“Lincoln” Women: How Sally Field and Gloria Reuben Stole Daniel Day-Lewis’ Show

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Steven Spielberg‘s “Lincoln” is, on the face of it, a standard “great man” biopic. Basked in a honeydew light, overflowing with sage advice, Daniel Day-Lewis‘ Great Emancipator is depicted as constantly and self-consciously speaking to the ages well before he belongs to them.

But let us now praise the film’s not-as-famous women. For what rescues “Lincoln” from bombast are the slier and subtler performances by a trio of fantastic and often under-utilized actresses – Sally Field, Gloria Reuben and S. Epatha Merkerson.

Each one uses her limited screen time to etch a devastating portrait of the limitations that faced women in a male-dominated society. After all, if the legislators debating the merits of the 13th Amendment in the movie fret openly that abolishing slavery will begin a slippery slope to black enfranchisement, they seem even more horrified at the prospect that it one day might lead to granting women the right to vote.

Though some critics have griped about Spielberg’s penchant for speechifying in “Lincoln,” there has been near universal praise for Day-Lewis and for Tommy Lee Jones’ work as the wily Thaddeus Stevens. Field’s take on First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln – a woman Louis C.K. quipped on “Saturday Night Live” recently was “historically insane” – has been more divisive.

In TheWrap, for instance, Steve Pond wrote, “Sally Field may well be nominated for Supporting Actress for her Mary Todd Lincoln, but to me her hysteria was one of the least-successful parts of the film.”

Yet Field’s work is in many ways more revelatory than that of Day-Lewis. True, the Irish-Anglo acting god daringly gives the 16th president a historically accurate high voice and indelibly paints a picture of a great orator with an outhouse sense of humor, but his modifications are slight tweaks to the Lincoln myth. Field’s interpretation is a whole-scale reinvention.

Field’s Mary is privately unhinged, true. But she is also a smooth Washington operator, comfortable sparring with Stevens over her White House redecorating and forcibly pressuring her husband to carry the 13th Amendment to the finish line while wielding little more than a fan.

Even her mania is rooted in the death of her young son Willy; an empathetic anchor that keeps Mary from becoming simply the backwoods, social-climbing hysteric she’s been portrayed as in the past.

In screenwriter Tony Kushner, Field finds an eager co-conspirator. As Kushner confessed on NPR, the Lincolns had a turbulent relationship in part because of Abraham Lincoln’s emotional coldness.

“People always think about Mary as being difficult and she absolutely was, but Lincoln wasn’t easy either,” Kushner said. “He was remote and complicated and rather interestingly fond of telling her things that would upset her horribly, like these dreams that he kept having and he would leave her kind of in a state night after night, telling her that he was having these kind of scary dreams.

It’s an enormously complicated relationship and the family is a tragic family.”

The only false note in an otherwise galvanizing portrayal, is having Mary deliver a line that is a too historically self-aware.

“All anyone will remember about me was that I was crazy and ruined your happiness,” Mary says at one point – to which my companion let forth a large guffaw.

Field who packed 25 pounds onto her slender frame and allowed the camera to scan her creased face is a revelation – it’s a reminder that the plucky star of “Norma Rae” is good for more than Boniva ads.

But Mary Todd Lincoln isn’t the only female who elbows her way into this big screen men’s club. Gloria Reuben‘s Elizabeth Keckley is also a marvel.

Dramaturgically it’s a thankless role with Reuben’s freed slave seamstress frequently used as a stand-in for all-antebellum African American suffering. Yet Reuben grounds the performance in a simmering fury and heartbreak, using her eyes to register the peigns of hurt that greets the racist slights Keckley is exposed to on a daily basis.

Her conversation in the White House portico with Daniel Day-Lewis about the meaning of emancipation is a bravura moment – a reminder of just how long a walk to freedom 19th century blacks faced.

Likewise, S. Epatha Merkerson‘s Lydia Smith is perhaps the greatest master class in doing a lot with a little since Judi Dench captured a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1998 for her eight-minute cameo in “Shakespeare in Love.”

Smith, the housekeeper and (spoiler alert) common-law wife of Thaddeus Stevens, has two fleeting scenes. In one, she gently removes Jones’ coat as he enters their Washington, D.C., home after the amendment passes, in the other she reads the constitutional addition aloud in bed to her secret-paramour. It is, in the words of another Kushner play, a reminder that “the world only spins forward.”

