News Analysis: The Perils of Yoga for Men





MEN are famous for ignoring aches and pains. It’s macho. Men get physical exams less often than women. They tend to remain silent if worried about their health. When hurt, their impulse is to shun doctors and rely on home remedies, like avoiding heavy lifting to ease backaches. Male athletes play through injuries. It’s all about virility and manliness.




The stereotype has exceptions, of course. But denial of injury and ill health — from the relatively inconsequential to the grave — is common enough that physicians seek ways to encourage men to be more forthcoming.


So it pays to listen carefully when guys start talking about intolerable pain and upended lives. Doing so led me to an unexpected finding that I have confirmed in a trove of federal data. It suggests that yoga can be remarkably dangerous — for men.


Guys who bend, stretch and contort their bodies are relatively few in number, perhaps one in five out of an estimated 20 million practitioners in the United States and 250 million around the globe. But proportionally, they are reporting damage more frequently than women, and their doctors are diagnosing more serious injuries — strokes and fractures, dead nerves and shattered backs. In comparison, women tell mainly of minor upsets.


Men who are breaking the code of silence are doing so with physicians in hospital emergency rooms, who in turn report their findings to the federal government.


Their outspokenness reveals much about modern yoga and suggests ways it can be made safer. As a practitioner since 1970, I know some of the guy hazards personally and have learned through painful experience how to live with my inflexible body.


The male disclosures help explain one of the central mysteries of modern yoga — why it is largely a feminine pursuit. As Yoga Journal, the field’s top magazine, put the question: “Where Are All the Men?”


Science has long viewed the female body as relatively elastic. Now the new disclosures suggest that women who tie themselves in knots also enjoy a lower risk of damage. It seems like common sense.


Surprisingly, evidence of the male danger has, to my knowledge, never before been made public. Nor has its flip side — that women seem less vulnerable. The subject of male risk merits discussion if only because the booming yoga industry has long targeted men as a smart way to expand its franchise.


Informal observations hint at possible explanations. Yoga experts say women tend to see classes as refuges while men see challenges — their goal at times to impress the opposite sex.


Women say men push themselves too far, too fast. Men admit to liking the intensity but say the problem is pushy teachers who force them into advanced poses while urging them to ignore pain.


I stumbled on the issue after my book, published in February, laid out a century and a half of science and, in its chapter on injuries, contradicted the usual image of yoga as completely safe. The yoga establishment makes billions of dollars by selling itself as a path to healthy perfection. Predictably, it responded with sharp denials.


I also received a surprising number of moving replies from injured yogis — male and female — including stroke victims.


A letter initiated my inquiry. In April, a man told how an agonizing back injury had turned his life into “a living hell.” Too many instructors, he wrote, are “pushing us too hard and having us do dangerous poses.”


The “us” resonated.


Suddenly, I realized his cry sounded familiar.


I raced through a correspondence file and saw that many of the letters about serious damage had come from men.


Tara Stiles, a yoga teacher who runs a popular studio in Manhattan, told me that guys have more muscle (one reason for their relative inflexibility) and can thus force themselves into challenging poses they might otherwise find impossible. It seemed a plausible explanation for blinding pain.


Other teachers echoed her analysis and cited supporting anecdotes.


Yoga poses are unisex. But in my research, I found a world of poorly known information on gender disparity.


“Science of Flexibility,” by Michael J. Alter, explained how the pelvic regions of women are shaped in a way that permits an unusually large range of motion and joint play. In yoga, the pelvis is the central pivot for extreme bending of the legs, spine and torso.


In June, I turned to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and its National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital emergency rooms. In July, officials sent me 18 years of annual survey data that summarized the admission records for yoga practitioners hurt between 1994 and 2011, the maximum available span.


First, I needed a baseline that would let me compare the guy admissions to males doing yoga in the United States. Figures in the yoga literature described men as making up some 10 percent of practitioners at the beginning of the period and 23 percent at the end. So the middle ground seemed to be roughly 16 percent.


