State population rises in sign of economic recovery

California's population has grown to 37.8 million, continuing the state's trend of slowing but steady growth — about 1% annually — over the last decade, according to new population estimates released by the state Department of Finance.

The population increased by 256,000 people since July 2011, a growth rate of 0.7%. It's roughly the same growth rate as last year, but some experts pointed to an uptick in the number of people moving in and out of California and between counties as a sign of economic recovery.

"We've been mired in this deep slump, economically and demographically, and we're all looking for signs of revival," said USC demography and urban planning professor Dowell Myers. "During the recession, everyone froze. People didn't move as fast as normal."

In Los Angeles County, more people moved out than into the county in 2011, but at a significantly slower rate than in 2010, the state numbers show.

"Overall, movements are speeding up in both directions, but L.A.'s attraction is winning the war," said Myers, who also noticed an increase in movement in the entire western region, particularly among young adults. "It means the system is unfreezing, it's loosening up....This is the beginning."

Recent estimates by the American Community Survey showed that about 100,000 more Californians left the state than moved here. Most of those who left headed to Texas, Arizona and Oregon.

But state demographers cautioned that the out-of-state migration numbers may appear misleading because immigrants often enter through California before settling in other states.

"People see that so many people are leaving the state, and they think 'oh, it's because California business is bad,' " said Bill Schooling, chief of demographics research for the state Department of Finance. "It's more that California, particularly with counties like L.A., is a huge gateway state."

Los Angeles remains the state's most populous county, with more than 9.9 million residents. More than 26% of the state's entire population lives within the Los Angeles County limits.

Schooling noted that much of the state's population growth was concentrated in coastal counties, where people tend to be younger and more mobile.

Economists also said that job growth has been much stronger along the coast, particularly with growth in foreign trade, technology and tourism.

"The state recovery really started in the Bay Area, spread to Orange County and San Diego, and in the last six months, has spread to L.A. County," said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. "Slow population growth is consistent with the early phase of recovery."

Births helped maintain the population growth, with 503,000 babies born in California between July 2011 and July 2012. There were 234,000 deaths in the state during the same time, a slight increase from past years, according to the state estimates.

Until the state becomes more stable economically, it is difficult to make long-term population projections, experts said.

"This is a step in the right direction," Myers said. "And we will, we should, have much better news next year."

rosanna.xia@latimes.com

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IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Dec. 13

NEWS President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have resorted to firing ballistic missiles at rebel fighters inside Syria, Obama administration officials said Wednesday, escalating a nearly two-year-old civil war as the government struggles to slow the momentum of a gaining insurgency. Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt report.

A former senior commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, Zdravko Tolimir, was convicted of genocide on Wednesday and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the killings of thousands of prisoners near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Marlise Simons reports.

German lawmakers on Wednesday passed legislation ensuring parents the right to have their boys circumcised, bringing a close to months of legal uncertainty set off by a regional court’s ruling that equated the practice with bodily harm. Melissa Eddy reports from Berlin.

After a raid at Deutsche Bank’s headquarters, the company disclosed Wednesday that two of its highest-ranking executives were a focus of a tax evasion investigation, dealing a fresh blow to the German institution’s already battered reputation. Jack Ewing reports from Frankfurt.

Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries left their 30 million-barrel-per-day quota for oil production intact Wednesday, indicating the cartel’s satisfaction with current crude prices and its reluctance to do anything to further weaken the world economy. Stanley Reed reports from London and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

Tripoli is no longer known for its meandering souks, its commerce or its culture: The modern-day city is known for its widespread poverty, high levels of corruption and repeated bouts of violence. Josh Wood reports from Tripoli, Lebanon.

In October, the government of Cyprus announced it was negotiating licensing deals with 15 companies to explore for natural gas in a deep-water zone off the island’s southwest coast. The government says it expects to sign four contracts early next year — raising deep concerns over the possible reaction of Turkey, which has never recognized the Republic of Cyprus or its maritime borders since the de facto division of the island in 1974. Stephen Glain reports from Nicosia, Cyprus.

