News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track





How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?




Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.


Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.


That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.


Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.


In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.


In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.


Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.


In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.


But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.


The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.


The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.


Other rumors also spring from real events.


In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.


Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.


So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.


Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.


In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.


The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.


Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”


The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.


The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.


The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.


The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.


The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.


In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.


In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.


Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.


But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.


More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”


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BitTorrent co-founder now working with Hollywood









A Silicon Valley executive whose previous venture was synonymous with Internet piracy has found a way to play nice with Hollywood.


BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin is working with television networks and consumer electronics companies on a new technology called Samba that aims to deliver enhanced viewing on Internet-connected "smart TVs."


Navin said his experiences with BitTorrent and the backlash engendered by the file-sharing pioneer spurred his decision to work in collaboration with the entertainment industry — instead of pursing a path of business disruption.





"You can get a lot of great press, you can get all the bloggers and social media folks really excited with statements like, 'I'm here to kill cable,'" said Navin, 35. "But that doesn't actually work. It's not productive,


because cable and subscription television is subsidizing and paying for the programming we love."


Navin's San Francisco company, Flingo, draws from the same body of academic research for Samba that underlies the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's face recognition technology to teach smart TVs to "see" the images flickering on the screen.


Like an infant opening her eyes for the first time, the software is trained to recognize actors' faces and objects on the screen. It uses these visual cues to identify a show in real time by comparing it with a database of hundreds of channels of content.


Once Samba determines what a viewer is watching, it delivers contextually relevant content, such as casting information or social media conversations, directly to the TV — as well as to other screens in the room. The software synchronizes the devices automatically, via the Internet, so the consumer doesn't need to download a special application. The supplemental material is available through a Web browser running on a tablet, smartphone or the TV itself.


"From a consumer point of view, [Flingo's] doing a nice job of stitching these things together based around a TV-centric experience," said Paul Gray, television research director for NPD DisplaySearch. "And not trying to be a PC in your living room — which is the big danger."


Flingo is one of several companies seeking to serve as the technological glue that connects the living room TV with the smartphones, tablets or laptop computers that millions of consumers have in their hands, along with their TV remote controls. One Nielsen study found that 86% of tablet owners and 84% of smartphone users said they check these screens while they watch TV. Television networks have been grappling with the intrusion of these small screens, which compete with the TV for viewers' attention.


"If we can find ways to connect those screens, we can deepen the engagement with the show, we can remind people that they are watching TV," said Hardie Tankersley, Fox's vice president of platforms and innovation. "Being able to match the ads that you're seeing on your laptop with the ads that are running on TV — that has tremendous potential for brands, who advertise both on TV and the Web. To be able to synchronize up is really powerful."


Companies such as Zeebox, Yahoo Inc.'s IntoNow and Shazam Entertainment Ltd. offer smartphone and tablet applications that identify TV shows and deliver supplementary content to this second, smaller screen — including cast lists, a plot synopsis and interactive features such as polling.


Flingo's Navin is placing his bet on a different screen: the TV. Announcements of partnerships with device makers are expected next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.


Smart TVs are moving from a novelty to the mainstream, with shipments expected to grow 15% worldwide this year, according to NPD DisplaySearch. Some 43 million of these devices — TVs that connect to the Internet and provide access to services such as YouTube, Netflix or Hulu — are expected to ship globally this year. That number is projected to reach 95 million by 2016.


This momentum is less obvious in North America, where Internet-connected TVs have been slower to catch on than other parts of the world, Gray said. That's because purchases are linked to media consumption habits. In China, for example, consumers watch free Internet content — and favor TVs with built-in browsers, which make it easier to watch streaming video. Similarly, in Western Europe, where half the households receive TV programming via over-the-air signals, broadcasters provide past episodes free online for consumers to do catch-up viewing. That's helped spur demand for Internet-connected TVs, Gray said.


Navin launched Flingo in 2008, creating smart TV applications for networks including A&E, Fox, History Channel, Lifetime, Showtime and TMZ, as well as websites such as Revision3, Funny or Die and College Humor. As a result of this development work, the company has built relationships with more than a dozen major consumer electronics manufacturers, among them LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Corp. and Vizio Inc. It claims to have published more smart TV apps than any other company in the world — available on more than 15 million devices in 118 countries.


