Renée Zellweger Puckers Up with Doyle Bramhall II in Hawaii: Photo
Label: LifestyleDoyle Bramhall II and Renée Zellweger
AKM-GSI
Renée Zellweger was feeling the love – and the surf – during her recent Hawaiian vacation.
Zellweger, 43, joined her boyfriend, musician Doyle Bramhall II, 44, for some kayaking, paddle-boarding and romantic kissing on the beach. Wearing matching black beachwear, the Texas natives were not shy about their happiness, holding hands and smiling broadly as they vacationed together.
But soon it's back to work for Zellweger, who's set to appear on the Oscar telecast Sunday in Los Angeles. The Academy Award winner will reportedly join her Chicago cast as presenters, marking the 10th anniversary of their musical film earning Best Picture honors.
Bramhall, a guitarist and songwriter who toured with Roger Waters and Eric Clapton, was last linked to Sheryl Crow in 2011.
The 85th annual Academy Awards will air live on ABC starting at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on Sunday, Feb. 24, from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.
FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug
Label: HealthWASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.
The drug Kadcyla (kad-SY'-luh) from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a double-shot of anti-tumor poison.
Cancer researchers say the drug may offer a clear advantage over older drugs because it delivers more medication with fewer side effects.
The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2.
The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.
Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.
FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.
Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.
FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug.
Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.
Kadcyla was co-developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech and ImmunoGen Inc., of Waltham, Mass. ImmunoGen developed the technology that binds the drug ingredients together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.
Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 33 cents, or 2.27 percent, to $14.63 in midday trading.
Eric Garcetti's role in L.A. budget fixes is in dispute
Label: BusinessPressed in the race for mayor of Los Angeles to say how he would fix a persistent budget gap that has led to the gutting of many city services, Eric Garcetti urges voters to look at what he has done in the past.
The onetime City Council president claims credit for reforms that he said cut the City Hall shortfall to just over $200 million from more than $1 billion. He sees "tremendous progress," principally in reducing pension and healthcare costs, and asserts: "I delivered that."
But the truth is in dispute. Although there is not a singular view about any aspect of the city's troubled finances, most of those in the thick of recent budget fights depict Garcetti not as a fiscal hard-liner but as a conciliator who used his leadership position to chart a middle ground on the most significant changes.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, city administrative officer Miguel Santana and one of Garcetti's rivals in the mayoral race, Councilwoman Jan Perry, were among those who pushed for bigger workforce reductions and larger employee contributions toward pensions and healthcare. Labor leaders and their champions on the City Council, including Paul Koretz and Richard Alarcon, sought to cushion the blow for workers.
Garcetti and his supporters say he moderated between those extremes. His critics said he worried too much about process and airing every viewpoint rather than focusing relentlessly on shoring up the city's bottom line.
"It was through the mayor's persistence and steadfast position that we got ongoing concessions," said Santana, the chief budget official for Los Angeles. "It was in collaboration with the council leadership that we finally reached agreements with labor."
The $1-billion-plus deficit Garcetti speaks of shrinking refers not to a single year but to the total of budget gaps that confronted Los Angeles over four years if no corrective action had been taken. The city's fiscal crisis worsened during that time because Garcetti and his fellow council members — including Perry and mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel — approved a city employee pay raise of 25% over five years just before the country stumbled into the recession. (Greuel left the council in 2009 when she was elected city controller.)
Although Garcetti focuses on his role, a portion of the financial improvements were outside his control. The state's elimination of redevelopment agencies in 2012 returned millions to L.A.'s general fund. Tax revenue also ticked upward with the economic recovery.
Garcetti's position as council president from 2006 through 2011 did put him at the center of debate about annual shortfalls that ranged to more than $400 million.
In 2009, he supported an early retirement plan that knocked 2,400 workers off the payroll. "I really pushed that through," the councilman said in an interview. Two participants in confidential contract talks at the heart of the deal had diametrically opposed views. "He made it happen, period," one said; the other offered: "I wouldn't say he was a major mover."
The plan saves the city a maximum of $230 million a year in salary and pension reductions in the short run. But Los Angeles borrowed to spread the costs of the program over 15 years, with current employees and retirees expected to shoulder the cost of the early exits.
The early retirements are expected to do nothing to resolve the long-term "structural deficit" — the $200 million to $400 million a year that Los Angeles spends above what it takes in. And early retirements could even be a net negative in the long run if, as city revenue recovers, new employees are put in those 2,400 empty positions too quickly.
In 2010 the city completed a budget fix that did attack the structural imbalance.
