Meat company owner sues USDA for right to slaughter horses

Rick de los Santos wants to reopen an animal slaughter business that's been banned in the U.S. for years. Along the way, he's also opened a can of worms.

The Roswell, N.M., meat company owner sued the federal government last week, alleging that officials ignored his application to resume domestic horse slaughter for food because the practice had become an emotional political issue throughout the West.

After waiting a year for permits, De los Santos, 52, says he's using the courts to force the U.S. Department of Agriculture to resume inspections necessary to open what would be the nation's first new horse slaughterhouse since 2007.

"I've submitted all the paperwork and have been told all along 'Oh, it won't be long now,'" said De los Santos, who owns Valley Meat Co. "I followed all their guidelines. I put more than $100,000 in upgrades and additions on my facilities to handle equine slaughter. And then the government comes back and tells me, 'We can't give you the permits. This horse issue has turned into a political game.'

"So what else do you do? I figured it was time to go to court."

The slaughterhouse owner, whose business had been slaughtering cattle, is also suing the Humane Society of the United States, Front Range Equine Rescue and Animal Protection of New Mexico, accusing those groups of defamation and causing loss of income during the dispute.

The dispute over killing horses has raged for years. Equine advocates have accused the Bureau of Land Management of failing to protect tens of thousands of mustangs that wander government-owned land in 10 Western states. Many of the animals are corralled each year and sent to long-term holding facilities. And reports surfaced this fall that the BLM was knowingly selling wild horses for slaughter, an outcome banned annually by Congress. The agency is investigating the claim.

In 2007, the last three domestic slaughterhouses in the United States were closed. Since then, unwanted domestic animals have been shipped to Mexico and Canada for slaughter.

Many animal protection groups and public officials were outraged at the idea of resuming domestic horse slaughter, including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, who has opposed the plan.

Many animal advocates says horse slaughter has no business in the U.S.

"Everything is wrong with this idea," said Sally Summers, founder of Horse Power, a Nevada-based equine advocacy group. "The economy has done just fine without this type of slaughter. And these plants are toxic to the community. They hurt these towns; they don't help them."

Summers said that many of the drugs that U.S. owners give their horses to ensure longevity and peak performance are carcinogenic. "This stuff gets into the water table through the drains," she said. "It's a nightmare. This man is smoking a pipe and I don't know what's in it."

The USDA declined to comment last week on the pending litigation. The agency has until January to respond to the suit, filed in federal court in late October.

De los Santos says his lawsuit will show that a recent "marked change in cooperation" by the USDA is due to pressure the government is receiving on the horse issue.

Some support a return to domestic horse slaughter. The American Quarter Horse Assn. says a 2011 report from the federal Government Accountability Office shows horse abuse and abandonment have been increasing since Congress essentially banned horse slaughter by cutting funding for USDA inspection programs in 2006.

The number of U.S. horses sent to other countries for slaughter has nearly tripled since domestic horse slaughter ceased. Most animal advocacy groups agree that some of the worst abuse occurs in the slaughter pipeline that often takes horses to inhumane facilities in Mexico.

Last year, 68,429 horses were shipped to Mexico and 64,652 to Canada, according to USDA statistics compiled by the Equine Welfare Alliance, a nonprofit group dedicated to ending horse slaughter. That compares with total exports of 37,884 of the animals in 2006.

De los Santos says he is tired of sitting in southern New Mexico and watching countless truckloads of horses en route to Mexico for slaughter.

"I've seen 130,000 horses a year on their way to Mexico — they go right through our backyard — and I wanted to tap into the market," he said. "I could have hired 100 people by now. Everyone in our community agrees we need this type of service. And I'm tired of waiting."

De los Santos says he is ready to start killing horses humanely.

"Everything that has four legs that walks can be slaughtered the same way, but we're ready to do this humanely," he said. "We've upgraded our knocking chutes for giving them that lethal hit."

He says he can't understand why everyone is so upset. Americans kill cows; why not horses?

"My wife says horse is on the menu all over Europe, but the moment you mention horse slaughter in the U.S., you've got a problem," he says.

john.glionna@latimes.com

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Terra/MODIS Color Image of Copahue Eruption Plume Across South America

For the first time since 2000, Copahue is erupting, sending an ash plume across southern South America. So far, the eruption is following the same patterns as the activity that ran from July to October 2000. That activity started with phreatic (water-driven) explosions, so it will be interesting to see if this eruption has new juvenile magma involved. Earlier this year, a study of the summit crater lake suggested new magma was intruding under Copahue and the SERNAGEOMIN report mentioned. that seismicity was rising before today’s eruption.

I grabbed the brand new Terra/MODIS imagery for South America and the plume from the Copahue was glorious – stretching over 350 km across Argentina to the east of the volcano. For a sense of scale on the image, the distance between Copahue and the Embalse los Barreales is ~225 km. The plume itself has been reported to be over 9.5 km / 30,000 feet tall.

UPDATE 12/22 5 PM EST: Eruptions reader Kirby pointed me to the SERNAGEOMIN webcam pointed at Copahue — check out the eruption live!

UPDATE 12/22 7 PM EST: ONEMI has not called for any evacuations on the Chilean side of Copahue — this article also has a nice gallery of pictures from the eruption as well.

Check out the original post with more details.

Erik Klemetti is an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University. His passion in geology is volcanoes, and he has studied them all over the world. You can follow Erik on Twitter, where you'll get volcano news and the occasional baseball comment.

Read more by Erik Klemetti

Follow @eruptionsblog on Twitter.

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Reports: Rolling Stones guitarist Wood ties knot

LONDON (AP) — Two British newspapers say Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has married his fiancee Sally Humphreys at a ceremony at London‘s Dorchester Hotel.

The Sun and the Daily Mirror carried photographs of the 65-year-old rocker with a pale boutonniere and a dark blue suit, and his 34-year-old bride in a traditional white gown and a clutch of matching white flowers.

The Sun quoted Wood as saying “I’m feeling great” as he and his bride kissed and posed for pictures outside the exclusive hotel in London’s upscale Mayfair district.

The newspapers said the guests included singer Rod Stewart and his wife Penny Lancaster as well as ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife Nancy Shevell.

A call and an email to Wood’s U.S.-based agent weren’t immediately returned Saturday.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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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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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.

Read More..

Flawed data stall California's 911 upgrades

A three-year effort by California to improve 911 emergency service has been stymied by flawed data and aging computers at local fire departments and rescue agencies across the state, a Times investigation has found.

Since 2009, the state Emergency Medical Services Authority has been seeking to centralize reports on millions of emergency medical responses, a project that officials see as critical to improving life-saving practices.

State officials hoped to capture information from the moment dispatchers answer a call until the victim is transferred to a hospital. The program would for the first time give public officials, medical researchers and regulators the ability to compare response times and patient treatment across local jurisdictions.

