Cuomo Bucks Tide With Bill to Lift Abortion Limits

ALBANY — Bucking a trend in which states have been seeking to restrict abortion, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is putting the finishing touches on legislation that would guarantee women in New York the right to late-term abortions when their health is in danger or the fetus is not viable.

Mr. Cuomo, seeking to deliver on a promise he made in his recent State of the State address, would rewrite a law that currently allows abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy only if the pregnant woman’s life is at risk. The law is not enforced, because it is superseded by federal court rulings that allow late-term abortions to protect a woman’s health, even if her life is not in jeopardy. But abortion rights advocates say the existence of the more restrictive state law has a chilling effect on some doctors and prompts some women to leave the state for late-term abortions.

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal, which has not yet been made public, would also clarify that licensed health care practitioners, and not only physicians, can perform abortions. It would remove abortion from the state’s penal law and regulate it through the state’s public health law.

Abortion rights advocates have welcomed Mr. Cuomo’s plan, which he outlined in general terms as part of a broader package of women’s rights initiatives in his State of the State address in January. But the Roman Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups are dismayed; opponents have labeled the legislation the Abortion Expansion Act.

The prospects for Mr. Cuomo’s effort are uncertain. The State Assembly is controlled by Democrats who support abortion rights; the Senate is more difficult to predict because this year it is controlled by a coalition of Republicans who have tended to oppose new abortion rights laws and breakaway Democrats who support abortion rights.

New York legalized abortion in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Mr. Cuomo’s proposal would update the state law so that it could stand alone if the broader federal standard set by Roe were to be undone.

“Why are we doing this? The Supreme Court could change,” said a senior Cuomo administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the governor had not formally introduced his proposal.

But opponents of abortion rights, already upset at the high rate of abortions in New York State, worry that rewriting the abortion law would encourage an even greater number of abortions. For example, they suggest that the provision to allow abortions late in a woman’s pregnancy for health reasons could be used as a loophole to allow unchecked late-term abortions.

“I am hard pressed to think of a piece of legislation that is less needed or more harmful than this one,” the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, wrote in a letter to Mr. Cuomo last month. Referring to Albany lawmakers in a subsequent column, he added, “It’s as though, in their minds, our state motto, ‘Excelsior’ (‘Ever Upward’), applies to the abortion rate.”

National abortion rights groups have sought for years to persuade state legislatures to adopt laws guaranteeing abortion rights as a backup to Roe. But they have had limited success: Only seven states have such measures in place, including California, Connecticut and Maryland; the most recent state to adopt such a law is Hawaii, which did so in 2006.

“Pretty much all of the energy, all of the momentum, has been to restrict abortion, which makes what could potentially happen in New York so interesting,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “There’s no other state that’s even contemplating this right now.”

In most statehouses, the push by lawmakers has been in the opposite direction. The past two years has seen more provisions adopted at the state level to restrict abortion rights than in any two-year period in decades, according to the Guttmacher Institute; last year, 19 states adopted 43 new provisions restricting abortion access, while not a single significant measure was adopted to expand access to abortion or to comprehensive sex education.

“It’s an extraordinary moment in terms of the degree to which there is government interference in a woman’s ability to make these basic health care decisions,” said Andrea Miller, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York. “For New York to be able to send a signal, a hopeful sign, a sense of the turning of the tide, we think is really important.”

Abortion rights advocates say that even though the Roe decision supersedes state law, some doctors are hesitant to perform late-term abortions when a woman’s health is at risk because the criminal statutes remain on the books.

“Doctors and hospitals shouldn’t be reading criminal laws to determine what types of health services they can offer and provide to their patients,” said M. Tracey Brooks, the president of Family Planning Advocates of New York State.

For Mr. Cuomo, the debate over passing a new abortion law presents an opportunity to appeal to women as well as to liberals, who have sought action in Albany without success since Eliot Spitzer made a similar proposal when he was governor. But it also poses a challenge to the coalition of Republicans and a few Democrats that controls the State Senate, the chamber that has in the past stood as the primary obstacle to passing abortion legislation in the capital.

