LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The Academy has dramatically expanded the potential pool of voters in three categories, looking to increase voter participation just as its first-ever adoption of online voting has apparently led to unexpectedly high turnout.
On Saturday, AMPAS president Hawk Koch sent an email to voters announcing that all 5,856 voting members would be sent screeners of all the nominees in the Best Documentary Feature, Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film categories.
The change had actually been adopted by the Board of Governors more than a year ago, at a December 2011 meeting.
Academy rules still require voters in the three categories to see all five nominees before voting, but the rules no longer insist that members to view the films theatrically at special AMPAS screenings.
The third short-film category, Best Documentary Short Subject, is not affected by the new policy, even though the push to expand the pool of voters via screeners began in the Documentary Branch when it changed the doc-feature rules a year ago.
Branch governor Michael Moore told TheWrap he plans to push for changes in the doc-shorts category this year.
The new procedures have the potential to increase the number of voters in those categories from the low hundreds into the thousands. The Academy does not release the numbers of members who vote, but those who’ve participated in the process have long surmised that categories requiring members to attend special voting screenings may only attract a couple hundred voters.
This year’s nomination vote was beset by snags in the transition to online voting, with the Academy first pushing back the deadline for members to request paper ballots, then opting to automatically send ballots to every member who didn’t sign up for the online option regardless of whether they’d requested paper.
The week that ballots were due, AMPAS also pushed back the final deadline for nomination voting by one day, amid rampant speculation and anecdotal evidence that voters were confused by the new procedures.
Many people insisted that the earlier deadline and the different voting procedures would cause members to give up, and thus substantially depress the number of voters who cast ballots.
But according to three Academy sources, voter turnout was in fact the highest number in years in every category.
When people fall in love and decide to marry, the expectation is nearly always that love and marriage and the happiness they bring will last; as the vows say, till death do us part. Only the most cynical among us would think, walking down the aisle, that if things don’t work out, “We can always split.”
But the divorce rate in the United States is exactly half the marriage rate, and that does not bode well for this cherished institution.
While some divorces are clearly justified by physical or emotional abuse, intolerable infidelity, addictive behavior or irreconcilable incompatibility, experts say many severed marriages seem to have just withered and died from a lack of effort to keep the embers of love alive.
I say “embers” because the flame of love — the feelings that prompt people to forget all their troubles and fly down the street with wings on their feet — does not last very long, and cannot if lovers are ever to get anything done. The passion ignited by a new love inevitably cools and must mature into the caring, compassion and companionship that can sustain a long-lasting relationship.
Studies by Richard E. Lucas and colleagues at Michigan State University have shown that the happiness boost that occurs with marriage lasts only about two years, after which people revert to their former levels of happiness — or unhappiness.
Infatuation and passion have even shorter life spans, and must evolve into “companionate love, composed more of deep affection, connection and liking,” according to Sonya Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside.
In her new book, “The Myths of Happiness,” Dr. Lyubomirsky describes a slew of research-tested actions and words that can do wonders to keep love alive.
She points out that the natural human tendency to become “habituated” to positive circumstances — to get so used to things that make us feel good that they no longer do — can be the death knell of marital happiness. Psychologists call it “hedonic adaptation”: things that thrill us tend to be short-lived.
So Dr. Lyubomirsky’s first suggestion is to adopt measures to avert, or at least slow down, the habituation that can lead to boredom and marital dissatisfaction. While her methods may seem obvious, many married couples forget to put them into practice.
Building Companionship
Steps to slow, prevent or counteract hedonic adaptation and rescue a so-so marriage should be taken long before the union is in trouble, Dr. Lyubomirsky urges. Her recommended strategies include making time to be together and talk, truly listening to each other, and expressing admiration and affection.
Dr. Lyubomirsky emphasizes “the importance of appreciation”: count your blessings and resist taking a spouse for granted. Routinely remind yourself and your partner of what you appreciate about the person and the marriage.
Also important is variety, which is innately stimulating and rewarding and “critical if we want to stave off adaptation,” the psychologist writes. Mix things up, be spontaneous, change how you do things with your partner to keep your relationship “fresh, meaningful and positive.”
Novelty is a powerful aphrodisiac that can also enhance the pleasures of marital sex. But Dr. Lyubomirsky admits that “science has uncovered precious little about how to sustain passionate love.” She likens its decline to growing up or growing old, “simply part of being human.”
Variety goes hand in hand with another tip: surprise. With time, partners tend to get to know each other all too well, and they can fall into routines that become stultifying. Shake it up. Try new activities, new places, new friends. Learn new skills together.
