Riordan abruptly ends bid to get L.A. pension measure on ballot

Former Mayor Richard Riordan speaks to the Los Angeles City Council on Nov. 20 about a half-cent sales tax increase. (Mark Boster /Los Angeles Times / November 26, 2012)

By David Zahniser and Kate Linthicum

November 26, 2012, 9:23 a.m.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan's push for a May ballot measure to cut pension benefits of city employees abruptly collapsed Monday, with a spokesman saying Riordan had suspended signature-gathering efforts.

Riordan's Save Los Angeles campaign had hoped to gather 300,000 signatures by Dec. 28 for a measure that would cut the pension benefits of existing employees and require new city workers to rely on a 401(k)-style retirement plan.

But according to a statement from spokesman John Schwada, "Riordan recently concluded that the Dec. 28 deadline cannot be met."

The statement said Riordan would explore other options "to accomplish the goal of pension reform."

“I ask the mayor, the city council and union heads to work with me over the next several months to save the city from bankruptcy and drastic cuts to public services," Riordan said.

The ballot measure proposal drew wide criticism from city employee unions, including the Police Protective League, which in recent weeks has sent out email blasts attacking Riordan.

Other city employee unions staged a vigil outside of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's house in protest of the proposed ballot measure.

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The 'SUV of Motorcycles' Offers Neither Sport nor Utility

Alessandro Tartarini, the son of Italjet founder Leopoldo Tartarini, has created a new category of motorcycle we didn’t know we needed. And based on the stats and those pesky laws of physics, we’re unconvinced it’s even a viable solution for the handful of potential buyers Tartarini and his company are targeting.

The design intent of the Brutus (no relation to the Brutus electric motorcycle or Caesar’s assassin) is to be a jack of all trades, handling serious off-road conditions while simultaneously being a practical long-distance cruiser. The big feature is the tires, which are 6 inches wide at the front, and 7 inches wide at the rear.

But as with any hybrid that attempts to blend the best of both worlds, the Brutus’ stats make it sound like a mis-imagined hodgepodge that won’t be good at anything.

To begin with, it weighs in at 485 pounds – about the same as 1,000cc tourers like the Ducati Multistrada. The reason tourers can’t go off road is because they’re far too heavy, which makes the Brutus overweight for dirt path duty.

Then there’s the suspension travel, which at 80mm at the front and 100mm at the rear, is far too short for hopping rocks and ripping through ruts. Most tourers have about twice that amount of travel, and use every millimeter of it.

But questionable stats aside, the Brutus is touted as “at home in any conditions” and “a valid work tool for going where other vehicles cannot.” Two dubious claims that combined with a 45bhp, 750cc single-cylinder liquid-cooled powerplant make even less of a case for Tartarini’s halved ATV.

The production model comes with an glut of options like a reverse gear, a sidecar, a winch, a generator, and even a “snow kit,” which converts the rig into a semi-snowmobile with a track out back. Look for a release next spring, although there’s no word on pricing.

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Beyonce documentary premiering on HBO in February

NEW YORK (AP) — Beyonce is getting personal.

HBO announced Monday that a documentary about the Grammy-winning singer will debut Feb. 16, 2013. Beyonce is directing the film, which will include footage she shot herself with her laptop.

The network said the documentary will include “video that provides raw, unprecedented access to the private entertainment icon and high-voltage performances.” It will also feature home videos of her family and of the singer as a new mother and owner of her company, Parkwood Entertainment.

Beyonce said in a statement the untitled project was “personal” to her. She is married to Jay-Z. They had their first child, daughter Blue Ivy Carter, in January.

The 31-year-old will perform at the 2013 Super Bowl halftime show on Feb. 3, 13 days before the documentary airs.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Wealth Matters: Dealing With Doctors Who Accept Only Cash

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Dr. Stanford Owen no longer accepts insurance. He charges patients like Monica Knight $38 a month.

A FEW weeks ago, my wife and I were at our wits’ end: our 4-month-old daughter wouldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time at night. We had consulted books and seen our pediatrician, but nothing was working. So my wife called a pediatrician who specializes in babies who struggle with sleep problems.

The next day, he drove an hour from Brooklyn to our house. He then spent an hour and a half talking to us and examining our daughter in her nursery. He prescribed some medicine for her and suggested some changes to my wife’s diet. Within two days, our baby was sleeping through the night and we were all feeling better.

