Syria President Bashar Assad makes clear he won't step down

BEIRUT — Ignoring mounting casualties and dwindling support, Syrian President Bashar Assad made clear to the world Sunday in his first public address in half a year that he has no intention of relinquishing power and that he, not anyone else, would dictate the end for Syria's 21-month-old civil war.

Assad unveiled his own peace plan, with cosmetic similarities to a settlement proposal championed by internationally sponsored peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, but he declared he had no partner for negotiations in the Syrian opposition, whom he continued to brand as killers and terrorists.

Assad's dismissive attitude and strict terms for settlement offered little hope for a diplomatic breakthrough. It was a reminder of how intractable the conflict has become, with the U.N. estimating last week that more than 60,000 people had died.

Syria's cities are scenes of carnage, with rebels and government security forces battling across provinces and major cities from Aleppo to Idlib to Damascus, the capital. Opposition forces, which the West has not agreed to arm, have not proved strong enough to exhaust Assad, but neither has the autocratic 12-year leader been able to stamp them out.

Assad, like Brahimi, called for a new cease-fire, reconciliation talks and some form of transitional government. But Assad sketched out a far more complicated vision, beginning with a dialogue with the opposition leading to a new national charter, approved by a referendum. That would be followed by an expanded government, including those in the talks, that would oversee the drafting of a constitution. The charter would also be approved by a national referendum, and then national elections would be held.

And where Brahimi has pushed for meaningful compromise between the rebels and the president, Assad continued to insist that all groups play according to his terms.

He put the onus on rebels for an end to fighting, announcing that his troops would honor a cease-fire only after the opposition stopped fighting and foreign countries stopped funding them, in what amounted to a swipe at Persian Gulf countries, Turkey and Western nations. His plan also appeared to go against the grain of Brahimi's call for both sides to put down their arms. By Sunday evening, Brahimi's office had no comment on Assad's address.

The international community, including Russia, the United States and regional players like Turkey, has endorsed the Brahimi plan's broad contours. But Russia and the West have clashed over Assad's future. Washington has insisted Assad must go, while Moscow has not, at least at this point, abandoned him, a stance also held by Iran, Syria's closest regional ally.

Assad, speaking at Damascus' Opera House, dismissed the opposition as "slaves" to the West, playing on the image of a deeply dysfunctional group including exiles with little influence in Syria and Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-affiliated organization that has become the most feared and valued fighting force among the rebels and their umbrella Free Syrian Army.

The speech was similar to his past promises of reform that have proved jarringly empty. In February, in the midst of the civil conflict, Assad called for and won passage of a new constitution, which he said enshrined freedom of speech and multiparty elections. Months earlier, he had repealed a decades-old emergency law. But in real time, his security forces continued to detain opponents, shell neighborhoods and besiege cities.

On Sunday, standing somberly in front of a photo collage of people who reportedly have been killed in the civil warfare, Assad presented himself as a Syrian patriot, the only one capable of holding the nation together. Supporters packing the theater pumped their fists and yelled, "God, Bashar and our army." He basked in the adulation and at times waved to the crowd.

Even with the death toll soaring and the territory under his control plummeting, Assad appeared to cling to the hope that those Syrians who have grown weary of the unrelenting conflict and the rise of radical Islamists would turn to him.

"We chose the political option from the beginning through its primary way, dialogue. We chose this to move Syria forward. But with whom are we talking? With extremists who only believe in the language of killing and terrorism?" Assad said.

Assad also papered over his government's hard-nosed tactics of airstrikes, artillery shelling and detention of opposition suspects, calling them a necessity for the nation's defense.

"They call it a revolution when it has no relationship to a revolution. A revolution needs intellectuals and is based on thought. Where is the thinker?" Assad said. "The revolution is usually that of the people, not of those who are imported to revolt against the people. It is a revolution against the interests of the people, so by God, are these revolutionaries?"

Opposition leaders swiftly slammed Assad's proposals. "For us as people on the ground, the situation hasn't changed, and during his speech 20 people died," activist Amer Shami said from Damascus by Skype.

