Testimony in Bell corruption trial comes to a bickering end

Testimony in the corruption trial of six former Bell leaders came to a bickering end Friday with a former councilman defending the city's huge salaries as a way to attract Latinos and a prosecutor sarcastically asking him whether he also felt a need for a chauffeur to get around the small, working-class town.

Since the trial opened — nearly three years after the city began imploding under the weight of a corruption scandal — the defendants justified their nearly six-figure salaries as fair pay for long hours or as a payday forced upon them by a fearsome administrator. Besides, they argued, the city attorney never told them anything was illegal.

Next week the case goes to the jury, which will deliberate whether Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal broke the law by drawing salaries of up to nearly $100,000 a year by serving on boards and authorities that rarely met and did little work.

Three weeks of testimony has revealed a city government where salaries were falsified, unauthorized pension time was bought with city money, a councilman was banished from City Hall and the city clerk signed minutes for meetings she didn't attend.

Former City Manager Robert Rizzo was depicted as a vengeful strongman, beginning with the opening statements from defense attorneys — one of whom called the former administrator "the thief, the fraud, the destructor of the city."

On the witness stand, Jacobo, Mirabal and Cole insisted that they had been tireless public servants with full-time duties who were always on call and did most of their work in the community, not just during government meetings.

"I thought I was doing a very good job to be able to earn that, yes," Jacobo said when asked if she believed her salary was fair to the citizens of Bell.

However, an interview Mirabal gave prosecutors the day of his 2010 arrest appeared to contradict the self-laudatory testimony. Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller on Friday played a recording of the interview in which Mirabal said he did little work for authorities outside of meetings.

"What about other City Council members?" Miller asked. "Were you aware of any of them doing work for the Public Finance Authority outside of the meetings?"

"No," Mirabal replied.

One of the trial's biggest surprises was that neither side called former Bell City Atty. Edward Lee, who wrote the city's charter and was repeatedly blamed by defendants for not informing them their salaries could be illegal. Lee had initially been on the prosecution's witness list.

Mirabal testified that at $13,000 a month, the least Lee could have done was to protect council members.

At times it seemed as if Lee and Rizzo were on trial.

Despite that, council members praised Rizzo's work for most of his tenure. "From the time he started, he was able to accomplish things other managers previous to him said couldn't be done," Cole testified.

Cole, who spent 24 years as a Bell civic booster, said his relationship with Rizzo splintered when the former councilman insisted on giving up the final year of his pay. At the time, Cole also was earning $95,000 a year as executive director of the Steelworkers Oldtimers Foundation.

Cole said he later voted for an annual 12% increase in council pay because he feared Rizzo would retaliate by harming educational and health programs he had established.

On Friday, Miller tried to dispel Cole's claim that high salaries were needed to bring more Latinos onto the council of the low-income, largely immigrant city. The prosecutor pointed out that fellow defendants Bello, Jacobo and Mirabal already were on the panel when he voted for a 2002 salary increase.

When Miller presented a document that ensured no employee hired or elected after June 30, 2005, would be eligible for the city's supplemental retirement plan, he asked Cole: "Wouldn't taking away that benefit adversely affect Latino representation on the City Council?"

Cole replied that it would.

"Did you vote for this because your friends on the City Council and yourself would be covered?" Miller asked.

"It looks like I did."

When Miller asked about the potential for a Bell council member to earn $100,000 — the salary of the other defendants — Cole appeared flustered. After being prodded several times, Cole admitted the resolutions made the salary possible.

Cole then pointed out that Los Angeles City Council members had a driver, car and staff. "I never had any of those," he said.

"Did you feel you needed a driver and a chauffeur to get around a 2½-square-mile city?" Miller asked.

jeff.gottlieb@latimes.com

corina.knoll@latimes.com

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India Ink: Kerala's Tangled Tryst With International Affairs

Indian states, though powerful in matters of internal administration, rarely deal with foreign governments. A bizarre shooting near Kerala’s coast involving Italian marines last year, which killed two Indian fishermen, gave the state a crash course on international diplomacy, one that also tested Kerala’s political standing with the central government.

One year after the shooting, the case appears to be nearing a quiet conclusion in what could have been a messy international fight. Though the outcome may not completely satisfy Keralites, they are not likely to find fault with their government. Kerala fought for as long as it could to handle the case on its own turf, and its determination has strengthened the state’s position in domestic politics.

