Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines.

The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011.

The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course.

The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them.

Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ”

Researchers say they are not sure what is behind the declines. They may be an early sign of a national shift that is visible only in cities that routinely measure the height and weight of schoolchildren. The decline in Los Angeles, for instance, was for fifth, seventh and ninth graders — the grades that are measured each year — between 2005 and 2010. Nor is it clear whether the drops have more to do with fewer obese children entering school or currently enrolled children losing weight. But researchers note that declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

Though obesity is now part of the national conversation, with aggressive advertising campaigns in major cities and a push by Michelle Obama, many scientists doubt that anti-obesity programs actually work. Individual efforts like one-time exercise programs have rarely produced results. Researchers say that it will take a broad set of policies applied systematically to effectively reverse the trend, a conclusion underscored by an Institute of Medicine report released in May.

Philadelphia has undertaken a broad assault on childhood obesity for years. Sugary drinks like sweetened iced tea, fruit punch and sports drinks started to disappear from school vending machines in 2004. A year later, new snack guidelines set calorie and fat limits, which reduced the size of snack foods like potato chips to single servings. By 2009, deep fryers were gone from cafeterias and whole milk had been replaced by one percent and skim.

Change has been slow. Schools made money on sugary drinks, and some set up rogue drink machines that had to be hunted down. Deep fat fryers, favored by school administrators who did not want to lose popular items like French fries, were unplugged only after Wayne T. Grasela, the head of food services for the school district, stopped buying oil to fill them.

But the message seems to be getting through, even if acting on it is daunting. Josh Monserrat, an eighth grader at John Welsh Elementary, uses words like “carbs,” and “portion size.” He is part of a student group that promotes healthy eating. He has even dressed as an orange to try to get other children to eat better. Still, he struggles with his own weight. He is 5-foot-3 but weighed nearly 200 pounds at his last doctor’s visit.

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m obese for my age,’ ” said Josh, who is 13. “I set a goal for myself to lose 50 pounds.”

Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. That rate, which has tripled since 1980, has leveled off in recent years but has remained at historical highs, and public health experts warn that it could bring long-term health risks.

Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Cancer Society says that being overweight or obese is the culprit in one of seven cancer deaths. Diabetes in children is up by a fifth since 2000, according to federal data.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” said Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who added that obesity is “almost certain to result in a serious downturn in longevity based on the risks people are taking on.”

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Drought and Economic Woes Vex Sheep Farmers

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Lambs inside pens at the Mountain View Lamb Feeders feedlot in Eaton, Colo. Many ranchers are cutting their flocks and selling at a loss.

SEVERANCE, Colo. — Since he was a boy in western Colorado, John Bartmann seemed destined to become a sheep man. He raised lambs with the local 4-H club and sheared them for elderly German farmers. His office is lined with paintings of sheep and a plaque honoring him for “promoting culinary excellence” in lambs.

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

John Bartmann, a Colorado rancher whose business has been battered by drought and plunging prices for lamb.

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

The wooly main attraction at the Mountain View Lamb Feeders feedlot.

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

A lamb points the way to the office of the Mountain View Lamb Feeders feedlot.

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Sheep graze at the Mountain View Lamb Feeders feedlot in Eaton, Colo.

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Farmers say they are still paying near-record prices for corn and hay to feed their livestock through the winter. “We’re feeding as much corn to the sheep as they can eat, and you can imagine how expensive that is, "said Fred Roberts, a Wyoming rancher. "Nothing grew here last year.”

But over the last few years, skyrocketing costs, a brutal drought and plunging lamb prices have battered Mr. Bartmann and the 80,000 ranchers across the county who raise sheep — from a few to several thousand. It is the latest threat to shadow a Western way of life that still relies on the whims of summer rains, lonely immigrant sheep herders and old grazing trails into the mountains.

“For the sheep industry, it’s the perfect storm,” Mr. Bartmann said, glancing out his office window here at a bleating sea of wool. “The money is just not there.”

Many ranchers are laying off employees, cutting their flocks and selling at a loss, and industry groups said a handful had abandoned the business entirely. Mr. Bartmann has trimmed his flock of 2,000 by one-third. With prices down more than half since last year and higher costs for gasoline and corn, Mr. Bartmann said he expected to lose about $100 for every lamb he sold.