Then I dug into the medical data. The analysis took weeks, but the results spoke volumes.


William J. Broad is a science reporter for The New York Times and the author of “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards.”



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Naomi Gleit helps keep Facebook growing









The gig: As senior director of Facebook Inc.'s growth, engagement and mobile team, Naomi Gleit helps grow the social network's 1-billion-plus user base.


Facebook employee No. 29: Few people outside Facebook have heard of Gleit, but she's the second-longest-serving Facebook employee, after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Gleit, 29, talked her way into a job at Facebook on July 18, 2005 — her birthday. She was Facebook's 29th employee, coming on board shortly after the company hit 1 million users and before anyone had an inkling of the colossus it would become.


Dogged spirit: Unlike most other early employees who eventually dispersed to seek new fortunes, Gleit says she has no intention of leaving Facebook. She gets that tenacity from her "tiger mom," a computer programmer who ferried her to ballet, piano, karate and Chinese lessons, and her Jewish father, an immigration lawyer who took her to Hebrew school, she said. "I know it sounds completely irrational, but I had no doubt in 2005 that Facebook would be something incredible in the future," she said.





Rival social networks: Her passion for Facebook began before she was hired, when she was a Stanford undergraduate studying science, technology and society, an interdisciplinary major. She wrote her senior thesis on why Facebook beat out rival college social networking site Club Nexus at Stanford. (Club Nexus was started by Stanford student and Turkish software engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, who went on to create Orkut, Google's first attempt at a social network.) Getting in on the ground floor at Facebook made her feel like she was taking part in something bigger than herself, the same feeling she got volunteering for six months in a refugee camp in Botswana, she said.


Growing with Facebook: Gleit helped Facebook push beyond colleges to high schools and eventually to everyone. In late 2007, when the torrid growth pace temporarily cooled, Zuckerberg tapped a team of five to reignite it and asked Gleit to lead product management. It fell to the growth team to identify the obstacles to the company's momentum. In a company ruled by engineers, Gleit, who never studied programming, earned respect with her analytical approach and intuitive understanding of people. "I always believed that growth was the most important thing, the most important way to impact the company," she said. There are now more than 150 people on the team. "It's been an incredible learning experience," she said. "Each year is different."


That magic moment: Those who work closely with Gleit say part of her success early on was her ability to seize on the "magic moment" that makes users fall in love with Facebook. She made it simpler to sign up, and she helped people find friends as soon as they joined. She also helped Facebook spread quickly to new countries by enlisting users to translate the service into more than 80 languages. Gleit helps her team parachute into new markets and traverse less-familiar languages and cultures. It's something that comes from her own passion to see the world and have new experiences. She has taught on a Navajo reservation and lived in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand.


One billion users: Around noon Sept. 14, Zuckerberg gathered with Gleit and dozens of employees in front of a big screen as the number of Facebook users crossed 1 billion. "The scale was insane," she said. "But that is not the goal. When Mark talks about his vision for Facebook, he talks about being able to connect everyone in the world to the people that they care about and provide some value for them every single day."


A problem solver: Zuckerberg calls on Gleit for high-profile projects. In May 2010, when Facebook was under siege because of how it was handling users' personal information, he put Gleit in charge of simplifying privacy settings. Last year she worked on a popular feature that lets users subscribe to a News Feed without having to become Facebook friends.


Betting on mobile: Now Gleit is focused on the future: mobile devices and how they can unlock emerging markets. Gleit knew back in 2011 that people would begin to log on to Facebook from mobile devices in greater numbers than from desktops, particularly in the developing world. So she traveled to Tel Aviv to buy Snaptu, which makes software that helps people on low-tech phones access Facebook, and she brought the whole team back to Silicon Valley with her. Now Facebook is surging in popularity on mobile devices in Tokyo and Nairobi, Kenya. "I have always been interested in technology and how it can be used to improve lives," Gleit said.


jessica.guynn@latimes.com





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Overhaul of state government payroll system at risk of collapse









SACRAMENTO — One of the state's biggest technology endeavors, a $371-million overhaul of the government payroll system, is beset with problems and "in danger of collapsing," according to the state controller's office.