In the afternoon of Feb. 15, 2012, two impoverished fishermen, returning to the Kerala coast from an exhausting fishing expedition, were shot dead by two Italian marines who were guarding an oil tanker, the Enrica Lexie, on suspicion that the fishermen were pirates.

The Indian authorities say the Italian marines had behaved suspiciously on the fateful day. After the marines killed the two fishermen, their ship sped away, the authorities said, angering the Indian Coast Guard, which pursued the tanker and brought it to the Kochi port under escort.

The Italian authorities, on the other hand, say that the marines warned an approaching boat to keep away, and that when it did not, they had no choice but to fire warning shots into the air. Since the shooting took place in international waters, the ship was not obliged to come to the Indian shore and that the matter would have been investigated back in Italy, the Italian authorities say.

If Italy had admitted its marines had made a mistake and offered compensation out of court in the early days, the case would have ended long ago. But Italy insisted that there was a piracy attempt and that since the shooting took place in international waters, India had no jurisdiction to try the marines on murder charges in India.

Then Kerala’s courts intervened and affirmed jurisdiction. A judge later rejected an out-of-court settlement that the Italians had worked out with some local church leaders.

Emotions ran high in Kerala, accentuated by the suspicion that Italy’s Delhi connections would let the marines off the hook at any time. The two Italians were lodged in prison first and then in a more comfortable guesthouse at the repeated requests of the Italian government at the highest level in Delhi. High-ranking Italian officials visited Kerala multiple times on behalf of the marines.

But Kerala’s courts maintained pressure, and it appeared that the case was moving toward a conviction. Then the Italian government filed a petition with the Supreme Court arguing that because the shooting occurred in international waters that the trial could not be held in India.

The chief minister of Kerala, Oommen Chandy, may have heaved a sigh of relief when the case was moved to the Supreme Court, but the shift initially caused much consternation in the fishing community in Kerala. The victims’ next of kin and the owner of the fishing boat were disappointed that the huge compensation that they had expected to receive through a direct settlement with the Italians or through a court order eluded them.

In fact, when the marines were allowed by the Kerala High Court to go home for Christmas after depositing 60 million rupees ($1.1 million) as surety, the local people were praying that they would not come back. The marines returned ahead of time, much to the disappointment of the next of kin.

Delhi took the line that the whole incident was an unfortunate accident, not involving any machinations by the Italians. It is in that direction that the case has moved.

Last month, the Supreme Court rejected Italy’s argument but ruled that the case should be moved out of Kerala and into a special Indian court under international maritime law. Since the shootings had happened in the contiguous zone and not territorial waters, Kerala had no jurisdiction, the Supreme Court said.

Even if the marines are ultimately convicted, it is likely they will return to Italy. On Monday, India announced that in November it had ratified a treaty with Italy, which was agreed upon before the shooting incident occurred, that allows citizens convicted of crimes in either country to serve their prison sentences in their home country.

Though it wasn’t the outcome it had sought, Kerala is taking a pragmatic view. Moving the legal battle from Kerala itself has brought down the profile of the case and the pressure of public opinion. Now, the state will accept any decision by the Supreme Court as long as adequate compensation is given to the next of kin and the boat owner.

The episode was not without its benefits for Kerala, which emerged with its principles intact. The central government never challenged Kerala, nor did it pressure the state to make concessions, and Mr. Chandy himself emerged as a tough negotiator and a champion of the law, which can only benefit the state in the future.

Ironically, the heroic efforts of the Italian government to get their nationals released from an Indian prison won the appreciation of many Indians, including Keralites. They pointed to the sustained efforts at the highest level by Italy to rescue the marines and criticized the Indian government for not doing enough for its own nationals in prisons abroad, accused of far less serious crimes.

Mr. Sreenivasan, a former Indian diplomat, is the executive vice chairman of the Kerala State Higher Education Council. His views are personal and do not reflect the policy of his state.

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American Idol's Top 40 Revealed

TV Watch

American Idol

By Steve Helling

02/14/2013 at 10:00 PM EST

From left: Randy Jackson, Mariah Carey, Ryan Seacrest, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban

Michael Becker/FOX.

American Idol really, really wants a woman to win this season. At the beginning of Thursday's episode, they reminded us that a female singer hasn't won the show since 2007, when Jordin Sparks bested Blake Lewis for the top prize. Let's put this into perspective: The last time a woman won, George W. Bush was still president, J.K. Rowling was still writing the Harry Potter series, and no one had any idea who Snooki was. Well, maybe a few people knew her.