The governor has said that his Reproductive Health Act would be one plank of a 10-part Women’s Equality Act that also would include equal pay and anti-discrimination provisions. Conservative groups, still stinging from the willingness of Republican lawmakers to go along with Mr. Cuomo’s push to legalize same-sex marriage in 2011, are mobilizing against the proposal. Seven thousand New Yorkers who oppose the measure have sent messages to Mr. Cuomo and legislators via the Web site of the New York State Catholic Conference.

A number of anti-abortion groups have also formed a coalition called New Yorkers for Life, which is seeking to rally opposition to the governor’s proposal using social media.

“If you ask anyone on the street, ‘Is there enough abortion in New York?’ no one in their right mind would say we need more abortion,” said the Rev. Jason J. McGuire, the executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, which is part of the coalition.

Members of both parties say that the issue of reproductive rights was a significant one in November’s legislative elections. Democrats, who were bolstered by an independent expenditure campaign by NARAL, credit their victories in several key Senate races in part to their pledge to fight for legislation similar to what Mr. Cuomo is planning to propose.

Republicans, who make up most of the coalition that controls the Senate, have generally opposed new abortion rights measures. Speaking with reporters recently, the leader of the Republicans, Dean G. Skelos of Long Island, strenuously objected to rewriting the state’s abortion laws, especially in a manner similar to what the governor is seeking.

“You could have an abortion up until the day the child would be born, and I think that’s just wrong,” Mr. Skelos said. He suggested that the entire debate was unnecessary, noting that abortion is legal in New York State and saying that is “not going to be changed.”

The Senate Democratic leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, who is the sponsor of a bill that is similar to the legislation the governor is drafting, said she was optimistic that an abortion measure would reach the Senate floor this year.

“New York State’s abortion laws were passed in 1970 in a bipartisan fashion,” she said. “It would be a sad commentary that over 40 years later we could not manage to do the same thing.”

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The Media Equation: In Omaha Manhole Fire Photo, Logging Off in Search of Some Clues

Stephanie Sands

This image, which was taken after an underground fire cut power in half of downtown Omaha, captivated the Web last month.

When photographs of spontaneous events miraculously appear on the Web, it generally prompts two responses: wonder and skepticism.

So it was with an image of exploding manhole covers in Omaha that took over the Web last month. On Sunday, Jan. 27, an underground fire cut power in half of downtown. A vivid photograph of unknown provenance, showing fire shooting out of manholes on a city street, began popping up on Reddit, where it had 1.5 million views, and Gawker.

The photo — an indifferently composed shot of an event that looks very far away — would not win any Pulitzers, but something incredible seems to be under way at the precise moment it was taken. You can almost hear the sequential explosions emanating below the street: boom, boom, boom as flames appear to shoot up from hell itself.

In this age of Photoshop, it wasn’t long before the debates cropped up, on the Web and in Omaha, about the picture’s authenticity.

Matthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, wondered the same thing, and one night found himself in a bar engaged in the real-versus-fake debate. Like many photos on the Web, this one came from everywhere — forwarded, tweeted and blogged — and nowhere — there was no name on the image nor any text to indicate its origin.

Mr. Hansen, intrepid journalist that he is, solved the mystery and wrote a column about it. The photo was real, it turned out, but not in the way people thought. (More on that later.) So, did Mr. Hansen use deep photo analytics or examine metadata to peel back the truth?

Nope. There was a notebook involved, a lawyer, some phone calls, a cursory digital investigation and some street reporting, which included an interview with a man with no pants.

Shoe leather never looked or smelled so good.

Mr. Hansen’s first step in solving what he called the “Great Omaha Manhole Fire Photo of 2013” was to determine from the angle of the photo that it could have been taken from only one apartment building — called the Kensington Tower. He then used an architectural detail to conclude that it was shot from the top floor, on the west side.