ARTS After traveling through Russia, setting up shop at Tate Modern in London and welcoming more than 350,000 visitors since its creation in 2009, the Museum of Everything has parked its 500 works of outsider art in Paris for the winter, at the end of a dark alleyway in St Germain des Prés in what used to be a catholic seminary. Saskia de Rothschild writes from Paris.

A new Paris Opera production of Bizet’s “Carmen” at the Bastille involves a suitcase, a wedding dress and a Marilyn Monroe wig. George Loomis reviews.

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U.S. federal agency to test RIM’s BlackBerry 10

TORONTO (Reuters) – Research In Motion said a U.S. federal agency, which recently outlined plans to move away from BlackBerry in favor of Apple Inc’s iPhone, is now set to begin testing RIM‘s new BlackBerry 10 platform and devices.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), will early next year begin a pilot program on RIM’s new line of BlackBerry 10 smartphones and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES 10), which allows corporations and government users to run the new devices on their networks, a RIM spokeswoman said late on Wednesday.

The news, which comes just as shares of the embattled company rallied to their highest close in seven months, signals that RIM’s BlackBerry 10 platform is gaining some traction ahead of its official launch next month.

RIM, a one-time pioneer in the smartphone industry, has lost market share in recent years to the iPhone and devices powered by Google Inc’s market-leading Android operating system, even among the business audience who once used BlackBerry devices exclusively.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is now seeking to persuade both corporations and government users to stick with its smartphones, which have long been valued for their strong security features. It promises that its new line of devices, which will be powered by the BlackBerry 10 operating system, will be both smoother and faster than previous BlackBerry phones.

RIM is betting that these new devices – to be launched on January 30 – will revive its fortunes. But that may well depend to a large extent on the response from enterprise customers, many of whom have recently begun to flee to rival platforms.

ICE is one such example. The agency, in October, announced plans to end a long relationship with RIM, stating that its now aging line-up of BlackBerry devices could “no longer meet the mobile technology needs of the agency.

At the time, ICE outlined intentions to buy iPhones for more than 17,600 employees. It is not immediately clear whether the agency plans to revisit this plan or whether its intends to use RIM’s new BES 10 platform to manage both iPhones and BlackBerry devices. A spokeswoman for the agency was not immediately able to comment on the pilot program or the agency’s plans.

SHARES SURGE

The news comes soon after yet another rally in RIM shares on Wednesday, after Eric Jackson – a long-time bear on RIM’s stock – penned an opinion piece on his now bullish stance on the company.

Jackson, the founder of Ironfire Capital, in his piece, said parallels drawn by some analysts between RIM and its now-defunct rival Palm are flawed, as Palm never had the kind of installed subscriber base that RIM enjoys.

In his article, published on Wednesday on the TheStreet.com, Jackson contends that RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 devices have much better odds of success than Palm’s Pre device, which failed to capture a following despite positive reviews on the device and its operating system.

Jackson, who was short RIM’s stock for an extended period, argues that the positive sentiment building in RIM’s stock ahead of the launch of the make-or-break line of devices is unlikely to dissipate in a hurry, as a large portion of RIM’s 80 million subscribers are likely to upgrade to BB10 when the new devices are launched. Jackson said he now has a long position in RIM.

Shares in the company rose 5.6 percent to close at $ 13.31 on the Nasdaq – their highest close since May 1. Its Toronto-listed shares rose 5.8 percent to close at C$ 13.14.

The stock has more than doubled in price since September 24, when the shares were trading slightly above the $ 6 level in both New York and Toronto. The wave of optimism around BB10 has in recent weeks been bolstered by a number of analyst upgrades on the stock.