Indeed, the entire film represents a major step forward for Spielberg whose earlier boy’s adventures were largely all-male affairs. Aside from Embeth Davidtz’s frightened maid in “Schindler’s List,” Whoopi Goldberg’s martyr-like Celie in “The Color Purple” and Karen Allen’s fiery adventurer in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the Spielberg women are a weightless bunch. Even great actresses like Julianne Moore in “The Lost World” are given gossamer thin screen time.

Here, transported by Kushner’s words, he allows these women to step forward out of the shadows and into history. Next time maybe he’ll let them take center stage.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Psychotherapy’s Image Problem Pushes Some Therapists to Become ‘Brands’

Illustration by Matt Dorfman. Photograph by Jens Mortensen for The New York Times.

In the summer of 2011, after I completed six years of graduate school and internship training and was about to start my psychotherapy practice, I sat down with my clinical supervisor in the Los Angeles office we’d be sharing. It had been a rigorous six years, transitioning from my role as a full-time journalist always on tight deadlines to that of a therapist whose world was broken into slow, thoughtful hours listening and trying to help people come to a deeper understanding of their lives. My supervisor went over the filing systems, billing procedures and ethical quandaries like whether to take referrals from current clients, but we never discussed how I would get these clients. I fully assumed, in what now seems like an astounding fit of naïveté, that I’d send out an e-mail announcement and network with doctors, and to paraphrase “Field of Dreams,” if I built it, they would come.

Except that they didn’t. What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, “Where Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?” According to the author, 30 percent fewer patients received psychological interventions in 2008 than they did 11 years earlier; since the 1990s, managed care has increasingly limited visits and reimbursements for talk therapy but not for drug treatment; and in 2005 alone, pharmaceutical companies spent $4.2 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising and $7.2 billion on promotion to physicians, nearly twice what they spent on research and development.

According to the A.P.A., therapists had to start paying attention to what the marketplace demanded or we risked our livelihoods. It wasn’t long before I learned that an entirely new specialized industry had cropped up: branding consultants for therapists.

I couldn’t imagine hiring a branding consultant to lure people to the couch. Psychotherapy is perhaps one of the few commercial businesses that doesn’t see itself as one, that views financial gain as unseemly when connected to the delicate work of emotional insight. Moreover, the field is predicated on strict concepts of authenticity, privacy and therapist-patient boundaries. Branding was the antithesis of what we did.

But a couple of months after setting up my office and waiting for people to call, I found myself wondering — first idly, then deliberately, and always guiltily — about those branding consultants and how exactly they helped therapists like me. Sitting at my desk one morning when my appointment book looked particularly dismal, a combination of curiosity and desperation got the best of me. On Google, I came across a branding consultant named Casey Truffo. Her Web site’s home page spoke directly to my situation: “You are called to be a therapist. Are you also called to poverty?” I immediately dialed her number.

The first thing Truffo told me when I reached her in her Orange County office was that I shouldn’t feel bad about my empty hours; nowadays, she said, even established veterans were struggling. Yes, the economy was bad, but the real issue was that psychotherapy had an image problem.

She told me about a therapist named Sandra Bryson. In 2009, Bryson called for help after her successful Oakland-based practice of 25 years lost patients when she stopped taking insurance. According to Truffo, Bryson shared a problem common to therapists: “a blah-sounding message and no angle.” Bryson had always done well as a generalist — treating anything from depression to grief to marital issues — but Truffo urged her to find a specialty, one that “captured the zeitgeist but didn’t feel played out.” Bryson mentioned that she liked helping parents and had an affinity for technology, and voilà — suddenly she had a brand. Not as a clinician addressing typical parenting issues like boundary-setting, which Truffo called “generic and old-school,” but as an expert who helps modern families navigate digital media. She also became a sought-after speaker on so-called hot issues like screen time, cyberbullying and sexting, and Bryson told me her practice, which is based on “mostly deep work,” had become “more advice-driven.” Now her schedule is full, and her income has increased about 15 percent a year.

“Nobody wants to buy therapy anymore,” Truffo told me. “They want to buy a solution to a problem.” This is something Truffo discovered in her own former private practice of 18 years, during which she saw a shift from people who were unhappy and wanted to understand themselves better to people who would come in “because they wanted someone else or something else to change,” she said. “I’d see fewer and fewer people coming in and saying, ‘I want to change.’ ”

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Lobbying, a Windfall and a Leader’s Family

Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Ping An, one of China’s largest financial services companies, is building a 115-story office tower in Shenzhen. The company is a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential.

SHENZHEN, China — The head of a financially troubled insurer was pushing Chinese officials to relax rules that required breaking up the company in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis.

The survival of Ping An Insurance was at stake, officials were told in the fall of 1999. Direct appeals were made to the vice premier at the time, Wen Jiabao, as well as the then-head of China’s central bank — two powerful officials with oversight of the industry.