He managed to gain entry to the building — that is, he sneaked in — and made his way to the top floor, where he began knocking on doors.

Mr. Hansen found a man named Kenneth who would not let Mr. Hansen in because he was indisposed — he became “Pantsless Kenneth” in the column — but said that he knew the photo in question and thought his neighbor had taken it.

But the neighbor wasn’t home, so Mr. Hansen stuck his business card in the door jamb and left.

When he returned to the office, Mr. Hansen jumped onto Reddit, found the person who had originally posted the photo there and through him found the person, Gwendolyn Olney, who had posted the photo on her Facebook page, the source for the Reddit posting.

Ms. Olney happened to be the associate counsel for The World-Herald. “Omaha is indeed a small town,” Mr. Hansen wrote in his column. He began to follow the pixilated bread crumbs.

“Gwen didn’t take the photo,” he added. “She got it from Rebecca, who didn’t take the photo. She got it from Brandon, who didn’t take the photo. They led me to Gwen’s friend Andrea, who didn’t take the photo, who led me to ... well, she couldn’t remember who she had gotten the photo from.”

Reading the column, you could almost hear his sigh when he wrote, “Dead end.”

Then his phone rang. “I took that photo,” the voice said.

The caller was Stephanie Sands, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She said that the day after she took the photo, which she had no idea had become a sensation, she learned from her friends that a reporter was asking about it.

“I was impressed that he had sneaked upstairs and put a card in my door, so I called him,” she said in an interview by phone.

Ms. Sands agreed to meet Mr. Hansen and told him that she had heard the explosion and took two photos with her phone. She sent one to friends and thought nothing more of it.

“I was actually disappointed in how it turned out,” she told me. “Because I was shooting at a distance with an iPhone, it didn’t really capture the severity of what I saw and heard.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 17, 2013

An earlier version of this column misidentified the author of a profile of Edna Buchanan. The writer was Calvin Trillin, not Gay Talese. 

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Deasy wants 30% of teacher evaluations based on test scores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

howard.blume@latimes.com

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The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many of the carvers know each other from previous competitions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Photos: Bryan Thayer/Speck

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Kate Upton says body shut down after Antarctic bikini shoot

(Reuters) – Swimsuit model Kate Upton said on Tuesday her body shut down after she posed in a skimpy bikini in Antarctica for Sports Illustrated magazine.

Upton, wearing only a white bikini bottom and an unzipped white parka, was picked as the cover girl for the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, unveiled on Monday, for the second consecutive year.

“It was freezing,” Upton, 20, told NBC’s morning TV show “Today” on Tuesday. “I’m from Florida, so it wasn’t easy for me.

“When I came back, I was losing my hearing and eyesight. My body was shutting down because it was working so hard to keep me warm.”

Upton joins celebrity models including Elle Macpherson, Christie Brinkley and Tyra Banks to appear more than once on the swimsuit issue‘s cover.

M.J. Day, a senior editor for Sports Illustrated, told Reuters that Upton braved temperatures as low as 24 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 Celsius) and wind chills as low as -20 Fahrenheit (-29 Celsius).

“We should name a passageway after her down there,” said Day, who accompanied Upton on the frigid shoot. “She braved six days in a bikini while we were head-to-toe in jackets … No one will ever accuse her of being a whiny model, ever.”

This year’s 17 models were part of photo shoots that stretched across all seven continents.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey in Los Angeles; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Mohammad Zargham)

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Livestrong Tattoos as Reminder of Personal Connections, Not Tarnished Brand

As Jax Mariash went under the tattoo needle to have “Livestrong” emblazoned on her wrist in bold black letters, she did not think about Lance Armstrong or doping allegations, but rather the 10 people affected by cancer she wanted to commemorate in ink. It was Jan. 22, 2010, exactly a year since the disease had taken the life of her stepfather. After years of wearing yellow Livestrong wristbands, she wanted something permanent.

