The Week: A Roundup of This Week’s Science News

“Science,” a colleague once said at a meeting, “is a mighty enterprise, which is really rather quite topical.” He was so right: as we continue to enhance our coverage of the scientific world, we always aim to keep the latest news front and center.

His observation seemed like a nice way to introduce this column, which will highlight the week’s developments in health and science news and glance at what’s ahead. This past week, for instance, the mighty enterprise of science addressed itself to such newsy topics as the flu (there’s still time to get vaccinated!), and mental illness and gun control.

In addition to the big-headline stories that invite wisdom from scientists, each week there is a drumbeat of purely scientific and medical news that emerges from academic journals, fieldwork and elsewhere. These developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)

Many discoveries are hard to unravel. “In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper,” the same colleague observed. “You couldn’t imagine anything less consumer-friendly.”

Let’s aim to fix that. Below, a selection of the week’s stories.

DEVELOPMENTS

Health

Strange, but Effective

People with a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile — which kills 14,000 Americans a year — have a startling cure: a transplant of someone else’s feces into their digestive system, which introduces good bacteria that the gut needs to fight off the bad. For some people, antibiotics don’t fix this problem, but an infusion of diluted stool from a healthy person seems to do the trick.

Genetics

Dig We Must

Hillery Metz and Hopi Hoekstra/Harvard University

Evolutionary biologists at Harvard took a tiny species of deer mice, known for building elaborate burrows with long tunnels, and bred it with another species of deer mice, which builds short-tunneled burrows. Comparing the DNA of the original mice with their offspring, the biologists pinpointed four regions of genetic code that help tell the mice what kind of burrow to construct.

Aerospace

Launch, Then Inflate

Uncredited/Bigelow Aerospace, via Associated Press

NASA signed a contract for an inflatable space habitat — roughly pineapple-shaped, with walls of floppy cloth — that will ideally be appended to the International Space Station in 2015. NASA aims to use the pod to test inflatable technology in space, but the company that builds these things, Bigelow Aerospace, has bigger ambitions: think of a 12-person apartment and laboratory in the sky, with two months’ rent at north of $26 million.

Biology

What’s Green and Flies?

Jodi Rowley/Australian Museum

National Geographic reported on an Australian researcher working in Vietnam who discovered a great-looking new species of flying frog. Described as having flappy forearms (the better for gliding), the three-and-a-half-inch-long frog likes to “parachute” from tree to tree, Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, told the magazine. She named it Helen’s Flying Frog, for her mother.

Privacy

That’s Joe’s DNA!

People who volunteer their genetic information for the betterment of science — and are assured anonymity — may find that their privacy is not a slam dunk. A researcher who set out to crack the identities of a few men whose genomes appeared in a public database was able to do so using genealogical Web sites (where people upload parts of their genomes to try to find relatives) as well as some simple search tools. He was trying to test the database’s security, but even he did not expect it to be so easy.

Genetics

An On/Off Switch for Disease

Geneticists have long puzzled over what it is that activates a disease in one person but not in another — even in identical twins. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who studied people with rheumatoid arthritis have identified a pattern of chemical tags that tell genes whether to turn on or not. In rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system attacks the body, and it is thought the tags enable the attack.

Planetary Science

That Red Planet

Everybody loves Mars, and we’re all secretly hoping that NASA’s plucky little rover finds evidence of life there. Meanwhile, a separate NASA craft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping the planet since 2006 — took some pictures of a huge crater that looks as if it once held a lake fed by groundwater. It is too soon to say if the lake held living things, but NASA’s news release did include the happy phrase “clues to subsurface habitability.”

COMING UP

Animal Testing

Retiring Chimps

Emily Wabitsch/European Pressphoto Agency

A lot of people have strong feelings about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral experiments, and the National Institutes of Health has been listening. On Tuesday, the agency is to release its recommendations for curtailing chimp research in a big way. This will be but a single step in a long process and it will apply only to the chimps the agency owns, but it may well stir big reactions from many constituencies.