But Assad's speech appeared aimed at a terrified Syrian population no longer certain of whom it should support and fearful their country could splinter. The days of spring 2011, when peaceful protesters called for government reform was long ago eclipsed by an armed insurgency, and Assad appears to bet even some in the opposition could be persuaded to return to his fold.

"Roughly speaking about 30% of Syrians want to hang Assad, another 30% support him, and then there are another 30% who long for peace and security and want to get on with their lives and are increasingly worried with how the rebels are behaving," said Syria expert Patrick Seale, author of the definitive biography of the current leader's father and predecessor as president, Hafez Assad.

"A good slice of the opposition will hate his speech and say they need to continue fighting, but it may plant doubt in the minds of some, that they will have to go to negotiations with Assad," Seale said.

One Syrian activist said the rebel movement has veered so far into Islamist ideology that by contrast Assad sounds almost moderate. "Assad's speech sounds more like the national voice, the one worried about the country from intervention and Islamization. For any neutral listener, his speech will sound 'right' compared to the opposition," said the activist, who goes by the name Nadja, in a Skype interview.

"He is talking about fighting against Islamists, Afghanis and Chechens and Libyans and so on," Nadja said. "I wouldn't want him to make peace with terrorists because I don't want the country to fall in their hands. But I don't want him to stay in power either. He killed so many people."

Even if Assad does seek to carry out his peace plan, it is hard to believe he is capable of success. He has consistently failed to follow through on his reform efforts, and at times has seemed beholden to the different interests in his government, from the security apparatus to family, who have lacked any enthusiasm for reform.

"Assad is only the front man for the institutions of the country, the security apparatus, the [Baath] party and minorities," Seale said. "It is not a one-man show."

ned.parker@latimes.com

Special correspondents Nabih Bulos and Alaa Hassan in Beirut contributed to this report.

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Looney Gas and Lead Poisoning: A Short, Sad History

Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.

In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.

To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.

The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.

But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to  sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.

The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.

In 1922,  the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).

Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up,  he had still not looked into the question.  Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.

In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.

In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.

It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill,  went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”

Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.

Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.

After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.

But fearing that such measures would spread,  that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.

The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged  a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”

It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.

In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.

The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition,  all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.

There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”

But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.

In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.

It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.

Which is just another way of say that we never got out of the loony gas building after all.

Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum

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Schwarzenegger is back, and Hollywood hopes he’s still a star

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – As he famously droned on-screen in his signature “Terminator” movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger is back.

A year after leaving the California governor’s office and becoming tabloid fodder for fathering a boy with his family’s housekeeper and splitting with his wife, Maria Shriver, the 65-year old former bodybuilder will star in no less than three Hollywood movies over the next 12 months.

None are likely to win Schwarzenegger an Oscar. Indeed, the movies, and Schwarzenegger‘s own fee, are low-budget compared with his global blockbusters of yore. But studio executives are betting that overseas fans especially will once again respond to a personality whose 24 films generated worldwide ticket sales of $ 3.9 billion, according to boxoffice.com.

“He is still a worldwide star who resonates with action audiences around the world,” said Rob Friedman, the co-chairman of the Lionsgate motion picture group, which is scheduled to release his next two films. “The Last Stand” will open on January 18, and “The Tomb” in September.

“Ten,” the third film, is scheduled for release in January 2014 by Open Road Films, a joint venture of the AMC and Regal Theater chains.

“When you have left the movie business for seven years, it’s kind of a scary thing to come back because you don’t know if you’re accepted or not,” Schwarzenegger said at a Saturday press event for “The Last Stand.”

“There could be a whole new generation of action stars that come up in the meantime.”

The actor said he was “very pleasantly surprised” by what he called a “great reaction” to his cameo in the 2010 action film “The Expendables,” which featured fellow action stars Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham. The film grossed $ 103.1 million in U.S. ticket sales and $ 274.5 million worldwide.

