Americans Under 50 Fare Poorly on Health Measures, New Report Says

Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.

Researchers have known for some time that the United States fares poorly in comparison with other rich countries, a trend established in the 1980s. But most studies have focused on older ages, when the majority of people die.

The findings were stark. Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females. The countries in the analysis included Canada, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and Spain.

The 378-page study by a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council is the first to systematically compare death rates and health measures for people of all ages, including American youths. It went further than other studies in documenting the full range of causes of death, from diseases to accidents to violence. It was based on a broad review of mortality and health studies and statistics.

The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.

“Something fundamental is going wrong,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”

Car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses were major contributors to years of life lost by Americans before age 50.

The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.

Sixty-nine percent of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared with an average of 26 percent in other countries, the study said. “The bottom line is that we are not preventing damaging health behaviors,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was on the panel. “You can blame that on public health officials, or on the health care system. No one understands where responsibility lies.”

Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes rates.

Youths fared no better. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and deaths from car crashes. Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries.

Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, also played a role for people under 50.

“We expected to see some bad news and some good news,” Dr. Woolf said. “But the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”

There were bright spots. Death rates from cancers that can be detected with tests, like breast cancer, were lower in the United States. Adults had better control over their cholesterol and high blood pressure. And the very oldest Americans — above 75 — tended to outlive their counterparts.

The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.

Education also played a role. Americans who have not graduated from high school die from diabetes at three times the rate of those with some college, Dr. Woolf said. In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.

Still, even the people most likely to be healthy, like college-educated Americans and those with high incomes, fare worse on many health indicators.

The report also explored less conventional explanations. Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.    

The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. But the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.

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State of the Art: Mixing and Matching to Create the Near-Perfect Digital Calendar - State of the Art

60 Seconds With Pogue: Calendars:
David Pogue reviews calendar apps and software.

You know what’s kind of wild? We can identify products by their container designs. You’d know a ketchup bottle, even if it was empty and unlabeled, no matter what the brand. You’d know a pickle jar, or a milk jug, or a bottle of salad dressing, or a cereal box just by their container shapes.

Same goes for the big software categories. You’d know a spreadsheet anywhere — formula bar at the top, grid below — no matter what company made it. Or e-mail program, word processor, Web browser. They all work pretty much alike.

But there’s one software category, an incredibly important one, where there’s no standard design or set of features: calendar software. Each one seems to have evolved on its own Galápagos island.

Take the new Calendar app in Windows 8. So much of Windows 8’s touch-screen mode is modern, updated and fresh — color, gestures, typography — that you’d expect an equally modernized calendar app at its heart.

Wow, would you be wrong. Listen, Microsoft: 1990 called. It wants its calendar back.

You can’t drag vertically through the Day-view column to create an appointment. You can’t drag an appointment to reschedule it. You can’t record an auto-repeating appointment like “Monday, Wednesday, Friday” or “first Tuesday of the month.”

And incredibly, you can’t create separate categories, like Home, Work and Social. There’s no way to color-code your appointments or hide certain categories.

That same week, on another computer, I installed a Mac calendar program called BusyCal 2.0. You know what’s so brilliant? When you open it, today’s date is always in the top row, no matter what week of the month this is. You always see the next four or five weeks, even if some are in the following month.

And why not? Almost always, you open your calendar to check coming dates — so why fill the screen with dates that have already gone by? That’s a limitation of paper calendars, where every month shows 1 in the first square.

And that’s when I had my epiphany. Our electronics are capable of fantastic flexibility, features and design; why are we still modeling our digital calendars on paper ones?

Apple’s Calendar app for the Mac goes so far as to display a little leather “binding” at the top, complete with scraps of torn-off “paper” to indicate where previous months’ “pages” have been torn off. Why?

If you spend enough time with the world’s calendar apps, you can see, through the mist, a vision of the ultimate digital calendar program. If you could mix and match the best of all the motley calendar apps, here’s what you might come up with.

