Selena Gomez works the front row at Neo show

NEW YORK (AP) — Selena Gomez sat front and center at the fashion show to preview the first collection in her collaboration with Adidas' streetwear Neo label.

But the runway at Wednesday evening's show was a next-gen catwalk: Teenager bloggers were charged with styling the outfits instead of industry professionals.

Gomez thanked them as she stood on stage at the end of the show. She was flanked by models in denim shorts, Bermudas, slouchy sweats and T-shirts that read "Pirate Love." There were a few graffiti prints sprinkled in, and some varsity jackets.

The clothes, mostly in sunny yellow, bright pink and navy, were more surf than sport, which is Adidas' normal niche.

The show was very briefly interrupted by a protester trying to hand out leaflets about sweatshops.

Read More..

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

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

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

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

The Presenting Problem:

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

The Patient’s Story:

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

A Sister’s Visit:

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

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

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

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

A Long Series of Illnesses:

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the Hospital:

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

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

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

Back to the Hospital, Again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solving the Mystery:

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

---

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

Read More..

Pitfalls seen in growth of part-time work

Although the state's unemployment rate is at its lowest level in almost four years and the number of employed Californians is growing, labor experts see a different reality: Full-time work has faded in many industries.

Nubia Calderón Barillas, 32, left a job in retail in May for a housekeeping job at the Holiday Inn LAX that promised better pay and steady work.

But nearly nine months later, the mother of three said, she rarely works more than two days a week. She has asked for more hours, she said, but to no avail, even in an industry that set a new peak employment level last year.

"It's been difficult lately," she said. "I practically didn't work all of December except for the holidays."

California employers picked up the rate of hiring during 2012 — at times at nearly twice the rate of the country as a whole. But a significant portion of those jobs are less than full time, according to federal data released last week.

The number of people involuntarily working part time nationwide has grown to 7.9 million, an 80% increase from 2006, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.

That trend is particularly pronounced in the Golden State, which saw the number of involuntary part-time workers swell to 1.3 million, up 126% from 585,100 in 2006. Only four other states, Nevada and Florida among them, had higher rates of involuntary part-time workers.

Various industries are increasingly relying on part-time workers and other contingent employees, such as temporary workers, to save money, said Michael Bernick, a Milken Institute fellow who studies labor markets.

"As you have more and more costs associated with full-time workers in terms of healthcare or other costs, employers look for alternative ways to reduce costs," Bernick said. "One way is on-demand and part-time work."

The increase isn't limited to industries that typically employ part-time workers, such as leisure and hospitality. Other sectors with strong job growth, such as professional and business services, have also seen a rise in part-time workers as employers aim to keep payroll costs down, Bernick said.

Nationwide, the number of involuntary part-time workers in professional and business services, which includes white-collar occupations such as accountants and lawyers, nearly doubled to 711,000 last year from 367,000 in 2007. A sector-by-sector breakdown is unavailable for California because the sample size of the household survey that the federal data rely on is too small.

Part-time work is common in California's leisure and hospitality sector, which added almost 61,000 jobs since December 2011, accounting for more than a quarter of the state's net jobs created in that time period.

Growth of low-wage industries such as hospitality provides work opportunities for people with limited education, even if the work is only part time, said Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast.

"We shouldn't look with dismay" on the rapid growth of a sector that is so dependent on part-time work, he said. "If that were the only sector we were growing, then that would be worrisome."

Tom Walsh, president of Unite Here Local 11, a union representing hospitality workers in Los Angeles and Orange counties, said in negotiations with employers, his group has pushed for workers' hours to be maximized.

Although full-time work sometimes isn't ensured, Walsh said, employers are urged to give part-time workers as many hours as possible.

"I think it's an example of certain employers being penny wise but pound foolish," he said. "They figure they can save money by having more part-time workers and having low pay. If they don't change that, folks are going to take jobs somewhere else the first chance they get."

The long-term implication of part-time work, economists said, is growing wage disparities and the risk of dampening consumer spending, a major driver of the economy. Part-time workers also are more likely to rely on state aid, such as food stamps, to make ends meet.

Kellie Flowers moved to Los Angeles late last year hoping to find work as an event coordinator or wardrobe stylist.

But full-time work has been elusive, even with a college degree.

The 30-year-old Virginia native managed to land two part-time jobs when she first relocated, one at a Manhattan Beach boutique and the other at a running store.