That may position it to take serious advantage of smart TV growth in the U.S.


"The smart TV is the last great unmined consumer platform," said billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who saw a demonstration of Flingo at the CES trade show last year and is an investor in the company.


dawn.chmielewski@latimes.com





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Baker's giant thermometer, long on the blink, is taking heat









BAKER — The temperature hit 114 degrees in July, but most folks passing by the "World's Tallest Thermometer" in this Mojave Desert pit stop never knew it.


Once a shimmering beacon of light to Las Vegas-bound drivers heading up Interstate 15 with fat wallets and paper-thin dreams, Baker's 13-story thermometer marks California's last-stop oasis of bathrooms and burger joints before the Nevada state line.


Now it's an eyesore. The pinkish roadside oddity has been on the blink for years. The string of ovals that lighted up in 10-degree increments, the top one also giving the exact temperature, are black and lifeless. The gift shop below is padlocked, its shelves stripped bare.





"It's totally disappointing,'' said Brad Roach, 27, of Los Alamos, N.M., who pulled off the highway on an L.A.-to-Vegas road trip with friends to get a closer look. "It's kind of like the biggest ball of twine," he said, referring to another storied American roadside attraction. "If you're diving by, you have to stop and see it. But there's nothing here.''


The thermometer's demise now serves as a billboard for a town on the brink. A chain link fence surrounds Baker's prized Starbucks — which closed its doors four years ago. Two of the town's three motels are shut. The Royal Hawaiian, which in the best of times aspired to two stars, peeks sadly out onto Baker Boulevard with smashed windows and graffiti-splattered walls.


Part of the blame belongs to the merciless Mojave Desert, where bleached 2-by-4s and cinder blocks are all that remains of gas stations, diners and other ventures that turned to dust along the highways. Part of the decline can be blamed on the recession, which depleted the conga line of vehicles heading to and from Las Vegas that sustains life in this tiny town of 735 on the edge of Death Valley.


Tough times are nothing new in this desert town, born more than century ago as a railroad station serving the borax mines in Death Valley. It was wiped off the map by floods in the '30s and saw its rails pulled up and shipped overseas during World War II. There still isn't a single stoplight in town.


Still, its people persevere. "There's always been work in Baker, but now, instead of one job, people are working two or three,'' said Ronda Tremblay, superintendent of the Baker Valley United School District, which has fewer than 190 students.


Baker has no bank or supermarket, no drugstore or health clinic — those are an hour's drive away, in Barstow.


But some hold out hope for the town and, not surprisingly in these parts, it could come from an unusual place: a spaceship.


The owner of Alien Fresh Jerky, one of the more popular stops on Baker's main drag, has plans to build a three-story, disc-shaped "UFO Hotel." Still in the permitting process, it would tower over the tiny markets, gas stations and restaurants on Baker's main drag. Plans call for a gift shop, cafe and 30-plus rooms. Outside, there would be a pool in the shape of an alien's noggin for guests to take a dip in on hot summer days.


"Forty percent of Americans believe in UFOs. Those are my customers," Luis Ramallo said. "No one has ever seen anything like it.''


A wacky dream? Perhaps. But Ramallo, an electrician who emigrated from Argentina in 1988, has parlayed on those before with great success. His beef jerky store started as a tiny, roadside stand outside of Nevada's Area 51, the top secret U.S. Air Force base that has morphed into the Bethlehem of UFO theology. After Ramallo's oddball enterprise became a hit, he relocated to Baker.


Now his store, on good days, has a line snaking out the door, Ramallo said. He expects even more business once the spaceship hotel opens, which he hopes will be in the next year or two.


"This will be the new big attraction in Baker,'' Ramallo said. "I don't want them to fix the thermometer. I want them to tear it down. It's gone from good to bad to ugly.''


The 134-foot-high thermometer was the brainchild of local businessman Willis Herron, who plunked down $700,000 to build the giant monolith in 1991 next to his Bun Boy Restaurant. The thermometer's 4,900 bulbs glowed so bright that Herron, who lived across the street, had to close his window shades at night.


"For 25 years I've had this dream of putting up the world's tallest thermometer, because people pulling off the freeway in the heat of summer are always making remarks like: 'Whew! It's hotter 'n hell. How hot is it anyway?'" Herron, who died years ago, told the Times in 1991.