Garcetti's initial proposal called for upping the retirement age for new city employees to 60 from 55 and requiring workers to contribute a minimum of 2% of salary toward their retiree health care.
Budget chief Santana offered a markedly tougher plan. It required a 4% retiree health contribution, halved the health subsidy for retirees and capped pension benefits at 75% of salary instead of 100%. Santana's plan, also for new employees, became the basis of the reform.
Some who served with Garcetti on the council committee that leads employee negotiations pushed for even greater sacrifices. But Garcetti fought against ratcheting up demands on workers, saying it would be useless to approve a plan that would not survive subsequent union votes.
The councilman's greatest contribution may have come after city leaders set their position on pensions. Garcetti took the unusual step of visiting groups of workers. Some employees booed. Some asked him why city lawmakers, among the highest paid in the nation at $178,000 a year, didn't cut their own salaries.
"There was a lot of anger," said a labor leader who spoke on condition of anonymity because that union has not endorsed in the race. "But Eric talked to people as if they were adults and stayed until he answered all their questions. People appreciated him ... taking that kind of heat."
Matt Szabo, a former deputy mayor who helped negotiate with labor, said Garcetti deserved "every bit of credit" he has claimed for deficit reduction. "He knew he was running for mayor, and he was doing the right thing, but it was something that was going to cost him later" in terms of union support, said Szabo, who is running to replace Garcetti on the council.
Most of the employee groups that have endorsed thus far in the mayor's race have come out for Greuel. One political advantage for the controller: She left the council in 2009, before the city began making its toughest demands on workers.
Garcetti found himself stuck the middle again with another 2010 vote, this one over the elimination of 232 jobs — most of them in libraries and day care operations at city parks. Garcetti voted for the layoffs. Later he voted to reconsider, though he said recently that he intended only to re-air the issue, not to keep the workers on the job.
Labor leaders faulted Garcetti for giving the appearance he might be ready to save the jobs when he really wasn't. The reductions remain a sore point, because a "poison pill" in the contract required that any layoffs be accompanied by immediate pay raises for remaining city employees. Fierce disagreement remains over whether the layoffs saved the city any money.
"That became part of the negative picture" of Garcetti, said one labor leader, who asked not to be named out of concern about alienating a possible future mayor. The candidate said in an interview that he frequently found himself hewing a middle ground between some colleagues "who simply hope more revenue would come in" and others who wanted to use an "ax," making indiscriminate cuts. He added: "To me, both views were equally unacceptable."
Critics find Garcetti too malleable, ready to shift to the last argument he has heard. But others appreciate his quest for the middle, saying the fact he sometimes irritated both budget hard-liners and unions showed he had taken a reasoned approach.
"The criticism of Eric is also sort of the good news," said one of the union reps. "He has this very process-y, kumbaya, can't-we-all-get-along style. It drove us all crazy. But now I really miss it because it seems to be all politics over policy."
james.rainey@latimes.com
Taylor Swift Channels Beyoncé at Brit Awards
Label: LifestyleDoes Sasha Fierce have a pop-country cousin?
During a sassy performance of "I Knew You Were Trouble" at Wednesday's Brit Awards, Taylor Swift shed a white wedding dress to reveal a black embellished jumpsuit, sexy boots – and some familiar moves.
Striking a pose, tossing her hair and even falling to her knees to belt out the hit song, Swift, 23, resembled Beyoncé in her highly buzzed-about Super Bowl halftime performance on Feb. 3. Flip through a carousel of photos from the performance above.
At the awards ceremony at London's O2 arena, Swift handed out the best British female prize to soulful Scottish singer and songwriter Emeli Sandé, who also took home the best album prize for her debut, Our Version of Events.
A nominee for international female solo artist, Swift lost in that category to another American, Lana Del Rey.
Adults get 11 percent of calories from fast food
Label: HealthATLANTA (AP) — On an average day, U.S. adults get roughly 11 percent of their calories from fast food, a government study shows.
That's down slightly from the 13 percent reported the last time the government tried to pin down how much of the American diet is coming from fast food. Eating fast food too frequently has been seen as a driver of America's obesity problem.
For the research, about 11,000 adults were asked extensive questions about what they ate and drank over the previous 24 hours to come up with the results.
Among the findings:
— Young adults eat more fast food than their elders; 15 percent of calories for ages 20 to 39 and dropping to 6 percent for those 60 and older.
— Blacks get more of their calories from fast-food, 15 percent compared to 11 percent for whites and Hispanics.
— Young black adults got a whopping 21 percent from the likes of Wendy's, Taco Bell and KFC.
