Murder case against tennis umpire is dropped

From the beginning, the death of professional tennis umpire Lois Goodman's husband was beset by contradictions.

When Alan Goodman, 80, was found dead in April at the couple's Woodland Hills condominium, paramedics noticed a suspicious cut to the side of his head. But Los Angeles police initially agreed with Lois Goodman's account that her ailing husband had fallen down a flight of stairs.

Days later, a coroner's investigator found that the injuries were consistent with being struck by a sharp object. That ultimately led to Goodman's dramatic arrest at a luxury Manhattan hotel as she prepared for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, with authorities claiming she bludgeoned her husband with a coffee mug.

PHOTOS: Murder case against tennis umpire is dropped

On Friday, prosecutors abruptly dropped a murder charge against her. Officials would say only that prosecutors received "additional information," declining to elaborate.

But law enforcement sources told The Times that medical experts consulted by the Los Angeles County district attorney's office concluded that the death could be the result of an accident, contradicting the coroner's determination that it was a homicide.

The finding added to a long list of problems with the case, the sources said, that included a lack of a clear motive as well as other physical evidence that could help the defense. Moreover, genetic tests found none of Goodman's DNA on the piece of the coffee mug that prosecutors had alleged she used to kill her husband.

After she left the courtroom Friday a free woman, Goodman, 70, insisted she was innocent and said she wanted to get back on the professional tennis tour, where she has been a fixture for decades.

"I feel wonderful," she said, standing in the rain outside the Van Nuys courthouse, flanked by her attorneys. "I just feel I have been treated fairly now and it was just a tragic accident."

The dismissal raised questions about how the case was investigated and whether both detectives and prosecutors rushed to charge Goodman. Last year, the LAPD acknowledged detectives had wrongly arrested a man in the high-profile beating of a San Francisco Giants baseball fan outside Dodger Stadium.

One of Goodman's attorneys, Robert Sheahen, criticized the LAPD's investigation, saying crime scene evidence undercut the theory that Alan Goodman's death was a homicide.

A prominent medical expert, he said, told the defense team that Goodman was more likely to have died from heart failure, noting that his heart was four times the size of a normal heart. Blood evidence showed that an injured Goodman was downstairs at some point but was upstairs in bed by the time paramedics arrived, Sheahen said. Lois Goodman — who suffered from bad knees, a torn rotator cuff, rheumatoid arthritis and severe back pain — was in no physical condition to move her 160-pound husband, the attorney said.

"She would have needed a forklift to take the body up the stairs. It was ridiculous," Sheahen said.

The LAPD declined to comment on details of the case, but LAPD Chief Charlie Beck released a brief statement.

"I am aware that the district attorney today declared that they are not ready to proceed in the Alan Goodman homicide trial and asked the court to dismiss the case without prejudice," Beck said. "This is still considered an open case, and our Topanga-area homicide detectives will continue their investigation."

Sources told The Times that prosecutors would review any new compelling evidence in the case and determine whether to refile charges but believed that would be unlikely. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing, said there were obvious problems from the outset, noting that the coroner was never called to the crime scene. Some inside the district attorney's office, they said, had questioned the public way in which Goodman was arrested. New York police took Goodman into custody after she had finished breakfast at a Midtown Sheraton and then walked her past photographers.

Steve Meister, a defense attorney and former Los Angeles County prosecutor, said district attorney's officials deserve credit for dismissing the case when they realized they did not have enough evidence to proceed. Nevertheless, he said, the office should examine whether prosecutors could have anticipated the problems before they decided to file criminal charges.

"There needs to be a ... thoughtful, honest internal review process to figure out what went wrong here, because something clearly did," Meister said.

From the outset, Lois Goodman told police she came home and found her husband dead in bed. She said she believed he crawled there after falling down the stairs and onto a coffee cup he was carrying.

At a court hearing earlier this year, a prosecutor accused her of plotting to kill her husband by wielding the broken coffee mug like an "improvised knife." Shards from the mug were found embedded in his wounds. Prosecutors alleged that she left him to die and went off to "tennis and to get her nails done."

A search warrant executed four days after the death turned up blood throughout the home "inconsistent with accidental death," an LAPD detective wrote in the warrant affidavit. Stains on carpets, the refrigerator door, inside a linen closet and on the wall leading to the garage suggested "a mobile victim" who, police theorized, would have called for help.

They also found that Lois Goodman, married to her husband for nearly 50 years, was communicating on the Internet with another man, according to the warrant. One email described in the warrant included cryptic remarks about her "terminating a relationship" and having "alternative sleeping arrangements," though exactly what she meant remains unclear.

But Lois Goodman's supporters described her as a loving wife who cared for her aging husband. And her lawyers said she passed a lie-detector test administered by a former FBI examiner in which she denied killing her husband.

Hours after the court hearing, a bail bonds official cut off the electronic ankle bracelet that Lois Goodman was required to wear while she was out on bail.

"I didn't do anything. I would never hurt my husband," Goodman said, her eyes filling with tears. "I loved him and I was his caretaker, and he came first and I came second."

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

jack.leonard@latimes.com

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

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The Cow Jumped Over the Moon (1957)

In June 1957, launch of the civilian U.S. Vanguard scientific satellite (image at top of post) was thought imminent. That month, Krafft Ehricke and George Gamow wrote in Scientific American magazine that, after Vanguard reached low-Earth orbit, the moon, 238,000 miles away, would be “the next interesting target in space.” They estimated that, with “luck and sufficient effort,” a U.S. automated probe could reach the moon by 1963.

Ehricke and Gamow proposed a design for such a probe, which they inelegantly dubbed “Cow” in tribute to the moon-jumping nursery rhyme character. Cow would have a mass of between 400 and 800 pounds. A 100-foot-tall, 120-ton rocket would boost it to a speed of 23,827 miles per hour on a path toward the moon. If the Earth existed in isolation, Cow would then enter an elliptical orbit around the Earth taking it 280,000 miles out into space – that is, about 45,000 miles beyond the moon. The gravitational attraction of the moon and Sun meant, however, that Cow would follow a “distorted” path to a point 1281 miles from the moon 75.6 hours after launch. The probe would then swing around the moon, collecting data all the while, and fall back to Earth.

Cow would strike Earth’s atmosphere moving at 25,000 miles per hour 157 hours after launch. Though high-speed reentry would drive Cow’s skin temperature to 5000° C, Ehricke and Gamow maintained that “preventing the capsule from burning up by means of insulation and a cooling system” would not be “technically prohibitive.” This would enable recovery of high-quality photographic film images and other recorded data.

Ehricke and Gamow then proposed an explosive follow-on mission that would employ two probes launched on a “Cow-type” trajectory. The lead probe would drop an atomic bomb on the moon, blasting a debris cloud far into space; then, through “a miracle of electronic guidance,” the trailing probe would “dive into the cloud, collect some of the spray and emerge from its dive by means of an auxiliary jet.” It would then fall to Earth bearing its precious cargo of lunar material. This was one of a host of U.S. and Soviet proposals to explode nuclear weapons on the lunar surface put forward in the late 1950s/early 1960s, none of which reached fruition.