The tower's height commemorated the 134-degree record temperature set in nearby Death Valley in 1913.


Shortly after it was finished, the thermometer snapped in two after being buffeted by 70-mph winds. Two years later, the rebuilt thermometer again twisted and swayed as gusts whipped through the valley, popping out light bulbs. The problem was solved when a work crew poured concrete inside the steel tower, anchoring it against the harsh desert wind.


Herron sold the Bun Boy and the giant thermometer to business partner Larry Dabour, owner of the Mad Greek restaurant, another Baker institution. It changed hands again in 2005 when Dabour "liberated" himself from the thermometer, Bun Boy and some other enterprises he owned.





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Saudi website editor could face death for apostasy-rights group






RIYADH (Reuters) – The editor of a Saudi Arabian website could be sentenced to death after a judge cited him for apostasy and moved his case to a higher court, the monitoring group Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.


Raif Badawi, who started the Free Saudi Liberals website to discuss the role of religion in Saudi Arabia, was arrested in June, Human Rights Watch said.






Badawi had initially been charged with the less serious offence of insulting Islam through electronic channels, but at a December 17 hearing a judge referred him to a more senior court and recommended he be tried for apostasy, the monitoring group said.


Apostasy, the act of changing religious affiliation, carries an automatic death sentence in Saudi Arabia, along with crimes including blasphemy.


Badawi’s website included articles that were critical of senior religious figures, the monitoring group said.


A spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s Justice Ministry was not available to comment.


The world’s top oil exporter follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam and applies Islamic law, or sharia.


Judges base their decisions on their own interpretation of religious law rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.


King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, has pushed for reforms to the legal system, including improved training for judges and the introduction of precedent to standardize verdicts and make courts more transparent.


However, Saudi lawyers say that conservatives in the Justice Ministry and the judiciary have resisted implementing many of the changes that he announced in 2007. (Reporting By Angus McDowall; Editing by Kevin Liffey)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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A huge collection of odd TV stuff needs a home


LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Comisar is the first to acknowledge that more than a few have questioned his sanity for spending the better part of 25 years collecting everything from the costume George Reeves wore in the 1950s TV show "Superman" to the entire set of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson."


Then there's the pointy Spock ears Leonard Nimoy wore on "Star Trek" and the guns Tony Soprano used to rub out a mob rival in an episode of "The Sopranos."


"Along the way people thought I was nuts in general for wanting to conserve Keith Partridge's flared pants from 'The Partridge Family,'" the good-natured former TV writer says of the 1970s sitcom as he ambles through rows of costumes, props and what have you from the beginnings of television to the present day.


"But they really thought I needed a psychological workup," Comisar, 48, adds with a smile, "when they learned I was having museum curators take care of these pieces."


A museum is exactly where he wants to put all 10,000 of his TV memorabilia items, everything from the hairpiece Carl Reiner wore on the 1950s TV variety program "Your Show of Shows" to the gun and badge Kiefer Sutherland flashed on "24" a couple TV seasons ago.


Finding one that could accommodate his collection, which fills two sprawling, temperature-controlled warehouses, however, has sometimes been as hard as acquiring the boots Larry Hagman used to stomp around in when he was J.R. on "Dallas." (The show's production company finally coughed up a pair after plenty of pleading and cajoling.)


Comisar is one of many people who, after a lifetime of collecting, begin to realize that if they can't find a permanent home for their artifacts those objects could easily end up on the trash heap of history. Or, just as bad as far as he's concerned, in the hands of private collectors.


"Some of the biggest bidders for Hollywood memorabilia right now reside in mainland China and Dubai, and our history could leave this country forever," says Comisar, who these days works as a broker and purchasing expert for memorabilia collectors.


What began as a TV-obsessed kid's lark morphed into a full-fledged hobby when as a young man writing jokes for Howie Mandel and Joan Rivers, and punching up scripts for such producers as Norman Lear and Fred Silverman, Comisar began scouring studio back lots, looking for discarded stuff from the favorite shows of his childhood. From there it developed into a full-on obsession, dedicated to preserving the entire physical spectrum of television history.


"After a couple years of collecting, it became clear to me," he says, "that it didn't much matter what TV shows James watched in the early 1970s but which shows were the most iconic. In that way, I had sort of a curator's perspective almost from the beginning."