Since then, Schwarzenegger appeared in a second “Expendables” and says he will join a fifth installment of the “Terminator” if it is made.

Comcast’s Universal Pictures wants to “do a bunch” of new films based on the 30-year-old “Conan The Barbarian” movie, said Schwarzenegger, in which he would reprise his role as a barbarian.

He added that Universal, after 10 years of prodding by Schwarzenegger, also wants to do a sequel to the 1988 comedy “Twins,” in which he and Danny DeVito played mismatched twins, to be called “Triplets.”

Schwarzenegger no longer commands the $ 25 million paychecks he cashed in his heyday and will get between $ 8 and $ 10 million for each of his next three films, according to two people with knowledge of his salary but who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. He also gets a percentage of the profits, according to one of the people.

The new Schwarzenegger calculus banks on his films doing outsized business overseas while operating within budgets that are a fraction of the $ 200 million cost of his last action film, the 2003 “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.” The budget for “The Last Stand” is estimated at $ 50 million, according to movie resource site IMDB.com.

“He has significant value outside the United States and Canada, where he is still revered by people who have grown up with him throughout the years,” said Jere Hausfater, chief operating officer of film production company Aldamisa International, which hopes to do a film with Schwarzenegger in the future.

What audiences will see is a aging star who isn’t afraid of showing his drooping muscles and widening paunch, or of making fun of being past his prime. In the “The Last Stand,” a less than rock hard Schwarzenegger plays a retired Los Angeles policeman who becomes the sheriff of a small border town and is then called on to stop a violent drug lord from crossing.

In “Ten” he plays an aging drug agent, and in “The Tomb” an older prison inmate.

“We all go through the same dramas, we look at the mirror and say, what happened? You once had muscles and slowly they are deteriorating,” said Schwarzenegger at “The Last Stand” press event.

“The great thing in the movie is that they we’re not trying to play me as the 35-year-old action hero but the one who is about to retire, and all of a sudden there is this challenge where he really needs to get his act together.”

The one-time muscle man compares his career metamorphosis to that of his friend Clint Eastwood, who transitioned from his Dirty Harry days to a wiser person who’s not afraid to make fun of his slipping abilities in recent films like “Trouble with the Curve.”

“That’s called evolution,” said Sylvester Stallone, who stars with Schwarzenegger as aging inmates in “The Tomb.” “There are no more wooly mammoths. Things change, but the one thing you cannot replace is charisma. Certain people have it, and will have it until the day they die.”

Schwarzenegger‘s infamy in fathering a son outside of his high-profile marriage to Shriver initially seemed to hurt his popular appeal. Within weeks of the disclosure, “The Governator,” a comic book that would feature his likeness, was canceled.

Ultimately, though, moviegoers will be less interested in Schwarzenegger‘s political adventures and personal scandals than in what he puts on the screen, says Peter Sealey, founder of The Sausalito Group and a former Columbia Pictures president of marketing and distribution.

“The movie-going audience really don’t care about things like infidelity, DUIs,” added publicist Howard Bragman, vice-chairman of the firm called Reputation. “They overlook a lot. Ultimately, it remains, how are the movies? Is he credible? Is he going to be a joke?”

(Reporting by Ronald Grover and Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Cynthia Osterman)

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Drug-Testing Company Tied to N.C.A.A. Draws Criticism

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A wall in one of the conference rooms at the National Center for Drug Free Sport displays magazine covers, each capturing a moment in the inglorious history of doping scandals in sports.

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

The National Center for Drug Free Sport, in Kansas City, Mo., tries to deter doping with programs for high school, college and professional leagues.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Don Catlin, formerly of U.C.L.A.’s Olympic Analytical Lab, has raised questions about drug testing at colleges.

The images show Ben Johnson, the sprinter who lost his 1988 Olympic gold medal after testing positive; and Barry Bonds, the tarnished home run king; and Lyle Alzado, one of the first pro football players to admit to steroid use.