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first Earth satellite. Though the Soviets had announced two years previously that they aimed to launch a satellite, few in the West had taken them seriously. A second satellite, Sputnik 2, reached orbit with the dog Laika on board on November 3, 1957.

The first Vanguard launch attempt, designated TV3, ended in a nationally televised launch pad explosion on 6 December 1957, heaping humiliation upon humiliation. President Dwight Eisenhower, eager to calm American anxiety about Soviet technological prowess, decided not to rely solely on Vanguard. He authorized the U.S. Army rocket team under Wernher von Braun to prepare to launch a satellite as work toward the next Vanguard launch attempt proceeded. Citing technical difficulties (a fault in the Vanguard rocket’s second-stage engine), the Vanguard TV-3BU mission stood down on January 26, 1958, clearing the way for an Army Juno I rocket to launch Explorer 1, the first U.S. Earth satellite, on 31 January 1958.

The first Vanguard satellite to reach orbit left Earth on March 17, 1958. The 3.2-pound satellite, which ceased operating in 1964, remains in Earth orbit. Sputnik 1, Sputnik 2, and Explorer 1 have long since reentered the atmosphere and been destroyed, making Vanguard 1 the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth.

In August 1958, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. began to launch probes toward the moon. The Soviet Luna 2 probe became the first human-made object to strike the moon (13 September 1959) and Luna 3 imaged the moon’s hidden Farside (6 October 1959). No spacecraft would follow Ehricke and Gamow’s Cow-type trajectory until the Soviet Zond 5 (an unmanned test of a manned circumlunar spacecraft) in September 1967, and none would return samples of lunar surface material until the first manned moon landing (Apollo 11, 16-24 July 1969).

Reference:

A Rocket Around the Moon, K. Ehricke and G. Gamow, Scientific American, Volume 196, Number 6, June 1957, pp. 47-53.

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Putin aide denies Russian president has health problems

TOKYO/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin is in good health, his chief of staff said on Friday after Japanese media said Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had postponed a visit to Moscow next month because the Russian president had a health problem.

A former KGB officer who enjoys vast authority in Russia, Putin has long cultivated a tough-guy image, and health issues could damage that. His condition though has been questioned in some media since he was seen limping at a summit in September.

Three Russian government sources told Reuters late in October that Putin, who began a six-year term in May and turned 60 last month, was suffering from back trouble, but the Kremlin has dismissed talk that he had a serious back problem.

Putin’s health troubles stem from a recent judo bout, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said this week.

Then on Friday Japanese news agencies Kyodo and Jiji reported that Prime Minister Noda talked about the delay of a visit planned for December in a meeting with municipal officials on the northern island of Hokkaido.

“It’s about (President Putin’s) health problem. This is not something that can easily be made public,” Jiji cited one of the officials as quoting Noda as saying.

But Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov denied there was any problem.

“Please don’t worry, don’t be concerned. Everything is in order with his health,” Putin’s said in Vienna, according to state-run Russian news agency RIA.

In an interview published on Friday in the popular Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said rumors about a spine problem were “strongly exaggerated”.

“He is working as he has before and intends to continue working at the same pace,” Peskov said.

“He also does not plan to give up his sports activities and for this reason, like any athlete, his back, his arm, his leg might sometimes hurt a little – this has never gotten in the way of his ability to work.”

Putin had been expected to make several foreign trips in late October or November, but they did not take place.

Putin is however due to visit Turkey on Monday and Turkmenistan on Wednesday.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, made amply clear the Kremlin was displeased by the public discussion of scheduling by Japanese officials and denied that Noda’s visit had been postponed, saying no date had been set.

“It is just unethical to name the dates that were discussed. There were several: at first it was October, November, December, January … then we even shifted to February,” Ushakov said, adding that the sides eventually agreed tentatively on January.

He said the diplomatic process of agreeing dates for the visit should have been “hermetically sealed”.

Putin’s image as a fit, healthy man helped bring him popularity when he rose to power 13 years ago because of the stark contrast with his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who was sometimes drunk in public and had heart surgery when president.

He has used activities like scuba diving and horseback riding to maintain that image.

On Friday, Putin met leaders of parliamentary factions in his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. He appeared in good health and was walking without any sign of a limp.

Likely to be on the agenda in talks between Russian and Japanese officials are energy cooperation and a decades-old dispute over islands north of Hokkaido known as the Southern Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan.

(Additional reporting by Darya Korsunskaya; Writing by Tomasz Janowski and Steve Gutterman; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jon Hemming)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Small union is causing big problems for ports

The small band of strikers that has effectively shut down the nation's busiest shipping complex forced two huge cargo ships to head for other ports Thursday and kept at least three others away, hobbling an economic powerhouse in Southern California.

The disruption is costing an estimated $1 billion a day at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, on which some 600,000 truckers, dockworkers, trading companies and others depend for their livelihoods.

"The longer it goes, the more the impacts increase," said Paul Bingham, an economist with infrastructure consulting firm CDM Smith. "Retailers will have stock outages, lost sales for products not delivered. There will be shutdowns in factories, in manufacturing when they run out of parts."

Despite the union's size — about 800 members of a unit of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union — it has managed to flex big muscles. Unlike almost anywhere else in the nation, union loyalty is strong at the country's ports. Neither the longshoremen nor the truckers are crossing the tiny union's picket lines.

The strike started at the L.A. port's largest terminal Tuesday and spread Wednesday to 10 of the two ports' 14 cargo terminals. These resemble seaside parking lots where long metal containers are loaded and unloaded with the help of giant cranes.

The union contends that the dispute is over job security and the transfer of work from higher-paid union members to lower-paid employees in other countries. The 14-employer management group says that no jobs have been outsourced and that the union wants to continue a practice called "featherbedding," or bringing in temporary workers even when there is no work.

The two sides haven't met since negotiations broke down Monday, but they were scheduled to begin talking again Thursday night. The union has worked without a contract for 21/2 years.

The clerical workers are a vital link in the supply chain. They handle the immense flow of information that accompanies each cargo ship as well as every item in the freight. One shipload of shoes, toys and other products is enough to fill five warehouses.

Logistics clerk Trinie Thompson, 41, normally spends her days working with railroad lines and trucking companies to ensure that the right containers are sent along to their proper destinations. On Thursday, she was walking the picket lines at the docks.

"We will be setting up trains to Houston, trains to Dallas, to Chicago, to the Pacific Northwest," said Thompson, who has worked for 10 years for Eagle Marine Services terminal, which is affiliated with the giant APL shipping line.

"For a typical container ship, we will have to set up multiple trains. We might be sending 200 to 300 containers to Chicago alone, and there will be paperwork for all of them."

The strike comes at a time of simmering labor unrest at other U.S. ports, underscoring the unusual power labor holds in maritime trade.

On the East Coast and Gulf Coast, another group of shipping lines and terminal operators called the United States Maritime Alliance has repeatedly failed to reach agreement on a new labor contract with the International Longshoremen's Assn. A strike that might have involved dozens of ports was avoided only after both sides agreed to extend negotiations past the September end of their current contract.

A strike also was narrowly avoided at Portland, Ore., only a few days ago in a dispute between grain shippers and union workers.

Operations at Oakland International Airport and at the Port of Oakland, the third-largest port in the state behind Los Angeles and Long Beach, were affected by a brief strike this month.