Although I’ve been a “water bug” my whole life, my husband could swim only as far as he could hold his breath. We were able to enjoy the water together when we both learned to kayak.
“A pat on the back, a squeeze of the hand, a hug, an arm around the shoulder — the science of touch suggests that it can save a so-so marriage,” Dr. Lyubomirsky writes. “Introducing more (nonsexual) touching and affection on a daily basis will go a long way in rekindling the warmth and tenderness.”
She suggests “increasing the amount of physical contact in your relationship by a set amount each week” within the comfort level of the spouses’ personalities, backgrounds and openness to nonsexual touch.
Positive Energy
A long-married friend recently told me that her husband said he missed being touched and hugged. And she wondered what the two of them would talk about when they became empty-nesters. Now is the time, dear friend, to work on a more mutually rewarding relationship if you want your marriage to last.
Support your partner’s values, goals and dreams, and greet his or her good news with interest and delight. My husband’s passion lay in writing for the musical theater. When his day job moved to a different city, I suggested that rather than looking for a new one, he pursue his dream. It never became monetarily rewarding, but his vocation fulfilled him and thrilled me. He left a legacy of marvelous lyrics for more than a dozen shows.
Even a marriage that has been marred by negative, angry or hurtful remarks can often be rescued by filling the home with words and actions that elicit positive emotions, psychology research has shown.
According to studies by Barbara L. Fredrickson, a social psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a flourishing relationship needs three times as many positive emotions as negative ones. In her forthcoming book, “Love 2.0,” Dr. Fredrickson says that cultivating positive energy everyday “motivates us to reach out for a hug more often or share and inspiring or silly idea or image.”
Dr. Lyubomirsky reports that happily married couples average five positive verbal and emotional expressions toward one another for every negative expression, but “very unhappy couples display ratios of less than one to one.”
To help get your relationship on a happier track, the psychologist suggests keeping a diary of positive and negative events that occur between you and your partner, and striving to increase the ratio of positive to negative.
She suggests asking yourself each morning, “What can I do for five minutes today to make my partner’s life better?” The simplest acts, like sharing an amusing event, smiling, or being playful, can enhance marital happiness.
Chrysler introduced a new Grand Cherokee in Detroit on Monday.
DETROIT — While its hometown rivals struggle to regain momentum, Chrysler is accelerating its unlikely product revival.
The smallest of the American automakers kicked off the annual Detroit auto show on Monday with new versions of two Jeep models, the Grand Cherokee and Compass, that have helped turn the company around since its government bailout and bankruptcy in 2009.
Chrysler outperformed the industry last year with a 20.6 percent increase in domestic sales in a market that grew by 13.4 percent. By comparison, sales increased just 3.7 percent at General Motors and 4.7 percent at Ford.
Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of both Chrysler and its Italian parent Fiat, said Monday he expected Chrysler’s upward sales trend to continue this year, particularly in pickup trucks and SUVs.
“I think there’s a general feeling that the U.S. market is in healthy shape,” Mr. Marchionne said in a meeting with reporters. “And we’re certainly going to improve in the market.”
Last year was a stellar one for Chrysler. Its bread-and-butter products like the Grand Cherokee and the Ram pickup had big gains, and new cars like the Dodge Dart began to mitigate the company’s traditional reliance on larger vehicles.
Now Mr. Marchionne is laying plans to build a new, entry-level Jeep at an underutilized Fiat plant in Italy – evidence of how the American company is shepherding its European parent company through difficult times.
Sales of Chrysler products now account for more than 60 percent of the total vehicles sold under the Fiat corporate umbrella, which also includes brands like Alfa Romeo and Maserati.
When Mr. Marchionne negotiated Fiat’s acquisition of Chrysler during its federal bailout, industry executives were skeptical that the American company could thrive after the failures of its previous owners, the German carmaker Daimler and the private-equity firm Cerberus.
Now, however, “it’s not Fiat saving Chrysler, it’s Chrysler saving Fiat,” said David Cole, a founder of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Mr. Marchionne said a key part of Chrysler’s growth will come from its iconic Jeep brand, which has updated its rugged image with better fuel efficiency and improved quality.
The company showed off the first diesel-engine version of the Grand Cherokee on Monday, which officials said could get 30 miles per gallon in highway driving.
A new version of the Jeep Liberty is scheduled to be introduced later this year. Mr. Marchionne said. The compact Jeep will be built alongside a Fiat model in the Italian plant.