After Ryan Seacrest all but begged us to vote for a female, we finally got to see the level of the women's talent. Angela Miller sat at the piano and sang her own song, "You Set Me Free." It was a show-stopping performance, prompting judge Keith Urban to rave.

"If that was recorded right there, I would play it in my car," he said. "That was just a beautiful song."

Miller was followed by Candice Glover, who gave an strong version of Alicia Keys's "Girl on Fire." Janelle Arthur also impressed with a pleasant version of Carrie Underwood's "I told You So."

Shubha Vedula had the nerve to sing a Mariah Carey song in front of Mariah Carey and did a great job.

And then there was Zoanette Johnson. (At some point, she needs to drop her last name and just be known as Zoanette.) She played the drums as she sang a song she had improvised onstage the previous night. It was a rambling tune about her Idol experience. It was manic and baffling. And then she came to an abrupt stop and yelled at the background singers.

"Slow it down! C'mon guys," she pleaded. "I need this to be right." At some point, she lost a drumstick.

It's fun to imagine what Simon Cowell's reaction would be to her performances.

Kez Ban, the season's other memorable contestant, was quickly cut from the competition after singing her original song. There is clearly only room for one unpredictable contestant this season – and her name is Zoanette.

As the show wound down, the judges cut the field down to 20 women, and then brought in the remaining 28 male singers to cut them down to 20. That's when the judges had Josh Holiday sing "Georgia on My Mind." He split his pants from crotch to knee.

But Holiday and 39 others are season 12's top 40. One of them will be the next American Idol. Will it be a girl?

Top 20 Women

Adriana Latonio
Amber Holcomb
Angela Miller
Aubrey Cleland
Brandy Hotard
Breanna Steer
Candice Glover
Cristabel Clack
Isabelle Pasqualone
Janelle Arthur
Jenny Beth Willis
Jett Hermano
Juliana Chahayed
Kamaria Ousley
Kree Harrison
Melinlda Ademi
Rachel Hale
Shubha Vedula
Tenna Torres
Zoanette Johnson

Top 20 Men

Bryant Tadeo
Burnell Taylor
Charlie Askew
Chris Watson
Cortez Shaw
Curtis Finch, Jr.
David Willis
Devin Velez
Elijah Liu
Gurpreet Singh Sarin
Jimmy Smith
Johnny Keyser
Josh Holiday
Kevin Harris
Lazaro Arbos
Mathenee Treco
Nick Boddington
Paul Jolley
Vincent Powell

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Study: Fish in drug-tainted water suffer reaction

BOSTON (AP) — What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.

It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.

The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.

"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.

Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places.

"We know that in a predator-prey relation, increased boldness and activity combined with decreased sociality ... means you're going to be somebody's lunch quite soon," said Gregory Moller, a toxicologist at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. "It removes the natural balance."

Researchers around the world have been taking a close look at the effects of pharmaceuticals in extremely low concentrations, measured in parts per billion. Such drugs have turned up in waterways in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere over the past decade.

They come mostly from humans and farm animals; the drugs pass through their bodies in unmetabolized form. These drug traces are then piped to water treatment plants, which are not designed to remove them from the cleaned water that flows back into streams and rivers.

The Associated Press first reported in 2008 that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans carries low concentrations of many common drugs. The findings were based on questionnaires sent to water utilities, which reported the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and other drugs.

The news reports led to congressional hearings and legislation, more water testing and more public disclosure. To this day, though, there are no mandatory U.S. limits on pharmaceuticals in waterways.

The research team at Sweden's Umea University used minute concentrations of 2 parts per billion of the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam, similar to concentrations found in real waters. The drug belongs to a widely used class of medicines known as benzodiazepines that includes Valium and Librium.

The team put young wild European perch into an aquarium, exposed them to these highly diluted drugs and then carefully measured feeding, schooling, movement and hiding behavior. They found that drug-exposed fish moved more, fed more aggressively, hid less and tended to school less than unexposed fish. On average, the drugged fish were more than twice as active as the others, researcher Micael Jonsson said. The effects were more pronounced at higher drug concentrations.

"Our first thought is, this is like a person diagnosed with ADHD," said Jonsson, referring to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "They become asocial and more active than they should be."