Maritime unions "have successfully organized one of the most vital links in the supply chain, and it's a tradition they nurture with all of their younger workers," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a UC Santa Barbara history professor and workplace expert. "They have a very strong ideological sense of who they are, and for now they are strong."

In Los Angeles and Long Beach, the 800 clerical workers have been able to shut down most of the ports because the 10,000-member dockworkers union is honoring the picket lines. Work continues at only four cargo terminals, where the office clerical unit has no workers.

"Longshoremen stand up when other workers need our help," said Ray Ortiz Jr., a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's Coast Committee. "Sure, it's a sacrifice to give up a paycheck when you refuse to cross the picket line, but we believe it's in the long-term interest of the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor area to retain these good local jobs."

Stephen Berry, lead negotiator for the shipping lines and cargo terminals, said the clerical workers have been offered a deal that includes "absolute job security," a raise that would take average annual pay to $195,000 from $165,000, 11 weeks' paid vacation and a generous pension increase.

At a news conference Thursday, Berry denounced the tactics by the clerical workers, calling them "irresponsible."

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 30

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Gotye wins big at Australia’s Aria music awards

SYDNEY (AP) — Gotye has taken home album of the year at Australia‘s Aria music awards for his internationally acclaimed “Making Mirrors.”

The album features the Belgian-born, Australian-raised singer’s multiplatinum hit “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which was the top song of the year on digital music service Spotify.

Gotye won three other awards at Thursday night’s Arias, including best pop release, best Australian live act and best male artist.

The annual awards show is Australia’s version of the Grammys. This year’s gala featured appearances by Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj and Russell Brand.

Fans shrieked with glee when British pop group One Direction was dubbed best international artist. The quintet thanked their Aussie supporters via video link.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Asian Chopped Salad With Seasoned Tofu ‘Fingers’ — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I like to serve the baked seasoned tofu “fingers” warm on top of the salad. They are delicious cold, too; it is worth making up a separate batch for the refrigerator. If you have an assortment of vegetables leftover from Thanksgiving dinner, throw them in!

For the Tofu:

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 tablespoons mirin (sweet Japanese rice wine)

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1 tablespoon minced or grated fresh ginger

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon Asian sesame oil

1 pound firm tofu

For the salad:

1 romaine heart, chopped

5 cups mixed chopped or diced vegetables such as:

Green or red cabbage

Celery (from the inner heart)

Red pepper

Radishes, sliced or chopped

1/4 cup dry roasted peanuts, coarsely chopped

1/4 cup chopped cilantro (more to taste)

1 serrano pepper, seeded and minced (optional)

For the dressing:

2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

1/4 cup tofu marinade, above

2 tablespoons canola or peanut oil

1/3 cup low-fat buttermilk or plain nonfat yogurt

1. Marinate the tofu: combine the soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, ginger and sugar in a 2-quart bowl. Whisk in the sesame oil and combine well. Drain the tofu and pat dry with paper towels. Slice into 1/3-inch thick slabs and cut the slabs in half lengthwise to get “fingers” approximately 1/3 inch thick by 3/4 inch wide. Blot each finger with paper towels. Add to the bowl with the marinade and gently toss to coat. Cover and refrigerate for 15 minutes to an hour, or for up to a day.

2. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 375 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment. Lift the tofu out of the marinade and arrange the pieces on the parchment-covered baking sheet. Bake for 7 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just beginning to color and the marinade sets on the surface of the tofu. Remove from the heat.

3. In a large bowl, combine all of the salad ingredients. Whisk together the dressing ingredients and toss with the salad. If desired, transfer to a platter. Garnish with the tofu strips and serve.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The chopped vegetables can be prepared up to a day ahead and refrigerated in a well covered container. The tofu marinade will keep for two days in the refrigerator. The baked seasoned tofu will keep for several days in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per serving: 317 calories; 20 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 8 grams polyunsaturated fat; 9 grams monounsaturated fat; 1 milligram cholesterol; 19 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 470 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 16 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Most Americans Face Lower Tax Burden Than in the 80s

What Is Fair?:
Taxes are still a hot topic after the presidential election. But as a country that spends more than it collects in taxes, are we asking the right taxpayers to pay the right amounts?

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — Alan Hicks divides long days between the insurance business he started in the late 1970s and the barbecue restaurant he opened with his sons three years ago. He earned more than $250,000 last year and said taxes took more than 40 percent. What’s worse, in his view, is that others — the wealthy, hiding in loopholes; the poor, living on government benefits — are not paying their fair share.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

"I don't have the answer of where to pull back. I want the state parks to stay open. I want, I want, I want. I want Big Bird, I think it's beautiful. What don't I want? I don't know," said Anita Thole, a safety supervisor for a utility contractor.

“It feels like the harder we work, the more they take from us,” said Mr. Hicks, 55, as he waited for a meat truck one recent afternoon. “And it seems like there’s an awful lot of people in the United States who don’t pay any taxes.”

These are common sentiments in the eastern suburbs of St. Louis, a region of fading factory towns fringed by new subdivisions. Here, as across the country, people like Mr. Hicks are pained by the conviction that they are paying ever more to finance the expansion of government.

But in fact, most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes — federal, state and local — than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.

Households earning more than $200,000 benefited from the largest percentage declines in total taxation as a share of income. Middle-income households benefited, too. More than 85 percent of households with earnings above $25,000 paid less in total taxes than comparable households in 1980.

Lower-income households, however, saved little or nothing. Many pay no federal income taxes, but they do pay a range of other levies, like federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. Only about half of taxpaying households with incomes below $25,000 paid less in 2010.

The uneven decline is a result of two trends. Congress cut federal taxation at every income level over the last 30 years. State and local taxes, meanwhile, increased for most Americans. Those taxes generally take a larger share of income from those who make less, so the increases offset more and more of the federal savings at lower levels of income.

In a half-dozen states, including Connecticut, Florida and New Jersey, the increases were large enough to offset the federal savings for most households, not just the poorer ones.

Now an era of tax cuts may be reaching its end. The federal government depends increasingly on borrowed money to pay its bills, and many state and local governments are similarly confronting the reality that they are spending more money than they collect. In Washington, debates about tax cuts have yielded to debates about who should pay more.

President Obama campaigned for re-election on a promise to take a larger share of taxable income above roughly $250,000 a year. The White House is now negotiating with Congressional Republicans, who instead want to raise some money by reducing tax deductions. Federal spending cuts also are at issue.

If a deal is not struck by year’s end, a wide range of federal tax cuts passed since 2000 will expire and taxes will rise for roughly 90 percent of Americans, according to the independent Tax Policy Center. For lower-income households, taxation would spike well above 1980 levels. Upper-income households would lose some but not all of the benefits of tax cuts over the last three decades.

Public debate over taxes has typically focused on the federal income tax, but that now accounts for less than a third of the total tax revenues collected by federal, state and local governments. To analyze the total burden, The Times created a model, in consultation with experts, which estimated total tax bills for each taxpayer in each year from 1980, when the election of President Ronald Reagan opened an era of tax cutting, up to 2010, the most recent year for which relevant data is available.