“Even in the good years, you don’t make that much money,” he said. “We can’t take that kind of hit.”

Weather and economics take big shares of the blame. The drought withered grazing grounds, killed off young lambs and dried up irrigation ditches, and a glut of meat and imported lambs from New Zealand helped send prices plummeting.

But some ranchers and officials in Washington believe that the deck was stacked against the sheep ranchers by the small number of powerful feedlots that buy lambs, slaughter them and sell them to grocery stores and restaurants. Even as prices farmers received fell to 85 cents a pound, consumers at supermarkets were paying $7 or more a pound for the same meat.

As cows, pigs, sheep and other animals make their doomed way from the range to kitchen tables, many of them end up in a matrix of feedlots, slaughterhouses and meatpacking facilities where a few companies control a vast share of the market. The top four companies control about 65 percent of the market for lamb and as much as 85 percent of the market for cows.

That kind of concentration makes it easier for a few powerful companies to manipulate prices to their advantage, said Patrick Woodall, the research director at Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group.

This fall, several Western senators and ranchers’ groups wrote to the Agriculture Department saying they suspected that meatpackers had been hoarding sheep in feedlots and keeping prices artificially low. The agency that oversees stockyards said it would investigate.

“We’re going to force a lot of people in the lamb industry out of that business,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana. “You want competition that’s fair. If you have manipulation, that’s a whole different story.”

In Kaycee, Wyo., Lisa Cunningham said she and other sheep ranchers watched with astonishment as their prices soared and then crashed over the course of the last two years. Ms. Cunningham said she was lucky to get $1 a pound for young lambs, down from more than $2.

“You can’t hardly get anyone to buy your lamb,” she said.

Still, even some sheep ranchers do not blame the packers and say they believe that the declines are related to shifts in the market.

Federal insurance has helped blunt the blow, as have government programs to buy lamb from struggling ranchers.

It is the latest twist in a brutal year for thousands of farmers and ranchers across the country. In a slow-motion disaster, a drought covering more than 60 percent of the country scorched corn stalks into parchment, dried up irrigation ponds and turned farm fields into brittle crust. Farmers begged local governments to let them tap aquifers. Scores of ranchers dumped their livestock at drought auctions.

Farmers say they are still paying near-record prices for corn and hay to feed their livestock through the winter. And if abundant snows do not come to replenish streams and coax new grass from the ground, they worry that next summer could be even worse than last.

“The drought plays into everything,” said Fred Roberts, a sheep rancher in Rock Springs, Wyo. “We have absolutely no feed. We’re feeding as much corn to the sheep as they can eat, and you can imagine how expensive that is. Nothing grew here last year.”

Here in the northern Colorado town of Severance, Mr. Bartmann, a man with a Wyatt Earp mustache and a master’s degree in animal production, spends his days managing a lamb feedlot increasingly surrounded by high-end ranch subdivisions.

Even before “the wreck” in prices, he said, his business had been growing increasingly tenuous. A few years ago, he lost big areas of grazing land because it was declared potential habitat for wild bighorn sheep. The summer drought claimed even more grassland. Now, many of his sheep are spending the winter on a Kansas feedlot. A few hundred others are here, munching hay under gray skies. Mr. Bartmann climbed into a battered pickup truck to check on them one recent morning, unsure what the next season would bring.

“It just keeps pulling everything down,” he said. “After a while, you say it isn’t worth it.”

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Rise in renewable energy will require more use of fossil fuels

The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the California grid.

On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades — or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1% of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

As is true on many days in California when multibillion-dollar investments in wind and solar energy plants are thwarted by the weather, the void was filled by gas-fired plants like the Delta Energy Center.

One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the state is not yet prepared to meet — is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to produce one-third of California's electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel plants.

"The public hears solar is free, wind is free," said Mitchell Weinberg, director of strategic development for Calpine Corp., which owns Delta Energy Center. "But it is a lot more complicated than that."