In the early days, collecting such stuff was easy for anyone with access to a studio back lot. Many items were simply thrown out or given away when shows ceased production. When studios did keep things they often rented them out for small fees, and if you lost or broke them you paid a small replacement fee. So Comisar began renting stuff right and left and promptly losing it, acquiring one of Herman Munster's jackets that way.


These days almost everything has a price, although Comisar's reputation as a serious collector has led some people to give him their stuff.


If he simply sold it all, he could probably retire as a millionaire several times over. Just last month someone paid $480,000 for a faded dress Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz." What might Annette Funicello's original Mickey Mouse Club jacket fetch?


He won't even think about that.


"I've spent 25 years now reuniting these pieces, and I would be so sick if some day they were just broken up and sold to the highest bidder," he says.


He, and every other serious collector of cool but somewhat oddball stuff, face two major obstacles, say museum curators: Finding a museum or university with the space to take their treasures and persuading deep-pocketed individuals who might bankroll the endeavor that there's really any compelling reason to preserve something like Maxwell Smart's shoephone.


"People hold television and popular culture so close to their hearts and embrace it so passionately," says Dwight Bowers, curator of entertainment collections for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, who calls Comisar's collection very impressive. "But they don't put it on the same platform as military history or political history."


When the Smithsonian acquired Archie Bunker's chair from the seminal TV comedy "All in the Family," Bowers said, museum officials took plenty of flak from those offended that some sitcom prop was being placed down the hallway from the nation's presidential artifacts.


The University of California, Santa Cruz, took similar heat when it accepted the Grateful Dead archives, 30 years of recordings, videos, papers, posters and other memorabilia gifted by the band, said university archivist Nicholas Meriwether.


"What I always graciously say is that if you leave the art and the music aside for one moment, whatever you think of it, what you can say is they are still a huge part of understanding the story of the 1960s and of understanding the nation's counterculture," says Meriwether.


Comisar sees his television collection serving the same purpose, tracing societal changes TV shows documented from the post-World War II years to the present.


The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation looked into establishing such a museum some years back, and Comisar's collection came up at the time, said Karen Herman, curator of the foundation's Archive of American Television.


Instead, the foundation settled on an online archive containing more than 3,000 hours of filmed oral history interviews with more than 700 people.


While the archive doesn't have any of Mr. Spock's ears, anyone with a computer can view and listen to an oral history from Spock himself, the actor Leonard Nimoy.


Comisar, meanwhile, believes he's finally found the right site for a museum, in Phoenix, where he's been lining up supporters. He estimates it will cost $35 million and several years to open the doors, but hopes to have a preview center in place by next year.


Mo Stein, a prominent architect who heads the Phoenix Community Alliance and is working with him, says one of the next steps will be finding a proper space for the collection.


But, really, why all the fuss over a place to save one of the suits Regis Philbin wore on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"?


"In Shakespeare's time, his work was considered pretty low art," Comisar responds.


Oh, he'll admit that "Mike and Molly," the modern TV love story of a couple who fall for each other at Overeaters Anonymous, may never rank in the same category as "Romeo and Juliet."


"But what about a show like 'Star Trek'?" he asks.


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The New Old Age Blog: Fudging the Facts, for Peace of Mind

Lou, my beloved grandfather, lived almost 101 years and obsessively worried every single day of his adult life — probably because his adult life began before it should have. As a child in Russia, he watched helplessly as his mother and sister were killed during a vicious pogrom in their village.

Lou (I called him Zadie) made his way to America, and immediately began imagining the worst about his fate, and his family’s fate, in his new country. I believe Zadie lived as long as he did because he was afraid of what would happen to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren if he wasn’t here to protect them.

When I was a third-year medical student in New York City, he called from Denver very early one morning, waking me and my roommates. He had been listening to his transistor radio on one of his many sleepless nights of worry, and had heard that a Staten Island Ferry boat had crashed, injuring numerous passengers.

There were more than seven million people in the city, and Zadie called at 4 a.m. to make sure I wasn’t one of those injured. It was from him we learned the importance of telling white lies and omitting certain truths with our elderly parents and grandparents.