But the project has floundered because many fire departments and ambulance operations have been unable to provide usable information.

One problem is that fire departments report basic information inconsistently, including how long it takes them to reach victims. Some begin counting the second a 911 call is answered. Others, including the Los Angeles Fire Department, have started the clock when rescue crews are alerted at fire stations.

Moreover, nearly half of the state's 32 regional emergency medical agencies have failed to contribute reports to the system, officials said. And many of those who do file reports use paper records.

The shortcomings, officials and experts said, underscore how fire agencies lag behind police departments and the private sector in using technology to better manage and evaluate their performance.

"There's been a lot of benign neglect in the fire service as far as collecting data," said Robert Upson, a Connecticut fire marshal who has analyzed data for a nationwide group that sets performance standards for fire departments.

"There's so much sloppiness in recording data. It's just built into the system."

Similar troubles have fueled a months-long controversy over faulty response time data at the Los Angeles Fire Department. In March, top commanders admitted that the department had repeatedly published reports overstating how fast rescuers reached victims in need of help. The flawed reports have been blamed on the use of unqualified firefighters to analyze data and outdated computer systems.

In an effort to improve such data, California officials launched their program to collect rich, comparable details on medical emergencies statewide. Incident reports were to be gathered by regional regulatory agencies and forwarded to the state.

But three years and about $1.6 million later, the voluntary project is plagued by lack of participation, money problems and inconsistent information. The root of the problem is that some agencies rely on outmoded, "home-brewed" computer systems, said Tom McGinnis, the state official overseeing the project.

"We can't compare apples to apples. We compare apples to oranges and peaches," McGinnis said.

The state isn't forcing cash-strapped local agencies to participate because doing so would require many to replace computer systems, McGinnis said. "Really what it comes down to is money," he said.

Some experts say the state program won't be able to deliver on its promise until reporting standards are clarified and participation is mandatory.

"It should become a requirement tomorrow," said Bruce Wagner, the top administrator for the emergency medical services agency in Sacramento County.

His agency is among those that have not provided data to the state. That's because fire departments and ambulance firms under his jurisdiction are hesitant to spend time and money gathering records if they are not required to do so, Wagner said.

"It's hard for us to tell them they are going to incur additional costs if it's not mandated," he told The Times.

Los Angeles County, where a third of the state's 911 medical rescues take place, is a year behind in processing performance information because 28 of the county's 31 fire departments submit paper reports, said Cathy Chidester, the local oversight agency's top executive. Voluminous pages of information must be individually scanned into electronic files or manually typed into a county computer system.

"It's like sweeping sand off the beach," Chidester said.

Of the county's three largest fire departments — Los Angeles city, Los Angeles County and Long Beach — only the LAFD collects medical records electronically.

The county Fire Department has not filed reports on more than 300,000 incidents over the last two years because budget cuts eliminated employees working on the records, officials said. Next year, the agency is launching a test program in which paramedics will use iPads to create electronic reports, Chief Deputy Mike Metro said.

The state data project, known as CEMSIS, short for California Emergency Medical Services Information System, has also struggled for funding. It began as a $240,000-a-year demonstration project using federal grants and philanthropic donations. But no permanent funding has been secured.

Where possible, officials are attempting to use the partial records they have compiled for research. But thus far, they haven't been able to answer fundamental questions, including how different agencies' 911 response times compare, McGinnis said.

Ideally, McGinnis said, regulators could use the database to compare "the entire spectrum" of emergency medical care in California. "I want everybody to participate and see what we're doing statewide," he said.

Detailed data could improve understanding of what works best in the field. For example, researchers could examine how often rescuers are able to restore heartbeats after arriving on the scene, a key step in increasing cardiac-arrest survival rates, said Dr. Marc Eckstein, the medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

"You have to really drill down to make sure we are talking about the right things," he said.

Slipping response times at the LAFD were only documented when outside experts, the city controller and The Times dug into the department's data. A series of Times reports found breakdowns and delays in processing 911 calls, dispatching units and summoning the nearest medical rescuers from neighboring jurisdictions.

Los Angeles Fire Commissioner Alan Skobin, who is overseeing a task force charged with overhauling the LAFD's data management, said programs such as California's fledgling 911 records system could help his agency compare its performance to other departments and improve service.

"There's a benefit to looking outside," Skobin said. "That's something the LAFD has to do."

Full coverage: Life on the line, 911 breakdowns at LAFD

Map: How fast is LAFD where you live?

Download: Open-source maps of California's emergency medical agencies

ben.welsh@latimes.com

robert.lopez@latimes.com

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Digital Social Visibility: How Facebook Gifts Change Our Choices

Facebook Gifts rolled out after a two-month beta last week, seamlessly melding social with shopping. Not to be outdone, Amazon recently released its Friends and Family Gifting option with the same kind of social gifting visibility.

For Facebook, another puzzle piece of its business model falls into place. For users, gift giving becomes by default a public rather than private activity: People can now fluidly and visibly give their friends holiday presents ranging from iTunes cards to Chandon champagne.

For our culture, however, an era of subtlety and “secret” Santa gives way to the era of reality TV. In many ways social gifting shrouds purchasing in a cloak of generosity, since the social streaming context removes the gaucheness of sharing these gifts. Yet these new social features also signal a culture where broadcasting our behaviors – whether gifting or other digitally shared activities – becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out, though: It changes the choices we make, both online and offline.

Lauren Rhue is a doctoral candidate and Arun Sundararajan (@digitalarun) is a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where they conduct research about how digital technologies transform business and society. 

How so? Our research and observations here are based on analyzing visibility behaviors across a range of social platforms over the last three years. Our data includes over 10,000 users who shared more than a million purchases on Blippy across two years, as well as a recent sample of over 1,000 Pinterest users with more than 200,000 connections and close to a million re-pins.

I Anticipate, Therefore I Change

Social influence always seemed to flow from the person who makes the choice, to the people who observe it. But digital visibility reverses the direction and creates a new form of anticipatory influence: What we do is now influenced by the peers who observe us.

We anticipate how people might perceive us or react, and those anticipatory effects change our choices.

Facebook Gifts, for example, might make us think twice about and possibly revise our shopping lists. Because our gifts aren’t just between us and our loved ones anymore: They become part of our social Timelines, our online personas. They’re the future digital ghosts of our Christmas pasts.

Social psychologists have long documented how introducing passive audience observers into situations affects athletic performance, productivity, decision times, memory recall, and even the sunny-ness of our smiles. Interestingly, modifying what one does in response to an audience isn’t simply a socially learned human trait: Similar behavior has also been recognized in non-human species ranging from Budgerigars birds to peacocks to Siamese fighting fish.