Wind and solar energy are called intermittent sources, because the power they produce can suddenly disappear when a cloud bank moves across the Mojave Desert or wind stops blowing through the Tehachapi Mountains. In just half an hour, a thousand megawatts of electricity — the output of a nuclear reactor — can disappear and threaten stability of the grid.

To avoid that calamity, fossil fuel plants have to be ready to generate electricity in mere seconds. That requires turbines to be hot and spinning, but not producing much electricity until complex data networks detect a sudden drop in the output of renewables. Then, computerized switches are thrown and the turbines roar to life, delivering power just in time to avoid potential blackouts.

The state's electricity system can handle the fluctuations from existing renewable output, but by 2020 vast wind and solar complexes will sprawl across the state, and the problem will become more severe.

Just how much added capacity will be needed from traditional sources is the subject of heated debate by utility officials, government regulators and policy experts. The concerns are expected to come to a head next year when the state must adopt a 10-year plan for its energy needs.

"This issue is someplace between a significant concern and a major problem," said electricity system expert Severin Borenstein, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "There is definitely going to be a need for more reserves."

Borenstein said state legislators and the governor did not consider all of the details, such as unleashing this new demand for fossil fuel generators, when they set the 33% mandate for renewable energy. The state now gets 20% of its power from renewables, in part from older hydro and geothermal energy. Gov. Jerry Brown has advocated upping the goal to 40%.

The cost to consumers in the years ahead could be in the billions of dollars, according to industry experts. California's electricity prices are already among the highest in the nation and are projected to rise sharply in coming years. At the moment, the need for reserve power isn't considered a cost of renewable power, though consumers have to bear its costs as well.

The California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit company that runs the grid, estimates that by 2020 the state will need to double its reserve capacity. California now maintains a margin of 7% to 8% above projected daily demand, in case a nuclear power plant goes offline or outages occur. But when 33% of the state's power comes from renewables, that margin will have to rise to 15%, said Stephen Berberich, the firm's chief executive.

Nobody knows whether Berberich's estimate is right or how much the added capacity will cost. The California Energy Commission, which has responsibility for licensing new power plants and forecasting future power demand, said it doesn't have the analytical tools necessary to know how much reserve power will be needed.

"It is frankly in the development stage," said Mike Jaske, the commission's senior policy analyst for electricity supply.

The independent system operator is warning that by 2017 the state will be short by about 3,100 megawatts of flexible power that it can dedicate to meeting reserve needs — about what three nuclear reactors produce. The company is pushing the state Public Utility Commission to require that capacity. The commission has been noncommittal so far.

Solar and wind advocates reject those concerns. They say renewables can provide their own reserve cushion because solar and wind generators will be spread across vast areas of the state. If wind power is down in one region, it might be up in another. If wind power is down statewide, desert sunshine might boost solar.

On the day last month when wind energy provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide, a brilliant sun spiked solar plant output.

The independent system operator "likes to show these frightening graphs for shock value," said Nancy Rader, executive director of the California Wind Energy Assn.

Edward Randolph, director of the Public Utility Commission's energy division, said the independent system operator understandably wants more reserves because its primary focus is on the reliability of the system. The PUC is focused on cost. If there is an immediate problem with reserves, the PUC can order utilities to make more available. And in three to five years, batteries, flywheels or other new technology can provide storage that would make reserves much less necessary, he said.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Star Formation in Carina

The spectacular star-forming Carina Nebula has been captured in great detail by the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. This picture was taken with the help of Sebastián Piñera, President of Chile, during his visit to the observatory on 5 June 2012 and released on the occasion of the new telescope’s inauguration in Naples on 6 December 2012.

Image: ESO. Acknowledgement: VPHAS+ Consortium/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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Alejandro González Iñárritu to direct “Birdman”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Alejandro González Iñárritu is set to direct “Birdman” from a script he co-wrote with Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo, a person familiar with the project told TheWrap.

Known for more dramatic pieces like “Amores Perros,” “Babel” and “Biutiful,” Iñárritu will be tacking a comedic film for the first time.

“Birdman” tells the story of an actor who once played an iconic superhero but is now facing a crisis as he battles his ego and attempts to recover his family and career in the days leading up to the opening of a Broadway play.