“People always assume that it’s the athletes at the top of their sport or the top of their game that are using,” said Frank Uryasz, Drug Free Sport’s founder and president. “But I can assure you that’s not the case. There’s always that desire to be the best, to win. That permeates all level of sport — abuse where you just wouldn’t expect it.”

Over the past quarter-century, athletes like Johnson, Bonds and Alzado stirred widespread concern about doping in sports.

Professional leagues without drug-testing programs have put them in; leagues with drug-testing programs have strengthened them. Congress and medical experts have called on sports officials at all levels to treat doping like a scourge.

It was in this budding American culture of doping awareness that Uryasz found a niche business model. He has spent the past decade selling his company’s services to the country’s sports officials.

The company advises leagues and teams on what their testing protocols should look like — everything from what drugs to test for to how often athletes will be tested to what happens to the specimens after testing. It also handles the collection and testing of urine samples, often with the help of subcontractors.

Drug Free Sport provides drug-testing programs for high school, college and professional leagues.

A privately held company with fewer than 30 full-time employees, it counts among its clients Major League Baseball, the N.F.L., the N.B.A., the N.C.A.A. and about 300 individual college programs.

Many, if not all, of the players on the field Monday night for the Bowl Championship Series title game between Alabama and Notre Dame have participated in a drug-testing program engineered by Drug Free Sport.

Uryasz says his company’s programs provide substantial deterrents for athletes who might consider doping.

Critics, however, question how rigorous the company’s programs are. They say Drug Free Sport often fails to adhere to tenets of serious drug testing, like random, unannounced tests; collection of samples by trained, independent officials; and testing for a comprehensive list of recreational and performance-enhancing drugs.

The critics, pointing to a low rate of positive tests, question Drug Free Sport’s effectiveness at catching athletes who cheat. Since the company began running the N.C.A.A.’s drug-testing program in 1999, for example, the rate of positive tests has been no higher than 1 percent in any year — despite an N.C.A.A. survey of student-athletes that indicated at least 1 in 5 used marijuana, a banned substance. (The N.C.A.A. tests for marijuana at championship competitions but not in its year-round program.)

Uryasz said the rate of positive tests was not meaningful. “I don’t spend a lot of time on the percent positive as being an indicator of very much,” he said.

Independent doping experts contend that having a contract with Drug Free Sport allows sports officials to say they take testing seriously without enacting a truly stringent program.

Don Catlin, the former head of U.C.L.A.’s Olympic Analytical Lab, best known for breaking the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative doping ring, oversaw the testing of many of Drug Free Sport’s urine samples when he was at U.C.L.A. He said the work by Drug Free Sport and similar companies could be used to mislead fans.

“The problem with these schools is they all want to say they’re doing drug testing, but they’re not really doing anything I would call drug testing,” he said.

A Company’s Origins

Uryasz said he became interested in working with student-athletes while tutoring them as an undergraduate at Nebraska. After he graduated, he earned an M.B.A. from Nebraska and worked in health care administration in Omaha. He said he heard about an opening at the N.C.A.A. through a friend.

Driven in part by scandals in professional sports, the N.C.A.A. voted at its 1986 annual convention to start a drug-testing program.

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Chinese Newspaper, Southern Weekend, Challenges Censors

Pool photo by

Xi Jinping at a meeting in Beijing in December. Unrest at an influential newspaper, Southern Weekend, has caught the public’s attention.

BEIJING — Turmoil at one of China’s leading newspapers is posing an early challenge to the measured political program of the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping, pitting a pent-up popular demand for change against the Communist Party’s desire to maintain a firm grip.

The unrest at the influential newspaper Southern Weekend began last week when censors appeared to have toned down the paper’s New Year’s letter to readers — traditionally a call for progress in the new year. That caused journalists and their supporters — including students at nearby Sun Yat-sen University — to issue open letters expressing their outrage.

“Our yielding and our silence has not brought a return of our freedom,” the students said in their petition on Sunday, according to a translation by Hong Kong University’s China Media Project. “Quite the opposite, it has brought the untempered intrusion and infiltration of rights by power.”