The only catch was this pediatrician did not accept insurance. He had taken our credit card information before his visit and given us a form to submit to our insurance company as he left, saying insurance usually paid a portion of his fee, which was $650.

A couple of weeks later, our insurance company said it wouldn’t pay anything. Here’s how the company figured it: First, it said a fair price for our doctor’s fee was $285, about 60 percent less, because that was the going rate for our town. Then, it said the lower fee was not enough to meet our out-of-network deductible.

While we were none too happy with the insurance company, we remained impressed by the doctor: he had made our baby better and was compensated for it, all the while avoiding the hassle of dealing with insurance.

Last year, I wrote about doctors who catered only to the richest of the rich and charged accordingly. But after my experience, I became interested in doctors for the average person who take only cash. What pushes a doctor to go this route, often called concierge medicine? And how hard is it to make a living?

As to why doctors decide to switch to a concierge practice, the answer is almost always frustration.

“About four years ago, one insurance company was driving me crazy saying I had to fax documents to show I had done a visit,” said Stanford Owen, an internal medical doctor in Gulfport, Miss. “At 2 a.m., I woke up and said, ‘This is it.’ ”

Dr. Owen stopped accepting all insurance and now charges his 1,000 patients $38 a month.

“When I decided to abandon insurance, I didn’t want to lose my patient base and make it unaffordable,” he said. “I have everything from waitresses and shrimpers to international businessmen. It’s a concierge model, but it’s also the personal doctor model.”

Dr. Owen, who once had three nurses and 10 examining rooms, said it was now just him and a receptionist. He has become obsessed with keeping overhead low, but he said that, for the first time since the 1990s, his income was going up.

At the other end of the spectrum is David Edelson, who runs a practice called HealthBridge in Great Neck, N.Y. In addition to five doctors, the practice has a full fitness center and provides the services of a personal trainer, nutritionist, acupuncturist, sleep expert and stress-management consultant.

“The current model for primary care is broken,” Dr. Edelson told me. “Either I can go down with the ship, sell my practice to a hospital or take my practice in the wrong direction. Or I can develop a better mousetrap, which is more time dealing with patients and their care.”

Dr. Edelson has reduced his own practice to 300 patients, from more than 3,000. Of those, 250 pay $1,800 a year for concierge services and 50 others receive scholarships. He estimated that from the combination of the membership fee for the extra services and what gets billed to insurance for typical care, he will make $600,000, and more of that will end up in his pocket.

“We’re bringing in the same fees but we’re reducing our overhead,” he said. Fewer patients means fewer medical assistants, receptionists and staff members to deal with insurance.

But of the five doctors in the practice, he is the only one to go fully concierge. Another, William Klein, is testing the model, with 15 percent of his patients in the concierge program. Dr. Klein said he was hedging his bets because he was not sure what the new federal health care law would mean for primary care physicians.

Weren’t some patients getting shortchanged by this hybrid model? He said he saw no difference in care.

“It’s like paying for first class and not coach,” Dr. Klein said. “Everyone is getting to the same destination, but some people have a better seat.”

This approach to medicine is not without risks for the doctors and downsides for patients.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 23, 2012

An earlier version of this column gave an incorrect middle initial for Mr. Harris. It is M., not V.

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DealBook: S.E.C. Chief Who Overhauled Agency to Step Down

11:42 a.m. | Updated

Mary L. Schapiro, who overhauled the Securities and Exchange Commission after the financial crisis, announced Monday that she was stepping down as chairwoman of the agency.

In recent days, the S.E.C. informed the White House and Treasury Department that Ms. Schapiro planned to leave Dec. 14, becoming the first major departure from the Obama administration’s team of financial regulators. Ms. Schapiro will also relinquish her position as one of the five members of the agency’s commission, the group that oversees Wall Street and the broader financial markets.

The White House announced on Monday that President Obama was naming Elisse B. Walter, a commissioner at the S.E.C., as the new chairwoman. In a somewhat surprising move, Ms. Walter will not step into an interim post, but will take over the top spot for the foreseeable future.

Ms. Walter’s appointment does not require Congressional approval because the Senate previously confirmed her as a commissioner. Eventually, the White House is expected to nominate another agency chief, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Ms. Schapiro’s departure, which follows a bruising four-year tenure, was widely telegraphed. Ms. Schapiro, 57, has confided in staff members for more than a year that she was exhausted and hoped to leave after the November elections.