¶ Give us an alternative to tabbing from Start Time to End Time and typing numbers into a tiny New Event box. Let us drag to indicate a meeting’s length. Or give us speech — intelligent speech, like Siri on the iPhone. “Make an appointment next Tuesday morning at seven: tennis with Casey,” you can say. Your hands never leave the wheel, the cat or the delicious beverage.

We should also be able to type plain-English phrases like “tomorrow 1pm lunch mtg” or “4/15 730p Dinner with boss,” and marvel as it creates the right appointment on the right calendar square at the right time. (Google, Apple’s Calendar for the Mac, BusyCal and, in particular, the iPhone app Fantastical can all do this.) Here again, you’re not fiddling with a dialogue box to enter a new event.

¶ Microsoft’s greatest calendaring effort remains Outlook, the e-mail program that comes with some versions of Microsoft Office. Outlook has its detractors, but one thing it got right is integration with your e-mail and address book. What are appointments, after all, but interactions with people you know — and how better to set up meetings with them than with e-mail?

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U.S. Supreme Court hands L.A. County a victory in water lawsuit

Los Angeles County got a reprieve in an ongoing dispute over who is responsible for pollution from storm water when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ruling won by environmentalists.

However, the court's 9-0 decision Tuesday did not deal with the larger question of how to regulate storm water and urban runoff flowing into the region's waterways.

Gary Hildebrand, assistant deputy director of the county's Department of Public Works, said the court's decision "validates the approach the flood control district has been taking to deal with water management."

The ruling allows the district to move forward with updated storm water regulations that the regional water board put in place in November, he said.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper — now Los Angeles Waterkeeper — sued the flood control district in 2008 alleging that it had violated its storm water permit. The lawsuit cited high pollution readings at monitoring stations in the county's rivers.

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the county was liable for pollution in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, and referred to the water flowing from the "concrete channels" into the natural part of the lower river as discharges of pollutants.

The Supreme Court said the 9th Circuit's opinion rested on a mistaken premise and reversed it. The water flowing from one "concrete" section of the river to another section cannot be deemed a "discharge" of pollutants, the court said. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said "no pollutants are 'added' to a water body when water is merely transferred between different portions of that body."

Steve Fleischli, water program director and senior attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, said the question that the court decided was never in dispute between the parties. He called the ruling a "temporary setback" in efforts to hold the county accountable.

"It doesn't close the door on our enforcement efforts against the county, and it doesn't limit the county's obligation to comply with the Clean Water Act," he said.

County officials have also argued that the flood control district is not primarily to blame for the pollution in the rivers, because there are dozens of cities discharging polluted runoff upstream from the monitoring sites. With only one monitoring station in each river, it is difficult to find the original source of the pollution.

The Supreme Court did not weigh in on that point, but when the case was argued last month, the justices commented that the county needs a better means of monitoring storm water runoff.

In her opinion, Ginsburg noted that the renewed storm water permit put in place by the Los Angeles regional water board will include monitoring the water quality at "discharge points" where storm drains flow into the rivers, which will provide more localized data.

Hildebrand said the ruling will not have an impact on a parcel fee the county is pursuing to raise about $290 million a year for projects that would help clean up storm water pollution. A hearing on that proposal is set for Jan. 15, and the Board of Supervisors may vote then to place the proposed fee on the ballot.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

david.savage@latimes.com

Sewell reported from Los Angeles and Savage from Washington, D.C.

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Rogue Planet Confirmed Orbiting Around 'Eye of Sauron'

LONG BEACH, California – Astronomers have confirmed that a controversial exoplanet called Fomalhaut b actually does exist and have calculated its potential orbit. The results show that the object is even stranger than scientists could have imagined, dubbing it a “rogue planet.”

The uncertainty about this object started in 2008, when scientists released an image taken with NASA’s Hubble space telescope of a tiny dot of light in the debris disk of a young, bright star called Fomalhaut, which is about 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. At the time, they presented only two data points, showing the exoplanet as it existed in 2004 and 2006. It was a sensational image — the enormous debris disk made the star resemble the “Eye of Sauron” from the Lord of the Rings movies — and was one of the first directly imaged extrasolar planets ever seen.