By Sunday night, the protests had transformed into a real-time melee in the blogosphere — a remarkable development in a country where protests of all kinds are tightly controlled and the media largely know the boundaries of permissible debate.

In this case, the newspaper’s economics and environmental news staffs appeared to declare that they were on strike, while editors loyal to the government shut down or took control of the paper’s official microblogs. One widely distributed staff declaration with 90 signatures said the publication’s microblogs were no longer authentic.

“I don’t know whether it will be a full strike, but I do know the joint statement about the confiscation of the Weibo account has widespread support,” said one former editor, referring to a microblogging site and speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The turmoil at the Guangzhou-based newspaper resonates especially strongly among politically aware Chinese because Mr. Xi chose southern China for a tour after taking power in November. He made a pilgrimage to nearby Shenzhen, where the father of China’s economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, initiated them two decades ago.

Indeed, Mr. Xi seems to be casting himself in the mold of Deng, who was known for bold economic reforms but who also brooked no opposition to the rule of the Communist Party.

The latest indication was a speech Mr. Xi made that also was published in newspapers on Sunday. Speaking to senior leaders, Mr. Xi repeatedly invoked Deng, especially on the need to adhere to “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a phrase often used to mean a combination of pragmatic policies and one-party rule. He also praised the prereform era, in what appeared to be an effort to appeal to harder-line Communists.

But part of the reason for the clamor for reforms are hopes that Mr. Xi himself has raised. So far he has won praise by calling for China’s constitutional protections to be put in effect, ordering officials to cut pomp and setting in motion an anticorruption campaign.

These actions seem to have prompted the calls for even bolder reforms.

Beyond the unrest at Southern Weekend, editors of the edgy historical journal Yanhuang Chunqiu published a cover article last week arguing that the existing Constitution offered a basis for political reform and that the party’s failure to abide by it was a central cause of political instability. On Friday, the magazine’s Web site was shut down, with officials claiming that it had failed to update its registration.

A message posted by the journal about the shutdown was forwarded 31,000 times, provoking many scathing criticisms of the government. The chief editor, Wu Si, said the journal’s staff had filed the paperwork and could be back online in 10 days.

Optimists say they hope the measures against the two publications were the result of recalcitrant officials appointed by the departing team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, whose decade in power was marked by an overriding desire for stability. Many members of Mr. Xi’s team will not take office until the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in March, and it could take years for Mr. Xi to put allies into important positions of power.

“If Xi does not remove people and promote some officials, his new policies — if he has any — will be sunk by the old people,” said a senior editor at a top party newspaper who asked to remain anonymous because of the delicacy of the subject. “The conflicts between the old and the new have just emerged.”

Chinese politics since Deng’s time have been defined by similar tensions between liberalization and reaction. But Mr. Xi also confronts millions of increasingly outspoken Internet users whose outpourings can confound even China’s heavy censorship.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of media at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the public anger showed how expectations had risen. “Currently in China people are unusually sensitive to developments like this, and so the reaction has been quite intense,” Mr. Zhan said.

Some are less sure that the atmosphere is more open, saying the media shutdowns have occurred because Mr. Xi has avoided taking a clear position.

“There are still no clear rules on the media, and so officials stick to using their habitual ways to control the media,” said Li Datong, a prominent Chinese newspaper editor fired for his views. “There won’t be any change until Xi Jinping enunciates any ideas about major change.”

Other commentators doubt this will happen. They note that in previous jobs Mr. Xi upheld the status quo and that now that he has reached the pinnacle of his career he is unlikely to support systemic reform.

“This is a traditional viewpoint: if you change the emperor you’ll have a change of policy and maybe some new, hopeful things,” said the exiled Chinese political commentator Zhang Ping, who goes by the pen name Chang Ping. “But I don’t think this is likely, because you still have an emperor.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong.