(Editing by Dan Grebler and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Tevin Hunte Is 'So Happy' After His Voice Elimination

TV Watch

The Voice

By Jessica Herndon and Julia Haskins

12/12/2012 at 07:45 PM EST

Team Cee Lo's Trevin Hunte was eliminated on Tuesday's episode of The Voice, but the soulful singer isn't letting the end of this journey hold him back.

"I feel like the best person on the planet Earth. I am so happy and excited to be honest," Hunte told PEOPLE after the show. I feel like a weight has been lifted. Being away from family and friends and what you're used to was definitely a hard thing for me."

Hunte is looking forward to his mom's cooking and seeing his friends back home, and he won't waste a second wondering what if he'd made it further.

"I have no regrets. I am glad that I took a leap of faith and auditioned," he said. "I auditioned for American Idol and told my family I didn't have the strength to do it again. But I am definitely happy and excited that I made it this far."

And he still has a long way to go. "I'm only 18," he said. "I'm just really excited."

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Congress examines science behind HGH test for NFL

WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressional committee has opened a hearing to examine the science behind a human growth hormone test the NFL wants to start using on its players.

Nearly two full seasons have passed since the league and the players' union signed a labor deal that set the stage for HGH testing.

The NFL Players Association won't concede the validity of a test that's used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball, and the sides haven't been able to agree on a scientist to help resolve that impasse.

Among the witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday is Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dick Butkus. In his prepared statement, Butkus writes: "Now, let's get on with it. The HGH testing process is proven to be reliable."

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Hugh Hefner's Engagement Ring to Crystal Harris Revealed

By Mike Fleeman

12/11/2012 at 07:00 PM EST

The wedding's back on – though it may be a good idea to save that gift receipt.

Hugh Hefner, 86, officially confirms that he is once again engaged to Crystal Harris, 26, telling his Twitter followers, "I've given Crystal Harris a ring. I love the girl."

And to prove it, Harris posted photos of the big diamond sparkler, calling it "my beautiful ring."

Neither announced a wedding date, though sources tell PEOPLE they're planning to tie the knot at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve.

Whether that still happens remains to be seen.

This is the plan they had in 2011 – a wedding at the mansion – except that Harris called it off just days before the nuptials were scheduled to happen in front of 300 invited guests.

Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris

David Livingston / Getty

The onetime Playmate of the Month then ripped Hef's bedroom skills, calling him a two-second man, to which Hefner replied, "I missed a bullet" by not marrying her.

A year later, Hefner's "runaway bunny" bounded back to him.

• Reporting by JENNIFER GARCIA

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DA investigating Texas' troubled $3B cancer agency

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Turmoil surrounding an unprecedented $3 billion cancer-fighting effort in Texas worsened Tuesday when its executive director offered his resignation and the state's chief public corruption prosecutor announced an investigation into the beleaguered agency.

No specific criminal allegations are driving the latest probe into the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, said Gregg Cox, director of the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit. But his influential office opened a case only weeks after the embattled agency disclosed that an $11 million grant to a private company bypassed review.

That award is the latest trouble in a tumultuous year for CPRIT, which controls the nation's second-largest pot of cancer research dollars. Amid the mounting problems, the agency announced Tuesday that Executive Director Bill Gimson had submitted his letter of resignation.

"Unfortunately, I have also been placed in a situation where I feel I can no longer be effective," Gimson wrote in a letter dated Monday.

Gimson said the troubles have resulted in "wasted efforts expended in low value activities" at the agency, instead of a focused fight against cancer. Gimson offered to stay on until January, and the agency's board must still approve his request to step down.

His departure would complete a remarkable house-cleaning at CPRIT in a span of just eight months. It began in May, when Dr. Alfred Gilman resigned as chief science officer in protest over a different grant that the Nobel laureate wanted approved by a panel of scientists. He warned it would be "the bomb that destroys CPRIT."

Gilman was followed by Chief Commercialization Officer Jerry Cobbs, whose resignation in November came after an internal audit showed Cobbs included an $11 million proposal in a funding slate without a required outside review of the project's merits. The lucrative grant was given to Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics, a biomedical startup.