“I humbly request that the vice premier lead and coordinate the matter from a higher level,” Ma Mingzhe, chairman of Ping An, implored in a letter to Mr. Wen that was reviewed by The New York Times.

Ping An was not broken up.

The successful outcome of the lobbying effort would prove monumental.

Ping An went on to become one of China’s largest financial services companies, a $50 billion powerhouse now worth more than A.I.G., MetLife or Prudential. And behind the scenes, shares in Ping An that would be worth billions of dollars once the company rebounded were acquired by relatives of Mr. Wen.

The Times reported last month that the relatives of Mr. Wen, who became prime minister in 2003, had grown extraordinarily wealthy during his leadership, acquiring stakes in tourist resorts, banks, jewelers, telecommunications companies and other business ventures.

The greatest source of wealth, by far, The Times investigation has found, came from the shares in Ping An bought about eight months after the insurer was granted a waiver to the requirement that big financial companies be broken up.

Long before most investors could buy Ping An stock, Taihong, a company that would soon be controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives, acquired a large stake in Ping An from state-owned entities that held shares in the insurer, regulatory and corporate records show. And by all appearances, Taihong got a sweet deal. The shares were bought in December 2002 for one-quarter of the price that another big investor — the British bank HSBC Holdings — paid for its shares just two months earlier, according to interviews and public filings.

By June 2004, the shares held by the Wen relatives had already quadrupled in value, even before the company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. And by 2007, the initial $65 million investment made by Taihong would be worth $3.7 billion.

Corporate records show that the relatives’ stake of that investment most likely peaked at $2.2 billion in late 2007, the last year in which Taihong’s shareholder records were publicly available. Because the company is no longer listed in Ping An’s public filings, it is unclear if the relatives continue to hold shares.

It is also not known whether Mr. Wen or the central bank chief at the time, Dai Xianglong, personally intervened on behalf of Ping An’s request for a waiver, or if Mr. Wen was even aware of the stakes held by his relatives.

But internal Ping An documents, government filings and interviews with bankers and former senior executives at Ping An indicate that both the vice premier’s office and the central bank were among the regulators involved in the Ping An waiver meetings and who had the authority to sign off on the waiver.

Only two large state-run financial institutions were granted similar waivers, filings show, while three of China’s big state-run insurance companies were forced to break up. Many of the country’s big banks complied with the breakup requirement — enforced after the financial crisis because of concerns about the stability of the financial system — by selling their assets in other institutions.

Ping An issued a statement to The Times saying the company strictly complies with rules and regulations, but does not know the backgrounds of all entities behind shareholders. The company also said “it is the legitimate right of shareholders to buy and sell shares between themselves.”

In Beijing, China’s foreign ministry did not return calls seeking comment for this article. Earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokesman sharply criticized the investigation by The Times into the finances of Mr. Wen’s relatives, saying it “smears China and has ulterior motives.”

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Survey finds many MTA employees have safety concerns

Hundreds of Metro transit workers — many of whom operate the trains and buses that carry 1.5 million riders daily — say they have concerns about their on-the-job safety.

Of 745 employees who responded to a workplace survey at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a large majority of mechanics, track workers, bus drivers, train operators and others described their workplace as somewhat safe, not very safe or not safe at all.

A significant number of employees, particularly those who operate and repair transit systems, also believe their supervisors are only concerned about safety when there is a serious accident.

Most of the Metro workers who were questioned, however, gave the agency high marks for safety overall. Yet almost half said they have encountered close calls on the job that could have killed or seriously injured someone.

Metro Chief Executive Art Leahy said he was pleased that the survey was "generally positive" and pointed out that many of its recommendations already have been addressed. He noted, for example, that the management of the department that maintains rail systems has been changed, more workers have been hired and trackside safety measures improved.

But Leahy said the study by Sam Schwartz Engineering, a national consulting firm, was not as comprehensive as he would have liked. And he questioned whether the employees who responded to the detailed questionnaire were really representative.

"I take deep offense to anyone who says I don't care about safety," Leahy said. "This is no joke."

Metro operates about 2,000 buses and 87 miles of subway and light-rail lines. It has about 9,000 employees and a $4.5 billion-annual budget.

The report, obtained by The Times under the state Public Records Act, is scheduled to be discussed at the authority's December board meeting. It comes at a time when agency leaders have been debating several safety issues.

During the last year, the authority has been dealing with a faulty rail junction on the recently opened Expo light-rail line to the Westside and a surge in accidents on the Blue Line, the light-rail link between Los Angeles and Long Beach.