A lifelong runner, Mariash got the tattoo to mark her 10-10-10 goal to run the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 10, 2010, and fund-raising efforts for Livestrong. Less than three years later, antidoping officials laid out their case against Armstrong — a lengthy account of his practice of doping and bullying. He did not contest the charges and was barred for life from competing in Olympic sports.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Mariash, of Wilson, Wyo., said of the antidoping officials’ report, released in October, and Armstrong’s subsequent confession to Oprah Winfrey. “When I look at the tattoo now, I just think of living strong, and it’s more connected to the cancer fight and optimal health than Lance.”

Mariash is among those dealing with the fallout from Armstrong’s descent. She is not alone in having Livestrong permanently emblazoned on her skin.

Now the tattoos are a complicated, internationally recognized symbol of both an epic crusade against cancer and a cyclist who stood defiant in the face of accusations for years but ultimately admitted to lying.

The Internet abounds with epidermal reminders of the power of the Armstrong and Livestrong brands: the iconic yellow bracelet permanently wrapped around a wrist; block letters stretching along a rib cage; a heart on a foot bearing the word Livestrong; a mural on a back depicting Armstrong with the years of his now-stripped seven Tour de France victories and the phrase “ride with pride.”

While history has provided numerous examples of ill-fated tattoos to commemorate lovers, sports teams, gang membership and bands that break up, the Livestrong image is a complex one, said Michael Atkinson, a sociologist at the University of Toronto who has studied tattoos.

“People often regret the pop culture tattoos, the mass commodified tattoos,” said Atkinson, who has a Guns N’ Roses tattoo as a marker of his younger days. “A lot of people can’t divorce the movement from Lance Armstrong, and the Livestrong movement is a social movement. It’s very real and visceral and embodied in narrative survivorship. But we’re still not at a place where we look at a tattoo on the body and say that it’s a meaningful thing to someone.”

Geoff Livingston, a 40-year-old marketing professional in Washington, D.C., said that since Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey, he has received taunts on Twitter and inquiries at the gym regarding the yellow Livestrong armband tattoo that curls around his right bicep.

“People see it and go, ‘Wow,’ ” he said, “But I’m not going to get rid of it, and I’m not going to stop wearing short sleeves because of it. It’s about my family, not Lance Armstrong.”

Livingston got the tattoo in 2010 to commemorate his brother-in-law, who was told he had cancer and embarked on a fund-raising campaign for the charity. If he could raise $5,000, he agreed to get a tattoo. Within four days, the goal was exceeded, and Livingston went to a tattoo parlor to get his seventh tattoo.

“It’s actually grown in emotional significance for me,” Livingston said of the tattoo. “It brought me closer to my sister. It was a big statement of support.”

For Eddie Bonds, co-owner of Rabbit Bicycle in Hill City, S.D., getting a Livestrong tattoo was also a reflection of the growth of the sport of cycling. His wife, Joey, operates a tattoo parlor in front of their store, and in 2006 she designed a yellow Livestrong band that wraps around his right calf, topped off with a series of small cyclists.

“He kept breaking the Livestrong bands,” Joey Bonds said. “So it made more sense to tattoo it on him.”

“It’s about the cancer, not Lance,” Eddie Bonds said.

That was also the case for Jeremy Nienhouse, a 37-year old in Denver, Colo., who used a Livestrong tattoo to commemorate his own triumph over testicular cancer.

Given the diagnosis in 2004, Nienhouse had three rounds of chemotherapy, which ended on March 15, 2005, the date he had tattooed on his left arm the day after his five-year anniversary of being cancer free in 2010. It reads: “3-15-05” and “LIVESTRONG” on the image of a yellow band.

Nienhouse said he had heard about Livestrong and Armstrong’s own battle with the cancer around the time he learned he had cancer, which alerted him to the fact that even though he was young and healthy, he, too, could have cancer.