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Venezuela contemplates next move with Hugo Chavez absent

CARACAS, Venezuela — The nerves of Venezuelans are sure to be tested in the coming week as the country seeks answers not only to the mystery of President Hugo Chavez's medical condition and prognosis but also to the debate over constitutional requirements should he be unable to take the oath of office Thursday to start a fourth term.

On Saturday, Chavez confidant and former army comrade Diosdado Cabello was reelected as National Assembly president, a key position that would make him the leader in any process to call a new election to replace Chavez if the fiery socialist dies or is deemed "permanently incapacitated."

Chavez has not been seen or heard from since he left Venezuela in early December for Cuba, where he underwent his fourth surgery to treat pelvic cancer. In sporadic and thinly detailed medical updates, officials have said he has encountered postoperative problems, including "respiratory insufficiency," that have dimmed his chances of being present for his inauguration.

After being reelected to his assembly post by his fellow lawmakers, Cabello said Chavez did not need to be sworn in Thursday to retain his presidential powers because he has permission from the National Assembly to be absent from the country.

"If Chavez isn't here by Jan. 10, the constitution establishes that he can be sworn in before the Supreme Court, although it doesn't specify how or when," Cabello said. "The president received unanimous permission from the assembly to be absent, and that is still in effect."

Constitutional law expert Carlos Ayala agreed that Chavez can be granted two oath-taking postponements for a total of 180 days in the event he is "temporarily incapacitated." But he said Venezuelans are entitled to proof that Chavez is alive, is tending to his duties and has a positive prognosis.

"The citizenry has a legitimate right to know the facts surrounding the mental and physical condition of the head of state," said Ayala, a professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas. "If he cannot exercise his duties and obligations under the constitution, then that leads to constitutional consequences."

If Chavez is so ill that he cannot competently carry out his duties, then he could be declared "permanently incapacitated." That would trigger a constitutional requirement for the National Assembly president to call a new presidential election within 30 days, Ayala said.

On Friday, Vice President Nicolas Maduro — whom Chavez has designated as his political heir and preferred successor — said the 58-year-old president was "resting and recuperating" and emerging from what he previously said was a "delicate postoperative phase."

But other pronouncements have been less positive. Communications and Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said last week that Chavez was experiencing "respiratory insufficiency," raising the possibility that Chavez is on a respirator or even comatose.

Luis Salamanca, a constitutional law expert at Central University of Venezuela, said "reading between the lines" of official announcements "verifies that things are getting worse."

Political consultant and commentator Ricardo Sucre said the Chavez government seems to be trying to frame the oath-taking as a "mere formality." If that interpretation is accepted, it would enable the government to defer the constitutional requirement to clarify the president's condition and, in a worst-case scenario, to avoid starting the wheels turning for a new presidential election.

Some opposition figures are openly questioning why the Chavez government has not decided to seek a postponement of the swearing-in under a "temporary incapacitation" provision if, in fact, Chavez's prognosis is one of recovery and not imminent death.

If Chavez is deathly ill, his successors will try to "draw out the process as long as possible to consolidate their power and take advantage of Chavez's image to better appropriate it for themselves," Sucre said.

Although Chavez won reelection in October in convincing fashion against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, the chances of success in another election against Capriles are much less certain for any Chavez successor, including Maduro or Cabello.

Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor at Pomona College, said opposition politicians should be careful not to create the impression that they are trying to gain power "on the possible disability or death of the leader they were unable to defeat in life."

"There is no harm in letting the process unfold and waiting to see if Chavez regains his health or not," Tinker Salas said. "The people of Venezuela freely elected Chavez in October 2012, and their decision on this matter should be respected."

Special correspondents Kraul reported from Bogota, Colombia, and Mogollon from Caracas.

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Looney Gas and Lead Poisoning: A Short, Sad History

Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.

In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.

To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.

The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.

But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to  sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.

The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.

In 1922,  the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).

Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up,  he had still not looked into the question.  Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.

In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.

In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.

It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill,  went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”

Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.

Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.

After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.

But fearing that such measures would spread,  that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.

The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged  a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”

It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.