So these audience effects are primal; they’re deeply ingrained in who we are. The underlying behavior we’re witnessing now isn’t new. Rather, social technologies are creating a broader and more visible digital public persona by letting us choose our audiences; expanding the audience beyond the individual or an intimate few; making the audience persistent; and transcending the constraints of space and time.

Consider maverick economist Thorsten Veblen‘s theory of conspicuous consumption, which formalized the idea that we make some of our purchases – particularly luxury goods – to advertise economic power and gain social status. Velben wrote his masterpiece “The Theory of the Leisure Class” over a century ago, when we could not transport our real-world social networks across all of our purchasing, gifting, and other consuming sites and moments.

But we no longer need physical and temporal co-location to realize the benefits of being conspicuous. We can now name-drop our Prada bag purchase or dinner at Masa instantly via a data trail or an Instagram picture … or through a Facebook gift in our stream.

Our audience might not be online when we do this, but they’ll probably see it tomorrow, next week, or maybe even next year.

Are You There, Audience? It’s Me, Social

Of course, the audience only matters if it’s actually there. But we don’t really know how many people see what we post on Facebook, which friends are online when, or what fraction of daily incoming tweets our followers actually notice.

This audience uncertainty is due to the absence of any real surroundings, environmental factors, and tactile cues for situating our digital visibility. These are the kinds of familiar cues that, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, shape our presentation in face-to-face settings.

One way of dealing with this audience uncertainty is to picture the group toward which we aim our shares, from whom we seek to maximize approval (or minimize disapproval): our imagined audience. When you buy your favorite employee a cool Facebook gift this holiday, it’s not just the gift recipient audience you’re playing to – you’re also orienting your largesse to other colleagues and maybe your boss too.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out: It changes the choices we make.

The trouble is, you might get the audience wrong. Your audience might instead end up being your spouse or your employee’s significant other, who could misinterpret the intent of your gift. The fissure between imagined and realized audiences can lead to conflict or the feeling that our privacy has been compromised — even though our intent was social.

This is an example of context collapse: facing multiple and unknown contexts for each of our online shares. It’s the result of having a variety of relationships (including those whittled down to just “Facebook friendships”) with competing social norms on the same platform, along with the online data trails that persist long after we leave them.

Digital social visibility is therefore a double-edged sword: As we transcend the boundaries of physical space and time, we also give up the familiar anchors and cues provided in our face-to-face interactions.

How then do people deal with context collapse? By focusing on the small fraction of our network that does provide visible acknowledgement or cues in the form of likes, re-pins, and votes.

Context collapse is the result of having a variety of relationships with competing social norms on the same platform

The problem is that this approach, however, is that it also changes the products we buy. Our research reveals that people buy more in the categories of products for which they get more feedback.

We’re just beginning to understand the phenomenon of image management as commerce and networks merge. The implications are many: for advertising (how should businesses surface choices for gifting?), for measuring influence (Klout doesn’t even begin to capture tacit persuasiveness and cues), for privacy (losing contextual integrity of our shares); and more.

But for us as individuals, the implications go beyond just buying and gifting. Luxury purchases are only one aspect of conspicuous consumption; individual taste-based goods and services are another. You’ll soon – if you’re not already – spend more time hanging out at hip restaurants or rock concerts, monster car rallies or museums, benefit dinners or book readings. Not just because you want to … but because you’ll detract from your digital visible image if you don’t.

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‘So You Think You Can Dance’ Hoofs It Into a 10th Season

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Put on your dancing shoes; “So You Think You Can Dance” has been given a 10th season, Fox said Thursday.

Auditions for the upcoming season will begin January 18 in Austin, Texas, before moving on to Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles and Memphis.

Fox’s president of alternative programming Mike Darnell praised “SYTYCD” creator Nigel Lythgoe in announcing the renewal.

“I couldn’t be more proud of the amazing work that Nigel and the entire ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ team has done over the past nine seasons,” Darnell said. “This show is truly one of the most compelling series on television and I can’t wait to bring it back for Season 10.”

Last season, the series underwent a format shakeup after Fox cut the show from two nights a week to one, eliminating the results shows.

Fox did not say when the new season of “So You Think You Can Dance” will premiere.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Your Money: Walking the Tightrope on Mental Health Coverage

Insurance covers more mental health care than many people may realize, and more people will soon have the kind of health insurance that does so. But coverage goes only so far when there aren’t enough practitioners who accept it — or there aren’t any nearby, or they aren’t taking any new patients.

In the days after the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, parents and politicians took to the airwaves to make broad-based proclamations about the sorry state of mental health care in America. But a closer look reveals a more nuanced view, with a great deal of recent legislative progress as well as plenty of infuriating coverage gaps.

The stakes in any census of mental health insurance coverage are high given how many people are suffering. Twenty-six percent of adults experience a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year, and 6 percent of all adults experience a seriously debilitating mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Twenty-one percent of teenagers experience a severe emotional disturbance between the ages of 13 and 18.

According to this year’s Society for Human Resource Management survey of 550 employers of all sizes, including nonprofits and government entities, 85 percent offer at least some mental health insurance coverage. A 2009 Mercer survey found that 84 percent of employers with more than 500 employees covered both in-network and out-of-network mental health and substance abuse treatments.

For now, some people who have no health insurance or who buy it on their own may avoid purchasing mental health coverage too, or may avoid seeking treatment for things like addiction or depression. This happens for many of the same reasons that there has historically been less mental health coverage than there has been for other illnesses. The earliest objections among insurance providers and employers had to do with whether mental disorders existed at all, according to Howard Goldman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland school of medicine. Then there were questions about whether treatment actually worked. Next, concerns arose over cost and how often people would avail themselves of costly mental health treatments.

But a subset of adults who have good insurance coverage still avoid treatment for mental illness to this day, according to Edward A. Kaplan, senior vice president and national practice leader for the Segal Company, a benefits consultant that works with many unions. “Culturally, a lot of people driving trucks don’t believe in it and suffer through,” he said. “And a lot of transport unions don’t trust employers and think they will look at it and use it to retaliate against the workers.”

For many of the people who do have mental health coverage, there is now a bit more of it at a lower cost than there might have been five years ago, even if mental health insurance over all remains much less generous than it was many years ago when employees did not pay as much out of pocket. That’s because a 2008 federal law requires employers with more than 50 employees that do offer mental health coverage to have no more restrictions than there are for physical injuries or surgery, and no higher costs.

This so-called parity bill now applies to a crucial provision of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Insurance plans in the exchanges that will offer health coverage to millions of uninsured individuals starting in 2014 must cover many items and services, including mental health disorders and substance abuse.

The combination of parity and expanded care is crucial, according to Anthony Wright, the executive director of Health Access, a consumer advocacy organization in California. After all, parity doesn’t do much good if the mental health coverage need only be equivalent to a meager health insurance plan that covers very little.