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Bank of Japan Moves to Fight Deflation

TOKYO — The Bank of Japan set an ambitious 2 percent inflation target and pledged to ease monetary policy “decisively” by introducing open-ended asset purchases, following intense pressure from the country’s audacious new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who has made beating deflation a national priority.

In a joint statement Tuesday with the government, the central bank said it was doubling its inflation target to 2 percent and said it would “pursue monetary easing and aim to achieve this target at the earliest possible time.”

The Bank of Japan also said that it intended to purchase assets indefinitely, promising to stick to a program that has allowed the bank to pump funds into the Japanese economy, even with interest rates at virtually zero. The bank’s board voted to keep its benchmark rate at a range of zero to 0.1 percent.

Mr. Abe immediately hailed the bank’s moves, telling the Bank of Japan governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, that the measures were “groundbreaking,” according to Kyodo News. Analysts, however, said the details of the bank’s policy were less impressive than the headlines and said they had expected more.

The central bank, for example, will only begin its open-ended asset purchases in 2014, and estimates that its asset purchase fund will increase by just 10 trillion yen in 2014, remaining unchanged after that. With such a paltry increase, it was unlikely Japan would achieve 2 percent inflation, analysts said. The consumer price index for 2012 fell 0.5 percent, according to government statistics.

The Bank of Japan’s announcement “will likely disappoint those who expected the policy board to answer Abe’s call for a ‘different kind of B.O.J. policy,’ or significantly ramp up its pace of easing,” Izumi Devalier, an economist with HSBC, said in a note to clients.

“This means pressure will remain in place for the B.O.J. to ease policy further, as the 2 percent inflation target remains ever out of reach,” Ms. Devalier and her colleagues said.

Masaaki Kanno, Japan economist for JPMorgan, also called the details of the asset purchase program disappointing. “That said, this is not the end of the game,” he said. “We should expect further easing” including an increase in asset purchases as well as purchases of longer-term assets, once Gov. Shirakawa’s term is up in April and a successor is appointed, Mr. Kanno said.

Since last year, when Mr. Abe was still opposition leader, he has urged the central bank to do more to end deflation, the all-around fall in prices, profit and incomes that has plagued Japan’s economy since the late 1990s. He stepped up the pressure on the bank after a landslide victory by his Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections in December, which catapulted him to office for the second time since a short-lived stint in 2006-07.

Mr. Abe’s call for the Bank of Japan to increase the monetary supply, among other things, has weakened the yen, a boon to the competitiveness of exporters, which make up much of Japan’s growth. Earlier this month, Mr. Abe also announced a 12 trillion yen emergency stimulus, providing even more tailwind for the Japanese economy. That bright outlook has pushed the Nikkei stock index 20 percent higher since mid-November, when Mr. Abe first campaigned on his expansionary platform.

Mr. Abe’s critics, however, warn that the central bank, which will buy up more government bonds as part of its asset purchase program, will become a printing press for profligate government spending — spending that carries great risks for a country whose public debt is already twice the size of its economy. Critics also say that before flooding a broken system with money, Japan must first tackle structural problems that hurt economic efficiency.

Mr. Abe maintains that deflation will undermine any efforts to grow, and that the government and central bank must act together to get prices rising again. But in a nod to critics, the joint statement said the government would also promote “all possible decisive policy actions for reforming the economic structure” and establish “a sustainable fiscal structure.”

“I believe we are firmly on the path toward bold monetary easing,” Mr. Abe told reporters following the bank’s announcement.

Mr. Shirakawa, who has long argued that the bank alone cannot spark inflation or economic growth, called on the government to do its part to bolster the Japanese economy.

“Various actors need to put in considerable effort along with the Bank of Japan,” Mr. Shirakawa told a press conference late Tuesday. “Those efforts are going to have to be quite drastic,” he said.