Before accusing me of infantilizing and patronizing my older family members, hear me out. Anxiety disorders can be debilitating for the elderly. A comprehensive review of the subject found 10 to14 percent of those 65 and older meet the criteria for these diagnoses, a significantly higher figure than for the more widely recognized depression syndromes in the same demographic.

Indeed, depression and anxiety disorders often occur together. Anxiety disorders are underdiagnosed in the elderly, largely because the symptoms are often assumed to be just another manifestation of aging. Additionally, the clinical assessment of the elderly for anxiety is more complicated than for younger patients because the signs may differ from those classically described in the diagnostic manuals.

A large national study showed an increased incidence of general anxiety disorder beginning after age 55, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness notes that, like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder tends to worsen in old age. Factors contributing to the prevalence and severity of anxiety disorders in the elderly include a host of concomitant medical problems that interact with anxiety in a complicated way.

From the review article cited earlier:

The co-morbidity between medical illness and anxiety disorders poses difficulties for…diagnosis and detection of anxiety. Researchers have suggested that older adults may be more likely to attribute physical symptoms related to anxiety to medical issues… In turn, many physical conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, hyperthyroidism, and pulmonary and vestibular difficulties, can mimic the symptoms of anxiety…making it difficult to establish the underlying cause…

Furthermore, the symptoms that result from medical illnesses may produce fearful bodily sensations that may result in the subsequent development of anxiety disorders.

As an example, more than 40 percent of patients with Parkinson’s disease meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder. Dementia is also associated with anxiety in a bidirectional way — anxiety can accelerate cognitive decline, which in turn can increase symptoms of anxiety. Added to this morass are the side effects, which can include anxiety, of many medications taken by older patients.

The elderly clearly are an at-risk population for anxiety disorders. Which brings us back to white lies. Zadie’s well-earned anxieties, obsessions and worries accelerated greatly as he got older, and we realized they could largely be prevented if we simply didn’t share the complete truth with him all the time. This became known in our family as the Zadie Filter.

When we took our children to the mountains, we told him we were headed to Colorado Springs; he’d been to Colorado Springs many times and knew it was a flat highway drive from Denver. No high mountain passes or narrow roads without guardrails.

When he begged my sons to become doctors so they would serve behind the front lines in the event they were drafted (this was long after the military draft ended, which was still not reassuring enough for Zadie), they so promised. When our daughter started driving, Zadie warned her it wasn’t safe for a girl to drive alone in case she had car trouble; she promised she would always have company in the car.

Zadie died when his great-grandchildren were still teenagers, and so he never had to know that the boys didn’t go into medicine and that his great-granddaughter drives alone.

My mother, Zadie’s daughter, inherited his anxieties, and as she has entered her mid-80s her symptoms have also markedly increased. On the other side of the family, my mother-in-law’s issues with anxiety began with her Parkinson’s disease and have worsened as her neurological condition has progressed.

With our mothers, we also rely on the Zadie Filter. Our white lies and omissions reduce their worries — which is not to say we can protect them from all triggers (they still read the newspaper and watch the nightly news), but even a bit of relief for them is relief for us as well.

Our parents live for the most part on fixed incomes, so when we’re able to cover some of their expenses without their knowing, we do so, and they worry a little less about their bills. All it takes is a little white lie: “The apartment manager waived your heating bill this month because you’ve been such a good long-term tenant,” or, “Of course I used your credit card when I paid for your medicines.”

My mother accidentally found out that our son broke his finger (playing flag football during finals week!) when a well-intentioned friend asked her how her grandson was doing after his injury. She was upset we hadn’t told her — but only for a few moments, until we explained that it had happened a week before, that he was all splinted up and was in no pain. All of which was 100 percent true, and she didn’t lose a minute of sleep worrying about it.

Last week, after pressing our law student son (he of the broken finger) about a school transcript issue I’ve been worried about for him, he assured me it had been taken care of. Our daughter in grad school goes into bars only when she’s with a large group of friends, and our college son is the designated driver for all of his fraternity functions.

And so it begins.


Dr. Harley A. Rotbart is professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of “No Regrets Parenting.”

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'Mastery' tries to provide a guide to becoming a genius









We're all geniuses now. At least, we all could be geniuses if only we buckled down and spent an awfully long time working at it.