Gimson chalked up Peloton's award to an honest mistake and has said that, to his knowledge, no one associated with CPRIT stood to benefit financially from the company receiving the taxpayer funds. That hasn't satisfied some members of the agency's governing board, who called last week for more assurances that no one personally profited.

Cox said he has been following the agency's problems and his office received a number of concerned phone calls. His department in Austin is charged with prosecuting crimes related to government officials; his most famous cases include winning a conviction against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2010 on money laundering charges.

"We have to gather the facts and figure what, if any, crime occurred so that (the investigation) can be focused more," Cox said.

Gimson's resignation letter was dated the same day the Texas attorney general's office also announced its investigation of the agency. Cox said his department would work cooperatively with state investigators, but he made clear the probes would be separate.

Peloton's award marks the second time this year that a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant authorized by CPRIT instigated backlash and raised questions about oversight. The first involved the $20 million grant to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston that Gilman described as a thin proposal that should have first been scrutinized by an outside panel of scientific peer-reviewers, even though none was required under the agency's rules.

Dozens of the nation's top scientists agreed. They resigned en masse from the agency's peer-review panels along with Gilman. Some accused the agency of "hucksterism" and charting a politically-driven path that was putting commercial product-development above science.

The latest shake-up at CPRIT caught Gilman's successor off-guard. Dr. Margaret Kripke, who was introduced to reporters Tuesday, acknowledged that she wasn't even sure who she would be answering to now that Gimson was stepping down. She said that although she wasn't with the agency when her predecessor announced his resignation, she was aware of the concerns and allegations.

"I don't think people would resign frivolously, so there must be some substance to those concerns," Kripke said.

Kripke also acknowledged the challenge of restocking the peer-review panels after the agency's credibility was so publicly smeared by some of the country's top scientists. She said she took the job because she felt the agency's mission and potential was too important to lose.

Only the National Institutes of Health doles out more cancer research dollars than CPRIT, which has awarded more than $700 million so far.

Gov. Rick Perry told reporters in Houston on Tuesday that he wasn't previously aware of the resignation but said Gimson's decision to step down was his own.

Joining the mounting criticism of CPRIT is the woman credited with brainstorming the idea for the agency in the first place. Cathy Bonner, who served under former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, teamed with cancer survivor Lance Armstrong in selling Texas voters in 2007 on a constitutional amendment to create an unprecedented state-run effort to finance a war on disease.

Now Bonner says politics have sullied an agency that she said was built to fund research, not subsidize private companies.

"There appears to be a cover-up going on," Bonner said.

Peloton has declined comment about its award and has referred questions to CPRIT. The agency has said the company wasn't aware that its application was never scrutinized by an outside panel, as required under agency rules.

___

Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber

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Grant to aid UC Berkeley's undocumented students

UC Berkeley announced a $1-million grant Tuesday to boost financial aid for undocumented students, which is thought to be the largest gift of its kind in the nation.

The donation from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund will supplement state aid for undocumented students that is scheduled to roll out over the next two semesters in a policy change authorized by the California Dream Act. Undocumented students will be eligible for state aid but not for federal grants or loans, and the donation — along with other private funds — will help fill in the gaps, officials said.

Starting next fall, the donation is expected to aid about 100 students a year with annual grants of $4,000 to $6,000 until the funds run out, officials said.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau said Tuesday that the Haas Fund gift grew out of a dinner he hosted last year to which he invited some undocumented students and some past UC donors, including Haas family members. The students talked about their immigration history and how they came to enroll at UC, deeply impressing the guests, he recalled.

"The individual stories of these students are so compelling," he said. "They are heroic. They encounter … challenges that very few of our students have to deal with." The Haas Fund later made the donation without a direct solicitation, he said.

Birgeneau said one of the biggest challenges for undocumented college students is that they cannot legally work to earn extra money for living expenses or books, even if they receive significant aid for tuition.