Market reaction was mixed. The Nikkei index average rose 0.8 percent in anticipation of the bank’s announcement, before giving up its gains to end 0.4 percent lower, at 10,709.93. The index has risen over 20 percent, however, since Mr. Abe started his monetarist push. The dollar briefly rose above 90 yen, near the 2-year high of 90.25 it hit on Monday, but had slipped to 88.67 yen late afternoon in Tokyo.

Yields on 10-year Japanese government bonds were largely unchanged, with a benchmark issue ending trading at 0.730 percent, down 0.005 percentage points from Monday’s close.

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Republican allies advocate for immigration reform

WASHINGTON — Traditional pillars of the Republican base, such as police groups, evangelical pastors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have begun to push skeptical GOP lawmakers to change federal immigration laws to allow most of the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants to apply for legal status.

The issue has long been fought mostly between Republicans and Democrats. But the fate of a potential immigration overhaul may be determined by battles erupting inside the GOP.

"Now it's conservatives versus conservatives over how much immigration reform should happen," said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington that has advanced a free-market argument for opening up the immigration system.

President Obama has vowed to revise immigration laws early in his second term, but Republican support would be necessary to pass any significant legislation in the GOP-held House.

Some national Christian organizations, law enforcement officials and business leaders have begun coordinating a national campaign to convince voters that immigration reform can be consistent with conservative values. Gathering in Washington last week, leaders of several groups said the goal is to help Republicans in Congress who fear being voted out of office if they support legal status for illegal immigrants.

Republican strategists have dubbed the emerging coalition "Bibles, badges and business." And opponents are gearing up their own lobbying machinery in favor of restricting immigration.

"It is unfortunate that these groups have abandoned the base to support immigration reform that is not in the best interest of Americans," said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a Virginia-based advocacy group that lobbies to reduce immigration levels and grades members of Congress. "We have 20 million Americans unemployed who can't find jobs."

But conservative views on immigration are changing. Recent polling shows a majority of Republican voters would support a plan that simultaneously tightens border security, requires employers to check the immigration status of new hires and creates a path to legal status for immigrants who have paid a fine and back taxes.

"The whole economy is suffering because we can't grow without immigration," said Carlos Gutierrez, former secretary of Commerce under President George W. Bush. He has helped create a political action committee to fund Republican congressional campaigns and "give cover to people who come out and admit they are for immigration reform," he said.

In coming months, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will try to convince local chapters that businesses will benefit from laws that make it easier for non-Americans to obtain work visas, and allow illegal immigrants to apply for permanent legal status, said Randel Johnson, a senior vice president for the chamber in Washington.

"We have time to build this right," Johnson said. Chamber officials are working with labor unions and other groups to help craft possible provisions for an immigration bill in May or June, he said.

The chamber has favored new laws for more than a decade, he said, but the organization is starting a more aggressive campaign to build public support.

"In the past, we didn't do what we needed," Johnson said. "Evangelicals bring another wrinkle to help us persuade Republicans to bring a bill."

A national network of evangelical pastors will encourage congregations to read 40 biblical passages about how to treat foreigners and to discuss how Scripture can inform the debate on immigration.

Called the "'I Was a Stranger' Challenge," the campaign is supported by several major Christian groups, including Sojourners, the National Assn. of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention. Many oppose abortion and gay marriage.

"I see this as a biblical justice and compassion issue," said Bill Hamel, president of the Evangelical Free Church of America, based in Minneapolis.

Hamel said he would encourage more than 1,000 churches affiliated with his organization to pray about immigration, and would meet his congressman, John Kline (R-Minn.), who has sought to lower immigration levels, to urge him to change his stance.

Some Republican law enforcement officials have joined the effort.

The lack of federal action on immigration has complicated the work of local police, said Gregory F. Zoeller, the Republican attorney general of Indiana. "It takes their eye off the ball of maintaining the safety of the people of Indiana," he said.

"Republicans need to change now because the country is changing," said Nowrasteh, the immigration expert at the Cato Institute. "It is self preservation as well."

brian.bennett@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 21

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."