Production is slated to begin in March 2013. The film will be produced by Iñárritu, Robert Graf and John Lesher. Iñárritu and the film are represented by CAA.

Iñárritu is also moving forward on another film, “The Revenant,” which was announced in 2011, a person with knowledge of that project told TheWrap.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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A Breakthrough Against Leukemia Using Altered T-Cells

PHILIPSBURG, Pa. — Emma Whitehead has been bounding around the house lately, practicing somersaults and rugby-style tumbles that make her parents wince.

It is hard to believe, but last spring Emma, then 6, was near death from leukemia. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy, and doctors had run out of options.

Desperate to save her, her parents sought an experimental treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one that had never before been tried in a child, or in anyone with the type of leukemia Emma had. The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells.

The treatment very nearly killed her. But she emerged from it cancer-free, and about seven months later is still in complete remission. She is the first child and one of the first humans ever in whom new techniques have achieved a long-sought goal — giving a patient’s own immune system the lasting ability to fight cancer.

Emma had been ill with acute lymphoblastic leukemia since 2010, when she was 5, said her parents, Kari and Tom. She is their only child.

She is among just a dozen patients with advanced leukemia to have received the experimental treatment, which was developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Similar approaches are also being tried at other centers, including the National Cancer Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

“Our goal is to have a cure, but we can’t say that word,” said Dr. Carl June, who leads the research team at the University of Pennsylvania. He hopes the new treatment will eventually replace bone-marrow transplantation, an even more arduous, risky and expensive procedure that is now the last hope when other treatments fail in leukemia and related diseases.

Three adults with chronic leukemia treated at the University of Pennsylvania have also had complete remissions, with no signs of disease; two of them have been well for more than two years, said Dr. David Porter. Four adults improved but did not have full remissions, and one was treated too recently to evaluate. A child improved and then relapsed. In two adults, the treatment did not work at all. The Pennsylvania researchers were presenting their results on Sunday and Monday in Atlanta at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Despite the mixed results, cancer experts not involved with the research say it has tremendous promise, because even in this early phase of testing it has worked in seemingly hopeless cases. “I think this is a major breakthrough,” said Dr. Ivan Borrello, a cancer expert and associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. John Wagner, the director of pediatric blood and marrow transplantation at the University of Minnesota, called the Pennsylvania results “phenomenal” and said they were “what we’ve all been working and hoping for but not seeing to this extent.”

A major drug company, Novartis, is betting on the Pennsylvania team and has committed $20 million to building a research center on the university’s campus to bring the treatment to market.

Hervé Hoppenot, the president of Novartis Oncology, called the research “fantastic” and said it had the potential — if the early results held up — to revolutionize the treatment of leukemia and related blood cancers. Researchers say the same approach, reprogramming the patient’s immune system, may also eventually be used against tumors like breast and prostate cancer.

To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell — and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turn malignant in leukemia.

The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.

The T-cells home in on a protein called CD-19 that is found on the surface of most B-cells, whether they are healthy or malignant.

A sign that the treatment is working is that the patient becomes terribly ill, with raging fevers and chills — a reaction that oncologists call “shake and bake,” Dr. June said. Its medical name is cytokine-release syndrome, or cytokine storm, referring to the natural chemicals that pour out of cells in the immune system as they are being activated, causing fevers and other symptoms. The storm can also flood the lungs and cause perilous drops in blood pressure — effects that nearly killed Emma.

Steroids sometimes ease the reaction, but they did not help Emma. Her temperature hit 105. She wound up on a ventilator, unconscious and swollen almost beyond recognition, surrounded by friends and family who had come to say goodbye.

But at the 11th hour, a battery of blood tests gave the researchers a clue as to what might help save Emma: her level of one of the cytokines, interleukin-6 or IL-6, had shot up a thousandfold. Doctors had never seen such a spike before and thought it might be what was making her so sick.

Dr. June knew that a drug could lower IL-6 — his daughter takes it for rheumatoid arthritis. It had never been used for a crisis like Emma’s, but there was little to lose. Her oncologist, Dr. Stephan A. Grupp, ordered the drug. The response, he said, was “amazing.”