The company hired for the project is in over its head and may be unable to deliver on its promise to update a payroll system so old that even simple salary adjustments can tie it in knots, the controller's chief administrative officer said in a letter.


The state has spent at least $254 million so far on contractors, staff salaries, software and more for the system upgrade, which is five years overdue and has nearly tripled in cost since lawmakers authorized it in 2005.








"The project … is foundering and is in danger of collapsing," administrator Jim Lombard wrote to the contractor, SAP Public Services, in October. Lombard said the new system is not capable of processing "any portion of the state payroll population, let alone the full population of approximately 240,000 employees."


An SAP spokesman, Andy Kendzie, said the company is meeting its contractual obligations.


"Considering the project's complexity, and the many requirements involved in payroll processing, there have been some challenges," Kendzie said in a statement. "Despite these, SAP remains committed to the overall success of the project."


Technology quagmires have become a hallmark of California state government, with delays and cost overruns common.


A new computer system for the public pension fund was finished in September 2011 at twice the original budget. An effort to upgrade accounting databases and allow agencies to coordinate purchasing has fallen years behind schedule, and the estimated cost has increased by hundreds of millions of dollars. Back in 1994, a failed DMV system was canned after $50 million had been spent.


Lombard wrote in his letter that the new payroll system was tested on 1,300 employees this year and failed. Some paychecks were issued to the wrong employees or for the wrong amounts.


Testing began in June, Lombard wrote, and since then "every pay cycle has experienced problems" despite SAP's repeated assurances that improvements were being made. A second trial run, set for September, has been delayed until at least March.


SAP failed to meet nine of its 44 deadlines in the first eight months of this year, says the 37-page letter. Lombard demanded that SAP fix all of the problems identified by the state, including replacing inexperienced project managers and staff.


The controller's spokesman, Jacob Roper, said officials are reviewing a plan that SAP submitted last month to address the state's concerns.


The company has already been paid $50 million. Roper said an additional $6.9 million hasn't been turned over because the project has missed various milestones, and the state plans to withhold remaining funds until problems are fixed.


The goal of the effort, called the 21st Century Project, is to integrate and replace six different human resources systems, some installed in the 1970s and now at risk of failure.


The new system will have to handle a $15-billion payroll across 160 state departments, agencies, boards and commissions, calculating data on 36 medical plans, 12 dental plans and dozens of paycheck deductions.


When finished, it is supposed to allow managers and employees to access and update human resources data much more easily, according to outlines of the project on the controller's website.


The first contractor on the project, BearingPoint, was fired in January 2009 amid mutual finger-pointing and lawsuits, and the project ground to a halt. The company had already been paid nearly $26 million, although the state was able to collect $2.8 million in insurance payments and keep any completed work.


SAP replaced BearingPoint in February 2010.


chris.megerian@latimes.com





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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore


LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.


The actor's divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.


Kutcher's filing does not indicate that the couple has a prenuptial agreement. The filing states Kutcher signed the document Friday, hours before it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.


Kutcher and Moore married in September 2005 and until recently kept their relationship very public, communicating with each other and fans on the social networking site Twitter. After their breakup, Moore changed her name on the site from (at)mrskutcher to (at)justdemi.


Kutcher currently stars on CBS' "Two and a Half Men."


Messages sent to Kutcher's and Moore's publicists were not immediately returned Friday.


Moore, 50, and Kutcher, 34, created the DNA Foundation, also known as the Demi and Ashton Foundation, in 2010 to combat the organized sexual exploitation of girls around the globe. They later lent their support to the United Nations' efforts to fight human trafficking, a scourge the international organization estimates affects about 2.5 million people worldwide.