In the survey, solid majorities of Metro employees said that accidents were thoroughly investigated, education and training programs were effective, management addressed safety-related complaints and changes in safety rules were adequately communicated.

"There is clearly a positive safety culture at Metro," researchers said, adding that such a distinction is only enjoyed by "a handful of transit agencies."

Metro's board of directors ordered the safety study in October 2011, at the request of Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, the current board chairman. The consultants reviewed written safety procedures, interviewed key managers and held group discussions with workers. Questionnaires were sent to 6,000 of Metro's 9,000 employees, of whom 745 responded.

Though the survey was not a scientifically based opinion poll, about 8% of the authority's workforce participated, considered to be a significant sample.

Howard Roberts, the author of the report, said the survey was designed to identify strengths as well as suspected problems that Metro should look into and correct if necessary.

The authority is "working on all the report's recommendations," said Roberts, a veteran transit executive who is now a consultant. "Metro ought to be commended for the survey. Not a lot of people do this. Some agencies don't want to recognize that they might have serious problems."

Roberts cautioned that some of the survey's findings were not always a reflection of the quality of Metro's safety policies. Track workers, train operators and bus drivers, he said, can feel vulnerable in the field and face inherent dangers that are difficult to eliminate, such as crime and accidents caused by the public.

The report found that significant numbers of bus drivers, train operators and those who work on Metro's rail network were more critical of their safety and agency practices than workers who are less connected to the direct operation and maintenance of rail and bus systems.

They said that many close calls or near misses are never reported to supervisors and that Metro is more interested in disciplining individuals for mishaps or safety violations instead of preventing recurrences.

Many other employees who work on tracks and related equipment said they were seriously concerned about pressure from supervisors to ignore some safety rules and procedures to get assignments done.

Majorities of all workers, however, said that Metro's management takes a "no blame" approach if near-misses are reported and that supervisors maintain an open-door policy and act quickly to correct safety problems.

In other findings, the report states that some bus drivers in group discussions complained that they now have to go faster than usual, turning their lines into "racetrack routes." Deep service cuts, they say, have increased the number of passengers, which makes it harder to stay on schedule because loading and unloading takes more time.

"I'd like to know where they exist," Leahy said, adding that he thought the complaints might have involved scheduling issues on the Orange Line bus rapid transit route in the San Fernando Valley, which have been looked into.

The report further stated that other drivers were concerned that there is not enough law enforcement presence on buses. They complained that Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies are seldom seen or only ride a few blocks before getting off.

Agency officials counter that deputies conducted more than 3,000 boardings from September through the first week of November and took about 900 bus rides of two hours each. Statistics show that deputies checked the fares of more than 100,000 riders and made 130 misdemeanor and felony arrests.

dan.weikel@latimes.com

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WHO Announces Family Cluster of Cases of New Coronavirus

Holidays. It never fails.

Today, while the United States has been largely off-line following our Thanksgiving holiday (and while Northern Europe was on its way to the pub for Friday evening revelry), the World Health Organization announced four new cases of the novel coronavirus that caused a great deal of worry immediately before the October hajj season. (Earlier posts here and here.)

In its bulletin, released by the WHO’s Global Alert and Response team (GOAR), the agency said:

• Four additional laboratory-confirmed cases have been identified; one of the four has died.


• One case is in Qatar, the location of one of the original two cases earlier this year.


• Three of the new cases, including the dead person, are in Saudi Arabia, site of the other original case (who also died).


• Two of the three Saudi cases, including the dead person, are members of the same family.


• In that family, two other people have also fallen ill, and one has died. The man who recovered showed no laboratory evidence of infection with the novel coronavirus. Analysis of the case of the person who died is continuing.

A quick recap: This new virus concerns public health officials because it is related to the viral cause of SARS, which swept the globe in 2003, sickening more than 8,000 people and killing almost 800. News of it first emerged in September, when a post to the mailing list ProMED described the illness and death in June of a man who lived in Saudi Arabia. That bulletin caused physicians in London who were treating a man from Qatar to realize that their patient was suffering from the same illness. The timing and location of the cases caused international concern, because Saudi Arabia was about to host the annual hajj, which brings millions of observant Muslims to the country in closely crowded conditions, and thus could have been a transmission risk.

Since then, very little new has been released.

On Sept. 27, the journal EuroSurveillance published two reports, a case definition and recommendation for public health measures by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (the EU’s equivalent of the United States’ CDC) and the UK’s Health Protection Agency, and a first attempt at PCR-based identifying tests, by scientists at the HPA, in Berlin, and at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who collaborated on that first ProMED post.