She earned $10 per hour at both jobs but didn't have benefits or health insurance.

"It was very hard working two jobs," she said. "You definitely don't have any spending money."

Flowers recently started a new job, selling spa packages, on commission. She sells between six to 10 a day, earning $15 for each.

"I'm going to look for other jobs that make me happier. Until then I just need to make money," she said.

Meanwhile, Barillas, the Holiday Inn housekeeper, said she hopes she'll eventually work more hours.

She and her husband are falling behind on utility bills at the one-bedroom Koreatown apartment they share with their three children. She recently applied for food stamps, a decision she said was embarrassing.

"I've always had work," she said. "I used to think people on food stamps just didn't want to work, but now I find myself with the need to ask for help."

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

Read More..

Child porn suspect indicted by federal grand jury

A North Hills woman whom authorities allege plied a young girl with crack cocaine and photographed her being sexually abused by an older man was indicted Tuesday on federal charges of producing child pornography and sex trafficking.

Letha Montemayor Tucker was named Tuesday in a four-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury. If convicted of all the charges, Tucker would face a mandatory minimum federal sentence of 10 years and could get up to life in prison, authorities said.

The charges come a month after authorities sought the public's help in the investigation by releasing photographs of a man and woman depicted in a set of widely circulated child pornography photos.

Tips started pouring in immediately after the photos were released, investigators said.

Tucker, who goes by the name Butterfly, was located about 10 hours after the release of the photos and taken into custody, said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The alleged victim, who was about 12 when the photos were taken, was found within a week of the case going public, Arnold said. She is an adult now and is cooperating with authorities, he said.

In addition to photographing the girl being sexually abused by the man, authorities said, Tucker also committed sex acts with the alleged victim.

The photos were part of a child pornography collection known as the "Jen Series."

The 40-plus photos were first discovered by investigators in the Chicago area in 2007. Investigators said images in the series have been reported about 300 times and have been found on computers across the country.

The victim "didn't even know these images were out there," Arnold said.

"The horror of child pornography is it's for life, the victimization," Arnold said. "Once the photos are there in cyberspace, they're there forever."

The girl, identified in court records only by the initials J.M.M., lived in the same Los Angeles County residential hotel as Tucker, who worked as a prostitute, authorities said.

Around 2000 or 2001, the girl stopped attending school regularly and spent more and more time in Tucker's room, smoking crack cocaine Tucker provided, according to the indictment.

The girl was present when Tucker engaged in prostitution with clients and was usually high when this happened, authorities allege. Tucker instructed the child to take off her clothes in front of the clients, prosecutors alleged in court papers.

The faces of Tucker and the girl are "clearly visible" in the photos, according to the indictment. Tucker had an eyebrow piercing and a tattoo of a sleeping cat behind her shoulder, which made her easier to identify, authorities said.

The face of the man, however, is blacked out in the photographs. Authorities are still trying to identify the man, Arnold said.

"Obviously, we want him also to answer for his crimes," Arnold said.

Arnold said the alleged victim is "going to be dealing with this for a long time."

Now that she has been identified, she will receive a victim notification every time one of the images turns up in an investigation, he said.

Tucker is being held without bond and is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court on Feb. 13. Her attorney could not be reached for comment.

hailey.branson@latimes.com

Read More..

Fox cuts ties to commentator Dick Morris

NEW YORK (AP) — Political commentator Dick Morris' prediction of a huge landslide for Mitt Romney didn't pan out. And now he's lost his job at Fox News Channel.

Network spokeswoman Dana Klinghoffer said Tuesday that Fox wasn't renewing its contract with Morris, who was steadfast throughout the campaign in his prediction of a big Romney win over President Barack Obama. He has made few appearances on Fox since the election.

Morris had also been criticized for accepting paid advertisements on his website from candidates that he discussed on the air at Fox.

On his website, Morris said he'll be appearing on CNN's Piers Morgan show Wednesday to talk politics.

Read More..

Well: Getting Into Your Exercise Groove

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

This isn’t meant as an insult, but you are physiologically lazy. So am I. So are we all. Using treadmill testing, scientists have definitively established that, like other animals, humans naturally aim to use as little energy as possible during most movement. So when we walk or run, our bodies tend to choose a particular cadence, a combination of step length and step frequency, that allows us to move at any given speed with as little physiological effort as possible.