Moore was previously married to actor Bruce Willis for 13 years. They had three daughters together — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — before divorcing in 2000. Willis later married model-actress Emma Heming in an intimate 2009 ceremony at his home in Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands that attended by their children, as well as Moore and Kutcher.


Kutcher has been dating former "That '70s Show" co-star Mila Kunis.


The divorce filing was first reported Friday by People magazine.


___


Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP.


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Medicare’s Chief Actuary, Richard Foster, Retiring


Carol T. Powers for The New York Times


Richard S. Foster testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in 2004







WASHINGTON — Richard S. Foster, who as chief actuary of the Medicare program for the last 18 years nettled presidents of both parties with his projections of rapid growth in federal health care spending, will retire next month, the Obama administration said Friday.




Mr. Foster, 63, a career civil servant known for his fierce independence, has been an influential voice on Medicare, Medicaid and the new health care law.


With 100 million people on Medicare or Medicaid and an additional 20 million expected to get federal subsidies for private insurance under President Obama’s health care law, the need for accurate estimates of health spending has never been greater, lawmakers say.


Mr. Foster said that Medicare savings in the 2010 health care law, based on cutbacks in payments to hospitals and other health care providers, were probably unsustainable and could jeopardize access to care for beneficiaries, a judgment that displeased the Obama administration.


In 2003, Mr. Foster found himself in conflict with the Bush administration when he raised questions about the cost of a Republican bill adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Federal investigators later found that a top Medicare official had threatened to fire Mr. Foster if he provided certain cost estimates to Congress.


Marilyn B. Tavenner, acting administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, praised Mr. Foster for “his adherence to the highest levels of professional independence and ethical conduct.” She said he “will be sorely missed by policy makers and officials throughout the administration and Congress.”


Ms. Tavenner said “we will soon begin a national recruitment effort” to find a successor to Mr. Foster, who began working for the federal government 40 years ago.


Proposals to rein in Medicare spending have been at the center of budget negotiations between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner. Both sides have relied on data from Mr. Foster’s office.


Congress bolstered the actuary’s independence in a 1997 law stipulating that the holder of the job can be removed from office “only for cause.”


In a report accompanying the law, Congress said that “the office of the actuary has a unique role,” serving both the administration and Congress, and often must work with lawmakers developing legislation.


With help from a staff of nearly 100, the chief actuary issues detailed annual reports on national health spending and the financial outlook for Medicare. In addition, the actuary’s office collects data used to calculate Medicare payment rates for doctors, hospitals and many other health care providers.


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E-book restrictions leave 'buyers' with few rights








There's a crass old joke about how you can never buy beer, just rent it. Who would think that the same joke applies to book buying in the digital age?

But that's the case. Many people who'll be unwrapping iPads, Amazon Kindles or Barnes & Noble Nooks on Tuesday morning and loading them with bestsellers or classics won't have any idea how limited their rights are as their books' "owners."

In fact, they won't be owners at all. They'll be licensees. Unlike the owners of a physical tome, they won't have the unlimited right to lend an e-book, give it away, resell it or leave it to their heirs. If it's bought for their iPad, they won't be able to read it on their Kindle. And if Amazon or the other sellers don't like what they've done with it, they can take it back, without warning.






All these restrictions "raise obvious questions about what 'ownership' is," observes Dan Gillmor, an expert on digital media at Arizona State University. "The companies that license stuff digitally have made it clear that you own nothing."

Typically, e-book buyers have no idea about these complexities. How could they? The rules and limitations are embodied in "terms of service" documents that Amazon, Apple, B&N and other sellers shroud in legalese and bury deep in their websites. That tells you how little they want you to know.