On Oct. 17, the New England Journal of Medicine carried a description of the first Saudi case written by the authors of that first ProMED post, Dr. Ali Moh Zaki of the Soliman Fareek Hospital in Jiddah and Dr. Ron Fouchier and other staff from Erasmus.

On Nov. 4 and Nov. 20, ProMED carried reports of two additional cases beyond the first two, both in Saudi. The Nov. 4 report, of a man who fell ill in Riyadh and recovered, was submitted to ProMED by Dr. Ziad Memish, the Kingdom’s deputy minister for public health. The Nov. 20 report relayed an announcement from the Kingdom’s Ministry of Health reporting an additional case in Riyadh. (There has been no indication whether these cases are included in the four new ones announced by the WHO, or are separate. Prior to today’s brief announcement, the WHO had not issued any bulletins on the new virus since Oct. 10.)

Meanwhile, on Nov. 13, the UK’s Health Protection Agency announced that its laboratories had achieved a complete genome of the virus isolated from the case treated in London, finding it to be most closely related to a coronavirus isolated from bats in the Netherlands several years ago. (This is important because the SARS virus, originally thought to be harbored by civet cats, was identified in 2005 in bats as well.)

And in addition, there have been some indications that the flow of information on this new virus may not be complete as health authorities might wish. Among them: On Oct. 22, Dr. Memish complained on ProMED of “incomplete, even hysterical reporting” and said that the initial report of the first Saudi case “intentionally or inadvertently circumvented” “internal reporting mechanisms.” Two days later, Deborah Mackenzie of New Scientist reported that the physician who sent that first report, Dr. Zaki, lost his job in the Kingdom after official actions that he described to her as “threatening,” and fled to Egypt, where he is from.

So where does that leave us today?

The WHO statement is notable for what it does not say: It does not give ages, genders or places of residence for the new cases, and it has nothing to say about how they may have become infected — including whether person-to-person transmission of the virus has occurred, which would be one reasonable hypothesis given the family relationships.

But it does say that the agency assumes the virus to be more widely distributed than these cases suggest, and urges countries to be on the look-out for additional cases. Notably, it suggests testing patients with severe pneumonia even if they have no travel history to Saudi Arabia or Qatar, which is a lowering of the screening threshold from what the agency recommended earlier:

WHO encourages all Member States to continue their surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) and is currently reviewing the case definition and other guidance related to the novel coronavirus. Until more information is available, it is prudent to consider that the virus is likely more widely distributed than just the two countries which have identified cases. Member States should consider testing of patients with unexplained pneumonias for the new coronavirus even in the absence of travel or other associations with the two affected countries. In addition, any clusters of SARI or SARI in health care workers should be thoroughly investigated regardless of where in the world they occur.

Much more to come on this, I am sure. Over the weekend, consider following Helen Branswell of Canadian Press and Declan Butler of Nature, who got stories about this posted this afternoon; and also indefatigable emerging-diseases blogger Crawford Killian, who has picked up indications that the new Qatar case may actually be in Germany.

Update: I failed to notice that Mike Coston of Avian Flu Diary has confirmed the reports of the new Qatar case actually being in Germany. Mike found a statement from Germany’s Robert Koch Institute about the man’s illness. So (and I should have said this earlier), for more about this evolving story, you should follow Mike too.

SARS image, PHIL, CDC

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Justin Bieber will not face charges from paparazzo run-in

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Teenage pop star Justin Bieber will not face charges for an alleged altercation with a man who was taking photos of him at a suburban shopping center in May, Los Angeles prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Deputy District Attorney Mara McIlvain said in a report there was “insufficient evidence for proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Canadian singer scuffled with paparazzo Jose Hernandez-Duran before leaving the shopping center with his girlfriend, actress Selena Gomez.

The photographer accused Bieber, 18, of leaving a van to kick him in the abdomen and punch him in the face. Officials called to the scene in Calabasas, 30 miles west of Los Angeles, found no apparent injury or trauma to the photographer.

A later doctor’s evaluation indicated “minor swelling” to the photographer’s right cheek and “redness” on his lower abdomen but labeled the injuries “superficial.”

McIlvain’s report indicated that Bieber became frustrated when photographers obstructed his vehicle as he attempted to leave the shopping center. He then left the vehicle, charged at Hernandez-Duran and fell after taking a swing at his camera.

Witnesses told investigators they could not determine if Bieber had struck Hernandez-Duran, who kept on taking photos of the singer after the incident. They said the photographer was approached by a lawyer soon after the run-in.

McIlvain said there were no photos of a scuffle between Bieber and Hernandez-Duran, even though many photographers were present.

