrect. He said he couldn't remember what was said back then and "might have heed and hawed."

"So it's easy to remember now?" Miller asked.

"Yes, actually."

"More than two years after charges have been filed, it's easier for you to remember now that you did work outside of the meetings for the Public Finance Authority?"

"Yes, sir."

Miller later asked Mirabal to explain a paragraph included on City Council agendas that began with the phrase, "City Council members are like you."

After some clarification of the question, Mirabal answered: "That everybody is equal and that if they look into themselves, they would see us."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

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Haters Don't Hate Amazon (Facebook On the Other Hand ...)

Check the comments section on any tech blog: People love to hate Apple. They love to hate Microsoft. And Facebook. Each of these companies has spawned a parallel online hater community.

But Amazon? Not so much.

The Amazon haters are no doubt out there. But I contend that the intensity of that hatred just isn’t as high.

Backing me up on that is a new survey from Harris Interactive (HPOL) that found the general public respects Amazon more than any other U.S. corporation.

The marketing firm polled 19,000 U.S. residents in deep detail to find out how they felt about the country’s 60 “most visible” companies. For the first time in the “reputation quotient” poll’s 14-year history, Amazon came out on top.

Rounding out the top five were Apple, Disney, Google and Johnson & Johnson. (Apple’s number-two ranking shows great hate does not exclude great love.)

The poll — independently funded by Harris — broke down reputation into six main categories. Amazon trounced the competition in the category of “emotional appeal,” beating second-place Disney by five points on a 100-point scale – which seems bizarre considering the only contact most of us ever have with Amazon is via a cardboard box.

“Amazon is predominantly a virtual company where you don’t get to see the people. You don’t see brick and mortar,” says Robert Fronk, executive vice-president of reputation management at Harris. “For them to first of all have the highest reputation, but more importantly to be the company with far and away the highest emotional appeal, is amazing.” Harris defines emotional appeal as trust, admiration and respect, not whether you get weepy when your package arrives.

Amazon also topped the products and services category, which Fronk attributed not so much to Amazon-branded products like the Kindle, but the millions of other products it brings together and sells. Even Amazon’s customer service, which is sometimes criticized for being opaque and inaccessible, gets very high marks in the Harris survey from customers and non-customers alike.

Amazon is also helped in the overall survey results by what Fronk describes as the tech industry bump: Americans simply admire the tech industry more than any other. (In what other industry, he says, can a company take a swing at a product and miss and still get credit for taking a chance?) Industries at the bottom of the reputation rankings were tobacco in dead last, followed by government and banking.

Still, tech companies did not escape entirely unscathed. Despite its high rank, Fronk says Apple’s positive reputation is anchored in the survey by positive perceptions of its financial performance — the aspect of its business over which it has the least control. As the company’s plunging stock over the last several months shows, the investing public has no problem tarnishing the reputations of tech companies that don’t live up to expectations

“You don’t want to have the conversations about you moving from innovation and the joy you bring, to always being about the share price,” Fronk says.

Of the most talked-about tech companies, Facebook by far received the least love. While Amazon, Apple and Google all ranked in the top five with total scores above eighty out of 100, and Microsoft ranked 15th with a “good” score above 75, Facebook came in 42nd – sandwiched between Best Buy and T-Mobile – with a score of just over 65, or what Fronk described as the borderline between “average” and “poor.”

“Facebook suffers badly from lack of trust,” Fronk said.

Amazon arguably collects as much personal data about its customers as Facebook does about its users, or at least if not as much, then possibly more intimate: purchase history, product search history, home address, credit card numbers. The Harris survey didn’t ask specifically about individual companies’ use of personal data. Yet it’s hard not to infer that privacy concerns were on the minds of survey participants when answering questions about trust.

Forty-six percent of all respondents said they “definitely would trust” Amazon “to do the right thing.” Only 8 percent said the same about Facebook. Add in “probably would trust” and Amazon’s total shoots to 91 percent, while Facebook’s reaches 49 percent.

Whatever Amazon is doing, or not doing, to earn itself so many points, Facebook apparently needs to take some notes, at least according to this poll’s results. By Harris’ tally, Amazon is the first company in the survey’s history to score negligible negative results across every category. If the results are to be believed, no one really hates Amazon. Says Fronk: “There’s not a detractor base whatsoever.”