The rules are based, in turn, on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with which Congress hoped to balance the rights of copyright holders and content users. "In the digital environment, that's always been the trickiest balance to strike," Annemarie Bridy, a specialist in intellectual property law at the University of Idaho, told me. In those terms, the DMCA looks like a failure.

Both camps have important rights to protect. Let's start with copyright owners.

In the non-digital world, copyright ends with the first sale of each copyrighted object. Under the "first sale" doctrine, once you buy a book, that physical book is yours to lend, give away, or resell. Copyright is safeguarded by the limitations of physical transfer — once the book is given or loaned, the original buyer no longer has access to it. If a library owns five copies of a book, only five borrowers can read it at the same time. Theoretically a book can be photocopied, but only at great effort and with a perceptible loss of quality.

In digital-dom, however, technology allows infinite copies to be made, with no loss of quality. Absent the usual restrictions, one could give away an e-book and still have it to read. Unrestricted transferability becomes a genuine threat to the livelihood of authors, artists, filmmakers, musicians.

So some limitation is sensible. That's usually done through digital rights management, or DRM, which encodes copy or usage limitations into the digital file. The DMCA protected DRM by outlawing efforts to circumvent it (with a few exceptions).

The question is whether the balance has tipped too far in favor of the booksellers, at the consumers' expense. The answer is yes.

For one thing, DRM has put far too much power in the hands of digital booksellers. Amazon, in particular, has shown it can't be trusted with that power. In 2009, having learned that it inadvertently had sold unauthorized e-book versions of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" through its website, the company simply deleted those e-books from buyers' Kindles stealthily, without warning.

An uproar followed, not least because Amazon's Orwellian behavior involved those Orwellian masterpieces. Amazon settled a subsequent lawsuit by promising never to steal a book back from a Kindle without the device owner's permission.

But earlier this year, the company was revealed to have unilaterally shut down the access of Linn Jordet Nygaard, a Norwegian Kindle owner, to her library of 43 e-books, for reasons it refused to divulge. Another uproar, and Amazon backed down again, restoring Nygaard's account — again without explanation. Amazon refused my request for comment.

Another downside of e-book DRM is that most e-books are tied to the seller's reading device or apps. Buy a book from Amazon, and you can read it only on a Kindle or Amazon app. Buy it from Apple, and it can be read only on an Apple device.

This lock-in gives the booksellers power over not only consumers but publishers. In fact, it led several publishers to make a price-fixing deal with Apple that aimed to undermine Amazon's market power, but ended with their getting whacked with a big federal antitrust fine instead.

Moreover, notwithstanding the public impression that digital is forever, nothing is permanent in the digital world. In fact, digital content can be less permanent than physical books. In libraries you can find volumes that date back hundreds of years and can still be read (if carefully); but there are digital files that date back only a decade yet are completely unintelligible today.

Nowhere does Amazon, Apple or any other distributor pledge to support its digital formats in perpetuity. Quite the contrary: They typically warn that they can cancel their service at any time, without warning, in a way that could end your access to a lifetime of e-book purchases in the flash of an electron. They could also go out of business, leaving millions of dependent customers in the lurch.

Amazon keeps your purchased content for free on its own servers — the term is "in the cloud" — for downloading to your Kindles as needed. You pay once for an e-book and can use it on all the Kindles you own. I can't find any written promise by Amazon that this storage will always be free. If it announces a few years from now that henceforth there will be a monthly fee to store books purchased, say, more than 10 years ago, what rights will you have to resist? None.

There are ways to protect your e-books from grasping e-booksellers or the future. Programs available on the Web can strip the DRM code from your purchased items — for books, one possible method involves an e-library management program called Calibre. The program easily can be augmented with a DRM-stripping application so you can convert e-books sold in any proprietary format into a different format or even as plain text.

But is it legal? No one is quite sure, and that's a problem. The DMCA makes it unlawful to circumvent certain DRM protection, but doing so on an item you've bought and want to keep in a different format for your own use — not to make multiple copies for sale — may not break the law. On the other hand, distributing software that enables that is illegal under the DMCA even if the goal is legitimate, which is absurd.