Then again, what good is parity in mental health insurance if you can’t get the treatment you need? Plenty of psychiatrists in private practice accept no insurance at all, though it is not clear how many; their professional organizations claim to have no recent or decent data on the percentage of people in private practice who take cash on the barrelhead, write people a receipt and send them off to their insurance company to request out-of-network reimbursement if they have any at all.

According to a 2008 American Psychological Association survey, 85 percent of the 2,200 respondents who said they worked at least part time in private practice received at least some third-party payments for their services. That doesn’t mean they take your insurance, though.

Nor does it guarantee that they or other mental health practitioners are anywhere near you or have any imminent openings for appointments. This can be a challenge for people who live far from major cities or big medical centers and need treatment for mental illnesses like severe depression or schizophrenia or disorders like autism.

But it is a particular problem for parents of autistic children who need specialized treatment that is relatively new or that not many people are trained to do. Amanda Griffiths, who lives in Carlisle, Pa., and is the mother of two autistic boys, called 17 providers within two hours of her home before finding one who was qualified to evaluate her younger son and was accepting new patients his age.

“No amount of insurance is going to magically make a provider appear,” she said.

And it remains a struggle to persuade insurance companies and employers to cover treatment that is new or expensive, even if it’s likely to be effective. Ira Burnim, legal director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, points to something called assertive community treatment, a team-based approach that has proved useful for adults with severe mental illness and holds promise for children, too. There, the challenge is to define what kinds of interaction with a patient outside of an office setting is billable and write rules for coverage.

Autistic children can benefit from an intensive treatment called applied behavior analysis, but many insurance companies haven’t wanted to cover what can be a $60,000 or $70,000 annual cost. They claim that the treatment, which can include intensive one-on-one interaction and assistance with both basic and more complex skills, is either too experimental or an educational service that schools should provide. This can be a tricky area for parents to navigate, because it isn’t always clear which part of an overall health insurance policy ought to cover various possible treatments.

A law school professor named Lorri Unumb faced a bill that big several years ago when her son Ryan was found to be autistic and she discovered that her insurance would not pay for treatment. After moving to South Carolina and meeting families there who had not been able to afford the therapy, she spent two years persuading state legislators to pass a law that forced insurance companies to pay for the treatment. “I did not really know how to write a bill,” she said. “I had watched ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ before, and that was kind of my inspiration and guidance.”

Autism Speaks, a national advocacy organization, saw what she accomplished and hired her to barnstorm the country in an effort to get similar laws passed. There are now 32 states that have them, though there’s a crucial catch: they don’t apply to the many large employers who pool their own resources in so-called self-funded insurance plans.

If you work in such a company, it may be up to you to lobby your human resources department to cover applied behavioral analysis or whatever mental health therapy you or your child may need. Sometimes a personal appeal will succeed; Mr. Kaplan, the benefits consultant, noted that when a parent called about a child, an employer might be particularly sensitive.

But a part of Ms. Unumb’s job these days is to assist parents with appeals where employers have said no or appear likely to. She has accompanied parents to meetings with their human resources departments all over the country to request that the employer expand coverage for everyone. She has a 115-page presentation that she draws on, pointing out that at its core, autism is a medical condition diagnosed by a doctor, the very thing health insurance is supposed to cover.

At $60,000 or more annually for children with particularly acute treatment needs, the coverage does not come cheaply. But Autism Speaks estimates that that expense, spread over thousands of employees, raises premium costs 31 cents a month.

Ms. Unumb notes that for many autistic children, intensive early intervention can allow them to function in mainstream classrooms and prevent a host of problems there and once they finish school. “You pay for it now or you pay for it later,” she said. “And you pay for it a lot more if you choose later, in more ways than just financial.”

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GOP lawmakers challenge plan to correct diplomatic security flaws

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans on Thursday challenged the Obama administration's plan for correcting flaws exposed by the deadly attacks on the U.S. mission in Libya, pressing for an overhaul of its approach to security and probing to discover what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top officials knew before the attacks.

Three days after an independent investigative panel delivered a stinging report on the department's failures in Benghazi, Libya, GOP lawmakers in open hearings demanded to know why State Department officials had not done more to protect the mission when they were clearly aware that militant attacks on Western targets had been increasing all year.

Republican lawmakers didn't appear to open any unexplored areas for investigation, however. And with a number of GOP lawmakers not showing up for the hearings, it appeared that an issue that has been a major focus of conservatives' efforts since fall may be losing steam.

The Benghazi attacks Sept. 11 killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans and set in motion a broad reexamination of how the State Department protects its 275 posts around the world.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) asked Clinton's deputies, William J. Burns and Thomas R. Nides, why the secretary hadn't sought to shift money to better protect the Benghazi mission, given the stream of violent incidents in the city and warnings from lower-level U.S. officials.

"Why did [Clinton] never ask for … any change of resources to make sure Benghazi was secure? Why did that not happen?" Corker asked at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "I cannot imagine that we had people out there with the lack of security.... What I saw in the report is a department that has sclerosis."

Administration officials have accepted the conclusion of the investigative panel that security arrangements were deeply flawed, and they have sought to show they are taking the initiative on the issue, which has the potential to affect Clinton's legacy as she prepares to leave office.

State Department officials have embraced all 29 reform proposals recommended by the Accountability Review Board and have removed from their jobs — but not the department — four officials with some responsibility for diplomatic security in Libya. They are asking Congress for more money and reallocating funds to pay for additional Marine guards, civilian security personnel and physical security improvements.

Burns acknowledged that "we did not do a good enough job … in trying to connect the dots" amid signs of mounting danger.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said the board's report "places a lot of the blame on lower-level officials" and asked how aware Clinton and top aides were of the concerns about the militant threat in Libya.

Burns said there were memos circulating among Clinton and top aides discussing the "deteriorating security situation in Libya." But he said he was not aware of any paper flow to the top level that discussed lower-level officials' requests for greater security funding in Benghazi.

The Republicans rejected arguments by administration officials and their Democratic supporters that part of the problem was the tight budget for diplomatic security, which House Republicans reduced last year. They called instead for a shift of money from lower-priority items.

At an afternoon hearing, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), said the problem was "misplaced priorities." She said the department was "lavishing" money on projects such as a "culinary diplomacy partnership" that sends American chefs around the world, and efforts to slow climate change.

The hearings probably would have drawn more lawmakers if Clinton had testified, as originally planned. But Clinton asked Saturday to be excused because she suffered a concussion in a fall last week. She plans to testify in mid-January, Ros-Lehtinen said.

The State Department said Wednesday night that three officials who had been criticized by the investigative board were giving up their jobs and that Eric Boswell, head of the Diplomatic Security bureau, agreed to resign. The three others were "relieved of their current duties" and have been "placed on administrative leave pending further action," a department statement said.