The plan helps solve Fiat’s glaring overcapacity issues in Europe, where vehicle sales have dropped to their lowest level in years. It also represents an aggressive step to grow the Jeep brand outside the United States.
“The brand needs an entry-level Jeep” that people can get at a lower price point, Mr. Marchionne said.
Chrysler was also close to finalizing plans to build Jeeps in China, he said.
Mr. Marchionne said it was important for Chrysler to expand its product lineup to help Fiat weather the European sales crisis, which is affecting most auto companies there.
He estimated that mass-market carmakers in Europe lost a combined 5 billion euros last year, mostly because demand fell well short of supply.
Automakers have so far announced a handful of plant closings to address the overcapacity issue. But Mr. Marchionne has consistently argued for a broader reduction in the number of factories throughout Europe.
“The gap is too large,” he said. “You can’t close a 5 billion euro gap in operating profit by tweaking the machine.”
Mr. Marchionne said that he was driving Chrysler to make up the difference in profits as Fiat falters and as comeback plans for Alfa Romeo take shape.
“We are living with the consequences of a collective inability to resolve the issue,” he said. “But this is not for the fainthearted.”
He said that overcoming the “threat of complacency” is Chrysler’s biggest issue. After the Ram pickup won the truck of the year award at the Detroit show, Mr. Marchionne cut short the celebratory mood at the company’s exhibit.
“Celebration is fine, I’m delighted,” he said. “But it’s over.”
An Egyptian court granted an appeal by former President Hosni Mubarak and ordered a new trial into the killings of hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising, a move certain to inflame the political unrest that has upset the country’s democratic transition.
The ruling was a victory for the ailing Mubarak and his Interior minister, Habib Adli, who also won his appeal. Both men, who had been sentenced to life in prison, face other criminal charges and are likely to remain in detention until a new trial in the deaths by security forces of more than 800 protesters.
“The previous ruling was unfair and illegal,” said Yousry Abdelrazeg, one of Mubarak’s lawyers, who accused the judge in the first trial of political bias. “The case was just a mess and there was no evidence against Mubarak.”
No date has been set for the new trial.
The court’s decision comes amid turmoil over an Islamist-backed constitution and outrage over the expanded powers of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. It means a bloody chapter in Egypt’s 2011 revolt will be revisited with the prospect that Mubarak, whose police state ruled for 30 years, may be absolved in a case that deepened the nation’s political differences and impassioned the Arab world.
Mubarak was convicted in June of not preventing the deaths of hundreds of protesters attacked by police and snipers during the uprising, which began on Jan. 25, 2011, and ended 18 days later when he stepped aside and the military seized power.
Mubarak argued that he had not ordered the crackdown and was unaware of the extent of the violence. A recently completed government-ordered investigation into the killings, however, reportedly found that Mubarak had monitored the deadly response by security forces in Tahrir Square via a live television feed.
The appeals court ruling came a day after prosecutors announced an investigation into allegations that Mubarak, 84, received about $1 million in illicit gifts from Al Ahram, the country’s leading state-owned newspaper. The former president has reportedly been in a military hospital since December after he fell in a prison bathroom and injured himself.
Last year’s trial riveted the nation with images of the aging Mubarak wheeled into the defendant’s cage on a stretcher, his arms crossed and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com
(Special correspondent Reem Abdellatif contributed to this report)
Spoiler warning: Firefly ended over 10 years ago and it’s been 7 years since its subsequent film, Serenity, came out, so the spoiler statute of limitations is officially up. Proceed at your own risk.
Like many fans of the Joss Whedon space western Firefly, Kyle Hill was shocked by the end of the Serenity movie, when fan-favorite character Wash (Alan Tudyk) was unceremoniously impaled by a Reaver harpoon. Unlike most fans, Hill — a research assistant with a degree in Environmental Engineering and a contributor at Scientific American — decided to try and rewrite (fictional) history by proving that Wash’s death was scientifically impossible, using the power of math, physics and fandom. His article originally appeared online at Scientific American, and Wired publishes this updated version with permission.
I was late to Firefly. Nearly 10 years after the show first aired and then was subsequently cancelled, I holed up in my room, coffee and external hard drive in hand, aiming to blaze through one of the most beloved sci-fi series.
A mix of science fiction and “spaghetti-western” genres, Firefly was wonderful. It certainly awakened the fanboy in me, and I quickly understood why my girlfriend envied me for being able to watch the series for the first time.