Tomas Brodin, another member of the research team, called the drug's environmental impact a global problem. "We find these concentrations or close to them all over the world, and it's quite possible or even probable that these behavioral effects are taking place as we speak," he said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Most previous research on trace drugs and marine life has focused on biological changes, such as male fish that take on female characteristics. However, a 2009 study found that tiny concentrations of antidepressants made fathead minnows more vulnerable to predators.

It is not clear exactly how long-term drug exposure, beyond the seven days in this study, would affect real fish in real rivers and streams. The Swedish researchers argue that the drug-induced changes could jeopardize populations of this sport and commercial fish, which lives in both fresh and brackish water.

Water toxins specialist Anne McElroy of Stony Brook University in New York agreed: "These lower chronic exposures that may alter things like animals' mating behavior or its ability to catch food or its ability to avoid being eaten — over time, that could really affect a population."

Another possibility, the researchers said, is that more aggressive feeding by the perch on zooplankton could reduce the numbers of these tiny creatures. Since zooplankton feed on algae, a drop in their numbers could allow algae to grow unchecked. That, in turn, could choke other marine life.

The Swedish team said it is highly unlikely people would be harmed by eating such drug-exposed fish. Jonsson said a person would have to eat 4 tons of perch to consume the equivalent of a single pill.

Researchers said more work is needed to develop better ways of removing drugs from water at treatment plants. They also said unused drugs should be brought to take-back programs where they exist, instead of being flushed down the toilet. And they called on pharmaceutical companies to work on "greener" drugs that degrade more easily.

Sandoz, one of three companies approved to sell oxazepam in the U.S., "shares society's desire to protect the environment and takes steps to minimize the environmental impact of its products over their life cycle," spokeswoman Julie Masow said in an emailed statement. She provided no details.

___

Online:

Overview of the drug: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682050.html

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Deputy killed in Dorner standoff was 'fun,' 'boisterous' new dad

Jeremiah MacKay was a regular at Liam's Irish Pub in Colton.

He always had a pint of Guinness and a smile, said Yara Alves, the bar's owner. He had Irish roots, and he'd show up, guaranteed, every St. Patrick's Day wearing a kilt and bringing his bagpipe.

"He never had anything sad or negative to say," Alves said. "It was as if he never had a bad day."

Alves choked up as she spoke about MacKay, 35, a San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy who was killed in a firefight Tuesday in an isolated area near Big Bear. Police said the gunman was Christopher Dorner, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer bent on revenge over his dismissal from the agency in 2009.

A second deputy, Alex Collins, was wounded in the gunfight, San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said. Collins has undergone multiple surgeries and is expected to make a full recovery.

McMahon said the deputies who responded to the cabin where Dorner barricaded himself are "absolutely true heroes."

"The rounds kept coming" from the cabin, he said, "but the deputies didn't give up."

Dorner also is believed to have killed three other people, including Riverside Police Officer Michael Crain, who was shot in his marked patrol vehicle. Crain was buried Wednesday. On Feb. 3, Monica Quan, daughter of a retired LAPD captain, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, were found shot to death in an Irvine parking garage in what police believe were the first of Dorner's crimes.

On Thursday, authorities confirmed that the charred remains found in the burned-out cabin were Dorner's.

For days, MacKay, a 14-year veteran of the department, was involved in the massive manhunt for Dorner in the mountains around Big Bear.

"We knew he was up there," MacKay's cousin Jennifer Goehring said. "We were praying for his safety, but never in a million years would we have thought this would happen."

MacKay posted photos from the mountains on his Facebook page, joking about how he — who grew up in the San Bernardino Mountains — was one of the only officers wearing short-sleeved shirts in the snow.

On Saturday he told an Associated Press reporter that he knew the danger as he scoured the mountains for Dorner: "This one, you just never know if the guy's going to pop out or where he's going to pop out. We're hoping this comes to a close without any more casualties."

On Sunday he was pictured on the front page of The Times, his eyes squinted as he put on a hat. He posted a photo of the newspaper on Facebook, making fun of his facial expression, Alves said.

San Bernardino County Sheriff's Capt. Lee Hamblin said he was responding to the call of a gun battle when he heard "Officer down." He said his worst fear was soon confirmed when he learned MacKay had been killed.

"Although we're glad it's over," Hamblin said of the manhunt, "the price we paid was way too high."

MacKay joined the department in July 1998, Hamblin said. He worked in the jails, as a detective at the department's Big Bear station and most recently as a deputy in the department's Yucaipa station.