In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.

The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition,  all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.

There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”

But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.

In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.

It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.

Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum

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HBO’s Liberace film aims to humanize through love story

PASADENA, California (Reuters) – Michael Douglas takes on larger-than-life entertainer Liberace as he plays the singer in an HBO film about a secret love affair in the 1970s that Douglas on Friday called “a great love story.”

Director Steven Soderbergh said he chose to tell Liberace’s story through the lens of his romance with Scott Thorson – a young man who walked into the singer’s Las Vegas dressing room in the summer of 1977 – in part to expand public perception beyond his outsized personality and lavish lifestyle.

“I was very anxious that we not make a caricature of either of their characters or the relationship,” Soderbergh told reporters at a meeting of the Television Critics Association.

“The discussions they’re having are discussions every couple has. We take the relationship very seriously,” he said.

The film called “Beyond the Candelabra” debuts this spring on Time Warner Inc-owned HBO. It is based on Thorson’s book of the same name about their relationship, which ended in a bitter breakup. Matt Damon plays Thorson.

The idea for the film was budding 12 years ago, when Soderbergh and the “Wall Street” actor were working on the 2000 movie “Traffic.” Soderbergh randomly asked Douglas if he had ever thought of playing Liberace.

Douglas said he thought “is this guy messing with me?,” but launched into an impersonation that stuck with Soderbergh years later when he began envisioning the Liberace film.

The movie depicts “a great love story,” Douglas said.

“This is a couple that felt for each other. There’s a lot of joyful moments; there is humor to it,” until their emotional split, he said.

Liberace tried to keep his relationship with Thorson from the public. When Thorson sued Liberace for palimony after their breakup, the entertainer denied that he was gay or that the two had been lovers.

“It’s unfortunate to see the movie through a contemporary lens and know they were not allowed to be as open back then as people are today,” Soderbergh said.

Liberace died in 1987 at age 67.

The filmmakers used locations and props directly from Liberace’s life. Scenes were filmed at the musician’s Los Angeles penthouse and on the stage at the Las Vegas Hilton where Liberace performed. The filmmakers also reunited his trademark, matching “Dueling Pianos.”

The movie’s costume designers worked to recreate his elaborate costumes. In one of the star’s dramatic entrances, the real-life Liberace wore a $ 300,000 white virgin fox coat, lined with $ 100,000 worth of Austrian crystals, that weighed 100 lbs (45 kg). In the film, Douglas wears a replica made of fake fur that weighs much less.

Damon also got to wear his share of flashy outfits. While he said he normally doesn’t pay too much attention to wardrobe fittings, he said he embraced the glamorous costumes in the Liberace film.

“I probably spent more time in wardrobe fittings in this thing than I have in the previous 15 projects,” he said. “I really enjoyed it.”

(Reporting by Lisa Richwine, editing by Jill Serjeant and Lisa Shumaker)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age: Murray Span, 1922-2012

One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.

So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”

And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.

But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.

Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.

His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.

So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.

On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.

When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.

But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.

All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.

Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.

His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.

“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”

Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.

These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.

I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.

He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.

He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.

As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.

In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.

The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.

We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.

We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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New High for Tuna at Tokyo Fish Sale

TOKYO — Tokyo’s main fish market ushered in the new year with an auction on Saturday that resulted in the highest price paid here, and probably anywhere, for a tuna.

A Tokyo-based sushi restaurant chain owner paid 155.4 million yen, or about $1.76 million, for a 488-pound bluefin, or about $3,600 per pound.

The record price was offered at the year’s first auction at the Tsukiji fish market, which provides Tokyo with much of its fresh fish. Restaurant owners from Japan and elsewhere in Asia compete annually for the prestige of buying the year’s first tuna, whose meat is prized by sushi fans. Conservationists warn that bluefin has been severely overfished.

The winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura, president of the company that runs the Sushi Zanmai chain. The bluefin was caught by a fisherman from Oma, a town renowned in Japan as the source of the most delicious tuna.

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