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Michelle Obama wears bangs, Krakoff to swearing-in

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama showed off her new bangs and a royal blue dress and cardigan by American designer Reed Krakoff at Sunday’s swearing-in ceremony.

The first lady and daughter Malia matched President Barack Obama‘s blue suit, also complementing the Blue Room of the White House, where the small ceremony took place. Younger daughter Sasha, however, went her own way: She wore a lacy pink dress with a gold, wide-width, high-waisted belt — a style her mother helped popularize — and gold shoes.

It’s not the first time Mrs. Obama chose a design by Krakoff. She previously has worn a gown and jacket by the designer, who also is the president and executive creative director of Coach, Inc. She has carried one of his tote bags, too.

Her hairdo, however, is a change — and it has been the subject of online chatter since its debut on Thursday in a photo taken at the White House.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: A Check on Physicals

“Go Beyond Your Father’s Annual Physical. Live Longer, Feel Better”

This sales pitch for the Princeton Longevity Center’s “comprehensive exam” promises, for $5,300, to take “your health beyond the annual physical.” But it is far from certain whether this all-day checkup, and others less inclusive, make a meaningful difference to health or merely provide reassurance to the worried well.

Among physicians, researchers and insurers, there is an ongoing debate as to whether regular checkups really reduce the chances of becoming seriously ill or dying of an illness that would have been treatable had it been detected sooner.

No one questions the importance of regular exams for well babies, children and pregnant women, and the protective value of specific exams, like a Pap smear for sexually active women and a colonoscopy for people over 50. But arguments against the annual physical for all adults have been fueled by a growing number of studies that failed to find a medical benefit.

Some experts note that when something seemingly abnormal is picked up during a routine exam, the result is psychological distress for the patient, further testing that may do more harm than good, and increased medical expenses.

“Part of the problem of looking for abnormalities in perfectly well people is that rather a lot of us have them,” Dr. Margaret McCartney, a Scottish physician, wrote in The Daily Mail, a British newspaper. “Most of them won’t do us any harm.”

She cited the medical saga of Brian Mulroney, former prime minister of Canada. A CT scan performed as part of a checkup in 2005 revealed two small lumps in Mr. Mulroney’s lungs. Following surgery, he developed an inflamed pancreas, which landed him in intensive care. He spent six weeks in the hospital, then was readmitted a month later for removal of a cyst on his pancreas caused by the inflammation.

The lumps on his lungs, by the way, were benign. But what if, you may ask, Mr. Mulroney’s lumps had been cancer? Might not the discovery during a routine exam have saved his life?

Logic notwithstanding, the question of benefits versus risks from routine exams can be answered only by well-designed scientific research.

Defining the value of a routine checkup — determining who should get one and how often — is especially important now, because next year the Affordable Care Act will add some 30 million people to the roster of the medically insured, many of whom will be eligible for government-mandated preventive care through an annual exam.

Dr. Ateev Mehrotra of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who directed a study of annual physicals in 2007, reported that an estimated 44.4 million adults in the United States undergo preventive exams each year. He concluded that if every adult were to receive such an exam, the health care system would be saddled with 145 million more visits every year, consuming 41 percent of all the time primary care doctors spend with patients.

There is already a shortage of such doctors and not nearly enough other health professionals — physician assistants and nurse practitioners — to meet future needs. If you think the wait to see your doctor is too long now, you may want to stock up on some epic novels to keep you occupied in the waiting room in the future.

Few would challenge the axiom that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Lacking incontrovertible evidence for the annual physical, this logic has long been used to justify it:

¶ If a thorough exam and conversation about your well-being alerts your doctor to a health problem that is best addressed sooner rather than later, isn’t that better than waiting until the problem becomes too troublesome to ignore?

¶ What if you have a potentially fatal ailment, like heart disease or cancer, that may otherwise be undetected until it is well advanced or incurable?

¶ And wouldn’t it help to uncover risk factors like elevated blood sugar or high cholesterol that could prevent an incipient ailment if they are reversed before causing irreparable damage?