“It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to work with so many dedicated S.E.C. staff who strive every day to protect investors and ensure our markets operate with integrity,” Ms. Schapiro said in a statement. “Over the past four years we have brought a record number of enforcement actions, engaged in one of the busiest rule-making periods, and gained greater authority from Congress to better fulfill our mission.”

In 2008, Mr. Obama nominated Ms. Schapiro, a political independent, to head the S.E.C. at a time when extreme economic turmoil had shaken investor confidence in the country’s securities regulators.

The agency was faulted for its lax oversight of brokerage firms like Lehman Brothers, which failed in 2008 and contributed to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Just weeks before Ms. Schapiro started as chairwoman, the Wall Street investor Bernard L. Madoff was accused of running a large Ponzi scheme, further damaging the credibility of regulators like the S.E.C., which missed crucial warning signs about the fraud.

“When Mary agreed to serve nearly four years ago, she was fully aware of the difficulties facing the S.E.C. and our economy as a whole,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “But she accepted the challenge, and today, the S.E.C. is stronger and our financial system is safer and better able to serve the American people – thanks in large part to Mary’s hard work.”

Ms. Schapiro, a lifelong regulator who previously ran the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, quickly gained a reputation as a consensus builder determined to repair the agency’s reputation. A tireless preparer and self-described pragmatist, Ms. Schapiro overhauled the agency’s management ranks, revived the enforcement unit and secured more money and technology at a time when other agencies were being asked to cut back. She also helped craft new rules for Wall Street oversight, as part of the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul.

“The S.E.C. came back from the brink,” said Harvey L. Pitt, a former chairman of the agency under President George W. Bush. “I give her enormous credit for that.”

Consumer advocates and other critics, however, say she failed to grab the bully pulpit at a time the country needed a vocal critic of Wall Street. Since the financial crisis, the agency brought few enforcement cases against the Wall Street executives at the center of the crisis.

The S.E.C. notes it has brought a record number of cases over the last two years. While no top banking executives have been charged, the agency has filed actions against 129 people and firms tied to the crisis.

Ms. Walter, a Democrat who became an S.E.C. commissioner in 2008 and briefly served as the agency’s acting leader a year later, is a longtime ally of Ms. Schapiro. They overlapped at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Finra, where Ms. Walter was a senior regulator and lawyer. At the S.E.C., Ms. Walter was often the only reliable vote for Ms. Schapiro’s rule-making efforts and is now expected to carry out a similar agenda as chairwoman.

While Ms. Walter will take over, she may not serve the whole term. Among the other people that Mr. Obama may consider naming as agency chief include Mary J. Miller, a senior Treasury Department official, a person briefed on the matter said. Sallie L. Krawcheck, a former top executive at Citigroup and Bank of America, is also in the running, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The agency’s enforcement chief, Robert Khuzami, is a long-shot contender.

As for Ms. Schapiro, few expect her to follow her predecessors and move into private legal practice, where she would defend the banks she has spent years regulating. Instead, they say she is more likely to seek out a position at a university or research group.

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Attack on Pakistani Shia Muslims kills five, injures 70

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A bomb blast in northwest Pakistan killed five people and injured 70 others Sunday, provincial and local authorities said, the latest in a wave of attacks that have struck the country’s minority Shiite Muslim community despite a host of stringent security measures, including wide-scale cellphone service bans and prohibitions on motorcycle riding in several cities.

The attack in Dera Ismail Khan was the second to strike the city of 119,000 this weekend and the fourth in five days directed at Shiite Muslims as they commemorate the anniversary of the 7th century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad. A remote-controlled bomb planted in a shop exploded as a procession of Shiite Muslims passed by, police said.  

On Saturday in Dera Ismail Khan, seven people were killed and 26 others injured by a remote-controlled bomb buried under a pile of garbage that exploded while a Shiite Muslim procession moved past. Shiite Muslims commemorate Imam Hussein’s death with large processions that wend their way through cramped neighborhoods in dozens of Pakistani cities, creating a formidable challenge for police assigned to provide security for the mourners.

No one had claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack, though suspicion immediately focused on the Pakistani Taliban, the country’s homegrown insurgency. The group had previously said it was behind the wave of violence against Shiite Muslims earlier in the week. The Shiite Muslim community remains a prime target for the Pakistani Taliban and other Sunni militant groups, which regard Shiite Muslims as heretics.