“On a personal level,” Nienhouse said, “he sounds like kind of a jerk. But if he hadn’t been in the public eye, I don’t know if I would have been diagnosed when I had been.”

Nienhouse said he had no plans to have the tattoo removed.

As for Mariash, she said she read every page of the antidoping officials’ report. She soon donated her Livestrong shirts, shorts and running gear. She watched Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey and wondered if his apology was an effort to reduce his ban from the sport or a genuine appeal to those who showed their support to him and now wear a visible sign of it.

“People called me ‘Miss Livestrong,’ ” Mariash said. “It was part of my identity.”

She also said she did not plan to have her tattoo removed.

“I wanted to show it’s forever,” she said. “Cancer isn’t something that just goes away from people. I wanted to show this is permanent and keep people remembering the fight.”

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The Education Revolution: In China, Families Bet It All on a Child in College

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Wu Caoying studied English under her father’s watchful eye in 2006. She is now a sophomore in college. More Photos »

HANJING, China — Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education.

His wife, Cao Weiping, toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during apple season in May and June. She earns $12 a day tying little plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going toward their daughter’s education.

Many families in the West sacrifice to put their children through school, saving for college educations that they hope will lead to a better life. Few efforts can compare with the heavy financial burden that millions of lower-income Chinese parents now endure as they push their children to obtain as much education as possible.

Yet a college degree no longer ensures a well-paying job, because the number of graduates in China has quadrupled in the last decade.

Mr. Wu and Mrs. Cao, who grew up in tiny villages in western China and became migrants in search of better-paying work, have scrimped their entire lives. For nearly two decades, they have lived in a cramped and drafty 200-square-foot house with a thatch roof. They have never owned a car. They do not take vacations — they have never seen the ocean. They have skipped traditional New Year trips to their ancestral village for up to five straight years to save on bus fares and gifts, and for Mr. Wu to earn extra holiday pay in the mines. Despite their frugality, they have essentially no retirement savings.

Thanks to these sacrifices, their daughter, Wu Caoying, is now a 19-year-old college sophomore. She is among the growing millions of Chinese college students who have gone much farther than their parents could have dreamed when they were growing up. For all the hard work of Ms. Wu’s father and mother, however, they aren’t certain it will pay off. Their daughter is ambivalent about staying in school, where the tuition, room and board cost more than half her parents’ combined annual income. A slightly above-average student, she thinks of dropping out, finding a job and earning money.

“Every time my daughter calls home, she says, ‘I don’t want to continue this,’ ” Mrs. Cao said. “And I say, ‘You’ve got to keep studying to take care of us when we get old’, and she says, ‘That’s too much pressure, I don’t want to think about all that responsibility.’ ”

Ms. Wu dreams of working at a big company, but knows that many graduates end up jobless. “I think I may start my own small company,” she says, while acknowledging she doesn’t have the money or experience to run one.

For a rural parent in China, each year of higher education costs six to 15 months’ labor, and it is hard for children from poor families to get scholarships or other government financial support. A year at the average private university in the United States similarly equals almost a year’s income for the average wage earner, while an in-state public university costs about six months’ pay, but financial aid is generally easier to obtain than in China. Moreover, an American family that spends half its income helping a child through college has more spending power with the other half of its income than a rural Chinese family earning less than $5,000 a year.

It isn’t just the cost of college that burdens Chinese parents. They face many fees associated with sending their children to elementary, middle and high schools. Many parents also hire tutors, so their children can score high enough on entrance exams to get into college. American families that invest heavily in their children’s educations can fall back on Medicare, Social Security and other social programs in their old age. Chinese citizens who bet all of their savings on their children’s educations have far fewer options if their offspring are unable to find a job on graduation.

The experiences of Wu Caoying, whose family The New York Times has tracked for seven years, are a window into the expanding educational opportunities and the financial obstacles faced by families all over China.