How we pick that cadence, though, and whether we can or would even want to change it has been unclear. But a series of recent studies involving runners, walkers, metronomes and virtual reality curtains suggests that while the tug of physiological laziness is strong, it can be controlled, or at least tweaked, with some conscious effort — and perhaps your iPhone playlist.

In the first and most revelatory of the studies, physiologists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia asked adult volunteers to walk on a treadmill at an easy pace. Using motion capture technology, the scientists determined how many steps each person was taking per minute at this speed. A person’s pace depends, of course, on both step length and step frequency. But because the two are inextricably entwined — lengthen your stride and you’ll take fewer steps over a given distance — studying one provides sufficient information about the other, and frequency is easier to enumerate.

After establishing each volunteer’s preferred step frequency, the scientists then sped up or slowed the treadmill, and the researchers measured how quickly people’s legs responded.

The body, remember, wants things to be easy. When you increase or decrease the speed of your walking or running, various physiological changes occur; the amount of oxygen in your blood rises or falls, for instance, because your muscles start requiring more or less of the stuff. Other biochemical changes also occur within muscle cells. Sensing those changes, the body realizes that, at this new speed, your cadence isn’t ideal; you’re taking too few or too many steps to use the least possible amount of energy. Your body adjusts.

But that process takes a little while, at least five seconds or so for the oxygen levels to change and your body to recognize the alteration, says Max Donelan, a professor at Simon Fraser University who was a co-author of the study with his graduate student Mark Snaterse and others.

However, the walkers in the study were adjusting their step frequency within less than two seconds after the treadmill speed changed, Dr. Donelan points out. They then fine-tuned their pacing after that. But the first adjustment came almost instantly.

The same process occurred when the researchers repeated the experiment with runners. If the treadmill speed changed, the runners’ step frequency shifted almost immediately, too fast for internal physiology to have played much of a role.

These insty adjustments suggest that our brains very likely contain huge libraries of preset paces, Dr. Donelan and his colleagues have concluded, of idealized, “physiologically efficient” step cadences for any given speed and condition. It seems probable, in fact, that over our lifetimes, Dr. Donelan says, our brains develop and store countless templates for most pacing situations. We learn and remember what cadence allows us to use the least energy at that speed, and when we reach that speed, we immediately default to our body’s most efficient pace.

Just how the brain recognizes that we are moving at any particular speed is not completely understood, Dr. Donelan says, but almost surely involves messages from the eyes, feet, ears, nervous system, skin and other bodily systems.

Interestingly, it seems to be quite difficult to fool your brain. When Dr. Donelan and his colleagues draped shower-curtain-like enclosures around the front of a treadmill, projected a virtual reality scene of a hallway onto it and then manipulated people’s sense of the speed with which they were moving through the hallway, they found that people’s step frequency would quickly change to match this supposed new speed. But then they would settle back into their former cadence, even as the virtual hallway continued to move past them at unnatural speed.

Visual cues simply were not strong enough to affect pacing for long.

But the scientists have found one signal that does seem effectively to override the body’s strong pull toward its preferred ways of moving: a strongly rhythmic beat. When Dr. Donelan and his colleagues fitted runners or walkers with headphones tuned to a metronome, they found that they could increase or decrease volunteers’ step frequency, even if that frequency was faster or slower than a person’s preferred step pattern. They would also maintain that pace for as long as the metronomic rhythm continued unaltered. The volunteers aligned their movement to the beat.

In practical terms, this finding suggests that music may be one of the best ways to affect the pace of your running or walking, especially if you are trying to maintain a pace with which you are not familiar or which feels awkward. Want to start jogging faster than you have in the past? Load your iPod with uptempo music, Dr. Donelan suggests (although obviously ease into any changes in training slowly, to lessen the risk of injuries).

Dr. Donelan and his colleagues even have recently launched an iPhone app called Cruise Control that allows people to coordinate their pacing with their playlists. Input your preferred running or walking speed and the app skims your music library (nonjudgmentally; if you like Nickelback, that’s your business) and strings together songs with the requisite beat, even subtly altering the tempo of songs, if needed.

But of course, if you’re comfortable with your pace as it is, stick with it. For me, the most stirring message of these recent experiments is that, left to its own devices, your body will almost always obligingly try to choose the least demanding pace for you, a goal with which I’m happy to fall into step.

Read More..

Congress' horse-and-buggy computer laws

As martyrs go, Aaron Swartz was an extraordinary example of the breed. A computer programming genius, he had helped develop the social networking site Reddit and became known as a leading advocate for easy and free information sharing on the Web.