Even if there is no direct medical benefit, many doctors say that having their patients visit once a year helps to maintain a meaningful relationship and alert doctors to changes in patients’ lives that could affect health. It is also an opportunity to give patients needed immunizations and to remind them to get their eyes, teeth and skin checked.

But the long-sacrosanct recommendation that everyone should have an annual physical was challenged yet again recently by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen.

The research team, led by Dr. Lasse T. Krogsboll, analyzed the findings of 14 scientifically designed clinical trials of routine checkups that followed participants for up to 22 years. The team found no benefit to the risk of death or serious illness among seemingly healthy people who had general checkups, compared with people who did not. Their findings were published in November in BMJ (formerly The British Medical Journal).

In introducing their analysis, the Danish team noted that routine exams consist of “combinations of screening tests, few of which have been adequately studied in randomized trials.” Among possible harms from health checks, they listed “overdiagnosis, overtreatment, distress or injury from invasive follow-up tests, distress due to false positive test results, false reassurance due to false negative test results, adverse psychosocial effects due to labeling, and difficulties with getting insurance.”

Furthermore, they wrote, “general health checks are likely to be expensive and may result in lost opportunities to improve other areas of health care.”

In summarizing their results, the team said, “We did not find an effect on total or cause-specific mortality from general health checks in adult populations unselected for risk factors or disease. For the causes of death most likely to be influenced by health checks, cardiovascular mortality and cancer mortality, there were no reductions either.”

What, then, should people do to monitor their health?

Whenever you see your doctor, for any reason, make sure your blood pressure is checked. If a year or more has elapsed since your last blood test, get a new one.

Keep immunizations up to date, and get the screening tests specifically recommended based on your age, gender and known risk factors, including your family and personal medical history.

And if you develop a symptom, like unexplained pain, shortness of breath, digestive problems, a lump, a skin lesion that doesn’t heal, or unusual fatigue or depression, consult your doctor without delay. Seek further help if the initial diagnosis and treatment fails to bring relief.

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Media Decoder: News Outlets Take to Washington for Inauguration Coverage

If he squints hard enough, President Obama will be able to see CNN from his perch on the inaugural podium on Monday.

The cable news channel has set up an elaborate studio on the National Mall — one of the four locations where its anchors will be leading coverage of Mr. Obama’s second inaugural celebration.

“The goal is to put our anchors in the middle of all the activity,” said Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief. So in the morning, Wolf Blitzer will start out by the Capitol building and Anderson Cooper by the Mall, moving to new spots along the parade route in the afternoon. Other anchors will be at the inaugural balls at night.

The coverage might seem more subdued on other major television networks, reflecting the fact that there is generally less enthusiasm for presidential inaugurations the second time around. Still, the ceremony and the spectacle that accompanies it will take over the networks and news channels beginning with their morning shows, some of which are relocating to Washington for the day.

CBS has built a studio on the Mall beside CNN’s. Its one-year-old morning show, “CBS This Morning,” will be broadcast from there and expand to three hours for the day. NBC’s “Today” show will have all of its hosts in Washington, as well.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” is doing it a bit differently, sending George Stephanopoulos and Josh Elliott to Washington and having the show’s other hosts stay in New York.

The bulk of the festivities will be anchored by the same correspondents who handled election night for their networks. There has been a last-minute change at PBS, though: Judy Woodruff is away from Washington because of a family illness, a spokeswoman said, so the senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown will anchor with Gwen Ifill, instead.

Most Americans will watch the inauguration on television, just as they did in 2009, the first time Mr. Obama was inaugurated. But there will also be a panoply of Web sites live-streaming the event, including that of the Presidential Inauguration Committee.

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Obama's second inauguration a mark of progress in its own right

WASHINGTON — The first time Barack Obama ran, the euphoria that attended his election captivated Kamilah Aquil. Then came his presidency, a bracing reality check.

Hope faded. Not enough changed. But for Aquil, that doesn't make Obama a disappointment.