It all ended abruptly, due to early cancellation, with the last episodes of Firefly barely answering any central questions or exploring the rich universe that had been so lovingly crafted by creator Joss Whedon. It was to my delight to learn that in 2005 there was a full-length movie in response to public (and private) outcries for more of Serenity and her crew.
Watching Serenity let me spend a bit more time in the ‘verse, and the film thankfully resolved a number of outstanding loops justwaiting to be closed. But the forced end of Firefly also forced Joss Whedon’s hand. He put in scenes that would only have appeared in a last hurrah like Serenity. One scene in particular shook me, like the unexpected sight of a Reaver ship. It’s a scene that drove me to NASA forums and technical reports, glass manufacturers, my calculator, and eventually to this post.
Late in Serenity, after crash-landing at the mysterious base of “Mr. Universe,” pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne meets his end at the tip of a Reaver spear. The immediacy of the violence, and his wife Zoe’s touching reaction, kept my mouth agape well into the next few minutes of the film. One of my favorite characters just died, as Firefly died. I couldn’t stand it. I had to be sure.
What if the Reaver spear couldn’t plausibly make it through the forward windows of Serenity? The movie may have been set in the future, but we too have built spacecraft with windows, and they are made to withstand impacts. If I could prove that a modern shuttle window (assuming that a future window would be even better) could withstand the impact that killed Wash, I could have the ultimate in fanboy closure: the movie is “wrong,” and my version of the story lives on.
Objects in Space
In terrestrial situations, a speck of paint is less than harmless. In space, it’s deadly. Travelling at a blistering 10,000 meters per second in orbit, the equations deem it lethal. It becomes a “hypervelocity” bullet.
Our spacecraft obviously must account for this deadly debris. Tens of thousands of pieces of extraterrestrial trash litter the orbit of Earth [PDF], meaning that a shuttle’s final impact could come from an errant hex nut. Shuttles today are outfitted with shielding to prevent such disasters, and feature two-and-a-half inch thick windows—the thickest pieces of glass ever produced in the optical quality for see-through viewing.
The largest impact to a shuttle window occurred when a fleck of paint struck STS-92—a flight to the International Space Station. A shuttle window has never been penetrated by a hypervelocity impact, but it doesn’t have to be. A deformation large enough could eventually cause window failure upon repeated take-offs and re-entries.
After engineers examined the crater in the window of STS-92, the shape that best explained the damage was a sort of miniaturized plate. But to begin making comparisons, I’ll consider the fleck of paint to be a similarly sized metal sphere. This will bring the numbers in line with the hypervelocity testing that NASA has already conductBased on the size and the speed of the fleck that hit STS-92, I calculated that the window weathered an impact with around 20 Joules of kinetic energy—equivalent to four milligrams of TNT or a decently thrown baseball. It created more than enough damage to warrant a window replacement. And such replacements from serious impacts are commonplace. Robert Lee Hotz notes in the Wall Street Journalthat “NASA shuttle engineers have replaced the spacecraft’s debris-pitted windows after almost every flight since since 1981, at a cost of about $40,000 per window.”
Such little flecks can be catastrophes. An orbiter unlucky enough to be hit by anything much larger than the paint chip that hit STS-92 is in for some trouble. Debris measuring five centimeters in diameter packs the punch of a bus collision. Any larger than that and we begin making comparisons to sticks of dynamite.
The shuttle windows are tough, to be sure, surviving nearly 1,400 impacts intact over 43 sampled missions, but are they strong enough to save Wash? Tiny particles are elevated to terrifying status because of their ridiculous speeds, not their mass. Conversely, the Reaver spear that killed Wash was larger, but moving much more slowly. A few assumptions and some physics equations would determine if I could save him.
I Am A Leaf on the Wind…
To get the general dimensions of the spear that killed Wash, I had to (unfortunately) go back to the scene in question, excruciatingly slowing down an emotional moment to be replayed over and over.
Diving back into Serenity, I used an earlier Reaver chase scene to guesstimate the spear size and speed. If Reavers shoot spears slow enough to be dodged (which they do), the spear that kills Wash can’t be moving much faster than a Major League fast-ball, putting the upper limit on speed around 100 miles per hour (45 m/s). This is orders of magnitude slower than the hypervelocity impacts that a shuttle deals with, but the spear is thousands of times more massive than a fleck of paint. Assuming it’s fashioned out of an “average” metal, and given its size, I’d guess it’s around 100-200 pounds (45-90 kg).
Kinetic energy is easy enough to calculate. The kinetic energy of a moving object is one-half of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity.