Her parents’ sacrifices to educate their daughter explain how the country has managed to leap far ahead of the United States in producing college graduates over the last decade, with eight million Chinese now getting degrees annually from universities and community colleges.

But high education costs coincide with slower growth of the Chinese economy and surging unemployment among recent college graduates. Whether young people like Ms. Wu find jobs on graduation that allow them to earn a living, much less support their parents, could test China’s ability to maintain rapid economic growth and preserve political and social stability in the years ahead.

Leaving the Village

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'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius weeps as he faces murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee revered in South Africa for overcoming his disability to compete in the London Games last year, wept in court Friday as he faced a murder charge in connection with the fatal shooting of his girlfriend.

During the proceedings in Pretoria, Gerrie Nel, one of the National Prosecuting Authority’s most senior advocates, said he would argue the killing of model and law graduate Reeva Steenkamp was premeditated murder, the most serious category of offense under South African law.

Nel is known for prosecuting high-profile cases, including winning the conviction of former police chief and Interpol boss Jackie Selebi on corruption charges.

Pistorius, nicknamed the "Blade Runner" because of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he uses to compete, did not enter a formal plea and was remanded into custody at Brooklyn police station in Pretoria until Tuesday, when his bail application is to be heard.

Under South African law, a suspect charged with such a high-level offense would have to prove exceptional circumstances to be granted bail.

In a packed courtroom, members of Pistorius' family struggled to pass through a media scrum and to find seats. The hearing coincided with "Black Friday," a day when people were being urged to wear black to protest rapes and violence against women.

[Updated, 8:35 a.m. Feb. 15: The family and Pistorius' management company later issued a statement denying that the athlete had murdered his girlfriend, saying: "The alleged murder is disputed in the strongest possible terms."

Some details of Pistorius' argument and the state's case are expected Tuesday.]

The famed athlete's court appearance came as South African media reported that he shot Steenkamp, his girlfriend of several months, four times through a bathroom door.

Under South African law, a person who fatally shoots an intruder has to prove he or she had a reasonable fear that the intruder posed a real threat to his or her life.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the world, with killings of women by intimate partners the leading cause of female homicide in the country. About 57% of female homicide victims were killed by their partners in 2009, according to a report last year by the Medical Research Council.

One-third of female homicides were committed by partners with a history of prior violence against their partners, according to the report.

Friends of Steenkamp and Pistorius mourned the incident on social media.

"Drained, confused, I just can't wrap my head around things," one of Pistorius’ close friends, Alex Pilakoutas, posted on Twitter.

Darren Fresco, who described himself as one of Steenkamp’s best friends said he was hoping to wake from a nightmare and hear her infectious laughter again.

"We were just goofing off the other day talking to each other in only the way that we could to each other. My heart is on the verge of exploding with the pain of such a sudden loss of one of my best friends," Fresco, who said he was one of the last people to exchange tweets with Steenkamp, posted on Facebook.

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robyn.dixon@latimes.com

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Lebbeus Woods: The Architect Who Dared to Ask 'What If?'

He envisioned underground cities, floating buildings and an eternal space tomb for Albert Einstein worthy of the great physicist’s expansive intellect. With such grand designs, perhaps it’s not too surprising that the late Lebbeus Woods, one of the most influential conceptual architects ever to walk the earth, had only one of his wildly imaginative designs become a permanent structure.

Instead of working with construction and engineering firms, Woods dreamed up provocative creations that weren’t bound by the rules of society or even nature, according to Joseph Becker and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, co-curators of a new exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled Lebbeus Woods, Architect.

“It was almost a badge of honor to never have anything built, because you were not a victim of the client,” Becker told Wired during a preview of the fascinating show, which opens Saturday and runs through June 2. While not a full retrospective of Woods’ career, the exhibit shows off three decades of his work in the form of drawings, paintings, models and sketchbooks filled with bold ideas, raw concepts and cryptic inscriptions. (See several examples of Woods’ work in the gallery above.)