But follow-up from other researchers failed to find the purported world. The original instrument on Hubble that saw Fomalhaut b broke in 2007 and was never replaced, meaning the team that discovered the exoplanet couldn’t reproduce their results either. When they spotted it in 2010 with another instrument, the object seemed to have drifted too far to the right to be in orbit around the star. This led some astronomers to discount the discovery of Fomalhaut b.

But late in 2012, a few other telescopes managed to snap images of the exoplanet. And now, the original team has presented their own new data. “We have three times as many orbits and there you see it very clearly in 2012,” said astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute, pointing to a new image released today during a press conference here at the American Astronomical Society 2013 meeting.

With their four data points, the original team has been able to calculate several potential orbits for the object. They show the exoplanet moving on a highly eccentric orbit around its parent star, coming in as close at 40 astronomical units (AU) and then swinging out to 350 AU. (An AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun). There is some indication that the planet’s orbit is very inclined relative to the debris disk around Fomalhaut, meaning that the exoplanet doesn’t pass through it, instead moving above and then underneath the dust.

This movement suggests to Kalas and his team that Fomalhaut b is a rogue planet, acting much more like a comet or icy body in our solar system’s Kuiper belt, which generally orbits far from the sun but may sometimes come in closer. The astronomers think the mass of the exoplanet is at least as much as an icy dwarf world, like Sedna in our solar system, but it could be as big as Jupiter. In either case, it’s unlike anything seen in our own system and shows that the architecture of other planetary systems could greatly differ from our own.

Image: NASA, ESA, and Paul Kalas (University of California, Berkeley and SETI Institute). Video: NASA/STSCI

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No joke: Obama to screen TV comedy “1600 Penn” at White House

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A “trophy wife” as first lady, a hapless college-aged son who burns down a fraternity house, and a daughter frantically taking pregnancy tests in a White House bathroom – this TV comedy had better be funny.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama is slated to hold a private screening at the White House with the cast and crew of “1600 Penn,” an NBC series about a dysfunctional first family.

The show, co-created by Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Obama, stars Bill Pullman as U.S. President Dale Gilchrist and Jenna Elfman as his first lady, and is named after the street address of the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A preview of the show, which premieres on Thursday, features first son “Skip,” played by the show’s co-creator Josh Gad, being rescued by the Secret Service after starting a fire at his college fraternity house.

“‘Meatball’ is in the oven,” an agent says into his lapel microphone, using the code name for the hapless Skip as he is hustled into a waiting black SUV.

But the show, which is apolitical, aims lower than other recent television dramas about the White House, like Aaron Sorkin’s drama series “The West Wing” or HBO’s dark satire “Veep.”

“We really wanted to dissect what it meant to be a family in the most extraordinary of circumstances – and what’s more extraordinary than being the first family?” Gad told reporters last month.

So will Obama laugh?

The screening in the White House’s family theater is “closed press,” meaning pool reporters won’t be there to document whether the comedy hits home.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Eric Beech)

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Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

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Chinese Man Pleads Guilty in Copyright Violation Case

Nearly five years ago, a Chinese man named Xiang Li registered several domain names, including www.crack99.com, and embarked on an ambitious, and ultimately illegal, venture.

Mr. Li, who was based in Chengdu, paid a network of computer experts to scour the Internet to find commercial software they could “crack,” meaning they bypassed security protocols designed to prevent unauthorized access or reproduction.

Ultimately, Mr. Li offered more than 2,000 pirated software products that could be used as applications in the military, engineering, space exploration, mathematics and explosive simulation, and sold them at a fraction of their retail price, which federal prosecutors said was over $100 million.

Among his biggest customers were an electronics engineer at NASA and the chief scientist at a government military contractor, but his clients also included students, inventors and small-business owners. Mr. Li sold the products for $20 to $1,200, accepting payments by Western Union and MoneyGram, according to government documents.

But Mr. Li’s criminal enterprise officially ended last year when he was arrested by undercover agents. On Monday, he pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Delaware to one count of conspiring to steal copyrighted software. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.