The analysis shows that the overall burden of taxation declined as a share of income in the 1980s, rose to a new peak in the 1990s and fell again in the 2000s. Tax rates at most income levels were lower in 2010 than at any point during the 1980s.

Governments still collected the same share of total income in 2010 as in 1980 — 31 cents from every dollar — because people with higher incomes pay taxes at higher rates, and household incomes rose over the last three decades, particularly at the top.

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Powerball's $580-million jackpot inspires wishes, dreamers

Don't bother telling Wednesday night's Powerball winners  that a lottery is just a tax on those who flunked math. With a winning ticket in hand, or even just the dream of one, who cares if the odds against them exceeded 175 million to 1? 

Last-minute ticket-buying pushed the jackpot to nearly $580 million, which is how much a single winner would get if he or she took the money in annual payments over 30 years.  

The winning numbers: 5-16-22-23-29, and the Powerball:  06. 

Hours after the 8 p.m. drawing, officials said winning tickets had been sold in Arizona and Missouri.

No one had won since Oct. 6, causing the jackpot to roll over 16 times. It  grows at least $10 million every time no one wins, lottery officials said. 

To play Powerball, one must pick five unique numbers from 1 through 59, and a Powerball number from 1 through 35. The odds of winning are 1 in 175,223,510. 

Powerball tickets aren't sold in California, but some feverish residents reportedly drove or flew to one of 42 participating states  to buy a chance at a fortune. The District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands also participate. 

Maybe the next time the jackpot soars, out-of-state travel won't be necessary. On Thursday, the California State Lottery Commission is expected to adopt regulations to join the Powerball lottery. If so, California retailers could start selling the $2 tickets in April.

[Updated, 10:45 p.m., Nov. 28: An earlier version of this post said the jackpot would exceed $550 million.  Late Wednesday, the Associated Press reported, Powerball officials said it would be nearly $580 million. And early Thursday EST, lottery officials said winning tickets had been sold in Arizona and Missouri.]

 ALSO:

Zig Ziglar dies at 86; motivational speaker inspired millions

Nanny, in hospital, pleads not guilty to murder of 2 children

Texas moves to seize polygamist Warren Jeffs' ranch compound 

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 29

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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X Factor judge Louis Walsh settles defamation case

DUBLIN (Reuters) – Television personality and pop music producer Louis Walsh on Wednesday settled a 500,000 euro ($ 640,000) defamation case against News Group Newspapers in Ireland.

The deal came after Walsh, best known for his role as a judge on the hit television show “The X Factor”, sued the group for publishing a story last year based on false allegations that he had groped a man in a Dublin night club.

Leonard Watters, who made the accusations before later retracting them, was jailed for six months earlier this year.

Paul Tweed, Walsh’s solicitor, said: “The publishers of the Irish, UK and online editions of the Sun have this morning unreservedly apologized to Louis Walsh.

“They have also agreed to pay very substantial damages of 500,000 euros together with his legal costs.”

Walsh, who managed Irish boy bands Westlife and Boyzone, said the story had a “terrible effect” on him.

“I’m very satisfied with this morning’s total vindication for me, but I remain very angry at the treatment I received at the hands of the Sun,” he said outside court.

“I have the utmost respect and time for most journalists with whom I’ve always enjoyed a good relationship, and I’m therefore absolutely gutted and traumatized that these allegations should have been published

“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

The Sun said it apologized “unreservedly”.

(Reporting by Sarah O’Connor)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: New Help for Hoarders

There were times, Sandra Stark remembers, when she couldn’t use her kitchen or sit on her sofa. Her collections — figurines, vases, paperweights — had overtaken every closet, drawer and surface. Stacks of clothing and old magazines added to the clutter.

Her daughters came in and threw everything away — to Ms. Stark’s horror — but a year later her home was again barely navigable. “I couldn’t throw out my garbage,” she said. “I put it in plastic bags, but I couldn’t take it out.”

A drop-in support group sponsored by the Mental Health Association of San Francisco helped her begin to control her hoarding behavior, and she has made considerable headway. “My bedroom is still a work in progress,” said Ms. Stark, 67. “But I can cook again.”

She has become a trained peer responder who works with others with this disorder. Many of the Mental Health Association’s clients are older adults: A woman in her 70s occupies one small room because the rest of her spacious house — leaking and mildewed — is filled with stuff she can’t discard. An 87-year-old, a compulsive thrift-store shopper, faces eviction because the city health department says she has created a safety hazard. “I’ll say, ‘Of these dozen black leather coats, pick two,’” Ms. Stark said, mapping her strategy to help keep the woman in her home.

Researchers are not sure if hoarding intensifies with age, but the problems it creates certainly do. “The older you get, the more stuff you’ve been able to accumulate,” said Randy Frost, co-author of the book “Stuff” and a Smith College psychologist. “And older people are less physically able to deal with it.” They are more prone to falls as they try to maneuver between piles of possessions and in a crisis, emergency crews may have trouble even entering their dwellings.

When I last wrote about hoarding almost three years ago (uncorking a wave of readers’ lamentation), I couldn’t offer much in the way of help except to steer people to the OCD Foundation. Though hoarding may not be a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, its site remains useful.

At the time, experts knew what didn’t solve the problem, namely psychoactive drugs or “dumpster therapy,” in which well-meaning friends or family toss hoarders’ possessions, in a temporary fix that doesn’t change their behavior. But researchers were only starting to figure out what did work.

“This is an area in which there haven’t been a lot of answers,” said Eduardo Vega, executive director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. Now, “there’s a lot more hope and good will.”

Across the country, for example, cities, counties and states have formed about 80 hoarding task forces so that housing and health departments, senior service agencies, law enforcement and emergency units can coordinate their responses.

On the mental health front, the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V is scheduled for publication in the spring, and many expect it will recognize hoarding as a distinct disorder with diagnostic criteria and a numeric code. That will make psychologists and other professionals more aware of the problem and, Mr. Vega said, “it will be easier to get insurers and providers to pay for treatment.”

Increasingly, there is treatment. Researchers have published studies showing that cognitive behavioral therapy can help, by encouraging people to reevaluate their attachment to possessions and supporting their decisions to start discarding.

Among patients in therapy groups, Dr. Frost has shown, 70 to 80 percent showed some improvement, he said. “That doesn’t mean they’re freed of symptoms, but their lives are improved and the behavior significantly reduced.”

Questions remain; several published studies use small samples that are heavily comprised of females, though hoarding may be more common among men. It is not clear, Dr. Frost said, whether cognitive therapy is as effective among older adults. And it is easier to find an individual therapist or a group in major cities than elsewhere. (Here’s a locator.)

But Dr. Frost and his co-authors have published a workbook called “Buried in Treasures,” along with a free facilitator’s guide, that allows people with hoarding disorders to form their own 15-session action workshops, led by peers rather than professionals. That approach, too, has brought measurable improvement (when used in groups, not individually), a study shows. “Here’s a way people can start working on this on their own,” Dr. Frost said.

Diagnostic criteria, treatment centers, workbooks, published research — all this is more than mental health professionals could offer years back. Still, compulsive hoarding remains a stubborn problem, a safety risk for older people and a heartache for their families.

