One big advantage for a Los Angeles city controller aspiring to higher office is the ability to make news with a steady flow of audits exposing wasteful spending at City Hall.
So while stuck in Hollywood Freeway traffic on a recent morning, Wendy Greuel, controller and candidate for mayor, picked up her phone for a radio interview about one of those reports, accusing the city of squandering $325,000 on improper mileage reimbursements.
"That was really just the tip of the iceberg," she told listeners, recycling a line she's used to publicize previous audits finding lavish travel spending at the Housing Authority and credit card abuses at the Coliseum.
In a city beset by chronic budget shortfalls, Greuel is campaigning in the March 5th election primary as a fiscal conservative. She's uniquely qualified, she argues, not just because of her record as a city official, but as a result of her work at DreamWorks and her family's ownership of a building supply business in North Hollywood.
"I have inside knowledge and an outside perspective," she said in an interview.
But Greuel's record, her opponents contend, doesn't match the image she's crafting. They question what she's accomplished with her audits and portray her Hollywood experience — in government relations — as emblematic of a career as a political insider.
"This whole notion that she's some kind of outsider who has an ounce of political courage, it's frankly a bunch of hooey," said Eric Hacopian, chief strategist for mayoral candidate and City Councilwoman Jan Perry. Greuel's audits, he said, amount to "constant headline grabbing" and "a whole bunch of sound and fury that signifies nothing."
With three rivals jostling to cut into her presumed and potentially decisive base of support in the San Fernando Valley, Greuel's prospects for succeeding Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa depend largely on how effectively she can repel that line of attack.
"It's a tightrope act," said Steven P. Erie, a political science professor at UC San Diego, noting that Greuel, in particular, needs to secure support from groups whose priorities may diverge.
"She doesn't want to turn labor off," he said. Indeed, she has courted unions by promising to fight harder than her opponents to protect the city workforce.
At the same time, Erie said, Greuel has to "appeal to a more fiscally moderate-to-conservative base out in the Valley."
A former Valley area City Council member who was elected controller in 2009, Greuel takes credit for identifying $160 million in potential city savings through her audits. But stopping that waste, she says, is up to the council and the mayor under the city's charter.
"I've been the one that has been looking at fiscal responsibility," she said.
Greuel's effort to cast herself as a champion of fiscal restraint is likely to face other tests, among them her support — during seven years on the council — for a rapid rise in spending that worsened the city's budget crisis.
Like her top competitors in the race, Perry and Councilman Eric Garcetti, Greuel now expresses regret for backing generous raises for 22,000 city workers in 2007 — despite a $243-million budget shortfall. The deficit quickly swelled when the economy spiraled downward.
She also has joined calls to abolish the city's business tax, which brings in $439 million a year. The revenue loss would exacerbate budget shortfalls projected to range from $216 million to $327 million in each of the next four years, analysts have warned.
Greuel and Garcetti say getting rid of the tax would spur economic growth. Perry and another candidate, entertainment lawyer Kevin James, say the city can't afford to abolish the tax.
Greuel, who grew up in Granada Hills, said her family's business, Frontier Building Supply, taught her to appreciate the burden of city taxes. "I did everything from cleaning the bathrooms to sweeping the warehouse to doing the accounting to answering the phone to driving the forklift and driving a truck," she said. Now, she co-owns the company with her brother, who runs it.
Greuel, 51, a UCLA graduate, started her career as an aide to Mayor Tom Bradley, working on such issues as homelessness, child care and services for the elderly. A Republican until 1992, when she registered as a Democrat, Greuel was part of a group of Bradley aides who moved to Washington to take jobs in the Clinton administration.
She recalled leafing with colleagues through the "plum book" directory of federal political appointments — named for its "plum" government jobs — as the end of Bradley's tenure approached. Mark Fabiani, a top Bradley aide who became special counsel to President Clinton, passed Greuel's resume to Andrew Cuomo, then Clinton's assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
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.