Even if reformatting a file you own is legal, what if you don't own it? The hard-to-find terms of service of e-book sellers specify that you're only licensing a book, not buying it (although the Amazon order page does say you're "buying" it). "In the digital context, it's not clear that the 'first sale' has ever occurred," says Bridy.

It should be a top priority for Congress to clear out the murk. Buyers of e-books must have the explicit right to reformat their purchases and save backup copies for their own use, permanently. The sale of an e-book must be irrevocable. On the other side, it must remain strictly illegal to make multiple unauthorized copies of any copyrighted work for distribution. Lending by libraries, one digital copy at a time, should be facilitated — it tends to widen the audience for books.

The guiding principle must be that an e-book owner's rights and responsibilities parallel those of a book owner, and the same must go for authors, publishers and booksellers. "Someone once observed to me that if libraries were being invented today, publishers would try to make them illegal," Gillmor says.

Clarify these rules of e-book commerce, and the book market will reap the benefit. The power of electronic booksellers over publishers might be reduced, and consumers would know what they were buying — and would own what they bought. Leave the rules as vague as they are, and the victims will be authors, consumers and publishers.

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.






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LAPD investigation of killing hobbled by DEA









The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has refused for more than two years to allow its agents to cooperate with a Los Angeles Police Department investigation into the death of a drug suspect shortly after he was arrested in a DEA operation, according to LAPD records.


The LAPD's homicide investigation has effectively stalled, and officials said in documents reviewed by The Times that without assistance from the DEA they cannot determine how the man's fatal injuries were inflicted.


An autopsy found that the suspect's ribs had been fractured in 21 places and coroner's officials concluded that the injuries were caused by "blunt force." The fractures led to internal bleeding, which ultimately killed the man, the coroner found.





The LAPD believes DEA agents may have caused the injuries when they placed the suspect on his stomach while handcuffing him, according to the documents. But without being able to interview the DEA agents who made the arrest, it's impossible for the detectives to determine whether the excessive force was used.


Dawn Dearden, a spokeswoman for the DEA, said the U.S. Justice Department's own Office of the Inspector General is conducting an investigation into the death to determine whether DEA agents broke federal civil rights laws by using excessive force when arresting the man. Dearden said the DEA has provided the LAPD with some information and documentation about the incident.


"However, it is not uncommon for an agent under multiple ongoing investigations to decline specific law enforcement interviews until an inspector general investigation is completed," she said.


LAPD officials said they need to conduct their own homicide investigation. Chief Charlie Beck outlined the department's struggles with the case in a report recently submitted to the L.A. Police Commission. Beck reports to the civilian panel on all serious use-of-force cases and in-custody deaths.


Beck wrote that his detectives had made "numerous requests" to the DEA for interviews with the involved agents but have repeatedly "been met with negative results."


The incident began on a July night in 2010 in a parking lot a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard. For months, DEA special agents had been working the area to arrest drug dealers and gang members, according to the report. On this night, an informant working with the DEA had arranged to meet two suspected dealers to purchase 10 ounces of crystal methamphetamine, the report said.


The informant, wired with a hidden microphone, approached the suspects' car and received the drugs from Alberto Arriaga, who remained in the passenger seat throughout the exchange. Drug agents moved in and are believed to have pulled Arriaga from the car, laid him face down on the pavement and handcuffed him, according to the LAPD report.


Eventually, officers from the LAPD were called in to take Arriaga and the other suspect to a nearby station to be booked, the report said. A station supervisor asked the men if they had any medical issues. Arriaga complained of leg pain from a previous injury but mentioned nothing else, the report found. The men were then placed in a holding cell together.