He was married to Lynette Quinata MacKay and had a 7-year-old stepdaughter and a 4-month-old son, Goehring said. He was thrilled to be a new father. His family, she said, made him the happiest man in the world.

On Thursday, a steady stream of people stopped by a makeshift memorial outside the Yucaipa station.

Janet Lopez, 55, placed flowers and a note at the memorial. MacKay, she said, had taken a liking to her father, who suffered from renal failure. MacKay would "go over and cheer him up, get him to walk," she said.

Family, friends and co-workers described the deputy as having a big personality, a big heart and a big, loud laugh. It was difficult to be sad around him, they said.

It was MacKay's laugh that first caught Edward Knuff's attention years ago in Liam's Irish Pub.

"He was a little boisterous, always fun," Knuff said.

Knuff, a commercial photographer, said he met MacKay at the pub for a meeting of the Inland Empire Emerald Society, a nonprofit that raises money for the families of fallen law enforcement officers.

Now the organization is raising money for MacKay's family.

hailey.branson@latimes.com

adolfo.flores@latimes.com

Times staff writer Joseph Serna contributed to this report.

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India Ink: A Volatile Brahmaputra River Will Grow Only More So

ELOPA, Arunachal Pradesh — Amid a desert of volleyball-sized boulders, Jibi Pulu bounces his Tata jeep over a trickling nullah. In his childhood, just 30-odd years ago, this stream used to irrigate his family paddy fields right here in the flatlands and provide fresh water to his ancestral village in the hills above the floodplain of the Dibang River, a major tributary of the Brahmaputra.

Today, the paddy fields are gone, and the village is abandoned, fallen prey to hillside erosion and river siltation. “This plain was once a narrow band of huge trees,” said Mr. Pulu, who heads the Idu-Mishmi tribe’s Community Resource Management Committee. “Now it’s a stony wasteland stretching for farther than the eye can see.

“As a young boy, I could sit here and watch animals come down right there to the river to drink – sambar deer, barking deer, wild boars, tigers, leopards, herds of wild elephants. It was like an African safari park. Now all you see of the animals are occasional tracks and droppings.”

Experiences like Mr. Pulu’s give vivid life to the numeric inputs that fuel Professor Subashisa Dutta’s statistical models. Together with his fellow civil engineering professor Shyamal Ghosh at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati, Mr. Dutta has published the most recent climate change models of the Brahmaputra River basin. Using the known flood characteristics of the basin, they plugged in regional rainfall projections under the climate change scenario that assumes warming over the Indian subcontinent because of greenhouse gas concentrations.

The results look grim. The Brahmaputra valley will experience “longer floods and more flood events outside the monsoon period,” Mr. Dutta predicted. Not only will peak flows increase, but so will the incidence of pre-monsoon floods, which could jeopardize key production phases in the agricultural cycle.

The worst threat, he added, will not come from cataclysmic once-in-a century floods, but rather from increasing year-to-year volatility. “Five-year-period floods will have more change than the 50-year-period floods,” Mr. Dutta said. And some of the biggest impacts will happen at the tributary level, rather than on the main channel of the Brahmaputra.

“Many tributaries on the North Bank are changing course or transforming from a meandering river to a braided river,” he said. This can only make the floods “flashier, drastically changing the hazards,” he warned.

Right across the Indian Institute of Technology’s expansive academic complex, Arupjyoti Saikia, a historian, has reached much the same conclusion from a far more anecdotal, almost personalized approach. Freshly returned from a fellowship at Yale University’s Agrarian Studies program, Mr. Saikia is now writing a kind of biography of the Brahmaputra.

It’s a short biography, in geologic terms. If the Brahmaputra were a person, it would be a tempestuous teenager who frequents all-night raves during the wet season. Its youthful temperament reflects the young geology of its Himalayan catchment basin as much as the heavy monsoon rainfall it receives.

Viewed on the human time scale, on the other hand, the Brahmaputra presents an immemorial landscape that is in peril. Though the plains in Assam have been settled for thousands of years, Mr. Saikia noted that only in the last hundred have people lived so close to the river.

Population pressure on the land, he explained, has pushed people to migrate into areas vulnerable to flood. In the past, those who cultivated in the flood plains always migrated to higher land during flood season. But nowadays, Assam is much too crowded for people to make these seasonal migration shifts.