It does make this second inauguration Monday a landmark she never expected and one she considers even more profound than the first. He's not just the first black president, but a man Americans trusted enough, missteps and all, to give another shot at shepherding our country.

That's one reason Aquil, a Los Angeles County probation officer, was headed for Washington last week with her 13-year-old son, Makhi Garvey.

I met them on the flight from Los Angeles, and questioned her — as I have dozens of black strangers in the last few weeks — about her verdict on Obama, who drew a record turnout of black voters in November, but less enthusiasm than in 2008.

Aquil has heard the grumbling that Obama hasn't done enough to relieve black suffering. She doesn't see it that way. "He puts it out on the table and tries to advocate for the country as a whole," she said. "He can only do so much."

Aquil was born and raised in Compton. She veered off track as a teenager, but an adult she admired steered her "off the path of destruction" and pointed her toward college.

She thinks about that when she sees her son watching President Obama. "It's his influence, who he is as an individual," she says, looking beyond the president's politics to praise his patience, tenacity and balance.

For her, and for millions of African Americans whose votes kept Obama in office, this president's reelection didn't turn on the standard question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

It was tied as well to a bigger vision, a sense that their footing is more solid and their children's future brighter because a black man — this particular black man — resides in the White House.

::

There have been reams written in the last four years about the ways race complicated the leadership challenges faced by the nation's first black president.

Now, as Obama enters his second term, those themes are already being replayed.

Ben Jealous, head of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, is as tired of answering the question as I've become of asking. Has Obama delivered for the masses of black people who helped put him in office?

Jealous sighs — its meaning clear in the silence:

Isn't it enough that the man expanded access to healthcare, dispatched Osama bin Laden and steered the nation through the worst recession in 70 years?

"I'm waiting for the article about the white president who disappointed the white people the most," Jealous said.

"How come nobody ever asked that question: How did white people feel about Bill Clinton, about George Bush?"

Because a white president has always been perceived to be the leader of all the people.

Obama's appraisal is muddied by uncertain expectations.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 20

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 @geekdads on Twitter.

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Ex-Discovery Exec Peter Liguori Named New Tribune CEO

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Former Fox and Discovery executive Peter Liguori has been named the new CEO of Tribune Company.

In its first board of directors meeting since emerging from a bankruptcy, Tribune Co. also named investor Bruce Karsh as its chairman. The new Tribune board includes Ross Levinsohn, the former interim CEO of Yahoo who this week was named CEO of Prometheus, the parent company of the Hollywood Reporter.

Eddy Hartenstein, who had served as CEO of Tribune for the last 18 months, will stay with the company as publisher/CEO of the Los Angeles Times Media Group. He will remain on the company’s board and serve as a special adviser to Ligouri.

Liguori’s appointment had been long expected. Reuters reported in September that he was being eyed as the company’s new CEO.

Liguori gave interviews to the two largest Tribune papers, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. In his Times interview, he was asked if the papers could be sold.

“There are people interested in the newspapers,” he said. “It is my fiduciary responsibility to hear them out and see if in fact their interest is real and their commitment is concomitant with the value of these newspapers. But that runs parallel to my working with you guys on running the business on a day-to-day basis to maximize the value.”

Liguori became an operating executive at Carlyle, a private equity firm, in July. At the company, he provided guidance to the telecommunications and media team. He was also up for the post of entertainment and digital media president at Microsoft.

That job went in September to former CBS executive Nancy Tellem.

Liguori was previously chief operating officer of Discovery Communications, serving as the cable network’s No. 2 executive from 2009 to the end of 2011. He served as interim CEO of OWN beginning in May 2011, after the dismissal Christina Norman.

Within two months, Oprah Winfrey named herself CEO of OWN. In November, Liguori said he was leaving Discovery, and the company said no replacement would be named.

Prior to joining Discovery, he spent 13 years with Fox Entertainment, serving as president and then chairman of Entertainment for Fox Broadcasting Company from 2005 to 2009.

He was previously president and CEO of News Corp.’s FX Networks.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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