That, roughly, is the thesis of "Mastery," the latest door stopper from Los Angeles author Robert Greene, whose books include "The 48 Laws of Power" and "The 50th Law," a management book co-authored with rapper 50 Cent.

Readers may spot that his new thesis is the same as that put forward in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," only Greene has improved it in three ways.








First, he has doubled the number of hours that must be put in to master anything from Gladwell's 10,000. Second, he has enlisted Goethe, Mozart, Wagner, Rembrandt, John Coltrane, Marcel Proust and a couple of dozen other great masters to show how it can be done.

And finally he has come up with a step-by-step guide, which includes finding something that is more vocation than job, working like crazy at it, getting a top mentor and using social networks.

To produce "Mastery," published by Viking Adult, Greene has taken his own advice to heart. According to the publicity material, he put in 20,000 hours thinking, researching and writing the book; the only trouble is that the dense 360-page result, with its vast quantities of research and effort much in evidence, makes one yearn for something snappier and less labored.

And yet, for anyone who can be bothered to master "Mastery," there are some rewards. First, Greene does a bracing line in disapproval and admonishment. "The passive ironic attitude is not cool or romantic, but pathetic and destructive," he writes. This sentiment is a good one, and as someone who earns a living by being both passive and ironic, I stand duly corrected.

Better still are the stories about geniuses with which the book is crammed. Open it at random and you find John Keats forcing himself to write the interminable poem "Endymion," through which he learned the importance of brevity.

Open it again, and there is Goethe paying a visit to his friend Friedrich Schiller to find the philosopher had gone out. Goethe sits down at his desk and is sickened by a smell coming out of the drawer, which he opens to discover a stash of rotten apples. On inquiry, he learns that Schiller's wife puts them there deliberately because the stench helps her husband concentrate.

Even though the stories are good, some are spoiled by how Greene tells them. There is something vaguely blasphemous about the idea of Leonardo da Vinci "sharing" memories on his deathbed. Greene also presumes to tell us what the great man might have been thinking in the last hours of his life, the sheer gall of which made me want to hurl the book at the wall.

However, the greatest weakness of "Mastery" is that it peddles a fiction. In true life, we can't all be geniuses. As if to prove otherwise, Greene keeps telling us that Charles Darwin was no good at school — but that doesn't mean that the modern louts leaving school with no diploma today will go on to write an "On the Origin of Species."

Most of us will never get anywhere near mastery at anything because we are either too stupid, too lazy, too unimaginative, too happy, too poorly educated, too encumbered by children and elderly parents or too unlucky. And no book will alter that.

I'm also suspicious of some of Greene's tips. He tells us that to find the right field in which to work, we should revisit what we loved as children. This worked for Marie Curie, who used to wander into her father's lab and be fascinated by the instruments. Alas, it works less well for me. What I loved was playing hairdressers in the trailer in my friend's garden. Vidal Sassoon should be glad I didn't read this book decades ago.

The final difficulty with "Mastery" is the pretense that all masters followed a similar path, when they surely did nothing of the sort. They shared one thing only: They did what they did — whether it was writing "Ode to a Nightingale" or building the world's first functioning airplane — without resorting to a book telling them how to do it.

Kellaway is a columnist for the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.





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Richard Adams dies at 65; gay marriage pioneer









Thirty-seven years ago, Richard Adams made history when he and his partner of four years, Anthony Sullivan, became one of the first gay couples in the country to be granted a marriage license. It happened in Boulder, Colo., where a liberal county clerk issued licenses to six same-sex couples in the spring of 1975.


Adams had hoped to use his marriage to secure permanent residency in the United States for Sullivan, an Australian who had been in the country on a limited visa and was facing deportation.


But Colorado's attorney general declared the Boulder marriages invalid. Several months later, Adams and Sullivan received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service that denied Sullivan's petition for resident status in terms that left no doubt about the reason:





"You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots," the notification read.


Adams, who later filed the first federal lawsuit demanding recognition of same-sex marriages, died Monday at his home in Hollywood after a brief illness, said his attorney, Lavi Soloway. He was 65.


Soloway described Adams and Sullivan as "pioneers who stood up and fought for something nobody at that time conceived of as a right, the right of gay couples to be married.