PASADENA, California (Reuters) – NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt said he expects the network’s ratings to slip in the coming months after an unexpectedly strong fall season, though he hopes some coming new shows will break out to help stem the decline.
The Comcast-owned network made a surprise comeback in the final months of 2012 after years in the ratings basement. The network’s viewership jumped 24 percent among the 18- to 49-year-old age group that advertisers crave, the only increase among the four major TV broadcast networks.
Critics are skeptical of whether NBC can stay on top of its competitors through the rest of the TV season. The NBC schedule received a boost in the fall from “Sunday Night Football,” singing competition “The Voice,” and new drama “Revolution.” NFL football games are gone from NBC until next fall, and “The Voice” and “Revolution” will not return until March 25.
Greenblatt said he was “totally prepared” for NBC ratings to decline in the coming weeks. “I think it’s inevitable,” Greenblatt told reporters at a meeting of the Television Critics Association.
He said NBC had a “very robust” mid-season plan that includes new shows such as “1600 Penn,” a comedy about a First Family living in the White House; soapy “Deception” about a murder in a wealthy family; and “Do No Harm,” a thriller about a neurosurgeon.
“I’m hoping that out of this new crop of shows we’ll get lucky,” Greenblatt said.
He said he decided to keep “Revolution” off the air until late March, rather than bringing it back in January, so the rest of the show’s first season can run without being interrupted by repeats.
“It’s a little bit more of a cable model,” Greenblatt said. “If you market properly and have the goods, and then you can run them all in a row without repeats, I actually think that’s the better long-term play,” he said.
When “The Voice” returns, it will have new judges Usher and Shakira in place of Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green. NBC also is bringing back Broadway musical drama “Smash” for a second season starting in February.
Greenblatt began his presentation to reporters and TV critics with a litany of ratings numbers from the fall season, many with double-digit percentage gains.
“I’m going to bore you with some statistics,” he said, “because I’m not sure when I’m going to have the chance to do this again.”
(Reporting By Lisa Richwine; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.
For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.
“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”
The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.
Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.
“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.
The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.
Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.
The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.
“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.
He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.
Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”
He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”
Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-bit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.
Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.
Bank of America agreed on Monday to pay $11.65 billion to Fannie Mae to settle claims over troubled mortgages that soured during the housing crash, mostly loans issued by the bank’s Countrywide Financial subsidiary.
Separately, federal regulators reached an $8.5 billion settlement on Monday to resolve claims of foreclosure abuses that included flawed paperwork used in foreclosures and bungled loan modifications by 10 major lenders, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank. About $3.3 billion of that settlement amount will go toward Americans who went through foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, while $5.2 billion will address other assistance to troubled borrowers, including loan modifications and reductions of principal balances. Eligible homeowners could get up to $125,000 in compensation.
The two agreements are not directly related, but they illustrate the extent of the banks’ role in the excesses of the credit boom, from the making of loans to the seizure of homes.
Under the terms of the Bank of America deal, the bank will pay Fannie Mae $3.6 billion to compensate for faulty mortgages and will also pay the housing finance giant $6.75 billion to buy back mortgages. It also must pay the agency $1.3 billion related to loan servicing problems.
The settlement will resolve all of the lender’s disputes with Fannie Mae, removing a major impediment to Bank of America’s rehabilitation. The bank had settled its fight with Freddie Mac, the other government-owned mortgage giant, in 2011.
Both Fannie and Freddie, which have posted billions of dollars in losses in recent years, have argued that Countrywide misrepresented the quality of home loans that it sold to the two entities at the height of the mortgage bubble. Bank of America assumed those troubles when it bought Countrywide in 2008.
Before the latest settlement announced on Monday, the Countrywide acquisition had cost Bank of America more than $40 billion in losses on real estate, legal costs and settlements, according to several people close to the bank.
By removing part of the bank’s mortgage albatross, the move is a continued retreat from home lending by Bank of America, even as rivals including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo compete for the profitable refinance business that has boomed with interest rates persistently low.