Within hours, Emma began to stabilize. She woke up a week later, on May 2, the day she turned 7; the intensive-care staff sang “Happy Birthday.”

Since then, the research team has used the same drug, tocilizumab, in several other patients.

In patients with lasting remissions after the treatment, the altered T-cells persist in the bloodstream, though in smaller numbers than when they were fighting the disease. Some patients have had the cells for years.

Dr. Michel Sadelain, who conducts similar studies at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, said: “These T-cells are living drugs. With a pill, you take it, it’s eliminated from your body and you have to take it again.” But T-cells, he said, “could potentially be given only once, maybe only once or twice or three times.”

The Pennsylvania researchers said they were surprised to find any big drug company interested in their work, because a new batch of T-cells must be created for each patient — a far cry from the familiar commercial strategy of developing products like Viagra or cholesterol medicines, in which millions of people take the same drug.

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NBC Rides ‘The Voice’ to First Place

Tyler Golden/NBC

Blake Shelton, left, Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine judging a contestant on "The Voice."

Could it still be true that even the worst performing television network is only one hit away from a turnaround?

Apparently so, as long as the hit is on for more than 40 hours in four months.

NBC has managed that unexpected turnaround from worst to first this fall, largely — competitors suggest almost exclusively — on the strength of the addition of a single show: “The Voice,” the singing competition that features swinging chairs and big-name musical artists as coaches.

Yes, NBC also has “Sunday Night Football,” but that powerhouse was on the schedule last fall, when NBC had a 2.6 rating among the viewers preferred by many advertisers, ages 18 through 49. Each rating point in that age category equals 1.26 million people. With those 40-plus hours of “The Voice” added (as well as vastly improved ratings for adjacent shows), NBC is up 23 percent to a 3.2 rating.

On Mondays, when the first of two weekly editions of the show plays, NBC is up a staggering 206 percent.

“We built our strategy around ‘The Voice,’ ” said Paul Telegdy, the president of reality and late-night programming for NBC. “We wanted to use Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to build momentum, and we’ve successfully done it.”

The show’s most recent edition started in February, coming out of a big introduction on the night of the Super Bowl. With its prime-time in tatters, NBC decided to insert the series twice this season, something its most similar antecedent, “American Idol,” has never done.

But the show’s executive producer, Mark Burnett, has done it before with shows he produced. “I knew it would be a challenge, but it was a challenge to take ‘Survivor’ to twice a season and ‘The Apprentice’ to twice a season, and that all worked out,” he said. The pressing question for NBC is what happens after Dec. 18, when this edition of “The Voice” has its finale. (Or, for that matter, when the N.F.L. season ends.)

Senior executives at two competing networks said NBC was taking a risk by being carried by one show. That immediately conjured comparisons to “Idol,” which for years lifted the Fox network almost single-handedly to first place, and — more ominously — to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” the game show phenomenon that blazed at ABC and then flamed out from overuse.

“You do wonder if this is the NBC version of ‘Millionaire,’ ” said Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media.

Mr. Burnett questioned that premise, noting that his “Survivor” has been on twice a season and is now in its 25th edition.

Still, “The Voice” does occupy a singing genre crowded with Fox’s two entries, “The X Factor” and “Idol.” Both have had recent ratings declines for their latest editions.

“The Voice” will also go through a test when it returns in March with two new coaches, the singers Shakira and Usher, replacing Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green, who are taking off that cycle. Blake Shelton and Adam Levine will remain in the four-coach mix.

Preston Beckman, the longtime senior program executive at Fox, said, “I do think they will feel the loss in January and February, and it gives ‘Idol’ the sole ownership of the genre for a few months. The real test will be what it does when it returns, especially with the two new judges. That will determine what happens to the network next year.”

Mr. Telegdy credited the success of “The Voice” to the power of the format, which was created by the Dutch producer John DeMol. It is now produced in more than 50 countries, and has been an explosive hit in many of them. “The finale of the Chinese version attracted 300 million viewers,” Mr. Telegdy said.