To screen the encroaching population from river hazards, the government of India went on a misguided embankment-building spree between the late 1940s through the 1970s.

People believed – and still do – that the embankments would protect them against floods. But time and again, that hope has proved false. Just this past flood season over 60 embankments broke, sending surging water into thatched-roof villages.

For at least four decades it has been clear to the technocrats that embankments spelled trouble, only compounding the hazards of the river while failing to tame it. But by the 1970s, “it was already too late; there was no going back,” Mr. Saikia lamented. “It permanently jeopardized the rhythm of the water.”

Yet “the Brahmaputra is still free,” Mr. Saikia said, sighing. Come monsoon time, “it can still play with its rhythm and it can dance as it likes.”

Jibi Pulu, who remembers the flowing waters that fed the rice paddy of his youth, knows this firsthand in his home region of the Dibang basin.

“See that plinth over there,” he said, pointing to a crumbling block of concrete atop an undercut bank. “Some Hindus tried to tame the river by building a Shiva temple there.” But just last year, the Dibang danced right over Nataraja, the lord of the cosmic dance.

Brian Orland’s dispatches will appear regularly in India Ink. Last month, he wrote about population growth along the Brahmaputra.

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Lady Gaga Cancels Born This Way Ball Tour Due to Severe Injury

02/13/2013 at 08:50 PM EST

It's a somber week for Lady Gaga – and her Little Monsters.

Following Tuesday's Facebook announcement that she was "devastated and sad" because she couldn't walk and had to postpone several Born This Way Ball concerts, the pop star, 26, has officially canceled the remaining dates of her world tour.

"After additional tests this morning to review the severity of the issue, it has been determined that Lady Gaga has a labral tear of the right hip," the singer's rep told PEOPLE Wednesday in a statement. "She will need surgery to repair the problem, followed by strict down time to recover. This unfortunately, will force her to cancel the tour, so she can heal."

Refunds for the cancelled performances will be available at point of purchase starting on Thursday.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," she wrote the previous day of postponing the dates. "I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

Get well, Gaga!

•Reporting by CHUCK ARNOLD

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Morning-after pill use up to 1 in 9 younger women

NEW YORK (AP) — About 1 in 9 younger women have used the morning-after pill after sex, according to the first government report to focus on emergency contraception since its approval 15 years ago.

The results come from a survey of females ages 15 to 44. Eleven percent of those who'd had sex reported using a morning-after pill. That's up from 4 percent in 2002, only a few years after the pills went on the market and adults still needed a prescription.

The increased popularity is probably because it is easier to get now and because of media coverage of controversial efforts to lift the age limit for over-the-counter sales, experts said. A prescription is still required for those younger than 17 so it is still sold from behind pharmacy counters.

In the study, half the women who used the pills said they did it because they'd had unprotected sex. Most of the rest cited a broken condom or worries that the birth control method they used had failed.

White women and more educated women use it the most, the research showed. That's not surprising, said James Trussell, a Princeton University researcher who's studied the subject.

"I don't think you can go to college in the United States and not know about emergency contraception," said Trussell, who has promoted its use and started a hot line.

One Pennsylvania college even has a vending machine dispensing the pills.

The morning-after pill is basically a high-dose version of birth control pills. It prevents ovulation and needs to be taken within a few days after sex. The morning-after pill is different from the so-called abortion pill, which is designed to terminate a pregnancy.

At least five versions of the morning-after pills are sold in the United States. They cost around $35 to $60 a dose at a pharmacy, depending on the brand.

Since it is sold over-the-counter, insurers generally only pay for it with a doctor's prescription. The new Affordable Care Act promises to cover morning-after pills, meaning no co-pays, but again only with a prescription.

The results of the study were released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's based on in-person interviews of more than 12,000 women in 2006 through 2010. It was the agency's first in-depth report on that issue, said Kimberly Daniels, the study's lead author.

The study also found:

—Among different age groups, women in their early 20s were more likely to have taken a morning-after pill. About 1 in 4 did.

—About 1 in 5 never-married women had taken a morning-after pill, compared to just 1 in 20 married women.

—Of the women who used the pill, 59 percent said they had done it only once, 24 percent said twice, and 17 percent said three or more times.

A woman who uses emergency contraception multiple times "needs to be thinking about a more regular form" of birth control, noted Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research for the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that does research on reproductive health.