When Swartz committed suicide in January, while awaiting trial on federal computer hacking charges that could have landed him in prison for 35 years and cost him fines of $1 million, his death was seen as a reproach to overzealous federal prosecutors in Boston. But the case raises a broader issue: Why is Congress so awful at writing computer and Internet laws?

Swartz was indicted in 2011 under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1984 law that has struggled to keep up with the times. It's been amended seven times and is more outdated than ever. The charges stemmed from his efforts to allegedly break into MIT's computer network and use it to download millions of academic articles kept by JSTOR, a nonprofit, fee-based service. Legitimate MIT users could access JSTOR articles for free. (JSTOR advocated dropping the case, but MIT did not.)

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, may be the worst of the statutes Congress has passed or debated as ways to address what is vaguely shoveled into a bin labeled "computer crime." But others are nearly as frightful. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, of 1998 imposes excessive civil and criminal penalties for activities engaged in by many users of digital books, movies and music in the real world.

In 2011, Congress contemplated a bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, which would have given the owners of supposedly pirated or counterfeited property nuclear-scale weapons to use against websites they didn't like, by allowing them to simply assert rights infringement to shut down a site. SOPA was derailed by an online campaign spearheaded by, among others, Aaron Swartz.

The three laws had much in common. They were written broadly, in a fruitless effort to "future-proof" them against new technologies. They imposed excessive penalties, on the reasoning that if a crime is bad, it's much worse when committed with these mysterious devices called computers. And they offered special interests such as copyright claimants, corporations facing trade competition, and media conglomerates opportunities to assert new legal rights they were denied in the world of old technologies.

"Congress tries to write technology-neutral laws," says Jennifer Granick, an Internet law expert at Stanford, "but there's been a wholesale change in how we interact with computers" that renders these laws quickly anachronistic.

Clever lawyers and aggressive prosecutors often rush in to fill the gaps. The DMCA was originally aimed to discourage hackers from copying code-protected DVDs; but it's been cited by a garage door-opener company against a rival making universal clickers, and by desktop printer makers against knock-off toner cartridges. (Both those efforts failed in court, but the potential for expansive interpretation remains.) The recording industry threatened to prosecute Princeton computer expert Edward Felten under the DMCA if he reported publicly on how he had broken the industry's digital protection technology — an effort he undertook at the industry's invitation. The threat prompted Felten to withdraw a planned public presentation.

By imposing extra penalties for using a computer to do things that have traditionally been handled in civil court, "these broader laws have criminalized things that are of dubious criminality," Granick told me.

The CFAA is a perfect example. The measure was written as a cyberspace analogue to trespass laws. Its broadest provision says that anyone who intentionally "exceeds authorized access and thereby obtains information from any protected computer" has committed a federal crime.

This is a wide-open definition that prosecutors have used very aggressively. A "protected computer," by Justice Department definition, can be almost anything with a microchip, including your Internet-savvy refrigerator or your car. "Unauthorized access" could mean viewing a website in violation of its terms of use, that mass of impenetrable legalese that most of us click on blithely without reading, just to use the site. Do that to obtain or read any "information," and you've committed a federal crime.

If you think this is an alarmist interpretation, consider the Lori Drew case — the "poster child" for CFAA overreaching, in the words of Orin Kerr, a Georgetown University cyber-law expert who argued Drew's side. She was the Missouri mother who was accused of helping set up a fake Myspace page to bully a classmate of her daughter. The classmate later committed suicide. Since there is no federal cyber-bullying statute, prosecutors charged Drew under the CFAA for violating the Myspace terms of use, which requires users to provide only accurate information about themselves. A Los Angeles jury found her guilty.

Los Angeles District Judge George Wu overturned the verdict, observing that a website's term of use, which can be altered without notice, are too flimsy to carry the weight of criminal liability, and almost never enforced by the website. But as Kerr notes, federal prosecutors have not abandoned their expansive interpretation despite its obvious absurdities: Until they were changed in March 2012, Google's terms of service required users to be of "legal age," meaning that a middle school child conducting a Google search was theoretically committing a federal crime. So are users of dating websites who exaggerate their good points, in violation of terms of use requiring rigorous accuracy about their height, weight, physical condition and charm.