“It’s really difficult for adult children,” who worry about their parents, but can’t induce them to change, Dr. Frost said. “There may be a history of animosity. Many report they grew up feeling their hoarding parents cared more about their possessions than about them.” The children, young or grown, could probably use a support group, too.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The Next War: In Federal Budget Cutting, F-35 Fighter Jet Is at Risk

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Vice Adm. David Venlet was named to lead the Joint Strike Fighter program in 2010 after problems had left it behind schedule and over budget.

LEXINGTON PARK, Md. — The Marine version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, already more than a decade in the making, was facing a crucial question: Could the jet, which can soar well past the speed of sound, land at sea like a helicopter?

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

An F-35B, the Marine Corps version of the Joint Strike Fighter.

On an October day last year, with Lt. Col. Fred Schenk at the controls, the plane glided toward a ship off the Atlantic coast and then, its engine rotating straight down, descended gently to the deck at seven feet a second.

There were cheers from the ship’s crew members, who “were all shaking my hands and smiling,” Colonel Schenk recalled.

The smooth landing helped save that model and breathed new life into the huge F-35 program, the most expensive weapons system in military history. But while Pentagon officials now say that the program is making progress, it begins its 12th year in development years behind schedule, troubled with technological flaws and facing concerns about its relatively short flight range as possible threats grow from Asia.

With a record price tag — potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars — the jet is likely to become a target for budget cutters. Reining in military spending is on the table as President Obama and Republican leaders in Congress look for ways to avert a fiscal crisis. But no matter what kind of deal is reached in the next few weeks, military analysts expect the Pentagon budget to decline in the next decade as the war in Afghanistan ends and the military is required to do its part to reduce the federal debt.

Behind the scenes, the Pentagon and the F-35’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin, are engaged in a conflict of their own over the costs. The relationship “is the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in some bad ones,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Bogdan of the Air Force, a top program official, said in September. “I guarantee you: we will not succeed on this if we do not get past that.”

In a battle that is being fought on other military programs as well, the Pentagon has been pushing Lockheed to cut costs much faster while the company is fighting to hold onto a profit. “Lockheed has seemed to be focused on short-term business goals,” Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said this month. “And we’d like to see them focus more on execution of the program and successful delivery of the product.”

The F-35 was conceived as the Pentagon’s silver bullet in the sky — a state-of-the art aircraft that could be adapted to three branches of the military, with advances that would easily overcome the defenses of most foes. The radar-evading jets would not only dodge sophisticated antiaircraft missiles, but they would also give pilots a better picture of enemy threats while enabling allies, who want the planes, too, to fight more closely with American forces.

But the ambitious aircraft instead illustrates how the Pentagon can let huge and complex programs veer out of control and then have a hard time reining them in. The program nearly doubled in cost as Lockheed and the military’s own bureaucracy failed to deliver on the most basic promise of a three-in-one jet that would save taxpayers money and be served up speedily.

Lockheed has delivered 41 planes so far for testing and initial training, and Pentagon leaders are slowing purchases of the F-35 to fix the latest technical problems and reduce the immediate costs. A helmet for pilots that projects targeting data onto its visor is too jittery to count on. The tail-hook on the Navy jet has had trouble catching the arresting cable, meaning that version cannot yet land on carriers. And writing and testing the millions of lines of software needed by the jets is so daunting that General Bogdan said, “It scares the heck out of me.”

With all the delays — full production is not expected until 2019 — the military has spent billions to extend the lives of older fighters and buy more of them to fill the gap. At the same time, the cost to build each F-35 has risen to an average of $137 million from $69 million in 2001.

The jets would cost taxpayers $396 billion, including research and development, if the Pentagon sticks to its plan to build 2,443 by the late 2030s. That would be nearly four times as much as any other weapons system and two-thirds of the $589 billion the United States has spent on the war in Afghanistan. The military is also desperately trying to figure out how to reduce the long-term costs of operating the planes, now projected at $1.1 trillion.

“The plane is unaffordable,” said Winslow T. Wheeler, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group in Washington, said Pentagon officials had little choice but to push ahead, especially after already spending $65 billion on the fighter. “It is simultaneously too big to fail and too big to succeed,” he said. “The bottom line here is that they’ve crammed too much into the program. They were asking one fighter to do three different jobs, and they basically ended up with three different fighters.”

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27 indicted in Mexican Mafia drug case in Ventura County

From a prison cell outside California, an inmate known as "Evil" was making himself known on Ventura County's streets.

Martin Madrigal, 39, was squeezing drug profits from street gangs for the prison-based Mexican Mafia, according to a grand jury indictment released Tuesday. He was so feared that rival gangs cooperated on extortion schemes, drug deals and violent crimes, according to law enforcement officials.

The 35-count indictment portrays Madrigal as a powerful figure representing an efficient and merciless organization that law enforcement officials believe has been operating for decades, largely from behind bars, calling shots among street gangs. He was one of 27 people named in the indictment, 24 of whom have been arrested. Officials declined to disclose where or why Madrigal is serving time.

The forced cooperation among rival gangs alleged in the indictment may be a sign that Mexican drug cartels are attempting to extend their authority over California drug trafficking, according to Ventura County Assistant Sheriff Gary Pentis.

Madrigal operated as a kind of regional manager, with a Ventura County gang member named Edwin "Sporty" Mora enforcing his decisions on the street with a written hit list from Madrigal and "permission to conduct extortion on behalf of the Mexican Mafia," according to the indictment. In one of the document's counts, Mora is said to have indicated that a gang member named Little Rudy "was going to kick in money by Wednesday and if he can't make that happen, Mora wanted the fool in the dirt."

Dozens of weapons, including an AK47, were confiscated during a series of arrests starting in May and ending earlier this month.

The Ventura County probe, dubbed Operation Wicked Hand, started with two shootings in Moorpark in April and a heroin bust about the same time.

"We soon came to realize the incidents weren't happenstance," Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said.

Sheriff's officials said investigators thwarted several crimes, including two planned killings and a drugstore robbery.

Officials would not reveal details of how the investigation was conducted. The indictment, returned Nov. 14, makes it clear authorities had access to text messages and phone calls that gang members made among themselves.

More than 70 officers from the Sheriff's Department participated in the investigation, as well as officers from the Oxnard Police Department and other agencies.

"This case has dealt a crushing blow to organized crime in Ventura County," Pentis said. "We have incapacitated the organization from the top through its geographic managers."

Bail for those arrested, including two juveniles, ranges from $1 million to $5 million. Dist. Atty. Greg Totten said a number of suspects are facing multiple charges, and three are facing possible life sentences under the state's three-strikes law.

Totten said his office submitted the case to a criminal grand jury rather than opting for a preliminary hearing because of its complexity and the ongoing investigation's need for secrecy.

The indictment names more individuals than any other in Ventura County's history, he said.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 28

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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In elf ears and wizard hats, ‘Hobbit’ fans rejoice

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Wearing elf ears and wizard hats, sitting atop their dad’s shoulders or peering from balconies, tens of thousands of New Zealanders watched their favorite “Hobbit” actors walk the red carpet Wednesday at the film trilogy’s hometown premiere.

An Air New Zealand plane freshly painted with “Hobbit” characters flew low over Wellington’s Embassy Theatre, eliciting roars of approval from the crowd.