Mr. Li, who is 36, could not be reached for comment, nor could his lawyer, Mingli Chen. Mr. Li’s wife, Chun Yan Li, was also indicted on charges of participating in the illegal scheme; she remains at large, presumably in China, officials said.

Mr. Li was arrested in June 2011 in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands during a meeting that had been arranged by undercover agents posing as American businessmen. The agents arranged the meeting under the guise of picking up their purchase of pirated software, design packaging and 20 gigabytes of proprietary data, and to discuss a plan to transmit cracked software over the Internet so they could resell it to small businesses in the United States.

After the arrest, agents recovered six disks from Mr. Li containing an assortment of data pirated from an unidentified American software company, including military and civilian aircraft image models and a software module containing data about the International Space Station.

Edward J. McAndrew, one of the prosecutors on the case, said Mr. Li’s arrest was among the largest criminal copyright cases to be successfully prosecuted by the government.

Mr. McAndrew and his colleague, David L. Hall, explained in court documents that once Mr. Li obtained cracked software, he would advertise it on his Web sites, which also included www.cad100.net and www.dongle-crack-download.com. Mr. Li’s customers would then wire him money, some of which he deposited in an account at the Bank of China. From February 2008 to June 2011, Mr. Li and his customers exchanged more than 25,000 e-mails about pirated products, according to the government, which obtained a search warrant for his Gmail account.

Mr. Li used his Gmail account to orchestrate more than 500 illegal transactions with customers in at least 28 states and more than 60 foreign countries, according to court documents. Software was pirated from more than 200 manufacturers.

Mr. McAndrew said none of the pirated software obtained by the undercover agents from Mr. Li contained classified material. But Mr. McAndrew said the government could not determine whether any classified material was distributed to other buyers since it did not have access to all the pirated products that Mr. Li sold.

One of Mr. Li’s biggest customers was Cosburn Wedderburn, a NASA electronics engineer, who bought 12 cracked software programs with a retail value exceeding $1.2 million. Another was Dr. Wronald Best, chief scientist at an unidentified government contractor that provides services to the United States military and law enforcement, like radio transmissions, microwave technology and vacuum tubes used in military helicopters. Dr. Best exchanged more than 260 e-mails with Mr. Li to obtain 10 cracked software programs, with a retail value of more than $600,000, prosecutors said.

Both Mr. Wedderburn and Dr. Best pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Both are awaiting sentencing.

Starting in January 2010, undercover agents began buying pirated software from Mr. Li’s Web sites, receiving electronic files with the pirated software or hyperlinks that allowed the agents to download the software from servers in the United States.

In all, the agents paid the Lis $8,615 for the software.

For instance, in January 2010, the agents bought a pirated copy of Satellite Tool Kit 8.0, a software product from Analytical Graphics that has a retail value of more than $150,000. The software includes several functions used by the military and intelligence communities, including three-dimensional warfare simulations.

Mr. Li’s e-mails suggest he was aware of the illegality of his venture, prosecutors say. “I am not a crack production engineers (my job is to collect)(.) This is an international organization created to crack declassified document (s),” he said in a 2009 e-mail. In another he wrote, “I need to use your money to seek the help of experts to cracker master I earn 10 percent of the profits.”

One customer asked who did the cracking. “Experts crack,” Mr. Li wrote. “Chinese people. Sorry can not reveal more.”

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A Grand Central Market makeover? It could work

At 9 a.m. sharp, the man in the blue blazer swung a brass bell over his head, a rite that dates back to the Grand Central Market's opening day in 1917. A minute later, nearly every swivel chair at the China Cafe counter was filled, mostly by older men hunched over bowls of wonton soup.

"It's not a fancy place," said Concepcion Orellano, 57. "People come here because they are poor."

Owner Rinco Cheung, an experienced restaurateur and Hong Kong native, confided he didn't know what chop suey was until he took over China Cafe from his wife's cousin last year.

"It's very old-style," Cheung said, pointing out the menu boards overhead, which list several "egg fo yeung" dishes the owner also didn't recognize. "They love it like that," he added.