Also on Thursday, the CDC released a report on overall contraception use. Among its many findings, 99 percent of women who've had sex used some sort of birth control. That includes 82 percent who used birth control pills and 93 percent whose partner had used a condom.

___

Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/

Emergency contraception info: http://ec.princeton.edu/index.html

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Bay Area man accused of threatening to kill state senator

SACRAMENTO — A Bay Area man who authorities say was building homemade bombs was arrested this week for threatening to kill a state lawmaker.

Everett Basham, 45, was booked on multiple charges, including possession of a manufactured explosive and illegal possession of chemicals used to make explosives.

Police served an arrest warrant for the man after being alerted by state Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), whose office said the lawmaker had been threatened with death for pushing legislation to restrict assault weapons.

The California Highway Patrol arrested Basham at a relative's home in Sunnyvale on Tuesday. Officers found a loaded handgun in his car, said Officer Sean Kennedy, a CHP spokesman.

Two hours later, a SWAT team searched his residence in Santa Clara, where members observed what authorities described as "pre-cursors to homemade explosives." Police ordered Basham's immediate neighbors to evacuate their homes as officers from CHP's bomb squad and the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office searched the residence and removed the chemicals.

Authorities detonated "a small amount of substances" that they were unable to identify after digging sandbagged trenches in the frontyard, Kennedy said.

Kennedy said the house was so cluttered that police were unable to finish their search and returned Wednesday, when they found "destructive devices." He said bomb squad officers were set to return with a bomb trailer Thursday to dispose of the devices. He declined to elaborate on what those devices were.

Basham is being held without bail.

A LinkedIn page that appears to be Basham's identifies him as a Silicon Valley engineer who once worked with Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday, Wozniak expressed shock at Basham's arrest

"He's not the sort of person who is a criminal or a terrorist," Wozniak said. "He's just very brilliant."

The LinkedIn profile says Basham is a graduate of UC Davis and specializes in the "development of complex test systems." It says he is experienced in making presentations to venture capitalists looking to fund new technologies.

According to the profile, he owns a company that provides engineering expertise to governments.

A neighbor who answered the phone at a nearby house, but who declined to give her name, said Basham was a polite but quiet neighbor. "He don't talk to nobody," she said.

In his mug shot, Basham is seen wearing camouflage fatigues. The neighbor said he had mentioned being in the military.

Adam Keigwin, Yee's chief of staff, said the senator received a threat in his government email account about four weeks ago. Both Keigwin and the CHP declined to say why the suspect wasn't arrested until this week.

"The senator has faced threats before. No matter how small they are, we immediately hand it over to law enforcement," Keigwin said. "But this one was different than the rest. This one was much more graphic and explicit."

Yee, a former school psychologist, has been an outspoken advocate for gun control. This year, he is proposing more background checks and registration requirements and a ban on devices on semiautomatic weapons that allow them to be easily reloaded.

michael.mishak@latimes.com

chris.megerian@latimes.com

Times staff writer Evan Halper contributed to this report.

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Silenced in Israel, Spy Tale Unfolds in Australia

JERUSALEM — The story had all the trappings of a spy thriller: an anonymous prisoner linked to Israel’s secret service, Mossad, isolated in a top-security wing originally built for the assassin of a prime minister. A suicide — or was it a murder? — never officially reported. A gag order that barred journalists from even acknowledging the gag order. And a code name to rival 007: Prisoner X.

The first reports about the death of Prisoner X leaked out in 2010, both in Israel and the United States, where a blogger identified the mystery man as a former Iranian general. Government censors immediately forced an Israeli news site to remove two items related to Prisoner X — and journalists were interrogated about it by the police.

On Tuesday, after an extensive Australian television report identifying Prisoner X as an Australian father of two who became an Israeli spy, the prime minister’s office summoned Israeli editors to a rare meeting to remind them of the court order blocking publication of anything connected to the matter.

It remains unclear what Prisoner X might have done to warrant such extreme treatment — and such extreme secrecy, which human rights groups have denounced as violating international law. What is clear is that the modern media landscape makes the Israeli censorship system established in the 1950s hopelessly porous: the Australian report quickly made the rounds on social media, prompting outraged inquiries from opposition lawmakers on the floor of Parliament.

“The Israeli public will know sooner or later what happened,” declared Nahman Shai, a Parliament member from the Labor Party.

Aluf Benn, the editor of the Israeli daily Haaretz, said the government forced him and another news organization to delete items about the Australian reports from their Web sites on Tuesday. Later, Haaretz posted an article on the unusual editors meeting and the parliamentary discussion.