The extended Haas family, whose fortune comes from Levi Strauss Co., which makes jeans, has been generous to UC and San Francisco-area charities. Haas Fund President Ira Hirschfield called the future scholarship recipients "motivated, hardworking and inspiring."

An estimated 200 undocumented undergraduates attend UC Berkeley, and as many as 5,000 attend other California colleges. California is one of a dozen states allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition.

An earlier $300,000 gift from Elise Haas, granddaughter of the fund's founders, provides support services, such as academic and legal advice, a textbook lending library and mental health resources, for undocumented students at UC Berkeley.

Uriel Rivera, an undocumented student whose family emigrated from Mexico when he was 15, plans to return to UC Berkeley next semester after taking time off because he couldn't make ends meet. He saved money working at his family's convenience store in Los Angeles.

The new state aid, and the possibility of the Haas money, will be a great relief, he said. "I'm no longer going to be worried in school about what I'm going to eat, how I'm going to afford a place to live next semester, owing fines because I can't pay for tuition," said Rivera, 23, an ethnic studies and public policy major.

larry.gordon@latimes.com

cindy.chang@latimes.com

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Moscow Journal: Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians

MOSCOW — After 20 years of opining on weighty bilateral issues like NATO expansion and ballistic missile defense, the political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin recently found himself trying to explain, for an uncomprehending Russian readership, the American phenomenon of the teenage baby sitter.

In Russia, children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards — like weather — that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children’s upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs.

But of course much in everyday American life sounds bizarre to Russians, as Mr. Zlobin documents meticulously in his 400-page book, “America — What a Life!”

It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages. But to Mr. Zlobin’s surprise, his book — published this year and marketed as a guide to Russians considering a move abroad — is already in its fifth print run, and his publisher has commissioned a second volume.

With the neutrality of a field anthropologist dispatched to suburbia, Mr. Zlobin scrutinizes the American practice of interrogating complete strangers about the details of their pregnancies; their weird habit of leaving their curtains open at night, when a Russian would immediately seal himself off from the prying eyes of his neighbors. Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. Why they cannot drink hard liquor. Why they love laws but disdain their leaders.

“The secret is that everyone wants to know what America is without its ideological blanket,” said Mr. Zlobin, who has lived in the United States on and off for 20 years and serves, at times, as an informal consultant to the Kremlin. “Originally I thought you had to watch the important issues, but it turns out what matters are the very basic ones.”

He is not the first Russian to engage in this exercise. In 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Soviet satirists, embarked on a road trip across the United States. Their book, “One-Story America,” described its residents’ earnestness (“Americans never say anything they do not mean”) their provinciality (“curiosity is almost absent”) and the ubiquity of advertising, which, they wrote, “followed us all over America, convincing us, begging us, persuading us, and demanding of us that we chew ‘Wrigley’s,’ the flavored, incomparable, first-class gum.”

That book, published less than two decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, was a touch subversive because it did not focus on the class struggle, then the Kremlin’s central talking point about the United States.

Mr. Zlobin is writing at a moment when state-controlled television casts the United States as a global bully, releasing waves of turbulence on the world and covertly undermining President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Zlobin does not make much effort to advance that thesis, instead suggesting, in his soft way, that Russian leaders would benefit from understanding what Americans are like.

“I often get appeals for help in Washington — ‘Get to know so and so,’ they tell me, naming some public figure, ‘We need to solve this problem,’ ” he writes. “It is difficult to explain that in the United States, in most cases, problems are not solved this way.”

Mr. Zlobin, who has lived in St. Louis, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Washington, finds his answers in middle-class neighborhoods that most Europeans never see. Readers have peppered him with questions about his chapter about life on a cul-de-sac. Most Russians grew up in dense housing blocks, where children ran wild in closed central courtyards. Cul-de-sac translates in Russian as tupik — a word that evokes vulnerability and danger, a dead end with no escape.