The statement didn't identify the three, but other officials said they include Charlene Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary in the Diplomatic Security bureau, and Raymond Maxwell, a deputy assistant secretary in the Near Eastern Affairs bureau.

paul.richter@latimes.com

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Net Neutrality, Data-Cap Legislation Lands in Senate

A proposal forbidding internet service providers from turning the data-cap meter off to grant a so-called internet fast lane to preferential online services was introduced Thursday in the Senate.

The bill by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) comes a week after a report found that the institutionalization of data caps by ISPs is geared toward profiteering rather than the stated goal of managing traffic congestion.

“A covered internet service provider may not, for purposes of measuring data usage or otherwise, provide preferential treatment of data that is based on the source or the content of the data,” (.pdf) Wyden’s bill reads.

Ars Technica noted that Comcast had not counted its Xbox video-streaming app against its data caps. Comcast, however, no longer enforces its data caps.

“Data caps create challenges for consumers and run the risk of undermining innovation in the digital economy if they are imposed bluntly and not designed to truly manage network congestion,” Wyden said in a statement.

Among other things, the proposal demands a standardized method for measuring data and also questions data caps altogether. That’s because it grants the Federal Communications Commission with regulatory power over data-cap pricing.

“The commission shall evaluate a data cap proposed by an internet service provider to determine whether the data cap functions to reasonably limit network congestion in a manner that does not unnecessarily discourage use of the internet,” according to the proposal.

That means internet companies might have to explain why the caps are imposed at low-traffic times, such as in the middle of the night.

The proposal was immediately applauded by the digital rights group Public Knowledge.

“Data caps create an artificial scarcity in the broadband market that limits consumer choice and hinders the creation of new competitive content online,” Christopher Lewis, the group’s vice president, said in a statement.

For the moment, the proposal is going nowhere as lawmakers are expected to adjourn for the year in the coming days.

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Twitter post offers clue to The Civil Wars’ future

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — While there still remain questions about the future of The Civil Wars, there’s new music on the way.

Joy Williams, one half of the Grammy Award-winning duo with John Paul White, said Thursday during a Twitter chat that she was in the studio listening to new Civil Wars songs.

It’s a tantalizing clue to the future of the group, which appeared in doubt when a European tour unraveled last month due to “irreconcilable differences.”

At the time, the duo said it hoped to release an album in 2013. It’s not clear if Williams was referring Thursday to music for a new album or for a documentary score they have composed with T Bone Burnett. They’re also set to release an “Unplugged” session on iTunes on Jan. 15.

Nate Yetton, the group’s manager and Williams’ husband, had no comment — though he has supplied a few hints of his own by posting pictures of recording sessions on his Instagram account recently. The duo announced last summer it would be working with Charlie Peacock, who produced its gold-selling debut “Barton Hollow.” The photos do not show Williams or White, but one includes violin player Odessa Rose.

Rose says in an Instagram post: “Playing on the new Civil Wars record… Beautiful sounds.”

Even with its future in doubt, the duo continues to gather accolades. Williams and White are up for a Golden Globe on Jan. 13, and two Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, for their “The Hunger Games” soundtrack collaboration “Safe & Sound” with Taylor Swift.

Williams’ comments came during an installment of an artist interview series with Alison Sudol of A Fine Frenzy sponsored by The Recording Academy.

___

Online:

http://thecivilwars.com

___

Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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Robert H. Bork, pivotal figure in Supreme Court history, dies at 85

Robert H. Bork, the conservative legal champion whose bitter defeat for a Supreme Court seat in 1987 politicized the confirmation process and changed the court's direction for decades, died Wednesday. He was 85.

The former Yale law professor and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit died at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va., from complications of heart disease, said his son Robert H. Bork Jr.

A revered figure on the right, Bork inspired a generation of conservatives with his critiques of the liberal-dominated high court in the 1960s and '70s. In speeches, law reviews and op-ed articles, Bork argued that the liberal justices were abusing their power and remaking American life by ending prayers in public schools, extending new rights to criminals, ordering cross-town busing for desegregation and striking down laws on birth control, abortion and the death penalty. Bork said the Constitution, as originally written, left these matters to the wishes of the majority.

Bork was more than a legal theorist. He was also a highly regarded constitutional lawyer. When he served as U.S. solicitor general under Presidents Nixon and Ford, the Supreme Court justices praised Bork as one of the finest advocates they had ever seen.

As solicitor general, he served as a footnote to the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon. In what became known as "the Saturday Night Massacre," the embattled chief executive ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox because he had demanded Nixon's secret White House tapes. The attorney general and then the deputy attorney general resigned rather than carry out the order. Bork, who was then in the No. 3 post as solicitor general, carried out the order and fired Cox.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Bork's name rose to the top of the list of potential court nominees. Reagan aspired to transform the Supreme Court, and Bork, then teaching law at Yale, was offered a seat on the Court of Appeals in Washington. It was seen as a stepping stone to the high court.

But it turned into a long wait for Bork.

Reagan chose Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981, fulfilling a campaign promise to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. A fateful moment came in 1986 when a second seat became vacant. Reagan and his advisors passed over Bork for his younger colleague, then-Judge Antonin Scalia, who won a unanimous confirmation in a Senate still under Republican control.

Bork's time finally came in the summer of 1987 when Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote on the closely divided court, announced his retirement. By then, however, the Democrats had taken control of the Senate, and Reagan had been weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal.

On July 1, 1987, Reagan introduced the burly, bearded Judge Bork as his nominee, but within an hour the president's words were drowned out by a fierce attack from Capitol Hill led by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, [and] rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids," Kennedy said. No one could remember such a harsh assault on a president's court nominee, and it set the tone for a campaign-style attack that lasted into the fall.

Bork gave the Democrats plenty of ammunition, however.

As a Yale professor in 1963, he had condemned the pending civil rights bill that would have given blacks an equal right to be served in hotels, restaurants and other public places across the nation. He called this a threat to individual freedom, and he advised Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, to cast a "no" vote against what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bork wrote critically of the Voting Rights Act and various school desegregation measures. He also denounced the court's "right to privacy" rulings that led to the Roe vs. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman's right to have an abortion.

When Bork made his case before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he faced a hostile majority of Democrats, including its new chairman, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. Because of his long "paper trail," Bork had no choice but to try to explain his views. He did so, at length, but he did not win over many converts. And viewers watching on television told pollsters they saw the stiff, scowling judge as an intimidating figure. Bork helped his opponents paint a portrait of him as a nominee who was more attuned to legal theory than to doing justice. When asked why he wanted to serve on the nation's highest court, Bork told one senator the job would be "an intellectual feast."

When the hearings ended, the Reagan White House knew Bork could not be confirmed. But the judge refused to withdraw, and the Senate rejected his nomination on a 58-42 vote.