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Cooley leaves legacy of fighting corruption, increasing DNA use

He waged an insurgent campaign against his boss to become Los Angeles County district attorney, promising to act as a prosecutor not a politician.

Twelve years later, Steve Cooley retired last week as one of the county's most entrenched political fixtures, having served a historic tenure as top prosecutor, reshaped the most powerful office in the local criminal justice system and left his mark on California law enforcement.

Cooley is widely credited with expanding the way law enforcement uses DNA and with making the fight against local public corruption a priority. His efforts to soften California's tough three-strikes sentencing law came to fruition less than a month before he left office when voters in November overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure that scales back the law.

"He steered a very middle and fair course," former Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp told reporters before Cooley's successor, Jackie Lacey, was sworn in earlier in the week. "He leaves a great legacy for this office."

But his tenure was hardly free of criticism or problems.

Cooley failed two years ago in a bid to become state attorney general, losing narrowly as the Republican nominee to Democrat Kamala D. Harris, who comfortably won in Cooley's home county. He has been dogged by accusations that he lacked the nerve to prosecute the toughest cases. And he waged an ugly battle with the union that represents line-level prosecutors, which accused him of retaliating against its officers.

As he steps off the public stage, Cooley insists he cannot think of anything he would have done differently.

"I have no regrets. My motives were pure," he said in a recent interview before he left office. "This has probably been the greatest run in anyone's memory."

Cooley, 65, who joined the district attorney's office straight out of law school in 1973, rattled off a long list of accomplishments but said a few stood out.

Among them was the work of his Public Integrity Division. In October, the division charged one of its most high-profile targets, county Assessor John Noguez, with taking bribes to illegally reduce property taxes for the clients of a political supporter. A year earlier, the unit hit eight Bell officials with a litany of corruption charges.

The office also spearheaded efforts to fight violent crime through the increased use of DNA.

Cooley signed the ballot argument in favor of a 2004 initiative that expanded the state's DNA databank to include anyone arrested for a felony. And he urged the state to embrace a controversial method of searching the databank for partial matches that would identify relatives of crime suspects. In 2010, the method helped investigators identify Lonnie Franklin Jr. as the "Grim Sleeper" serial killer, now linked to the slayings of more than a dozen women.

One of Cooley's first actions in office was to introduce a policy for prosecutors generally not to seek life sentences for repeat offenders under the three-strikes law unless the latest offense was a serious or violent crime.

His efforts to amend the law led him to butt heads with other district attorneys, but the state's prosecutors must now follow a law modeled on his approach thanks to the passage of Proposition 36, which his office helped write.

Donna McClay, president of the union that represents deputy district attorneys, said the public has more trust in the office today than 12 years ago, and she credited Cooley with improving the diversity of its employees. More than 36% of the office's prosecutors are nonwhite compared with 28% in late 2000. Nearly 53% are women. "That's a positive thing," she said.

But she said many prosecutors are disappointed that Cooley did not do more to make good on a campaign promise to improve their salaries and benefits. Cooley did, however, receive a 23% raise himself in 2008. He retired making more than $308,000 and will continue to receive about that sum as his annual pension.

Cooley spent his first week of retirement at a defendant's table in federal court scribbling notes on a legal pad during a civil trial in which two former union presidents allege that he retaliated against them with punitive transfers and dead-end assignments. Cooley denies the claim.

In his last few days, he upset some in the office when he announced a final round of promotions for 19 mid-level prosecutors. Among those chosen from a top group of 152 prosecutors was his daughter, Shannon, who was hired in April 2009 and has less time in the office than all but two others of those promoted.

Cooley defended his decision, saying it was based on merit. His daughter earned perfect scores on the office's written test and from her supervisor. The supervisor, Head Deputy Dist. Atty. John Zajec, called her "dedicated, conscientious, hardworking" and among the most outstanding young prosecutors. She recently won a conviction in a difficult drunk-driving murder trial, he said.

Under Cooley, the district attorney's office brought a good share of public corruption cases to court. But some have questioned Cooley's decision not to file charges against high-profile subjects.