Bank of America also agreed to sell the servicing rights on about $306 billion worth of home loans to other firms. In separate statements, Nationstar Mortgage Holdings and the Newcastle Investment Corporation announced they were buying the rights. Those servicing costs, which were roughly $3.4 billion in the third quarter, have weighed on the bank’s profits, especially as borrowers fall behind on their bills.
Brian T. Moynihan, the bank’s chief executive, said in November that he intended to sell off about two million loans the bank currently serviced.
“Together, these agreements are a significant step in resolving our remaining legacy mortgage issues, further streamlining and simplifying the company and reducing expenses over time,” Mr. Moynihan said in a statement on Monday.
Bank of America said it expected the settlement to hurt its fourth-quarter earnings by $2.5 billion because of costs tied to foreclosure reviews and litigation. The firm also expects to record a $700 million charge, an accounting move known as a debt-valuation adjustment, related to an improvement in the prices of its bonds.
The deal on Monday helps the bank move away from its troubled mortgage business. Still, the bank’s attempts to resolve other costly mortgage litigation have so far been stymied. Looking to appease investors that sued the bank for losses when mortgages packaged into securities imploded during the financial crisis, the bank agreed to pay $8.5 billion in June 2011. But the settlement, which would help mollify investors including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Pimco, has been stalled.
Further thwarting Bank of America’s retreat from the mortgage business, federal prosecutors sued the bank in October, accusing it of churning through loans so quickly that quality controls were virtually forgotten. The Justice Department sued the bank under a law that could mean Bank of America could pay well more than $1 billion to settle.
Bank of America has been embroiled with other legal woes, including accusations that it misled investors about the acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Shareholders, led by pension funds, had said the bank provided false and misleading statements about the health of the Wall Street firm, which, unknown to the public, was racking up huge losses in late 2008 amid turmoil in the markets.
The separate agreement with 10 banks on foreclosure abuses concludes weeks of feverish negotiations between the federal regulators, led by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the banks. That settlement will end a troubled foreclosure review mandated by the banking regulators.
The deal, which was hashed out over the weekend, had teetered on the brink of collapse after officials from the Federal Reserve demanded that the banks pay an addition $300 million to address their part in the 2008 financial crisis, according to several people briefed on the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Federal Reserve, though, agreed to back down on the demands in the hope that the pact could move ahead and bring more immediate relief to homeowners struggling to stay afloat in a time of persistent unemployment and a sluggish economy.
The multibillion-dollar foreclosure settlement was driven, to a large extent, by banking regulators, who decided that a review of loan files was inefficient, costly and simply not yielding relief for homeowners, these people said. The goal in scuttling the reviews, which were mandated as part of a consent order in April 2011, was to provide more immediate relief to homeowners.
The comptroller’s office and the Federal Reserve said on Monday that the settlement “provides the greatest benefit to consumers subject to unsafe and unsound mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices during the relevant period in a more timely manner than would have occurred under the review process.”
The relief will be distributed to homeowners even if they did not file a claim for their loan files to be reviewed.
Concerns about the Independent Foreclosure Review began to mount in within the comptroller’s office, according to the people familiar with the matter. The alarm, these people said, was that the reviews were taking more than 20 hours a loan file at a cost of up to $250 an hour. Since the start of the review, the banks, which are required to pay for consultants to review the files, had spent an estimated $1.5 billion.
More vexing, the banking regulators said that the reviews were not providing any relief to borrowers or turning up meaningful instances where homes of borrowers current on their payments were seized, according to these people.
Michael J. de la Merced and Ben Protess contributed reporting.
Correction: January 8, 2013
An earlier version of this article omitted one element of the settlement between Bank of America and Fannie Mae, and summaries of the article in some sections of nytimes.com consequently understated the total amount of the two mortgage-related settlements announced Monday. It is more than $20 billion, not $18.5 billion.
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.
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
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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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.
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.