“They live in a previous century, unfortunately,” Mr. Benn said of the Israeli administration. “Today, whatever is blocked in news sites is up in the air on Facebook walls and Twitter feeds. You can’t just make a story disappear. I hope that they’re more updated in whatever they do professionally.”

The prime minister’s office and prison service declined on Tuesday to comment. “I can’t tell you anything; I’m not dealing with this,” said the prison spokeswoman, Sivan Weizman. “I can’t answer any question about it. Sorry.”

On Wednesday morning, Israel Radio reported that the government had partially lifted the gag order, allowing local media to publish articles quoting foreign reports but not ones based on original material.

The Australian report, a half-hour segment based on a 10-month investigation that was broadcast Tuesday on the ABC News magazine program “Foreign Correspondent,” identified Prisoner X as Ben Zygier and said he had used the name Ben Alon in Israel. Mr. Zygier immigrated to Israel about a decade before his death at age 34, married an Israeli woman and had two small children, according to the report.

“ABC understands he was recruited by spy agency Mossad,” read a post on the Australian network’s Web site. “His incarceration was so secret that it is claimed not even guards knew his identity.” Mr. Zygier “was found hanged in a cell with state-of-the-art surveillance systems that are installed to prevent suicide,” it said, adding that guards tried unsuccessfully to revive him and that he was buried a week later in a Jewish cemetery in a suburb of Melbourne.

A spokeswoman for the Australian government said in an e-mail that its embassy was unaware of the prisoner’s detention until his family asked for help repatriating the remains, and that she could not “comment on intelligence matters (alleged or actual).”

The Australian report builds on news items from 2010 that described the death of Prisoner X in solitary-confinement cell 15 in a part of Israel’s Ayalon Prison said to have been created especially for Yigal Amir, who killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Prisoner X was not allowed visitors or a lawyer, according to those reports.

Richard Silverstein, an American blogger, claimed in 2010 that Prisoner X was Ali-Reza Asgari, a former general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and a government minister, who had previously been reported to have defected to Israel and cooperated with Western intelligence agencies. On Tuesday, Mr. Silverstein acknowledged his error, saying his source apparently was part of “a ruse designed to throw the media off the scent of the real story.”

Bill van Esveld, a Jerusalem-based analyst with Human Rights Watch, said the reports suggested a serious violation of international law. “That’s the most basic obligation you can think of, not disappearing people,” he said. “You can’t take somebody into detention, deny any knowledge of them, and not allow their families to be in communication with them, not allow them to see a lawyer or have any due process. That’s what needs to be looked into.”

Dov Hanin, a member of Parliament from the left-wing Hadash Party, on Tuesday questioned Israel’s justice minister, Yaakov Ne’eman, about Prisoner X, asking: “Are there people whose arrest is kept a secret? What are the legal monitoring mechanisms in charge of such a situation? What are the parliamentary monitoring systems in charge of such a situation? And how can public criticism exist in cases of such a situation?”

Mr. Ne’eman replied that the matter did not fall under his jurisdiction, but said, “There is no doubt that if true, the matter must be looked into.”

Israel has long employed a military censor and refused to acknowledge certain operations, most recently its airstrike last month in Syria. Most politicians here offer only winks and nods about Israel’s well-known nuclear program, and Israeli journalists are left to quote foreign news media reports about such things. Two weeks ago, Reporters Without Borders ranked Israel 112th out of 179 countries on its annual press freedom index.

But even within that context, experts said the Prisoner X situation was extraordinary. They likened it to the case of Marcus Klingberg, a Soviet spy who was held in Israel for years under a false name.

“There are some episodes in the history of Israel that are still kept under the strongest secrecy thick veil possible,” said Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine who is writing a book about the Mossad. “Some of them are 40 years old, 50 years old, and are still under thick, thick secrecy, and anyone violating this secrecy would be thrown into jail himself.”

Mr. Bergman said he had information about Prisoner X but could not share it because “so far the gag order is in motion and I’m an Israeli citizen.” Three former directors of the Mossad also refused on Tuesday to comment on the case.

“This is the topic you want to talk to me about? No way,” said Danny Yatom, who headed the spy agency in the late 1990s and later served as a Labor member of Parliament. “I don’t know if it is true or not. Even if I would have known if it were true, I wouldn’t have talked about it.”

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