Conservatives were furious, insisting that partisan attacks had maligned the reputation of one of the most accomplished jurists to come before the Senate. The phrase "to bork" became shorthand for inflicting a harsh, unfair public attack. Liberals and Democrats countered that Bork went down to defeat because most Americans did not share his views.

But no one disputed that the Bork battle changed how presidents choose nominees and how the Senate debates them. In the wake of Bork's defeat, presidential legal advisors looked for judicial nominees who had said or written little on the major legal controversies. In 1990, for example, President George H.W. Bush chose a little-known New Hampshire judge for the Supreme Court because his views were unknown. Justice David H. Souter easily won confirmation, but then surprised his Republican backers when he became a reliable liberal on the court.

Court nominees after Bork refused to follow his tack of seeking to explain his views in answer to questions from senators, instead choosing to duck them. Bork's defeat also had a profound and lasting impact on the Supreme Court itself. Had Bork won confirmation, the court's conservative bloc, led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, would have had a majority to overturn Roe vs. Wade as well as the strict ban on school-sponsored prayers and invocations. Instead, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Reagan nominee who eventually filled Powell's seat, cast a deciding vote in 1992 to preserve the right to abortion and the ban on school prayers. Kennedy has also been a strong foe of laws that discriminate against gays and lesbians, and he is seen as holding the decisive vote in the upcoming cases involving same-sex marriage.

Bork's influence on conservative legal thought was also lasting. In the 1970s, he was among the first to argue for interpreting the Constitution based on its "original intent," an idea that was later championed by Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas.

As a scholar of antitrust law, Bork helped fundamentally change the thinking behind the law. He criticized those who targeted "big" businesses as monopolies and said antitrust law should focus instead on the welfare of consumers. At Yale, students joked that Bork taught "pro-trust," not antitrust. But his views are now widely accepted.

Bork stepped down from the bench a year after his Senate defeat, and he wrote several books renewing his criticism of liberalism. In the last year, he served as a chairman of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's advisory committee on the judiciary and the courts.

Scalia praised Bork as "one of the most influential legal scholars of the past 50 years. His impact on legal thinking in the fields of antitrust and constitutional law was profound and lasting. More important for the final accounting, he was a good man and a loyal citizen."

Bork was born in Pittsburgh on March 1, 1927, and served in the Marines. He graduated from the University of Chicago and its law school and worked as a lawyer in New York and Chicago before joining the Yale faculty in 1962.

His first wife, Claire Davidson, died in 1980. He married Mary Ellen Bork, a former nun, in 1982. She survives him, along with three children from his first marriage, sons Robert and Charles Bork and daughter Ellen Bork, and two grandchildren.

david.savage@latimes.com

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Patent Office to Review Apple's Document-Scrolling Patent

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has ruled that a patent that’s central to the epic Apple v. Samsung intellectual property lawsuit is subject to reexamination, which could lead to portions of the patent — but probably not all of it — being invalidated.

Patent No. 7,844,915, referred to as the ’915 patent, covers document scrolling. The patent office rejected all 21 claims of the patent, which means it is up for scrutiny — but it is unlikely that the patent would be invalidated in its entirety. Eighty-nine percent of patents subject to reexamination survive in some form or another, Brian Love, an assistant professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, has told Wired.

Just last week another Apple patent holding, a multi-touch related patent dubbed the “Steve Jobs” patent, was also tentatively invalidated. We saw the same thing in October with Apple’s so-called “rubber-banding patent.” In each case, the patent is merely being reexamined.

However, should a patent examiner determine a patent is invalid, it could have a significant effect on the damages Samsung owes Apple in the Apple v. Samsung case — a jury trial determined that 19 Samsung smartphones violated this particular patent. Judge Koh has already denied Apple a permanent injunction against infringing Samsung devices.

Samsung submitted the filing to Judge Lucy Koh as part of ongoing post-trial decisions in the two companies’ multi-faceted intellectual property battles. If the patent survives, but adjustments need to be made in order for it to be valid, it’s also bad news for Apple.

“If Apple has to amend its claims to salvage the patent, it will not be able to recover damages for allegedly infringing activity that took place before the patent was amended,” Love told Wired December 7. In layman’s terms: Samsung would still be off the hook for this patent in Apple v. Samsung.

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Leah Remini sued by former managers over “Family Tools” commissions

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Leah Remini‘s new TV gig is already giving her a headache, months before it even starts. Former “King of Queens” star Remini is being sued by her former managers, the Collective Management Group, which claims that it’s owed $ 67,000 in commissions relating to her upcoming ABC comedy “Family Tools,” which debuts May 1.

In a complaint filed with Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, the Collective says that it entered into an agreement with the actress in November 2011 that guaranteed the company 10 percent of the earnings that emerged from projects that Remini “discussed, negotiated, contemplated, or procured/booked during Plaintiff’s representation of Remini,” regardless of whether the income was earned after she and the Collective parted ways.

According to the lawsuit, that would include the $ 1 million that it says Remini will earn for the first season of “Family Tools.” (The suit allows that it isn’t owed commission on a $ 330,000 talent holding fee that Remini received from ABC prior to officially being booked on the show.)

Remini, pictured above wearing the self-satisfied smirk of someone who just might stiff her former managers out of their commission, terminated her agreement with the Collective “without warning or justification” in October, the suit says.

Alleging breach of oral contract among other charges, the suit is asking for an order stipulating that it’s owed the $ 67,000, plus unspecified damages, interest and court costs.

Remini’s agent has not yet responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.

(Pamela Chelin contributed to this report)

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Adding to Rules for Online Privacy

In a move intended to give parents greater control over data collected about their children online, federal regulators on Wednesday broadened longstanding privacy safeguards covering children’s mobile apps and Web sites. Members of the Federal Trade Commission said they updated the rules to keep pace with the growing use of mobile phones and tablets by children.

The regulations also reflect innovations like voice recognition technology, global positioning systems and behavior-based online advertising, or ads tailored to an individual Internet user.

Regulators had not significantly changed the original rule, based on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or Coppa. That rule required operators of Web sites directed at children under 13 to notify parents and obtain their permission before collecting or sharing personal information — like first and last names, phone numbers, home addresses or e-mail addresses — from children.

The intent of that was to give parents control over entities seeking to collect information about their children so that parents could, among other things, prevent unwanted contact by strangers.

The new rule, unveiled at a news conference in Washington, significantly expands the types of companies required to obtain parental permission before knowingly collecting personal details from children, as well as the types of information that will require parental consent to collect.

Jon D. Leibowitz, the chairman of the trade commission, described the rule revision as a major advance for children’s privacy. “Congress enacted Coppa in the desktop era and we live in an era of smartphones and mobile marketing,” Mr. Leibowitz said. “This is a landmark update of a seminal piece of legislation.”

The agency’s expanded privacy protections for children also represent the first step in a larger effort by a few regulators and legislators to give adult consumers some rights to control data collected about them.