Sometime later that night, after the booking process had been completed, detention officers tried to move Arriaga, 45, to another jail facility. He told the jailers he was having abdominal pain "and had been beaten up by the DEA agents who arrested him," the report said. Arriaga was taken by ambulance to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. There, according to coroner's records, he waited 16 hours without receiving medical attention despite his worsening condition and then died.


The coroner's autopsy revealed that Arriaga's fractured ribs had caused internal bleeding in his chest that led to respiratory failure. Because the ribs had been broken by "blunt force injuries" that came from the back, the coroner classified the death as a homicide.


The exam also found that Arriaga had cirrhosis of the liver, a condition that can impair the blood's ability to clot and so could have exacerbated the internal bleeding.


As it does with all in-custody deaths and cases involving serious force by officers, the LAPD deployed a team of specialized investigators to look into Arriaga's death. Such investigations typically focus on LAPD officers and determine if they violated any department rules or committed any crimes.


However, the Arriaga case was complicated. Pursuing the theory that Arriaga's ribs were broken while he was being taken into custody, the investigators found that no LAPD officers had been involved in the arrest or even had been present to witness it.


An LAPD detective who had been briefed on the arrest by a DEA agent told investigators he had learned that Arriaga "was not cooperative in coming out of the vehicle, was subsequently pulled out of the vehicle and then placed on the ground," according to the LAPD report.


The report concluded that Arriaga's wounds were not inflicted by LAPD officers when he was custody — a finding corroborated by the Police Commission. The report did not address whether he could have been beaten by a fellow inmate but noted that the department is working to have better video surveillance of the lockup facilities.


The investigators asked the DEA repeatedly for permission to interview the agents involved in the arrest, but were rebuffed, according to the report.


At first DEA officials told the LAPD that the agents needed some time to find attorneys who would accompany them.


Then, once legal counsel was arranged, the DEA said the interviews would have to wait until after Arriaga's autopsy results were completed, which occurred a short time later. Still, the agency did not make the agents available.


Frustrated by the DEA's inaction, LAPD investigators went for assistance to local prosecutors in the district attorney's office, who concluded they did not have the authority to compel federal agents to cooperate with a local police department's investigation.


Several months later, the LAPD turned to U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte for help getting the agents to talk. According to Beck's report, agents from Birotte's Los Angeles office agreed to conduct the interviews with the DEA agents. Those interviews were put on hold, however, and have never occurred.


joel.rubin@latimes.com


Times staff writer Frank Shyong contributed to this report.





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Country singer Tate Stevens wins Fox's 'X Factor'


NEW YORK (AP) — Tate Stevens, who was mentored by music exec L.A. Reid on the second season of "The X Factor," has won the Fox singing competition.


The 37-year-old country singer from Belton, Mo., beat runner-up Carly Rose Sonenclar, a 13-year-old schoolgirl from Westchester, N.Y., and teenage girl group Fifth Harmony on the finale that aired live Thursday night.


Stevens wins a $5 million recording contract.


More than 35 million votes were cast by viewers after Wednesday's performance show.


Besides Reid, judges this season included Demi Lovato, Britney Spears and series creator Simon Cowell.


Thursday's show was also the grand finale for Reid. Earlier this month, he said he wouldn't be returning to "The X Factor" next year. No replacement has been announced.


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Stigma Fading, Marijuana Common in California


Jim Wilson/The New York Times


At a San Francisco concert in 2010, marijuana use was general while signatures were collected for a measure to decriminalize it.







LOS ANGELES — Let Colorado and Washington be the marijuana trailblazers. Let them struggle with the messy details of what it means to actually legalize the drug. Marijuana is, as a practical matter, already legal in much of California.




No matter that its recreational use remains technically against the law. Marijuana has, in many parts of this state, become the equivalent of a beer in a paper bag on the streets of Greenwich Village. It is losing whatever stigma it ever had and still has in many parts of the country, including New York City, where the kind of open marijuana use that is common here would attract the attention of any passing law officer.