As the curators discussed Woods’ work and his impact on the world of architecture, they talked of a brilliant mind consumed with disruption, with confronting the boring, repetitive spaces humans have become accustomed to living in by challenging the “omnipresence of the Cartesian grid.” Woods’ fantastic visions included buildings designed for seismic hot zones that might move in response to earthquakes, or a sprawling city that would exist underneath a divided Berlin, providing a sort of subterranean salon where individuals from the East and West might mingle, free from the conflicting ideologies of their governments.

“He was very focused, I think, in all of his work, in what he said was ‘architecture for its own sake,’” Becker said. “Not architecture for clients, not architecture that is diluted, and not architecture that really had to be held up against certain primary factors, including gravity or government.”

Woods found his place in the conceptual architecture movement that sprang from the 1960s and ’70s, when firms like Superstudio and Archigram presented a radical peek into a possible — if improbable — future. Casting a skeptical eye on the way humans lived in cities, these conceptual architects were more interested in raising questions than in crafting blueprints for buildings that would actually be built of concrete, steel and glass.

In fact, none of the nearly 200 fascinating drawings and other works on display in Lebbeus Woods, Architect were ever meant to be built, said Dunlop Fletcher. Instead of the archetypical architect’s detailed plans and models, carefully calibrated to produce a road map to a finished structure, Woods’ drawings are whimsical and thought-provoking, with radical new ideas being the intended result of his efforts. “There are going to be gaps in this, and you fill in the gaps with what you bring to it,” she said.

Woods’ ideas started in his sketchbooks, which he crammed with detailed drawings. “He was extremely gifted with the pen,” said Becker, adding that many of the pieces are notated in a strange hybrid language that could be part Latin, part invented. The curators likened it to a kind of code that connected the conceptual fragments that run through Woods’ highly theoretical work.

“It could mean something, it could be that he’s creating almost these fictional artifacts of these supporting elements to engage with the larger drawings that he would do later,” Becker said. “They’re almost Da Vinci-like in their illegibility.”

Other questions remain about just what, exactly, Woods was up to with when he took pencil to paper. Take, for instance, a piece called Aero-Livinglab, from his Centricity series from the late 1980s, in which the architect was “essentially creating a utopian city” with “its own set of rules,” according to Becker. The drawing depicts a floating room that resembles an insect as much as it does some sort of alien zeppelin. Just what would the purpose of such a construction be?

“It could be an inhabitable space,” Becker said. “It could be small, it could be large. Often these things don’t have clear scale, but we do know that the point of Centricity was to invite a question of ‘what if?’”

An obituary on the Architectural Record website dubbed Woods “the last of the great paper architects” and said he “achieved cult-idol status among architects for his post-apocalyptic landscapes of dense lines and plunging perspectives. Deconstructivist in the most literal of ways, they were never formalist exercises. Instead, they conveyed the architect’s deep reservations as to the nature of contemporary society, and particularly its penchant for violence. He eschewed practice, claiming an interest in architectural ideas rather than the quotidian challenges of commercial building.”

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Oscar’s oldest nominee, Emmanuelle Riva, on “Amour”: it’s a gift in the last stage of my life

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The life of an artist is full of surprises, and none has been bigger for French actress Emanuelle Riva than the one that has come late in life. The response has been overwhelming to her performance in this year’s meditative “Amour,” which brought her the first Oscar nomination of her career – and makes her the oldest Best Actress nominee ever, at 85.

Riva was best known previously for her role in the 1959 French New Wave classic, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” directed by Alain Resnais. In Michael Haneke‘s “Amour,” she plays a wife declining inexorably toward death, losing her physical and intellectual grasp.

The loving husband who cares for her is played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose breakout role was playing Brigitte Bardot’s young suitor in the original version of “And God Created Woman.”