The figures are averages. Included in the calculations are some people who almost never eat fast food, as well as others who eat a lot of it.
The survey covers the years 2007 through 2010 and was released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors couldn't explain why the proportion of calories from fast food dropped from the 13 percent found in a survey for 2003 through 2006.
One nutrition professor cast doubts on the latest results, saying 11 percent seemed implausibly low. New York University's Marion Nestle said it wouldn't be surprising if some people under-reported their hamburgers, fries and milkshakes since eating too much fast food is increasingly seen as something of a no-no.
"If I were a fast-food company, I'd say 'See, we have nothing to do with obesity! Americans are getting 90 percent of their calories somewhere else!'" she said.
The study didn't include the total number of fast-food calories, just the percentage. Previous government research suggests that the average U.S. adult each day consumes about 270 calories of fast food — the equivalent of a small McDonald's hamburger and a few fries.
The new CDC study found that obese people get about 13 percent of daily calories from fast food, compared with less than 10 percent for skinny and normal-weight people.
There was no difference seen by household income, except for young adults. The poorest — those with an annual household income of less than $30,000 — got 17 percent of their calories from fast food, while the figure was under 14 percent for the most affluent 20- and 30-somethings with a household income of more than $50,000.
That's not surprising since there are disproportionately higher numbers of fast-food restaurants in low-income neighborhoods, Nestle said.
Fast food is accessible and "it's cheap," she said.
Doctor sexually assaulted unconscious patients, police say
Label: BusinessAn Orange County anesthesiologist convicted of sexually assaulting three unconscious female patients has been sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation, despite the objections of prosecutors who wanted state prison time.
Yashwant Balgiri Giri, 60, pleaded guilty to a court offer to multiple felony counts related to the sexual battery of patients, including a 16-year-old, according to a statement from the Orange County district attorney's office.
Giri will have to register as a lifetime sex offender and will have his medical license revoked, in addition to the jail time and probation.
Prosecutors sought a state prison sentence, citing a violation of his "position of power and trust" with the women at a particularly vulnerable time.
Giri, who lives in Cypress, was working at Placentia-Linda Hospital at the time of the crimes, prosecutors said. He previously worked at several hospitals in Anaheim and Lakewood.
Through a spokeswoman, Placentia-Linda Hospital declined to comment.
Prosecutors said that in February 2009, while a 16-year-old was unconscious from medication, Giri assaulted the girl when a scrub nurse preparing surgery tools had her back turned. The nurse witnessed the assault, prosecutors said, and reported it immediately to a hospital official.
Prosecutors allege that the hospital did not report the incident to police at the time.
In March 2011, prosecutors said, a hospital employee witnessed Giri fondling the breasts of a 36-year-old woman while she was under anesthesia for an outpatient surgery procedure.
An employee allegedly witnessed the incident Prosecutors said the fondling continued for an extended period of time, as his actions were concealed from the surgeon and nurse.
The alleged assault was reported to a hospital official and then to Placentia police, prosecutors said.
Soon after an investigation began, Giri resigned from his duties at the hospital.
After he was arrested in May 2011, a third alleged victim stepped forward, saying she had been assaulted by Giri.
In April 2010, prosecutors said, Giri assaulted a 27-year-old woman while she was being put under anesthesia but before she was unconscious. Prosecutors said he touched the woman under the pretense of performing an examination, although it had no legitimate medical purpose.
During a sentencing hearing, a statement from the then-36-year-old woman, who was fondled, was read by prosecutors.
"His actions make me question every single doctor, nurse, medical decision and procedure I encounter within my everyday life," she said. "I not only fear for myself, I fear for my child, my friends, my family. This is a burden caused by the perverted actions of this predator."
ALSO:
O.C. shootings: Listen to frantic 911 call
Hollywood Park Casino might lay off all 600 workers
San Diego sheriff confident 2 wounded deputies will fully recover
-- Rick Rojas
Photo: Yashwant Balgiri Giri. Credit: Orange County district attorney's office.
IHT Rendezvous: True or False? The Tussle Over Ping Fu's Memoir
Label: WorldDid Ping Fu, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman and author of a recent memoir, “Bend, not Break,” make up her horrible experiences during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in order to gain United States citizenship? Did they help her become an American by claiming political asylum?
That’s what her critics, many of them fellow Chinese-Americans, say. It’s an accusation that can stick. As a recent New York Times investigation showed, claiming persecution has spawned an immigration industry involving lawyers prepping clients to make false asylum claims.