“It’s shocking, from my perspective, the number of people that we all know who are recreational marijuana users,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor. “These are incredibly upstanding citizens: Leaders in our community, and exceptional people. Increasingly, people are willing to share how they use it and not be ashamed of it.”


Marijuana can be smelled in suburban backyards in neighborhoods from Hollywood to Topanga Canyon as dusk falls — what in other places is known as the cocktail hour — often wafting in from three sides. In some homes in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, it is offered at the start of a dinner party with the customary ease of a host offering a chilled Bombay Sapphire martini.


Lighting up a cigarette (the tobacco kind) can get you booted from many venues in this rigorously antitobacco state. But no one seemed to mind as marijuana smoke filled the air at an outdoor concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September or even in the much more intimate, enclosed atmosphere of the Troubadour in West Hollywood during a Mountain Goats concert last week.


Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor, ticked off the acceptance of open marijuana smoking in a list of reasons he thought Venice was such a wonderful place for his morning bicycle rides. With so many people smoking in so many places, he said in an interview this year, there was no reason to light up one’s own joint.


“You just inhale, and you live off everyone else,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, who as governor signed a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.


Some Californians react disdainfully to anyone from out of state who still harbors illicit associations with the drug. Bill Maher, the television host, was speaking about the prevalence of marijuana smoking at dinner parties hosted by Sue Mengers, a retired Hollywood agent famous for her high-powered gatherings of actors and journalists, in an interview after her death last year. “I used to bring her pot,” he said. “And I wasn’t the only one.”


When a reporter sought to ascertain whether this was an on-the-record conversation, Mr. Maher responded tartly: “Where do you think you are? This is California in the year 2011.”


John Burton, the state Democratic chairman, said he recalled an era when the drug was stigmatized under tough antidrug laws. He called the changes in thinking toward marijuana one of the two most striking shifts in public attitude he had seen in 40 years here (the other was gay rights).


“I can remember when your second conviction of having a single marijuana cigarette would get you two to 20 in San Quentin,” he said.


In a Field Poll of California voters conducted in October 2010, 47 percent of respondents said they had smoked marijuana at least once, and 50 percent said it should be legalized. The poll was taken shortly before Californians voted down, by a narrow margin, an initiative to decriminalize marijuana.


“In a Republican year, the legalization came within two points,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked on the campaign in favor of the initiative. He said that was evidence of the “fact that the public has evolved on the issue and is ahead of the pols.”


A study by the California Office of Traffic Safety last month found that motorists were more likely to be driving under the influence of marijuana than under the influence of alcohol.


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U.S. economic growth in third quarter is revised upward









WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy grew faster in the third quarter than previously thought, but the last three months of the year are looking much weaker.


And many analysts see a sharper pullback early next year if the government's fiscal problems aren't resolved soon.


In its latest revision of economic growth data for the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday that the nation's gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 3.1% in the three-month period. That was up from its earlier estimates of 2.7% and 2%.





The revision was encouraging, in one way, because U.S. exports and consumer spending were a little stronger than estimated. Still, the overall advance in the third quarter came largely from a buildup of inventories and federal defense spending, neither of which is likely to be sustained.


Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of GDP, increased by a tepid 1.6% in the third quarter. And although the housing recovery is now clearly helping to lift the broader economy, businesses have been reducing their investments in items such as equipment.


Over the last year, GDP, which is the total value of goods and services produced, expanded at a respectable 2.6% pace. But that will probably be short-lived.


Economists see growth in the current quarter sliding back to a range of 1% to 2%, in part, because of the damage from Superstorm Sandy and concerns about the so-called fiscal cliff, the automatic spending cuts and tax hikes that would begin Jan. 1.


For now, most forecasters see GDP expanding next year at about a 2% rate — a pace too slow to make a meaningful dent in the unemployment rate. Many economists, however, say the economy could pick up steam in the second half, especially if the fiscal cliff can be averted.


don.lee@latimes.com





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