Which is precisely the problem. I too love the Grand Central Market: its Beaux Arts touches, the flowing script of the neon signs at each stall, the weird store names — "Jones Grain Mill" — the exposed pipes and pendant light fixtures.

And I'm a fan of the back-in-the-day comfort food and retro prices in the cavernous food hall between Broadway and Hill streets. On Friday, (small) avocados were on sale at one of the produce stands seven for $1, and Jose's Ice Cream Corner had cones for $1.50. The market, with its mix of Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern food, is one of the last holdouts of the $5-or-less lunch plate in downtown Los Angeles.

But landmarks cannot live on nostalgia alone. And even the most militant preservationist has to see it's time to shake up the venerable food emporium. Downtown's population has exploded, but the Grand Central Market clearly is failing to bring in many of its new, upscale urbanistas. Last week, I saw more vacant space than I can remember at any point in the last decade.

Alarms went off after The Times reported on the planned makeover by Adele Yellin, president of the development company started by her late husband, Ira. The news bounced around the blogosphere, drawing complaints about a loss of authenticity. Times staff writer Joseph Serna denounced the gentrification of the "people's market."

The minds behind the chichi Ferry Building, a foodie mecca in San Francisco, are involved; a consultant told Times reporter Betty Hallock his "fantasy" is a pocket cafe or sushi bar under the stairs.

The consternation seems somewhat misplaced. The basement's tenants now are a passport photo place and one of those ubiquitous 99-cent-style discount stores; I doubt they'll be missed much.

But our history of slash-and-burn urban renewal does not give comfort. It brings to mind the Vietnam War tag line: We had to destroy the village to save it.

Bunker Hill was flattened. Nothing was preserved of the magnificent Ambassador Hotel when Los Angeles Unified converted it to a public school. Instead, the district built kitschy facsimiles of the hotel's Paul R. Williams-designed coffee shop and Cocoanut Grove nightclub. The once-glamorous Brown Derby icon sits atop a strip mall in Koreatown, robbed of any history or meaning.

I talked to Yellin and her developer, Rick Moses, and I believe they are sincere about maintaining the character of the market. After all, her late husband kept his promise not to make the place "Westside cute" during an earlier overhaul in the 1990s. The changes thus far are modest: the sawdust was removed, and the floors, pipes and ceiling are being scrubbed and polished.

"Yes, we want to clean it up, but we don't want to change the feel of it," Moses told me.

But how about also committing to structuring rents so that at least some portion of the market's offerings remain affordable?

It's only fair. The public has a sizable stake in the Grand Central Market. Local agencies financed $44 million in bonds for Ira Yellin's renovation of the historic market and the Homer Laughlin Building above it. The market today still owes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the now-defunct L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency $32 million, Moses said.

People come downtown not simply for its historic charm, but because it's a beautiful mess — a hodgepodge of what came before, what's hot now, grit, glitz and authenticity.

Retired computer systems engineer Daniel Kerr took the train in from San Clemente to visit the China Cafe on Friday for the wonton soup but also to take in the action.

"I like city life," he said. "There's so much to see and to do. it's just interesting." Being on a fixed income, he'll probably have to cut back on the China Cafe if a meal there goes up to $10 or more, he said.

"I think it's so cool here," said Adrian Aguilar, 25, an El Monte native who recently moved into a loft downtown. "I love sushi, but this is just like straight from the streets of L.A."

Aguilar, tattooed and dressed head to toe in black, said he had musician friends coming in from New York and was "all excited to bring them to places like this."

Moses and Yellin say there is no intention to purge existing tenants, just to fill the holes. As a sign of good faith, they recently signed Las Morelianas, of pig snout taco fame, to a new lease.

Cheung kept the old menu and employees when he took over the China Cafe. This, along with his beer license, the only one in the market, undoubtedly helped him hang on to old customers. He has high hopes the new style can blend with the old. "Why not mix it all together?" he said.