Bieber’s publicist could not immediately be reached for comment.

The pop star swept the American Music Awards on Sunday, winning three, including the top prize of the night, and performed live during the show.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and David Brunnstrom)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Inquiry Sought in Death in Ireland After Abortion Was Denied

DUBLIN — India’s ambassador here has agreed to ask Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland for an independent inquiry into the death of an Indian-born woman last month after doctors refused to perform an abortion when she was having a miscarriage, the lawyer representing the woman’s husband said Thursday.

The lawyer, Gerard O’Donnell, also said crucial information was missing from the files he had received from the Irish Health Service Executive about the death of the woman, Savita Halappanavar, including any mention of her requests for an abortion after she learned that the fetus would not survive.

The death of Dr. Halappanavar, 31, a dentist who lived near Galway, has focused global attention on the Irish ban on abortion.

Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, has refused to cooperate with an investigation being conducted by the Irish health agency. “I have seen the way my wife was treated in the hospital, so I have no confidence that the H.S.E. will do justice,” he said in an interview on Wednesday night on RTE, the state television broadcaster. “Basically, I don’t have any confidence in the H.S.E.”

In a tense debate in the Irish Parliament on Wednesday evening, Robert Dowds of the Labour Party said Dr. Halappanavar’s death had forced politicians “to confront an issue we have dodged for much too long,” partly because so many Irish women travel to Britain for abortions.

“The reality is that if Britain wasn’t on our doorstep, we would have had to introduce abortion legislation years ago to avoid women dying in back-street abortions,” he said.

After the debate, the Parliament voted 88 to 53 against a motion introduced by the opposition Sinn Fein party calling on the government to allow abortions when women’s lives are in danger and to protect doctors who perform such procedures.

The Irish president, Michael D. Higgins — who is restricted by the Constitution from getting involved in political matters — also made a rare foray into a political debate on Wednesday, saying any inquiry must meet the needs of the Halappanavar family as well as the government.

In 1992, the Irish Supreme Court interpreted the current law to mean that abortion should be allowed in circumstances where there was “a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother,” including the threat of suicide. But that ruling has never been codified into law.

“The current situation is like a sword of Damocles hanging over us,” Dr. Peter Boylan, of the Irish Institute of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told RTE last week. “If we do something with a good intention, but it turns out to be illegal, the consequences are extremely serious for medical practitioners.”

Dr. Ruth Cullen, who has campaigned against abortion, said that any legislation to codify the Supreme Court ruling would be tantamount to allowing abortion on demand and that Dr. Halappanavar’s death should not be used to make that change.

Dr. Halappanavar contracted a bacterial blood infection, septicemia, and died Oct. 28, a week after she was admitted to Galway University Hospital with severe back pains. She was 17 weeks pregnant but having a miscarriage and was told that the fetus — a girl — would not survive. Her husband said she asked several times for an abortion but was informed that under Irish law it would be illegal while there was a fetal heartbeat, because “this is a Catholic country.”

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Cyber Corps program trains spies for the digital age

TULSA, Okla. — Jim Thavisay is secretly stalking one of his classmates. And one of them is spying on him.

"I have an idea who it is, but I'm not 100% sure yet," said Thavisay, a 25-year-old former casino blackjack dealer.

Stalking is part of the curriculum in the Cyber Corps, an unusual two-year program at the University of Tulsa that teaches students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage.

Students learn not only how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.

It may sound like a Jason Bourne movie, but the little-known program has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security.

The need for stronger cyber-defense — and offense — was highlighted when Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned in an Oct. 11 speech that a "a cyber-terrorist attack could paralyze the nation," and that America needs experts to tackle the growing threat.

"An aggressor nation or extremist group could gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals," Panetta said. "They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."

Panetta said the Pentagon spends more than $3 billion annually for cyber-security. "Our most important investment is in skilled cyber-warriors needed to conduct operations in cyberspace," he said.

That's music to the ears of Sujeet Shenoi, a naturalized citizen from India who founded the cyber program in 1998. He says 85% of the 260 graduates since 2003 have gone to the NSA, which students call "the fraternity," or the CIA, which they call "the sorority."

Shenoi subjects his students to both classroom theory and practical field work. Each student is assigned to a Tulsa police crime lab on campus and uses digital skills to help uncover evidence — most commonly child pornography images — from seized devices. Several students have posed as children online to lure predators. In 2003, students helped solve a triple homicide by cracking an email account linking the perpetrator to his victims.

"I throw them into the deep end," Shenoi said. "And they become fearless."