Sam Rashidmardani, 12, said he came to see Gollum actor Andy Serkis walk the red carpet — and he wasn’t disappointed.

“It was amazing,” Rashidmardani said of the evening, adding his Gollum impression: “My precious.”

British actor Martin Freeman, who brings comedic timing to the lead role of Bilbo Baggins, said he thought director Peter Jackson had done a fantastic job on “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”

“He’s done it again,” Freeman said in an interview on the red carpet. “If it’s possible, it’s probably even better than ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ I think he’s surpassed it.”

While is unusual for a city so far from Hollywood to host the premiere of a hoped-for blockbuster, Jackson’s filming of his lauded ‘LOTR’ trilogy and now “The Hobbit” in New Zealand has helped create a film industry here. The film will open in theaters around the world next month.

One of the talking points of the film is the choice by Jackson to shoot it using 48 frames per second instead of the traditional 24 in hopes of improving the picture quality.

Some say the images come out too clear and look so realistic that they take away from the magic of the film medium. Jackson likens it to advancing from vinyl records to CDs.

“I really think 48 frames is pretty terrific and I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction,” Jackson said on the red carpet. “It’s been talked about for so long, but finally the film is being released and people can decide for themselves.”

Jackson said it was strange working on the project so intimately for two years and then having it suddenly taken away as the world got to see the movie.

“It spins your head a little bit,” he said.

Aidan Turner, who plays the dwarf Kili in the movie, said his character is reckless and thinks he’s charming.

“I don’t get to play real people it seems, I only get to play supernatural ones,” he said. “So playing a dwarf didn’t seem that weird, actually.

Perhaps the most well-known celebrities to walk the carpet were Cate Blanchett and Elijah Wood, who reprise their roles in the LOTR in the “Hobbit.”

“Mostly I came here to see everyone. I like them all,” said fan Aysu Shahin, 16, adding that Wood was her favorite. She said she wanted to see the movie “as soon as possible. I’m excited for it.”

At a news conference earlier in the day, Jackson said many younger people are happy to watch movies on their iPads.

“We just have to make the cinema-going experience more magical and more spectacular to get people coming back to the movies again,” he said.

Jackson said only about 1,000 of the 25,000 theaters that will show the film worldwide are equipped to show 48 frames, so most people will see it in the more traditional format. The movie has also been shot in 3D.

A handful of animal rights protesters held signs at the premiere.

The protest by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals comes after several animal wranglers said three horses and up to two dozen other animals had died during the making of the movies because they were housed at an unsafe farm.

Jackson’s spokesman earlier acknowledged two horses had died preventable deaths at the farms but said the production company worked quickly to improve stables and other facilities and that claims of mistreatment were unfounded.

“No mistreatment, no abuse. Absolutely none,” Jackson said at the news conference.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Spinach and Turkey Salad — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Turkey or chicken transforms this classic spinach salad (minus the bacon) into a light main dish, welcome after Thanksgiving and before the rest of the holiday season feasting begins.

2 cups (12 ounces) shredded cooked turkey, chicken breast or chicken breast tenders

1 6-ounce bag baby spinach

6 white or cremini mushrooms, thinly sliced

1 cup cooked wild rice

2 tablespoons chopped walnuts

1 to 2 hard boiled eggs (to taste), finely chopped (optional)

2 tablespoons chopped chives

1 to 2 tablespoons chopped fresh herbs such as parsley, tarragon or marjoram

For the dressing:

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar, tarragon vinegar or sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 small garlic clove, pureed

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons plain low-fat yogurt

1. Combine all of the salad ingredients in a large salad bowl. Whisk together the lemon juice, vinegar, Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil and yogurt. Toss with the salad just before serving.

Yield: Serves 4 as a main dish

Advance preparation: The salad can be assembled and the dressing mixed several hours before serving. Refrigerate and toss together when ready to serve.

Variation: Add 1 ripe but firm persimmon, peeled, cored and sliced, to the mixture.

Nutritional information per serving: 375 calories; 25 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 5 grams polyunsaturated fat; 15 grams monounsaturated fat; 53 milligrams cholesterol; 14 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 119 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 26 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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California Shows Signs of Resurgence

Sam Hodgson/Bloomberg News

Prosperous coastal places like La Jolla, here, are better off than the state as a whole; many inland areas still have high jobless rates.

LOS ANGELES — After nearly five years of brutal economic decline, government retrenchment and a widespread loss of confidence in its future, California is showing the first signs of a rebound. There is evidence of job growth, economic stability, a resurgent housing market and rising spirits in a state that was among the worst hit by the recession.

California reported a 10.1 percent unemployment rate last month, down from 11.5 percent in October 2011 and the lowest since February 2009. In September, California had its biggest month-to-month drop in unemployment in the 36 years the state has collected statistics, from 10.6 percent to 10.2 percent, though the state still has the third-highest jobless rate in the nation.

The housing market, whose collapse in a storm of foreclosures helped worsen the economic decline, has snapped back in many, though not all, parts of the state. Houses are sitting on the market for a shorter time and selling at higher prices, and new home construction is rising. Home sales rose 25 percent in Southern California in October compared with a year earlier.

After years of spending cuts and annual state budget deficits larger than the entire budgets of some states, this month the independent California Legislative Analyst’s Office projected a deficit for next year of $1.9 billion — down from $25 billion at one point — and said California might post a $1 billion surplus in 2014, even accounting for the tendency of these projections to vary markedly from year to year.

A reason for the change, in addition to a series of deep budget cuts in recent years, was voter approval of Proposition 30, promoted by Gov. Jerry Brown to raise taxes temporarily to avoid up to $6 billion in education cuts.

“The state’s economic recovery, prior budget cuts and the additional, temporary taxes provided by Proposition 30 have combined to bring California to a promising moment: the possible end of a decade of acute state budget challenges,” the report said. “Our economic and budgetary forecast indicates that California’s leaders face a dramatically smaller budget problem in 2013-14.”

And 38 percent of Californians say the state is heading in the right direction, according to a survey this month by U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times. For most places, that figure would seem dismal. But it is double what it was 13 months ago.

California’s recovery echoes a rebound across much of the country; the state suffered not only one of the longest downturns but also one of the most severe. Economists say the turnaround, should it continue, is a positive harbinger for the nation, given the size and diversity of the state’s economy.

Democrats here have been quick to argue that the improvements in fiscal conditions that the state is now projecting after voters approved the temporary tax increase may embolden other states, and Congress, to raise some taxes rather than turn to a new round of cuts.

Yet California still faces major problems. The economic recovery is hardly uniform. Central California and the Inland Empire — the suburban sprawl east of Los Angeles — continue to stagger under the collapse of the construction market, and some economists wonder if they will ever join the coastal cities on the prosperity train. Cities, most recently San Bernardino, are facing bankruptcy, and public employee pension costs loom as a major threat to the state budget and those of many municipalities, including Los Angeles.

A federal report this month said that by some measures, California has the worst poverty in the nation. The river of people coming west in search of the economic dream, traditionally an economic and creative driver, has slowed to a crawl.

Still, the fear among many Californians that the bottom had fallen out appears to be fading. Economists said they were spotting many signs of incipient growth, including a surge in rental costs in the Bay Area, which suggests an influx of people looking for jobs.