This equation gives the Reaver spear a frightening 45,500 Joules at the low end. This is over 3,700 times the energy of the largest recorded impact to a space shuttle window — equivalent to a detonation of a pencil made of TNT or a medium sized anvil dropped on it.
What are the risks? via Aerospace.org
Based on hypervelocity testing undertaken by NASA, the Reaver spear would be like an aluminum sphere with a one-centimeter diameter hitting the window at 10 kilometers per second (assuming that the tip of the spear is comparable to a 1cm diameter point). Seeing that the damage threshold for a shuttle window based on this testing is 0.004 centimeters, my hopes quickly vanished. With this kind of energy, the Reaver spear could pierce a shuttle’s wing, its thermal protection tiles, or even its crew cabin.
The math doesn’t lie—Wash didn’t stand a chance.
Watch How I Soar…
I thought I had found the perfect fanboy out. The windows in Serenity looked flimsy and thin, surely not something a space-faring craft would be outfitted with. If the windows were anything like what we use to traverse the ‘verse today, perhaps all that would have happened is a jolt of fright from a deflected Reaver spear, or so I hoped.
But even delving through a hundred page NASA technical report [PDF] on impact shielding couldn’t ease my psyche.
Now, this is at its core a fanboy rant. No matter what I found, Wash dies in the movie. It’s part of the larger story and serves as a plot point, not a meaningless killing-off. But I selfishly wanted closure; I needed to resolve the dissonance between a character’s death and the fact that we know he wouldn’t have died if the networks saw better numbers from Firefly.
Maybe this is a testament to the enduring qualities of the show. To create characters important enough, and in only fifteen short stories, to warrant hours of research and calculation that ultimately proves useless in the larger story is an outcome of a great narrative. It’s typical of a fan base that will still pack a Comic-Con panel ten years after the airing of the show.
In the end, I like the story better this way. It takes a great narrative to make someone care so much about a character that he takes real world steps to resolve his own dissonance. If I could have ‘proved’ that Wash wouldn’t have been killed, a whole can of worms would open. What about the fact that Serenity was an old ship with sub-optimal gear? What about space-age technologies like super-strong window polymers? The scene obviously resonated with people (especially me), and the fact that I failed is a better story than a discussion of faulty film physics.
DALLAS (Reuters) – Grammy-winning country music singer Randy Travis had a blood alcohol level nearly twice the state’s legal limit when he was arrested last summer after a Texas state trooper found him lying naked on a road after crashing his car, authorities said.
Travis, 53, was charged on Wednesday with driving while intoxicated for the August 7 incident near his hometown of Tioga, about 60 miles north of Dallas, in which he also threatened to shoot and kill state troopers while he was being transported to jail, Grayson County prosecutors said.
Travis had a blood alcohol level of more than 0.15 percent, or nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 in Texas, authorities said in the statement issued on Thursday.
The misdemeanor charge carries up to two years in jail and a $ 4,000 fine if he is convicted.
Travis has not been charged for the threats to troopers, which remain under investigation and could be considered retaliation, a third-degree felony, the statement said.
Prosecutors and lawyers representing Travis have been actively negotiating a resolution, Grayson County District Attorney Joe Brown said in the statement, apparently hinting at a possible plea deal.
“The filing of this charge allows us to get the case into court, in order to finalize the case as soon as we can,” Brown said, noting that it took some time to complete blood alcohol tests needed by the state and defense attorneys.
In addition to winning multiple Grammy awards, Travis also has appeared in movies and television shows.
The August crash and drunken driving charge is the latest in a series of law enforcement incidents involving Travis, who is known for “Forever and Ever, Amen” and other songs.
Travis pleaded not guilty in December to assaulting a man in a church parking lot in the Dallas suburb of Plano last August. Police said Travis intervened in a dispute between a woman he was with and her estranged husband. The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum $ 500 fine. Trial is set for March 11.
He was also arrested last February on suspicion of drunken driving while sitting in his car in the parking lot of another North Texas church.
(Editing by David Bailey and Will Dunham)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.
There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.
“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.
Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.
While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.
There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.
In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.
“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”
There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.
In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.
As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.
According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.
Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.
Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.
The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.
A version of this article appeared in print on 01/13/2013, on page A21 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New York Declares Health Emergency.
WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Saturday that it will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to head off an imminent battle with Congress over raising the government’s borrowing limit.
“Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” Anthony Coley, a Treasury spokesman, said in a written statement.
The Obama administration has indicated that the only way for the country to avoid a cash-management crisis as soon as next month is for Congress to raise the “debt ceiling,” which is the statutory limit on government borrowing. The cap is $16.4 trillion.