Last year, a judge hearing the case against Bell officials said it was curious that the city's former police chief, Randy Adams, hadn't been charged. Adams made more money than the Los Angeles police chief for heading Bell's 46-person Police Department. Prosecutors say his contract was drawn up so the public could not learn the real size of his paycheck.

Cooley called Judge Kathleen Kennedy's comments "gratuitous and uninformed." He said his prosecutors carefully reviewed the evidence against Adams before determining that they did not have enough to charge him.

"Randy Adams is an embarrassment to the profession, to every uniform he has ever worn, and he ought to just go hide," he said. "But ... we don't overreach. We don't bring false charges."

Despite his defeat in the 2010 attorney general's election, Cooley recently showed that he still has plenty of political clout as he helped his anointed successor, Lacey, win election.

For the future, Cooley said he has only vague plans that include setting up a management consulting firm to advise government and private organizations. He might also try his hand at books that would detail some of the high-profile cases his office handled during his tenure, he said. One possible title: "Fakes, Frauds and Phonies."

"It would include both people we've prosecuted and others I've run across," he said with a laugh.

jack.leonard@latimes.com

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New Crowdfunding Site Seeks to Protect Backers of Industrial Design

Entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff wants to build more credibility into crowdfunding — so he’s launching a new platform that takes responsibility for ensuring the viability of new projects.

The crowdfunding process, pioneered by sites like Kickstarter, has had its share of huge successes, as well as failures. The problem, says Siminoff, is that when a venture fails, the funders are left holding the bag. That’s all well and good if you were investing in an artist’s crazy project. It’s much more of a problem if you thought you were pre-ordering a nearly finished gadget.

The biggest culprit for these kinds of issues are physical products. Witness the anger unleashed when Kickstarter darling Pebble announced a further delay alongside underwhelming color choices.

This kind of issue is why Kickstarter recently made some changes, undertaking a combination of education and rule revision. They reminded consumers that Kickstarter is not a store while requiring that all projects disclose risks and challenges, as well as forbidding renderings and concept videos in hardware products.

Siminoff’s answer is Christie Street, a crowdfunding site devoted exclusively to physical products. The promise of Christie Street is that it will vet the projects that it launches carefully, and provide guarantees of progress along the way. The idea is that these protections will make consumers feel safer about the products they’re backing. “We built something that we felt we needed,” he says.

Christie Street, named for the New Jersey road where Edison’s workshop was located, will require that all funders go through an auditing process before they are allowed to go live. Siminoff says that the idea will be to check for basic viability, a kind of sanity test.

“You look at the chips they say they want to use, the size of components that will need to fit in, and so on,” he says, “You check that things conform to what’s available on the market.” From there, they also perform third-party audits of the places where the product will be manufactured, and look at things like production cost and likely shipping time, to ensure that all of this seems realistic.

It’s an all-or-nothing audit. Either the new project meets Christie Street’s approval or it doesn’t. “Our feeling is that the customer that’s buying doesn’t have the sophistication to make the right decision [about whether a design's production targets are reliable],” says Siminoff, “The only way is create a place where you can trust to buy.”

Even after the initial approval, Christie Street stays involved in the project. Successfully funded projects get their money in stages, with Christie Street holding the rest in escrow. Inventors get one-third of the money on funding, one-third of the money once they have a production-ready prototype, and the final one-third when they have a golden prototype, which means they are ready for full manufacturing.

If at any time along the way the project fails, Christie Street will can the project and refund the remaining money to investors.

What constitutes failure? Siminoff ticks off four conditions.

First, the inventor could for whatever reason announce that they couldn’t finish.

Second, if the project ends up more than six months late. “This forces people to be more careful with their delivery dates,” says Siminoff.

Third, if the product falls short of what was promised. “If the pre-production sample is more than 15 percent worse than what was promised, we will not allowed you to manufacture the product,” says Siminoff. (For example, if you promised me 512GB and only delivered 256.)

Last, says Siminoff there are other nuances that they’ll have to work out as the site develops. For example, if a product ends up requiring significant redesign, then Christie Street might end up withholding funds. “Design is a tougher one to quantify,” he says, “but it’s important that the design overall fits what was promised to the customer.”