The law places a powerful weapon in the hands of employers, who routinely forbid workers from using their computers for personal business. "The computer gives employees new ways to procrastinate by chatting with friends, playing games, shopping or watching sports highlights," wrote Appellate Judge Alex Kosinski in a ringing denunciation of the CFAA last year. "Under the broad interpretation of the CFAA, such minor dalliances would become federal crimes." Kosinski's ruling upheld the dismissal of CFAA charges against a corporate headhunter who used information from his old employer's computer system to start a competing company.

Efforts are underway in Congress to pare back the CFAA. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) has proposed a draft "Aaron's Law," which would ban prosecutions based strictly on violations of a website's terms of service or an employer's policies. She would also make clear that tweaking a computer's digital signature — as Swartz did to conceal his identity in a weeks-long cat-and-mouse game with MIT network overseers — is not in itself a crime.

Yet nothing in Lofgren's bill would address the fundamental problem of Congress writing nonsensically broad laws to govern cyberspace and letting the Justice Department work out the kinks. But prosecutors always agitate for more discretion and stiffer penalties, Kerr says; that's how we end up with criminal penalties for lying about one's age on a dating site.

It's also how Swartz gets threatened with 35 years in jail for downloading academic papers that MIT students could access for free. The prosecutors' goal was to pressure him to take a plea, but the instrument was put in their hands by a Congress that couldn't be bothered to educate itself about the real world of computers and networks before legislating about it. That's the type of legislating that has to change to avoid more cases like Swartz's.

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

Read More..

Brown weighs parole for Manson family member

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown has about a month to decide whether to release a former follower of notorious killer Charles Manson from prison.

Bruce Davis, 70, has been behind bars since 1970, convicted with Manson of the murder of a musician and a stuntman. He was not involved in the Manson family's infamous 1969 slayings of Sharon Tate and four others in a Benedict Canyon home.

For the second time, a state parole panel has determined that Davis should be freed. The parole board forwarded the decision to Brown on Friday, starting a 30-day period for the governor to agree, request a full board hearing or reverse the decision.

PHOTOS: The Manson family murders

Davis is incarcerated at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where he has a clean record and is active in prison ministries, his lawyer told the parole officials. A prisons panel first granted him parole in 2010, citing his record and his completion of rehabilitation programs.

Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the decision. Davis won a legal challenge to the reversal but lost last year on appeal.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey has urged Brown not to release Davis. In a three-page letter to the governor Jan. 24, she described Davis as Manson's "right-hand man" and said he poses an "unreasonable risk of danger to society."

"Davis has been diagnosed with narcissistic and antisocial personality traits," Lacey wrote. "He consistently blames everyone but himself for his criminal and antisocial behavior."

Davis was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and robbery for the deaths of Gary Hinman and Donald "Shorty" Shea.

Though Davis said he had a peripheral role in the murders, prosecutor Steven Kay and former Manson family member Barbara Hoyt described Davis as a prominent member of the Manson family who "wanted to be second in command."

Hinman, an aspiring musician whom Manson believed had a substantial inheritance, was held captive in his home for several days, tortured and ultimately stabbed to death. In her letter, Lacey contended that Davis held a gun on Hinman while Manson attempted to slice off the captive's ear.

A Black Panther symbol and the words "political piggy" were written on the walls of the home with what was later identified as Hinman's blood.

Shea, a ranch hand who lived with the Manson family, was killed in August 1969 because Manson believed him to be a police informant. Lacey cited witnesses who testified that Davis bragged of his part in Shea's stabbing death.

Shea's widow, Phyllis Murphy, sent her own plea to the governor.

"The details of this [heinous] murder are like a story with description of something only a very evil person would take part in," she wrote. "If Bruce Davis is set free, how safe will the neighbors be, will he be allowed to take yet another life?"

paige.stjohn@latimes.com

Read More..

NJ Gov. Christie, Letterman laugh about fat jokes

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and David Letterman have shared some laughs about the many fat jokes the comedian has made about the lawmaker's ample girth.

Christie has termed his plumpness "fair game" for comedians. And during his first appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman" on Monday, the outspoken Republican and potential 2016 presidential contender read two of Letterman's jokes that he said were "some of my personal favorites."

The governor also drew loud laughs when he pulled out a doughnut and started eating it while Letterman asked him if he was bothered by the digs that have been made about his weight. Christie said he wasn't, noting that he laughs at the jokes if he finds them funny.

"Late Show" airs on CBS at 11:35 p.m. Eastern time.

Read More..

Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

---

Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

Read More..