In one of the earlier attacks this week, a suicide bomber slipped into a procession of more than 150 Shiite Muslims late Wednesday in the garrison city of Rawalpindi and detonated his explosives-filled vest, killing 23 people and injuring 62 others, according to Rawalpindi police. Earlier on Wednesday, militants detonated two bombs outside a Shiite mosque in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, killing two people and injuring 12 others.

Anticipating a spike in attacks, Pakistani officials late last week announced a series of restrictions aimed at curbing violence against Shiite Muslims.

Cellphone service was suspended in dozens of Pakistani cities over the weekend, a measure aimed at preventing the use of cellphones as remote-control detonators. Because assailants often use motorcycles to carry out attacks, motorcycle riding was banned in Islamabad, the capital, and the southern cities of Hyderabad and Quetta. The Pakistani newspaper Express-Tribune reported that the northwest town of Haripur imposed a 15-day ban on the wearing of shawls and coats to prevent would-be attackers from hiding explosives and other weapons.

ALSO:

Suicide bomber kills 3, wounds 90, in Afghanistan attack

Middle East shifts may weaken Iran's influence with Palestinians

Clashes erupt, offices ablaze after Egypt president expands power

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New Naval Era Dawns as China's Carrier Launches First Jet

China's aircraft carrier has launched and landed her first jet fighters, as shown in photos and videos released over the weekend by Beijing's state media.

The milestone comes 14 years after the communist state acquired the derelict flattop Varyag from Ukraine, and nearly 18 months after the refurbished, rechristened Liaoning set sail from northern China.

With the commencement of fixed-wing flight operations on Nov. 23, China joins an exclusive club of just five other nations -- the U.S., Russia, France, India and Brazil -- that operate full-size carriers with fixed-wing planes.

Liaoning's first take-offs and landings represent an undeniable triumph for China's fast-growing navy. But Beijing still has a long way to go in learning how to use its new flattop and her jets.

Video: China Central Television

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Rolling Stones mark 50th year with London show

LONDON (AP) — The Rolling Stones are marking their 50th anniversary with a concert in London.

The band says R&B singer Mary J. Blige and rock guitarist Jeff Beck will be joining them on stage Sunday at the O2 Arena. Most of the tickets for the gig had sold out within minutes.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood will also be joined by former Stones members Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor, who will perform again with the band for the first time in more than 20 years.

The Stones are playing again in London on Thursday before going to the U.S. for a show in New York on Dec. 8 and in Newark, New Jersey, on Dec. 13 and 15.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That’s not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. “The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money,” says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

“It’s inconvenient to have to send things to a lab,” so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. “Bob is not consumed with any one company,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. “His mission is to create the idea.”

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab’s combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer “walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries.”

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is “notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it’s a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States,” says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students “as an extended family,” adding that “I really want them to do well.”

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta’s chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people’s health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer’s is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has “come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering,” he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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Black Friday online sales up nearly 21%

Online shoppers avoided long lines like this and boosted Web sales nearly 21%. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)

By Shan Li

November 24, 2012, 11:04 a.m.

Black Friday shoppers headed to their laptops, tablet computers and mobile phones to scoop up deals.

On the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally the kickoff to the holiday shopping season, online sales jumped 20.7% over last year, according to study from IBM. That beat the 17.4% growth over Thanksgiving in Web sales.

That reflects a trend that has swept through the retail industry as shoppers increasingly go online to find the best bargains and deals, forcing traditional brick-and-mortar retailers to adapt in in order to retain customers.

Many consumers chose to shop on their mobile devices, with nearly a quarter of shoppers checking out retailers online.

The Apple iPad was top choice for online buyers, comprising almost 10% of total Web shopping. That's followed by the iPhone at 8.7% and Android-powered devices at 5.5%.

"This year's holiday shopper was hungry for great deals and retailers didn't disappoint, said Jay Henderson, strategy director at IBM Smarter Commerce.

ALSO:

Black Friday shoppers smash door at Urban Outfitters

Nine protesters arrested outside Wal-Mart in Paramount

Drivers, beware: Parking lot accidents increase on Black Friday

Follow Shan Li on Twitter @ShanLi

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