For the extra cautious, Christie Street goes even further than the refund of remaining money. For 10 percent of their pledge value, backers can insure their entire pledge. If the project goes wrong they’ll get all of it back. Combine that with a pledge from inventors that the product will retail for at least 10 percent more than the pledge amount, and you can either take a 10 percent discount for some additional risk or pay full retail, with a money-back guarantee.

In effect, Christie Street is navigating a space between crowfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which expect backers to handle a lot of their own due diligence while allowing the inventors to be entrepreneurs, and crowdsourcing design sites like Quirky, which handles all of the business elements in-house.

Christie Street is an effort at drawing the lines of trust in a new way, one tied directly to the realities of post-industrial product design. Rather than a blanket ban on renderings and early designs, or a Wild West ‘anything goes’ approach, they instead seeks to tame the parts where production can go really wrong, in the devilish details of prototyping and manufacturing. It leaves questions of whether or not the thing is cool to the wisdom of the crowds, while taking on the question of whether or not the thing is possible.

This is obviously a lot more intervention between middleman and inventor than you’d see on a site like Indigegogo or Kickstarter. Siminoff says that they can still take the same 5 percent cut as their competitors because physical products tend to be involved higher dollar-value projects from the start. “If all goes well, we’ll be doing 10 to 15 live projects a months a year from now,” he says, “We think we can be profitable in the product world.”

“We’re not trying to make it where inventors are just be a name on a product,” says Siminoff, “We still want them to be entrepreneur and build this thing. We just want to make sure that they don’t fail in a way that hurts the customer.”

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“Freaks and Geeks” revisited: “Everybody was so talented and nobody knew it yet”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Looking back on “Freaks and Geeks,” Linda Cardellini – who led the (now) star-studded cast as Lindsay Weir – sums up the short-lived NBC series in one simple sentence: “Everybody was so talented and nobody knew it yet.”

Thanks to Judd Apatow, the director of “Knocked Up” and sort-of-sequel “This Is 40,” everybody knows it now.

And Vanity Fair’s in-depth oral history of the coming-of-age comedy by the likes of Seth Rogen, James Franco and Jason Segel details just how hard they worked (even on the weekends) to develop that talent.

“We would get the script on a Friday, and Seth and James and I would get together at my house every Sunday, without fail, and do the scenes over and over and improve them and really think about them,” says Segel, who played Nick Andopolis. “We loved the show. And we took the opportunity really, really seriously.”

Franco – who admits he may have taken himself a bit “too seriously” as a young actor – went to such great lengths to capture the character of bad boy Daniel Desario, that he tracked down and visited the high school that creator Paul Feig (“Bridesmaids”) attended.

“I knew that Paul had grown up just outside of Detroit, and I found his high school,” Franco explains. “I saw all the kids at summer school, and there was this guy the teacher pointed out to me, this kind of rough-around-the-edges-looking kid. He had a kind face, but he looked like he’d been in a little bit of trouble. And I remember thinking, ‘Ah, there’s Daniel.’”

When the trio wasn’t studying “SCTV” alum Joe Flaherty (Mr. Weir) to perfect their improv techniques – a hallmark of the many Apatow comedies – they were working on their writing skills.

“I was interested in the writing,” Franco fondly remembers. “So after hounding Judd and Paul they said, ‘You want to see how it’s written?’ They took me into Judd’s office, and they wrote a scene right in front of me, just improvising as the characters out loud. That was really important for me.”

Apatow and Feig’s influence was, perhaps, more important for Rogen and Segel since writing proved to be a hobby that would eventually elevate their career to the next level. Segal broke through as a screenwriter with 2008′s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” but Rogen did it first with his own brand of raunchy, yet heartfelt humor in 2007′s “Superbad” – a movie he began writing when he wasn’t filming “Freaks” scenes as Ken Miller.

“I dropped out of high school when I started doing the show,” Rogen reminisces. “I told them I was doing correspondence school from Canada and just wrote ‘Superbad’ all day.”

They aren’t the only writers to graduate from McKinley High either. John Francis Daley, who portrayed 13-year-old Sam Weir, has written a number of movies currently in production since the success of 2011′s “Horrible Bosses.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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