The Secret Service has also tapped the Cyber Corps. Working from a facility on campus, students help agents remove evidence from damaged cellphones, GPS units and other devices.

"Working alongside U.S. Secret Service agents, Tulsa Cyber Corps students have developed techniques for extracting evidence from burned or shattered cellphones," Hugh Dunleavy, who heads the Secret Service criminal division, said in a written statement. More than 5,000 devices have been examined at the facility, he added.

In 2007, California's secretary of state, Debra Bowen, hired the University of California to test the security of three electronic voting systems used in the state, and Shenoi and several students joined one of the "red" teams assigned to try to hack the voting machines. They succeeded. One of the students, who now works at the NSA, showed that someone could use an off-the-shelf device with Bluetooth connectivity to change all the votes in a given machine, Shenoi said.

"All our results were provided to the companies so they could fix the machines to the extent possible," Shenoi said.

In May, the NSA named Tulsa as one of four national centers of academic excellence in cyber-operations. The others were Northeastern University in Boston, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and Dakota State University in Madison, S.D.

"Tulsa students show up to NSA with a lot of highly relevant hands-on experience," said Neal Ziring, a senior NSA official who visited the school recently to consult about the curriculum and to interview students for jobs and internships. "There are very few schools that are like Tulsa in terms of having participation with law enforcement, with industry, with government."

Shenoi's students have ranged in age from 17 to 63. Many are retired from the military, or otherwise starting second careers. They are usually working toward degrees in computer science, engineering, law or business. About two-thirds get a cyber-operations certification on their diplomas, or what Shenoi calls a "cyber-ninja" designation "because they have to be super techie."

To be accepted into the corps, applicants must be U.S. citizens with the ability to obtain a security clearance of "top secret" or higher. But not all of them spend their careers in government.

One former student, Philip McAllister, worked after graduation at the Naval Research Laboratory, which does scientific research and development for the Navy and Marines. He later moved to San Francisco and worked at several startup companies before he joined Instagram, which developed a photo-sharing mobile application, early this year. Facebook purchased Instagram, which had only 13 employees, for $1 billion three months later.

"Sujeet gets incredibly talented people," said Richard "Dickie" George, who retired last year after a three-decade career at the NSA.

Shenoi speaks proudly of students who pushed the boundaries or broke the rules.

One, who now works at the NSA, hacked the school's computer system and created a fake university ID to impersonate his cyber-stalking target, for example. Another spoofed a professor's email account to fool his target into spilling details. As part of a vulnerability study, one student sneaked into a Tulsa water system facility and stole blueprints that a more malign attacker could use to wreak havoc.

A few years ago, Shenoi says, a group of students rummaged through trash bins outside offices on campus and obtained confidential information about football recruits, professors' salaries, and major financial donors.

"We are now banned from Dumpster diving on campus," he said with a smile.

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

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How to Make an All-Instant Thanksgiving Dinner

It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and you forgot to reserve a turkey. Or maybe you are short on time, or just really lazy and don’t want to actually cook the meal. Either way, modern food science has the entire turkey day menu covered: Just add water.

We put together an all-instant menu, made up of only room-temperature foodstuffs requiring, at most, boiling water or a microwave to prepare. No baking, barbecuing, broiling, frying, grilling, roasting, sauteing or stewing necessary.

When it comes to instant gratification, freeze-drying is king, we’re told by Washington State University food engineer Juming Tang. And it preserves flavor while making food inhospitable to bacteria.

“It was developed in the 1950s, and gives you the highest quality product over canning, pickling and other food-preservation techniques,” Tang said. “But it’s also the most expensive, about three to 10 times as much.”

So if you are ready to boil and microwave your way out of any kind of really labor-intensive Thanksgiving preparations, here’s what you need.

Turkey

You must abandon the idea of a glistening, crispy skinned bird sitting on the dinner table. No room-temperature substitute comes close. But if there must be turkey, your options abound.

Ideally, you’ve already saved some cooked turkey for a rainy day by freeze-drying it. A more readily available choice is canned turkey, but it’s not a good sign when turkey products for your cat or dog (usually made from industrial food factory offal) overwhelm the human selection.

Beyond that, your best bet is an MRE, or “Meal, Ready to Eat,” developed by food scientists to feed troops hot dishes on the front line. Simply pour a little water in a magnesium-filled pouch for an exothermic reaction, and let ‘er cook.

As a last resort, take a hike to your local gas station for some turkey jerky.

Gravy

Kitchen wars have been fought over what gravy is, exactly, but we think it should be brownish, salty, gooey and bad for you.