“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”
In recent weeks, some Republicans have indicated that they would not agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agreed to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.
The White House has said it would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for Congressional authority to borrow more, and it has insisted that Congress raise the ceiling as a matter of course, to cover expenses already authorized by Congress. In broader fiscal negotiations, it has said it would not agree to spending cuts without commensurate tax increases.
The idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin drew wide if puzzling attention recently after some bloggers and economic commentators had suggested it as an alternative to involving Congress.
By virtue of an obscure law meant to apply to commemorative coins, the Treasury secretary could order the production of a high-denomination platinum coin and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, where it would count as a government asset and give the country more breathing room under its debt ceiling. Once Congress raised the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could then order the coin destroyed.
Mr. Carney, the press secretary, fielded questions about the theoretical tactic at a news conference last week. But the idea is now formally off the table.
The White House has also rejected the idea that it could mount a challenge to the debt ceiling itself, on the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that the “validity of the public debt” of the United States “shall not be questioned.”
The Washington Post earlier published a report that the Obama administration had rejected the platinum-coin idea.
Los Angeles police continued to search for armed suspects who took 14 hostages at a Nordstrom Rack store in Westchester this week, brutally assaulting some of them.
Law enforcement sources said detectives were following several promising leads in tracking the suspects.
Several of the hostages -- all store employees -- were hurt in the incident. But their injuries were not life-threatening, and by Friday afternoon the victims had all been treated and released.
The gunmen apparently stormed the store about 10 p.m. Thursday, as it was closing.
Two employees hid in a restroom, authorities said. The gunmen herded the rest into another restroom on the third level, according to dispatch audio posted on the Venice 311 server. There, at least two employees were told to strip.
One woman was dragged to a separate room, where she was sexually assaulted, police said. A second woman was stabbed in the neck, police said, and a third hostage was pistol-whipped.
After officers arrived, a vehicle with tinted windows and its headlights off sped out of the parking garage. The driver wore a black hoodie and the passenger a white T-shirt, according to dispatch recordings.
"White SUV! White SUV! White Ford Explorer!" an officer barked. "High rate of speed leaving the parking lot!"
"Go pursue that vehicle!" another officer said.
They did, to no avail.
"We lost sight of that vehicle," an officer said over the radio. "We're going on the 405 north. I need other units to try Sepulveda. We don't know where vehicle is now."
The suspects had apparently escaped — though officers didn't know that at the time and waited to move into the store. They called in a SWAT team, which arrived about 1 a.m. The mall remained on lockdown — stranding at least 200 moviegoers at the cineplex.
Simeon Campbell, 26, and two of his friends had gone to the 10 p.m. showing of "A Haunted House."
"It was funny until we got out," he said.
Theater employees told them the mall had been closed off but did not explain why. Some moviegoers were escorted to the second floor, where Campbell looked out a window.
"It became real when I saw the SWAT team," he said.
Some moviegoers munched on popcorn that theater employees handed out. Others tried to nap. Campbell paced, his head throbbing and his stomach in knots.
"What if they run in here? What if they have accomplices?" he said he thought.
The wait ended sometime before 3 a.m., when some of the Nordstrom hostages called 911, described their injuries and asked for medical aid, according to dispatch recordings.
A federal judge late Friday blocked enforcement of a California voter-approved measure that would have dramatically curtailed the online, First Amendment rights of registered sex offenders.
Proposition 35, which passed with 81 percent of the vote in November, would have required anyone who is a registered sex offender — including people with misdemeanor offenses such as indecent exposure and whose offenses were not related to activity on the internet — to turn over to law enforcement a list of all identifiers they use online as well as a list of service providers they use.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco also said the measure was overbroad.
“The challenged provisions have some nexus with the government’s legitimate purpose of combating online sex offenses and human trafficking, but the government may not regulate expression in such a manner that a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance its goals,” he wrote.
The Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act would also have forced sex offenders to fork over to law enforcement their e-mail addresses, user and screen names, or any other identifier they used for instant messaging, for social networking sites or online forums and in internet chat rooms.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately filed suit after its passage. The measure would currently affect some 75,000 sex offenders registered in California, but the law also requires those convicted of human trafficking to register as sex offenders, thus widening the pool of people affected.
The measure carries three-year prison penalties.
Henderson had tentatively blocked enforcement of the measure immediately after it passed. His decision Friday is in the form of a preliminary injunction. Next up is a trial on the lawsuit’s merits, if it gets that far.
David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