“The Coppa rule revisions which we are announcing today are a critical piece in our overall approach to how we deal with consumer privacy in this technological age,” said Julie Brill, a member of the commission.

Industry analysts said the new rule represented a partial victory for Web site operators, app developers and advertising networks because regulators watered down some of their original proposals to which companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter had objected. Apple and Google, for example, opposed proposals that suggested they would be responsible for the data collected by children’s apps sold in their app stores. Regulators have now clarified that general-interest app stores would not be held liable for that.

Yet, few companies lent any support to the commission at its news conference; Viacom and Disney sent representatives, but other companies were absent.

“What we’ve got here is an expansion of Coppa that some in the industry would say has gone too far,” said Alan Friel, a lawyer who leads the media and technology practice at the firm of Edwards Wildman Palmer. “But the F.T.C. has provided exceptions that continue to allow internal use of a child’s data, including one-time use of contact information for facilitating promotions and send-a-friend e-mails.”

In an era of widespread photo sharing, video chatting and location-based apps, the revised children’s privacy rule makes clear that companies must obtain parental consent before collecting certain details that could be used to identify, contact or locate a child. These include photos, video and audio as well as the location of a child’s mobile device.

While the new rule strengthens such safeguards, it could also disrupt online advertising. Web sites and online advertising networks often use persistent identification systems — like a cookie in a person’s browser, the unique serial number on a mobile phone, or the I.P. address of a computer — to collect information about a user’s online activities and tailor ads for that person.

The new rule expands the definition of personal information to include persistent IDs if they are used to show a child behavior-based ads. It also requires third parties like ad networks and social networks that know they are operating on children’s sites to notify and obtain consent from parents before collecting such personal information. And it makes children’s sites responsible for notifying parents about data collection by third parties integrated into their services.

Collecting data to show children contextual ads based on the content of a site or app, however, will not require parental consent. “The only limit we place is on behavioral advertising,” Mr. Leibowitz said. “Until and unless you get parental consent, you may not track children to create massive profiles” for behavior-based ads.

Stuart P. Ingis, a lawyer representing several marketing associations, said that reputable online marketers did not knowingly profile children to show them behavior-based ads. He added that industry guidelines prohibited the practice.

He agreed with regulators that privacy protections for children online needed to keep pace with new technologies. But he said he was concerned that the restrictions on cookie-based identifiers might cause some children’s sites to reduce their use of ad networks to avoid having to notify parents about data collection by those services.

“There might be overreaction that would limit just general third-party collection of data, which is very useful to businesses and consumers,” said Mr. Ingis, who represents the Direct Marketing Association and the Association of National Advertisers.

The revised rule also clarifies requirements for sites that are not primarily directed at young children but whose audience may include them, like a Disney family site, for example. Those sites can now screen visitors by age, but they will be required to obtain permission from a parent to collect personal data about children under 13.

Children’s advocates generally welcomed the strengthened protections.

“Clearly, this is a major step forward, but the devil is in the details,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, an advocacy group in Washington.

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Two more funerals in Newtown; NRA responds to school massacre

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Two more of the children killed by a gunman who invaded a Connecticut elementary school were buried on Tuesday as officials released new details of the deadly spree that has reshaped the debate over gun control.

The National Rifle Assn., which has been under pressure to comment on the Newtown shootings, broke its silence and issued a statement saying it was ready to offer its plans at a Friday news conference.

“We were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown,” said the pro-gun rights lobbying group, which has repeatedly fought gun-control legislation on the national, state and local levels. “The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.”

PHOTOS: Mourning after the massacre

Both funerals were held at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, which has been one of the centers for consoling the bereaved and for memorial services that began Friday evening, hours after Adam Lanza opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Primarily using a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle, Lanza killed 20 children and six adults in the school before turning a handgun on himself, authorities said. The rampage began Friday morning when Lanza killed his mother, Nancy, in the home they shared.

Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the state’s chief medical examiner, told reporters on Tuesday that Nancy Lanza was shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. She was most likely asleep when she was killed, Carver said, according to the Hartford Courant.

After shooting his mother, Adam Lanza took her car and several of her guns and went to the school, where he forcibly entered and opened fire. The Bushmaster and two handguns were later recovered from the building and a shotgun was found in the car, officials said.

Sandy Hook Elementary remains closed, most likely for months, as investigators continue their work seeking to understand why Lanza did what he did. The hundreds of students at the school are being relocated to a school in nearby Monroe, Conn.

In the rain and cold Tuesday, other Newtown students returned to their schools where teachers were prepared to help them cope with the massacre. Campuses also had a sizable police presence to reassure parents.

One Newtown school, Head O'Meadow Elementary, was locked down Tuesday due to an unspecified threat. The principal told parents to keep their children home, according to a letter from the principal published by WFSB-TV. Police have said they will deal harshly with hoaxes and threats, including two directed over the weekend at St. Rose.

The first funeral Tuesday morning was for James Mattioli, 6. In what has become an ongoing sight, mourners kept their heads down and walked quickly into the building, and refused to comment. The families have repeatedly asked for privacy for their grief, a position backed by local police.

James' funeral was the first of eight to be held at the church. By noon, flowers for the second service, for Jessica Rekos, also 6, had begun to arrive.

James has been described by family members as a budding “numbers guy.” Jessica was a horse enthusiast who wanted cowgirl boots for Christmas, relatives told reporters.

A wake was scheduled Tuesday night for slain teacher Victoria Soto. Police were to be part of an honor guard for Soto, who died trying to protect her students by getting them into a closet and putting her body between the gunman and her charges.

The shootings have reopened the debate on gun-control laws, specifically whether to renew the expired national ban on assault weapons. President Obama has asked his staff to come up with proposals, though no time frame for action has been given. Even staunch pro-gun rights lawmakers have also called for reopening discussion on some bans.

ALSO:

'Puppies for Rent' business in Utah sparks criticism

L.A. girls pay tribute in visit, but Newtown is a day of hearses

'No, no, no': Harrowing 911 call, then 4 dead near Longmont, Colo.

Susman reported from Newtown, Conn., and Muskal from Los Angeles.

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Army Says This General Sexually Abused an Officer, Then Threatened Her Career

An Army general isn’t just accused of sexually assaulting a female subordinate. According to newly released military documents, the one-star general ”threaten[ed] to use his rank, position, and authority to damage or ruin [the captain's] military career if she ended their sexual relationship.” And he disobeyed a direct order from his superior officer to leave the female officer alone.

Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, the former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, “received a lawful command from Major General (O-8) James L. Huggins,” then Sinclair’s superior officer, to cease contact with an unnamed female Army captain that Sinclair stands accused of sodomizing “without [her] consent.” That’s according to Sinclair’s official charge sheet, which Danger Room has acquired. Sinclair “attempt[ed] to willfully disobey the same by calling her cell phone” in March 2012. That attempted contact occurred after Sinclair allegedly sexually abused the captain.