After a lifetime of steady roles in France, Riva has spent the better part of the past year responding to global interview requests and accepting accolades, including a New York Film Critics Circle award in January that led to her first trip ever to New York. The Oscars will be her first trip to Los Angeles. It will also take place on her 86th birthday.

TheWrap spoke by phone to Riva from her family home in Les Vosges, a region in eastern France.

Thank you for making the time to speak to us.

Well, I am horribly tired. I don’t have a moment to rest. They don’t leave me in peace. But, my word, I said I’d do it.

Have you been surprised by the response to “Amour”?

It surprises us, this much success. I didn’t expect so much interest. But it’s not only to me, it’s to the film, those who worked in the film. We are very happy for this huge public response.

How did Michael Haneke approach you about doing the role?

It’s not me who decided. It’s Haneke who decided. When a director like him chooses someone, he is so precise. He knew me from “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” I was 30 years old. He hadn’t seen me since that time. And he wanted to meet me. It was done very classically. A director looks for an actor, he has a vision, we met.

And then what happened?

We did a rehearsal with the scene in the kitchen – when she begins to depart, to go elsewhere. the regard that’s no longer there. The absence. It’s terrible. He looked at it closely. He wanted to see me on the screen. He said I touched him deeply in this scene.

What did you think of the role when you read it?

When I read the script I found it so extraordinary.

I had the profound certitude that I could do it. I felt that at that moment in my life as an actress, I was immediately capable of doing it. If he didn’t give me the role, I would have been so sad.

Were you afraid of confronting this theme of mortality?

Afraid? No, not at all. Why would I be afraid? This role presents the subject of the film that touches each of us, every human on the planet. As an actress, it’s so exciting to be engaged in a role like this. I would never have felt fear for this. If an actress is afraid, she should head for the door right away.

I was so happy in the work. Every day, every day. Two months of work. It was such happiness-a feeling of complete fullness. Of life, of death, of love. I never lost the excitement of the work. I was so infinitely happy during this shoot. So serious, but it wasn’t sad at all.

What was it like creating that intimacy with Jean-Louis Trintignant?

I’d met him in Rome many years ago when we were young, but I don’t know him well. This is the heart of our work. We meet other people we don’t know, and immediately we are in complete intimacy. I didn’t do anything. I just was there, and him also.

We started with the kitchen scene after the concert at the Champs Elysee Theatre. I seem to recall that scene. We were facing each other at the table as if we’d been for years. I just lived it. This is what’s so marvelous. When I don’t know someone, I’d say I have more freedom as an actress. Sometimes we surprise ourselves, but one can surprise the director with how deep you can go. Haneke – he is fantastic – he was the music of the film.

What direction did Haneke give you?

There was one direction, not 36. From there we had a lot of freedom. He’s not tyrannical. His direction was very simple, very rigorous. We were doing a scene and he said, “It’s very nice – very sweet, very tender – but it’s too tender. No sentimentality. From here on in, no sentimentality.” This was the key that opened the horizon of the film. Once I heard that, it became much more clear. I said, “I get it.” This husband and wife each have very strong personalities. But it is not expressed in sentimentality.

How did you react to the Oscar nomination?

I found out in New York, I was there for the critics circle award. The 10th of January, early morning. My neighbors who help me when I travel shouted for joy. I was barely awake. They were screaming, “You’re nominated!” I stayed very calm. I got up and said, “I’m not nominated.” Of course I was very happy.

And how do you feel about coming to the Oscars?

I am very calm in the face of all of this. I am 85 years old. I am not going to flop about like a fish. What makes me nervous is these hours on the plane. Frankly, it seems like a hell of a journey to me. It’s so long. But I will do things to the end. I will fall in someone’s arms if I need to.

This adventure, this gift, in the last stage of my life – it’s not easy to measure up – but it’s the exact moment in my life when I could do it. Before would have been too early. Later might have been too late. But it’s a great treasure to participate in this film.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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