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CNN slots Jake Tapper Show, cuts length of Wolf Blitzer’s “Situation Room”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – CNN slotted new anchor Jake Tapper‘s upcoming show for 4 p.m. on weekdays, cutting Wolf Blitzer‘s “The Situation Room” back one hour, a CNN spokeswoman told TheWrap.

Tapper, lured away from ABC News in December, was CNN boss Jeff Zucker‘s first major hire since taking charge of the network. Now, with his own show coming in March, Blitzer’s program will but cut from three hours to two as it moves to the 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. time slot.

A CNN spokeswoman told TheWrap Tapper‘s show has no specific starting date yet because it is still in development.

Last month, Turner Broadcasting posted LinkedIn job openings for a senior producer at a new daily program called “Tapper.”

And on Monday, CNN named Federico Quadrani, MSNBC’s executive producer of “Jansing and Company,” as the show’s new executive producer.

Choosing Quadrani – who served as an Emmy-winning producer for NBC’s “Today” show from 2003 to 2009 – is one of Zucker’s higher profile hires as the former “Today” producer attempts to replicate his morning show success at CNN.

After taking charge of the show in 1992, Zucker led “Today” to its ratings highs before Katie Couric‘s departure for CBS. The subsequent exit of Meredith Vieira, who replaced Couric, made it vulnerable to rival “Good Morning America.”

Late last month, CNN announced that it had bought “20/20″ anchor and former “GMA” host Chris Cuomo to lead a new morning show with Erin Burnett.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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DealBook: Ryanair Indicates Regulators Will Reject Aer Lingus Deal

Ryanair, the discount European airline, is preparing for a fight with regulators over its deal to buy Aer Lingus.

On Tuesday, Ryanair said the European Commission “intends to prohibit” its offer for Aer Lingus, despite the airline’s attempts to appease antitrust concerns. Ryanair added that it planned to appeal the decision.

“It appears clear from this morning’s meeting, that no matter what remedies Ryanair offered, we were not going to get a fair hearing and we’re going to be prohibited regardless of competition rules,” Robin Kiely, head of communications for the airline, said in a statement.

The deal has been troubled from the start.

Ryanair moved to buy Aer Lingus last summer, offering 694 million euros ($931 million) in its third attempt to buy the Irish carrier. Management trumpeted the opportunities, saying the deal would create “one strong Irish airline group capable of competing with Europe’s other major airline groups.”

But the board of Aer Lingus immediately rejected the hostile takeover bid, saying it undervalued the airline and would raise antitrust concerns. Ryanair’s first bid to buy Aer Lingus in 2007 was blocked for antitrust reasons.

Since then, Ryanair has sought to assuage concerns about competition, lining up buyers for various operations and routes.

Even so, regulators notified Ryanair on Tuesday that they would block the deal. Ryanair now says it has instructed its lawyers to “appeal any prohibition decision” to the courts.

“This decision is clearly a political one to meet the narrow, vested interests of the Irish government and is not based on competition law,” Ryanair said in a statement.

Aer Lingus supported the regulatory decision, saying it was “a much stronger airline today than it was at the time of the previous Ryanair offers” and that it was the only rival to Ryanair on a large number of routes.

“The reasons for prohibition are therefore even stronger in this instance than with the previous offers,” Aer Lingus said in a statement. “Therefore, it was and remains Aer Lingus’ position that the offer should never have been made.”

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Grammys 2013: Fun., Mumford, Gotye lead a newer generation

Grammy Awards voters gave their top honor to British roots music band Mumford & Sons for their album "Babel" on Sunday at the 55th awards ceremony. Other top honors were distributed to a broad array of younger acts, including indie trio Fun., electronic pop artist Gotye, rapper-R&B singer Frank Ocean and rock group the Black Keys.

"We figured we weren't going to win because the Black Keys have been sweeping up all day — and deservedly so," Mumford & Sons front man Marcus Mumford said after he and his band members strode to the stage at Staples Center in Los Angeles to collect the award from last year's winner, R&B-soul singer Adele.

Pop culture historians may look back at 2013, however, as the year the Grammy Awards gave up its long fight against new forms of music dissemination, embracing songs and videos that consumers soaked up by way of YouTube and other Internet outlets as opposed to purchasing them.