Gravy cubes, gravy powder and cans of gravy make it one of the easiest Thanksgiving sides to instantly produce, but we vote for the canned species. That’s because they’re less likely to contain strange ingredients such as hydrogenated oils, monosodium glutamate, sulfiting agents, anti-caking agents, artificial colors and the ever-mysterious “artificial flavoring.” But if you like that sort of thing, go for the powder.

Stuffing

Homemade stuffing calls for a lot of toasting and mixing and baking, but we don’t have time for that. Grab any preservative-rich box of the instant variety, plus some butter (see below), and add boiling water.

Butter

Whoever said turkey is the essential element to any Thanksgiving dinner never looked at the ingredients list. Butter sneaks it way onto just about every fixin’, especially dessert.

The average stick of butter lasts only a few months in a refrigerator, but powdered butter lasts for about 5 years. That’s because it’s a dry powder, and bacteria need water to thrive. Go ahead and grab the big can — you’ll need it.

Cranberry Sauce

Don’t over-think this one. Secure a can of gelatin-infused cranberry sauce and be merry.

Mashed Potatoes

You will have no problem securing some instant mashed potatoes, thanks again to the wonders of freeze-drying.

Green Bean Casserole

Merge one can of French-style green beans with one can of cream of mushroom soup, then top with FUNYUNS® or some other mysterious fried onion substitute. Not your grandmother’s recipe, but it’s functional.

Candied Yams

Replicating the crusty-gooey mouth feel of yams, brown sugar and marshmallows without an oven isn’t impossible.

If you’re boiling water on the stove top for another dish, roast the marshmallows on a stick over the flames, then drop them onto the yam and brown sugar mixture. Better yet, cram your dish into the microwave and watch the marshmallows turn into goo.

Bread

Who needs the yeasty aroma of fresh-baked bread when you’ve got bread-in-a-can?

Pie

Making a pie using by only adding water may sound ludicrous, but it’s as easy as… not baking a pie.

For the crust, mash up vanilla wafers or graham crackers, drip in a few tablespoons of butter and shape the mix into a proper pie-filling receptacle.

Opinions on essential Thanksgiving pie fillings vary, but whatever you’re making, gelatin — collagen extracted from ground-up animal bones, hides and skin — is your friend. Mix spices, primary filling (e.g. canned pumpkin), condensed milk, reconstituted eggs (see below) and any other ingredients into some water and gelatin, heat it in the microwave for a bit, then dump it into your crust.

Cooling helps gelatin molecules solidify into a wiggly matrix, so take advantage of chilly weather by setting the pie outside.

Eggs

A few dinner menu staples call for eggs as a binding agent, especially the pies. Thanks again to freeze-drying methods, there’s a powder for that.

Whipped Cream

We don’t know what’s in it, but whipped cream powder is out there.

To play it on the safer side, get some freeze-dried heavy cream powder, add water and whip it up with an electric beater.

If we missed anything, let us know in the comments. And if anyone actually makes the Wired.com instant Thanksgiving dinner, send a photo to @wiredscience on Twitter.

Images: 1) Flickr/Mr. T 2) Flickr/Paul Pellerito 3) PackItGourmet.com 4) Flickr/pinprick 5) Flickr/sandwichgirl

See Also:

Follow us on Twitter @davemosher and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

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Ex-’Price is Right’ model gets $8.5M in damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The producers of “The Price is Right” owe a former model on the show more than $ 7.7 million in punitive damages for discriminating against her after a pregnancy, a jury determined Wednesday.

The judgment came one day after the panel determined the game show’s producers discriminated against Brandi Cochran. They awarded her nearly $ 777,000 in actual damages.

Cochran, 41, said she was rejected when she tried to return to work in early 2010 after taking maternity leave. The jury agreed and determined that FremantleMedia North America and The Price is Right Productions owed her more than $ 8.5 million in all.

“I’m humbled. I’m shocked,” Cochran said after the jury announced its verdict. “I’m happy that justice was served today not only for women in the entertainment industry, but women in the workplace.”

FremantleMedia said it was standing by its previous statement, which said it expected to be “fully vindicated” after an appeal.

“We believe the verdict in this case was the result of a flawed process in which the court, among other things, refused to allow the jury to hear and consider that 40 percent of our models have been pregnant,” and further “important” evidence, FremantleMedia said.

In their defense, producers said they were satisfied with the five models working on the show at the time Cochran sought to return.

Several other former models have sued the series and its longtime host, Bob Barker, who retired in 2007.

Most of the cases involving “Barker’s Beauties” — the nickname given the gown-wearing women who presented prizes to contestants — ended with out-of-court settlements.

Comedian-actor Drew Carey followed Barker as the show’s host.

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

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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