“I think the state is turning a corner,” said Enrico Moretti, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He said that the recovery was creating regional lines of economic demarcation — “We are going to see a more and more polarized state,” he said — but that over all, California was emerging from the recession.

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Man suspected of plotting to join Al Qaeda is held without bail

A Riverside man arrested on suspicion of plotting to join Al Qaeda with three other suspects was ordered Monday to be held without bail until trial.

Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym found that Arifeen Gojali, 21, was too much of a flight risk and danger to the community, based on the allegations by federal investigators.

Gojali was led by federal marshals into U.S. District Court in Riverside on Monday, bound by handcuffs and leg irons and wearing a bright orange, jail-issued uniform. He showed little emotion during the hearing, chatting briefly with his attorney, John Aquilina.

Aquilina told the judge that neither his client nor his family had the financial means to post bail.

"If we can't get over that hurdle, what's the point?" Aquilina told reporters outside the courtroom after the brief hearing.

Gojali and three other men from the Inland Empire have been accused of plotting to join Al Qaeda or the Taliban in Afghanistan to attack American troops or coalition forces.

Gojali and two other suspects, Bart Deleon of Ontario, 24, and Miguel Santana of Upland, were arrested during a vehicle stop in Chino on Nov. 16, a day after they booked airline tickets from Mexico to Afghanistan.

Deleon and Santana are being held without bail. The alleged ringleader, Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, was taken into custody the next day. Kabir has lived in Pomona and served a year in the U.S. Air Force.

The native Afghan and naturalized U.S. citizen converted Deleon and Santana to Islam in 2010, then left for Afghanistan, intent on joining the Taliban or Al Qaeda and paving the way for Santana and Deleon to join him, according to authorities.

Santana and Deleon allegedly recruited Gojali in September. Deleon's attorney, Randolph K. Driggs, last week criticized the federal government's case for hinging on evidence gathered by a paid confidential informant who had been convicted of drug-related charges.

The informant, who received $250,000 from the FBI and "immigration benefits" for his work over a four-year period, infiltrated the group in March and wore recording devices that provided evidence crucial to the case.

phil.willon@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 27

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Halle Berry’s ex claims he was victim in Thanksgiving brawl

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Halle Berry‘s ex-boyfriend Gabriel Aubry on Monday won a restraining order against the actress’s current lover, as the two men fought in the Los Angeles courts over who started their Thanksgiving Day brawl.

Releasing photos of himself with a black eye and cuts to his face, Aubry claimed that he was the victim in the November 22 punch-up with Berry’s fiancé, French actor Olivier Martinez, in the driveway of her Los Angeles house.

“I suffered numerous injuries as a result of the attack, including a fractured rib, multiple bruises on my face and a number of cuts which required stitches,” Aubry said in court papers, alleging that Martinez had threatened the day before to kill him.

“It all happened so fast and so suddenly; I did not see Mr Martinez’s actions coming and thus I was not ready for it and was not able to defend myself,” Aubry wrote.

Aubry, Martinez, and the Oscar-winning “Monster’s Ball” actress have been embroiled for months in a custody fight over Berry’s 4-year-old daughter, Nahla. Berry wants to take the daughter she had with Aubry to live with her and Martinez in France, but a Los Angeles judge denied that request earlier in November.

Aubry claimed in his request for a restraining order on Monday that Martinez told him, “You cost us $ 3 million,” while the French actor punched and kicked him on November 22.

Aubry, a Canadian model, was arrested last week for battery after the fist fight, and ordered to stay away from Berry, the child, and Martinez.

Neither man has been yet been formally charged in the case.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Jackie Frank)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: New Efforts to Close Hospitals' Revolving Doors

In the past, the only thing a patient was sure to get after a hospital stay was a bill. But as Medicare cracks down on high readmission rates, hospitals are dispatching nurses, transportation, culturally specific diet tips, free medications and even bathroom scales to patients deemed at risk of relapsing.

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., has nurses visit high-risk patients at their home within two days of leaving the hosital. Teresa De Peralta, a nurse practitioner who runs the program, said they frequently find that patients don’t realize a drug they were prescribed in the hospital does the same thing as one they have already been taking.

“When medications are changed, they don’t want to throw things out, they think it’s a waste,” Ms. De Peralta said. “We actually go through the cupboards and painstakingly write out in big letters what they should be taking during the day.”

Many hospital officials say their efforts to keep patients healthy after discharge have been spurred by new financial penalties Medicare started imposing in October on places with too many readmissions. Increasingly, hospitals are no longer leaving to patients the responsibility for setting up follow-up appointments or filling new prescriptions.

And hospitals are not assuming that personnel in nursing homes and other facilities know how to properly care for their patients and follow the hospital discharge instructions.

Patients taking the wrong dose or mixing medicines that react badly often end up back in the hospital. A survey of 377 elderly patients at Yale-New Haven Hospital, published this year in The Journal of General Internal Medicine, discovered that 81 percent of the patients either didn’t understand what all their prescriptions were for; were prescribed the wrong drug or the wrong dose; were taken off a drug they needed, or never picked up a new prescription.

Dr. Leora Horwitz, the study’s leader, said patients who were called a week after their discharge and were asked what changes to their medication they were supposed to make “overwhelmingly” couldn’t tell them.

A big part of reducing readmissions is making sure that patients understand early warning signs that their health is deteriorating. Sun Health Care Transitions, a foundation-supported program in Sun City, Ariz., gives scales to some patients with congestive heart failure because small weight gains indicate they are retaining water, a sign that their heart isn’t pumping adequately.

“We have them keep a log,” said Jennifer Drago, a Sun Health vice president. “We want them to be looking for a two-pound daily weight gain, or five pounds over the week.”

Patients whose weight creeps up are quickly sent back to their doctor. Debra Richards, director of case management at Banner Del E. Webb Medical Center, one of the hospitals Sun Health is assisting, said, “That program has helped us quite a bit.”

Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, Md., has started taking patients’ cultural backgrounds into consideration when doling out advice about maintaining their health. For example, the hospital encourages Salvadoran patients to substitute olive oils for the palm oils their cuisine traditionally calls for, to roast or bake meat instead of frying it and to use sugar substitutes when making horchata, a popular Central American drink.

When Hackensack University Medical Center sent staff members to teach caregivers how to take care of their patients, one place “didn’t even know what a low-salt diet was,” even though that’s a critical part of keeping heart failure patients from retaining fluids, said Dr. Charles Riccobono, chief quality and safety officer at the New Jersey hospital.

Aurora Health Care, a Milwaukee-based health system, now places its own nurse practitioners in several nursing homes to watch over Aurora’s discharged patients. Aurora says readmission rates of those patients have decreased, in some months by as much as half.

Dr. Eric Coleman, a Denver geriatrician whose ideas on reducing readmissions have been adopted by a number of hospitals and Medicare, said that while some hospital changes are “exciting and new,” others are “relabeling old wine in new bottles.”

“Yesterday we had ‘discharge planning’ and today we have a ‘rapid response transition team,’ and content-wise they’re doing the same thing,” Dr. Coleman said. “But it’s a nice thing to report out to the board of trustees.”

Jordan Rau is a reporter for Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Puerto Rico Races to Rescue Its Pension Fund

Puerto Rico is fighting to stay afloat in a rising sea of debt.