"Attitudes at the time were not supportive, to put it mildly," Soloway said. "They went on the Donahue show and people in the audience said some pretty nasty things. But they withstood it all because they felt it was important to speak out."


Born in Manila on March 9, 1947, Adams immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 12. He grew up in Long Prairie, Minn., studied liberal arts at the University of Minnesota and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1968.


By 1971 he was working in Los Angeles, where he met Sullivan and fell in love.


Four years later, the two men heard about Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex: She had decided to issue marriage licenses to gay couples after the Boulder district attorney's office advised her that nothing in state law explicitly prohibited it.


On April 21, 1975, they obtained their license and exchanged marriage vows at the First Unitarian Church of Denver.


The Boulder marriages attracted national media attention, including an article in the New York Times that called Colorado "a mini-Nevada for homosexual couples." Rorex received obscene phone calls, as well as a visit from a cowboy who protested by demanding to marry his horse. (Rorex said she turned him down because the 8-year-old mare was underage.)


After their marriage, Adams and Sullivan filed a petition with the INS seeking permanent residency for Sullivan as the spouse of a U.S. citizen. In November 1975, they received the immigration agency's derogatory letter and lodged a formal protest. Officials reissued the denial notice without the word "faggots."


They took the agency to court in 1979, challenging the constitutionality of the denial. A federal district judge in Los Angeles upheld the INS decision, and Adams and Sullivan lost subsequent appeals.


In a second lawsuit, the couple argued that Sullivan's deportation after an eight-year relationship with Adams would constitute an "extreme hardship." In 1985 a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the hardship argument and opened the way for Sullivan to be sent back to Australia.


Because Australia had already turned down Adams' request for residency in that country, the couple decided the only way they could stay together was to leave the U.S. In 1985, they flew to Britain and drifted through Europe for the next year.


"It was the most difficult period because I had to leave my family as well as give up my job of 18 1/2 years. It was almost like death," Adams said in "Limited Partnership," a documentary scheduled for release next year.


The pair ended their self-imposed exile after a year and came home. They lived quietly in Los Angeles to avoid drawing the attention of immigration officials, but in recent years began to appear at rallies supporting same-sex marriage, Soloway said.


They were encouraged by new guidelines issued by the Obama administration this fall instructing immigration officials to stop deporting foreigners in long-standing same-sex relationships with U.S. citizens.


Although the policy change came more than three decades after Adams and Sullivan raised the issue, it gave Adams "a sense of vindication," Soloway said.


The day before he died, Sullivan told him that the most important victory was that they were able to remain a couple.


"Richard looked at me," Sullivan told Soloway, "and said, 'Yeah, you're right. We've won.'"


Adams, who was an administrator for a law firm until his retirement in 2010, is survived by Sullivan; his mother, Elenita; sisters Stella, Kathy, Julie and Tammie; and a brother, Tony.


elaine.woo@latimes.com





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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore


LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.


The actor's divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.


Kutcher's filing does not indicate that the couple has a prenuptial agreement. The filing states Kutcher signed the document Friday, hours before it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.


Kutcher and Moore married in September 2005 and until recently kept their relationship very public, communicating with each other and fans on the social networking site Twitter. After their breakup, Moore changed her name on the site from (at)mrskutcher to (at)justdemi.


Kutcher currently stars on CBS' "Two and a Half Men."


Messages sent to Kutcher's and Moore's publicists were not immediately returned Friday.


Moore, 50, and Kutcher, 34, created the DNA Foundation, also known as the Demi and Ashton Foundation, in 2010 to combat the organized sexual exploitation of girls around the globe. They later lent their support to the United Nations' efforts to fight human trafficking, a scourge the international organization estimates affects about 2.5 million people worldwide.


Moore was previously married to actor Bruce Willis for 13 years. They had three daughters together — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — before divorcing in 2000. Willis later married model-actress Emma Heming in an intimate 2009 ceremony at his home in Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands that attended by their children, as well as Moore and Kutcher.


Kutcher has been dating former "That '70s Show" co-star Mila Kunis.


The divorce filing was first reported Friday by People magazine.


___


Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP.


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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct


C.J. Gunther for The New York Times


Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.







For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.




Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.


No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.


And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”


At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.


Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.


“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.


The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.


The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”


Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.


Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.


The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?


In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.


But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.


Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.


At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.


The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.


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