What a concept: a real mixed-used project.

gale.holland@latimes.com

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Brad Pitt Joins China's Version of Twitter, Creates Confusion

World-traveling man of intrigue Brad Pitt has joined China’s version of Twitter — Sina Weibo — and in his first message hinted that he could be making a visit to the country, which he had reportedly been banned from visiting. Or maybe not.

In a mysterious message posted to Pitt’s account the actor simply stated: “It is the truth. Yup, I’m coming.” The tweet of sorts got thousands of comments, the AP reports, and has raised speculation that the actor could be headed to the People’s Republic. The Inglourious Basterds star was reportedly banned from entering following his appearance in 1997′s Seven Years in Tibet, which offered a harsh portrayal of Chinese rule. However, a few hours after it was posted, the message reportedly was deleted.

Whether the ersatz tweet was an accident, something that was posted prematurely, or simply removed because it was being misconstrued, the actor’s cryptic appearance on the microblogging service brings up some interesting issues about the intersection of tech and culture in China. Because even if he’s not on his way to the Communist country — which would not be entirely impossible since, as Entertainment Weekly notes, the country lifted the ban on Seven Years director Jean-Jacques Annaud — his presence on the site is still a big get for Weibo and a move that shows the importance of both American celebrities and social networking in China.

Weibo, which according to parent company Sina Corporation has some 400 million registered accounts, has erupted in the world’s most populous nation, where actual Twitter is blocked by Chinese censors. The Chinese microblog service is also subject to censors as well; at the government’s behest some 1,000 Sina employees reportedly go through messages on Weibo and remove content considered offensive. But there are indications that more freedom is coming to the social network, like the fact that users now seem to be able to search for Chinese officials like President Hu Jintao and even write criticism despite the Great Firewall.

Pitt isn’t the only star to have a presence on Weibo. His Interview with the Vampire co-star Tom Cruise and British actress Emma Watson are also on the service, which launched in 2009 and boasts functionality similar to a Twitter/Facebook hybrid – allowing users to not only post messages but also embedded videos and images. And as American films gain in popularity in China — Pitt’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith brought in $7.5 million at the Chinese box office — it only seems logical that more and more celebrities will use the service to reach their international fanbase.

But for Pitt, who along with his partner Angelina Jolie is known for humanitarian efforts, one can’t help but wonder if any messages he has for China could go beyond movie promotion — whether he delivers them online or in the flesh.

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“Downton Abbey” sets PBS record with 7.9 million viewers

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – British period drama “Downton Abbey” scored rave reviews and a record 7.9 million viewers for public broadcasting channel PBS as viewers tuned in to watch a wedding and financial calamity during the award-winning show’s third season U.S. premiere on Sunday.

Fans witnessed the wedding of Matthew and Lady Mary Crawley, after two seasons in which viewers were kept wondering if they would ever tie the knot.

According to PBS, the ratings for season 3 quadrupled the average viewings for PBS primetime shows, which usually is 2 million viewers, and nearly doubled the premiere of the second season, which kicked off with 4.2 million viewers in January 2012.

The joy over the wedding was offset by news that Lord Grantham, the owner of the grand estate, had lost his fortune to bad investments.

American actress Shirley MacLaine debuted in the role of the feisty Martha Levinson, the mother of Lord Grantham’s American wife Cora. She entertained viewers with her witty exchanges with Downton matriarch Violet Crawley, played by Maggie Smith.

“Downton Abbey,” created by British screenwriter Julian Fellowes, has become both a critical success and a cult favorite among its many U.S. fans.

It has won seven Emmy awards and will be going into Sunday’s Golden Globe awards with three nominations in major television categories including best drama series.

Vanity Fair, which live-tweets humorous comments during the show, leads a strong online following of fans who discuss aspects of the show ranging from dresses and dances to the dramatic twists.

“The Subcommittee on Preventing Edith’s Happiness resolves to kill off her boyfriend, put thumbtacks in her evening shoes,” the magazine tweeted, referring to the unlucky-in-love Lady Edith Crawley.

PBS said that the show garnered nearly 100,000 tweets during its Sunday premiere.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Eric Walsh)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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