As I write in my Letter from China this week, Ms. Fu is being accused of making up a lot of things in her memoir. She’s also a successful entrepreneur: the U.S. government honored Ms. Fu, the founder of the software company Geomagic (in the process of being sold to 3D Systems), with a “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award.
Ms. Fu is on the board of the White House’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is a member of the National Council on Women in Technology, according to the Web site of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Ms. Fu, who says in her memoir she was “quietly deported” to the U.S. in 1984 for writing about female infanticide while still a college student, denies the accusations. But until now she hadn’t explained in public how she became an American.
In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, she said, apparently for the first time, the reason she kept quiet was she was trying to protect her first husband, an American, whom she does not mention in her memoir. The marriage took place while she was living in California, she said.
“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later. Until now she had kept silent because of a “smear” campaign against her online, mostly by fellow Chinese who accuse her of lying, which extended to real-life harassment, she said: “They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.” She said the accusers, who are “angry” for reasons she doesn’t really understand, contacted U.S. immigration authorities to challenge her award and her citizenship, as well as shareholders of 3D Systems to warn them she was a “liar,” and not to buy Geomagic. Her second husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, whom she has since divorced, received many “hate e-mails,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt innocent people.”
If a first, unpublicized marriage might lay to rest one contentious issue, there are others. Some were the result of exaggeration or unclear communication with her ghostwriter, MeiMei Fox of Los Angeles, she said.
In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely criticized account of the ‘‘period police,’’ the authorities who checked a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers — an invasion of the woman’s body.
Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but it didn’t get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she said, but the mistake went into print anyway.
In general, Ms. Fox may have ‘‘just made some searches on the Internet that maybe weren’t correct,’’ Ms. Fu said.
Chiefly the errors involved use of the words ‘‘all, never, any,’’ that generalized unacceptably, Ms. Fu said. And, ‘‘She doesn’t know China’s geography,’’ she said.
At the beginning of her memoir, Ms. Fu writes of being kidnapped by a Vietnamese-American on arrival in the U.S. state of New Mexico and locked in his apartment to care for his very young children, whose mother had left, in a bizarre incident. A spokeswoman at the Albuquerque Police Department’s Records Office, where the alleged kidnapping took place, said she could not locate such an incident in their records. Asked about it, Ms. Fu repeated that she did not press charges as, fresh from China, she was terrified of all police, “So I don’t know how they keep records, if there is no criminal charges or record.”
And in an e-mail to me, she admitted she made mistakes about a magazine she said she helped edit, called Wugou, or “No Hook,” produced in 1979 by students at her college, then called the Jiangsu Teacher’s College (later it changed its name to Suzhou University, she said.) It was not that magazine but another one, This Generation, that was taken to a meeting in Beijing of student magazine writers from around the country, she wrote in the e-mail. “A good case that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong,” she wrote.
But bigger questions about the scale of the online vitriol from parts of the Chinese and Chinese-American community remain. “I really haven’t known China for 20-something years, and it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote would generate so much anger,” she said. In the last years, “as China got stronger, nationalistic views got stronger,” she said, making a “civil conversation” about disagreements apparently harder.
Additional reporting by Cindy Hao in Seattle.
Princess Diana Gowns for Sale Again
Label: LifestyleSome of the gorgeous and historic dresses worn by Princess Diana are headed for auction – again!
The most famous of the 10 dresses, which were originally sold by Diana in New York a few months before her death in 1997, is the midnight blue gown that Diana wore as she twirled around the dance floor at the White House with John Travolta in 1985. Diana graced the Victor Edelstein-designed velvet dress for the state dinner given by President Ronald and Nancy Reagan in honor of the princess's then-husband, Prince Charles.
London-based auctioneer Kerry Taylor is selling the gowns, with the collection including some of the princess's favorite designers: Zandra Rhodes, Catherine Walker and Bruce Oldfield.
The sale, "Fit for a Princess: Important dresses formerly in the collection of Diana, Princess of Wales," will take place March 19. From romantic ballgowns to chiffon cocktail dresses and then, as she matured, rich velvets in darker colors, the dresses were worn for official formal events, such as visits to Austria, Australia, Brazil, India and South Korea, as well the U.S.
Others she modeled for leading portrait photographers such as Mario Testino and Lord Snowdon, says Kerry Taylor.
A pink "lavishly embroidered evening gown and bolero" by Catherine Walker made for her visit to India is expected to go for up to $180,000. A sea-green gown – also by Walker – made for a tour to Austria could get as much as $50,000.
The original sale at Christie's auction house in New York came at a time when post-divorce Diana was re-assessing her life, and, she revealed at the time, the idea to sell the dresses to aid charity had been her son Prince William's.
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