It is unclear from the charge sheet if Huggins knew that Sinclair had forced himself on the captain, who apparently maintained a sexual relationship with Sinclair for years. Huggins recently completed a tour as the 82nd’s commanding officer and commander of U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan. He is slated for a promotion to lieutenant general.

On Tuesday, officials at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, announced that Sinclair will definitely face a court-martial on charges of forcible sodomy, sexual misconduct, conduct unbecoming an officer, and other charges. Sinclair’s arraignment at Fort Bragg is scheduled for Jan. 22.

According to the charge sheet, the married Sinclair displayed “pornographic and sexually explicit photographs and movies” while serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan; used his government charge card for personal uses; and carried “inappropriate relationship[s]” with at least two other female officers, one a major and the other a lieutenant. The charge sheet does not accuse Sinclair of abusing those officers.

Sinclair is also charged with covering up his abuse of the female captain. In March of 2012, while he was serving in Kandahar, the charge sheet alleges Sinclair “wrongfully endeavor[ed]] to impede an investigation in the case of himself, by deleting nude photographs” and the e-mail account that either sent or received them.

As has been previously reported, when criticized for using “derogatory and demeaning words to refer to female staff officers,” Sinclair allegedly responded, “I’m a general, I’ll say whatever the [redacted] I want,” according to the charge sheet, which calls that “conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman.” The female captain allegedly abused by Sinclair testified at a pre-trial hearing at Fort Bragg in November.

Secrecy has surrounded the Sinclair case since it became public in September that Sinclair faced potential prosecution. It’s unusual for the sheet listing the charges facing an accused servicemember to be delayed for so long. Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, told Danger Room in November that it smelled of favoritism shown to a general officer that an enlisted soldier wouldn’t enjoy. The Army insists that’s flat wrong.

“We did not initially release the charge sheets because the Article 32 investigating officer needed to decide if the evidence presented was sufficient to bring forward to the General Court Martial Convening authority for his action,” says Col. Kevin Arata, the spokesman for the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. “Now that the GCMCA has made a decision on those charges, and the accused is being arraigned, we know explicitly what charges are being referred against the accused, thus the release of the redacted charge sheets at this time.”

Gary Solis, a military law scholar at Georgetown University, considers that a credible explanation. “There is much to criticize, when it comes to public access to disciplinary matters denied by the military, but this is not such a case,” Solis tells Danger Room. “To have publicly announced un-investigated charges in the case of a general officer, even this one, would have been a miscarriage of justice, had any of the charges been demonstrated at the 32 to be groundless.”

Davis, unconvinced, adds: “I can’t recall a case where there was public interest where the charges were withheld from public disclosure until after the Convening Authority decided to refer the case to trial.”

Sinclair is one of a number of prominent generals whose ethical lapses have prompted Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to launch an inquiry into whether the military needs to review its ethics training. (Dempsey’s initial findings, delivered last Friday, are that general and flag officers could benefit from ethics refreshers.)

But those other generals either misused small amounts of their official salaries for personal benefit, like Army Gen. William “Kip” Ward and Navy Adm. James Stavridis, or may have had “flirtatious” relationships over e-mail, like Marine Gen. John Allen. Sinclair stands accused of sexually assaulting, harassing and humiliating one of the officers under his command. It’s hard to imagine that a general officer needs a refresher course to understand how wrong that is.

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Newsman’s disappearance largely kept secret

NEW YORK (AP) — NBC was able to keep the abduction of chief Middle East correspondent Richard Engel in Syria largely a secret until he escaped late Monday because it persuaded some of this country’s most prominent news organizations to hold back on the story.

Otherwise, the disappearance of Engel — probably the most high-profile international television reporter on a U.S. network — would have been big news.

Engel and three colleagues, producers Ghazi Balkiz and Aziz Akyavas and photographer John Kooistra, escaped during a firefight between rebels and their captors, forces sympathetic to the Syrian government. The journalists were dragged from their cars, kept bound and blindfolded and threatened with death.

NBC said it did not know what had happened to the men until after their escape. The first sign of trouble came last Thursday, when Engel did not check back with his office at an agreed-upon time.

The Associated Press learned of Engel’s disappearance independently and was asked to keep the news quiet upon contacting NBC, said John Daniszewski, the AP’s vice president and senior managing editor.

“A general principle of our reporting is that we don’t want to write stories that are going to endanger the lives of the people that we are writing about,” Daniszewski said. The first few days after an abduction are often crucial to securing the captive’s release.

CBS News also said that it had honored NBC’s request, but a spokeswoman declined to discuss it. ABC, Fox News and CNN were also contacted by NBC.

CNN, in an editor’s note affixed to a website story on Engel’s escape, noted NBC’s request. CNN said it complied to allow fact-finding and negotiations to free the captors before it became a worldwide story.

“Hostage negotiators say that once the global spotlight is on the missing, the hostages’ value soars, making it much harder to negotiate their freedom,” CNN said.

For similar reasons, the AP did not report its own news several years ago when a photographer was kidnapped in the Gaza Strip, securing his release within a day. In one celebrated case of secrecy, The New York Times withheld news that reporter David Rohde was kidnapped while trying to make contact with a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. Rohde escaped after seven months in captivity.

It wasn’t clear whether Engel’s abductors knew what they had at the time. That knowledge, CNN argued, could have greatly complicated any negotiations. In this case, the captors did not make any ransom demands during the time he was missing.

This isn’t simply a professional courtesy; the AP has withheld news involving overseas contractors in the past, Daniszewski said. For similar reasons, the organization does not reveal details of military or police actions it learns about beforehand if the news will put people at risk, and doesn’t write about leaders heading into war zones until they are safely there.

Still, it’s not a decision lightly taken by news organizations. “The obligation of journalists is to report information, not withhold it, except in exceptional circumstances,” said Robert Steele, a journalism ethics professor at DePauw University.

The news that Engel was missing was first reported Monday by Turkish journalists who had heard about Akyavas’ involvement, and was picked up by the U.S. website Gawker.com. In explaining why the news was reported, Gawker’s John Cook wrote that no one had told him of a specific or even general threat to Engel’s safety.

“I would not have written a post if someone had told me that there was a reasonable or even remote suspicion that anything specific would happen if I wrote the post,” Cook wrote.

He also noted that China’s Xinhua News Agency and the Breitbart website had also reported on Engel’s disappearance. Breitbart’s John Nolte attached a note to his report saying that he wasn’t even aware of any news embargo until after hearing that Engel had been released.

The news was also tweeted by a small number of journalists, apparently unaware of the embargo request.

Whether a disappearance has become widely known could influence a decision by AP on whether to withhold the news, Daniszewski said. In this case, it wasn’t clear that it had been widely circulated, he said.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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