PHOTOS: 2013 Grammy Award winners

"Somebody That I Used to Know," the wildly popular collaboration between Gotye and New Zealand pop singer Kimbra, took the top award presented for a single recording upon being named record of the year, which recognizes performance and record production.

"Somebody…" not only was one of the biggest-selling singles of 2012 but also has notched nearly 400 million views on YouTube, powerfully demonstrating the increasingly vital role of the "broadcast yourself" video Internet phenomenon. Different YouTube posts of Ocean's "Thinking About You" single have totaled nearly 60 million views.

New York indie rock trio Fun. was named best new artist, an acknowledgment of the good-time music the group brought to listeners and viewers last summer largely through its runaway hit single "We Are Young," which has racked up nearly 200 million YouTube views. It also was named song of the year, bringing awards for the group's songwriters, Jack Antonoff, Andrew Dost and Nate Ruess, and collaborator Jeff Bhasker.

GRAMMYS 2013: Full coverage | Pre-show winners | Winners | Ballot

"Everyone can see our faces, and we are not very young — we've been doing this for 12 years," Ruess said as they collected the award.

The song's title could also serve as a theme for the evening, which was dominated by other relatively young acts in the most prestigious Grammy categories.

Singer, rapper and songwriter Ocean emerged the victor in the one category that pitted him directly against real-life rival Chris Brown, as his critically acclaimed solo debut album, "Channel Orange," won the urban contemporary album award. A few minutes later Ocean got a second Grammy with Kanye West, Jay-Z and the Dream in the rap-sung collaboration category for their single "No Church in the Wild."

GRAMMYS 2013: Winners list | Best & Worst |  Red carpet | Timeline | Fashion | Highlights

Ocean's tuxedo covered all but his hands, but it appeared as he picked up the urban album award that his left arm remained in a wrist brace he'd exhibited Thursday at rehearsals for this year's broadcast, a remnant of his scuffle last month with Brown over a parking space at a recording studio. Los Angeles Police Department investigators said Ocean informed them that he would not press charges against Brown.

It was the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach who quickly built up steam as the front-runner to dominate this year's awards, taking several statuettes barely an hour into the show, including producer of the year for himself and three with his group including rock performance, rock song and rock album for "El Camino."

The Black Keys homed in on the fundamentals of rock 'n' roll — big guitar riffs, lustful lyrics and a bevy of musical hooks on "El Camino," one of the best reviewed albums of the group's career.

FULL COVERAGE: Grammy Awards 2013

Auerbach picked up another award as producer of the blues album winner, Dr. John's "Locked Down."

Carrie Underwood grabbed the country solo performance Grammy for the title track from her album "Blown Away," which also won the country song award for writers Josh Kear and Chris Tompkins earlier during the pre-telecast ceremony at Nokia Theatre, across the street from Staples Center.

The Zac Brown Band added to its growing place as a new-generation country powerhouse with a win of the country album trophy for its "Uncaged," built on muscular Southern rock guitar riffs, elaborate multipart vocal harmonies and jam-band instrumental excursions.

Last year's big winner, Adele, collected the first statuette of the night for her single "Set Fire to the Rain" in the pop solo performance category.

The show got off to an eye-popping start with a Cirque du Soleil-inspired performance by Taylor Swift of her nominated single "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together."

The preponderance of youthful acts not broadly known to mainstream TV audiences heightened the use of cross-generational pairings. Rising songwriter and singer Ed Sheeran shared the stage early with veteran Grammy darling Elton John, while Bruno Mars teamed with Sting and Rihanna in a Bob Marley tribute later in the show. Several members of Americana acts, including Alabama Shakes and Mumford & Sons, sang alongside veterans John, Mavis Staples and T Bone Burnett in a salute to drummer Levon Helm of the Band.

But it was the young guns to whom the evening — and perhaps the future — of the Grammy Awards belonged.

The Grammys are determined by about 13,000 voting members of the Recording Academy. The eligibility period for nominated recordings was Oct. 1, 2011, to Sept. 30, 2012. The show aired on CBS live except on the West Coast, which gets a tape delay.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Twitter: @RandyLewis2

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