Its economy is sputtering. Its population is shrinking. Its recent election is disputed. Its public pension fund is perilously low on cash. The American territory has just been through a brutal five-year recession, something not experienced in the United States as a whole since the 1930s.

Desperate to raise cash, Puerto Rican officials have been selling off anything they can: two toll roads and the main airport so far.

To bring in tax revenue, they are trying to lure people out of the underground economy. Coffee shops, hairdressers, even outdoor market stalls are being required to issue printed receipts with every sale. The receipts carry a lottery number, with a chance to win cars or cash, as an incentive to get shoppers to pay the island’s 7 percent sales tax.

Though many of Puerto Rico’s problems are reminiscent of Greece’s — tax noncompliance, a stagnant economy, years of issuing long-term debt to cover short-term payments — investors have had a nearly insatiable appetite for its bonds.

But now their support is dwindling. Some big investors are pruning their holdings. That is beginning to widen the cost of borrowing for Puerto Rico relative to other states and municipalities, which are benefiting from a big decline in borrowing costs. The interest rate its 30-year bonds now pay is about 2.5 percentage points higher than other municipal borrowers’, up from a difference of just 1.5 percentage points at the beginning of 2012, according to Municipal Market Data.

The possibility of a credit downgrade also hangs in the air, something that could lead to more selling.

“There is no specific event looming on the horizon,” said Alan Schankel, a managing director at Janney Capital Markets in Philadelphia. “But it’s a problem of immense magnitude, and it’s very challenging to sit here and see how they work their way out of it.”

Puerto Rico needs to be able to issue bonds at attractive rates to cover its short-term financing needs. Perhaps more important, it has to figure out how to salvage its retirement funds. After shortchanging them for years, it now has the weakest major public pension system in America.

The main fund, which serves about 250,000 government workers, past and present, is only 6 percent funded — a small percentage of what is considered the minimum needed for a marginally healthy pension plan — and could run out of money as soon as 2014. Another fund, for about 80,000 teachers, which is 20 percent funded, will last just a few years longer if nothing is done. Police officers and teachers in Puerto Rico have opted out of Social Security and rely entirely on their pensions.

“For now, I’m not totally shaken about the possibility of the fund going broke,” said Jorge Ramón Román, a 78-year-old retired instructor for the island’s Civil Air Patrol. “But I do fear for the future, when I’ll be an even older person, more infirm and with less of a pension.”

Héctor M. Mayol Kauffman, the executive director of the pension system, said it would be impossible to cut the benefits of people who are already retired, citing court precedent.

Puerto Rican officials were racing this fall to put together a rescue plan for the pension fund. Voters, though, pushed out Gov. Luis Fortuño, who had tried austerity measures that included cutting tens of thousands of government workers along with a revamping of the fund.

They elected Alejandro García Padilla, who promised to create 50,000 new jobs in the next 18 months. But the margin was razor-thin and Mr. Fortuño has requested a recount. Mr. García Padilla’s party had dropped out of the retirement overhaul effort, but the governor-elect says he will deal with the looming pension crisis with “diligence and promptness” and has put together a task force of economists and financial advisers.

“We will not leave retired government workers stranded at a bus stop in their older years,” he said.

Since the election, yields on the island’s 30-year bonds have continued to widen.

“I don’t think that there’s a default that’s about to happen, but a default isn’t the only bad thing that can happen when you’ve got bonds,” Mr. Schankel said. Puerto Rico’s bonds are just a notch or two above junk status. If they fall to that level, at least some institutions would be forced to sell, potentially setting off a chain reaction. And individual investors could get a jolt if they saw the value of their holdings fall. Many people own Puerto Rican debt without knowing it, through their mutual funds.

“The concern is that Puerto Rico is a systemic risk to the municipal bond market because it’s so widely held,” said Robert Donahue, a managing director with Municipal Market Advisors.

Rafael Matos contributed reporting from San Juan, P.R.

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Military's dogs of war also suffer post-traumatic stress disorder

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas — Not long after a Belgian Malinois named Cora went off to war, she earned a reputation for sniffing out the buried bombs that were the enemy's weapon of choice to kill or maim U.S. troops.

Cora could roam a hundred yards or more off her leash, detect an explosive and then lie down gently to signal danger. All she asked in return was a kind word or a biscuit, maybe a play session with a chew toy once the squad made it back to base.

"Cora always thought everything was a big game," said Air Force Tech. Sgt. Garry Laub, who trained Cora before she deployed. "She knew her job. She was a very squared-away dog."

PHOTOS: Military dogs

But after months in Iraq and dozens of combat patrols, Cora changed. The transformation was not the result of one traumatic moment, but possibly the accumulation of stress and uncertainty brought on by the sharp sounds, high emotion and ever-present death in a war zone.

Cora — deemed a "push-button" dog, one without much need for supervision — became reluctant to leave her handler's side. Loud noises startled her. The once amiable Cora growled frequently and picked fights with other military working dogs.

When Cora returned to the U.S. two years ago, there was not a term for the condition that had undercut her combat effectiveness and shattered her nerves. Now there is: canine post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Dogs experience combat just like humans," said Marine Staff Sgt. Thomas Gehring, a dog handler assigned to the canine training facility at Lackland Air Force Base, who works with Cora daily.

Veterinarians and senior dog handlers at Lackland have concluded that dogs, like humans, can require treatment for PTSD, including conditioning, retraining and possibly medication such as the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. Some dogs, like 5-year-old Cora, just need to be treated as honored combat veterans and allowed to lead less-stressful lives.

Walter Burghardt Jr., chief of behavioral medicine and military working-dog studies at Lackland, estimates that at least 10% of the hundreds of dogs sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to protect U.S. troops have developed canine PTSD.

Cora appears to have a mild case. Other dogs come home traumatized.

"They're essentially broken and can't work," Burghardt said.

There are no official statistics, but Burghardt estimates that half of the dogs that return with PTSD or other behavioral hitches can be retrained for "useful employment" with the military or law enforcement, such as police departments, the Border Patrol or the Homeland Security Department.

The others dogs are retired and made eligible for adoption as family pets.

The decision to officially label the dogs' condition as PTSD was made by a working group of dog trainers and other specialists at Lackland. In most cases, such labeling of animal behavior would be subjected to peer review and scrutiny in veterinary medical journals.

But Burghardt and others in the group decided that they could not wait for that kind of lengthy professional vetting — that a delay could endanger those who depend on the dogs.

Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the military has added hundreds of canines and now has about 2,500 — Dutch and German shepherds, Belgian Malinois and Labrador retrievers — trained in bomb detection, guard duty or "controlled aggression" for patrolling.

Lackland trains dogs and dog handlers for all branches of the military. The huge base, located in San Antonio, has a $15-million veterinary hospital devoted to treating dogs working for the military or law enforcement, like a Border Patrol dog who lost a leg during a firefight between agents and a suspected drug smuggler.

"He's doing fine, much better," the handler yelled out when asked about the dog's condition.

Cora received her initial training here and then additional training with Laub at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. Before they could deploy, however, Laub was transferred to Arkansas, and Cora shipped off to Iraq with a different handler, much to Laub's regret.

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