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Royal phone scandal highlights new media risks

CANBERRA (Reuters) – Back in 2007, as investigations were gathering strength into the UK phone hacking scandal involving journalists working under the umbrella of the Murdoch media empire, a comedy show based around prank telephone calls made a low-key debut in Britain.

‘Fonejacker’ proved such a hit with the British public that the next year the program, in which a masked caller bamboozles hapless victims, won a coveted BAFTA award for best comedy, underscoring the attraction of the prank call amid a blurring of a ceaseless news cycle with social media and entertainment.

But just such a prank telephone call, to a London hospital where Prince William‘s pregnant wife Kate was being treated, has sparked a firestorm in traditional and social media after the apparent suicide by the nurse who put the call through.

Much of the fury has been directed at laying blame for the nurse’s death on the Australian DJs who made the prank call, or the media in general, with the most vitriolic comments appearing on the public domains of Facebook and Twitter.

The social media outrage has become a story of its own, outlasting the original news value of a prank call, and has seen advertising pulled from the program which broadcast the hoax call and the suspension of the two radio announcers.

Shares in radio station 2DayFM’s owner, Southern Cross Austero fell 5 percent on Monday as the public backlash gathered strength.

Media commentators and analysts warn the rapidly changing traditional and social media worlds may have given people greater freedom of expression, but can unleash a genie which can have destructive or negative repercussions, without responsible behavior by both mainstream and social media operators.

“It’s all changing so fast that societal norms have retreated in confusion,” said veteran newspaper columnist Jennifer Hewett in the Australian Financial Review.

“What is clear is that we will soon look back to count the mounting costs and destructive force, as well as the great benefits, of the explosion of communication in an all-media, all-in, all-the-time world,” Hewett said.

Jacintha Saldanha, 46, was found dead in staff accommodation near London’s King Edward VII hospital on Friday after putting the hoax call through to a colleague who unwittingly disclosed details of Kate’s morning sickness to 2DayFM’s presenters.

Her death, still being investigated, followed still simmering outrage in Britain over phone hacking, as well as Australian anger over the power of radio announcers to plump ratings with a diet of shock, including a 2Day announcer who sparked fury by calling a woman journalist rival a “fat slag”.

And while in Britain the popular press were quick to seize the moral high ground and point the finger “Down Under”, Australian commentators pointed blame the other way, or at confusion over the changing role of media and voracious public demand for not only information, but increasingly titillation.

Australian newspaper columnist Mike Carlton said while 2Day FM and its parent company made good money by “entertaining simple minds”, for tabloid British papers to point “Down Under” over a ‘gotcha’ news genre they created was “towering hypocrisy”.

CHANGING MEDIA ETHICS

The social media condemnation of Saldanha’s death should prompt a re-think of ethics in the era of celebrity news, said Jim Macnamara, a media analyst from Australia’s University of Technology, Sydney.

“There is a lesson in this for media organizations everywhere, and for journalists and media personalities, and that is that they need to look at community standards and better self regulate,” said Macnamara.

The tragic fallout from the radio stunt has rekindled memories of the death of William’s mother Diana in a Paris car crash in 1997 and threatens to cast a pall over the birth of his and Kate’s first child.

Public amusement at the prank started turning when British media reported the call as a major security breach of the royal family’s privacy, despite the call never reaching Kate’s room and the information revealed by a nurse was already public.

But news of Saldanha’s death is what sparked the Internet firestorm, that once unleashed could not be controlled.

Hypocritically, some of the harshest criticism was on Twitter and Facebook, where people unleashed fury on Australian and British media, after having themselves publish news of Saldanha’s error under a Twitter topic #royalprank, which was repeated more than 15,000 times.

“When the twitterverse goes into meltdown, we all react with a chain reaction any nuclear plant would be proud of. I hope, in time, the world will learn to splash cold water on itself when these stories break and cool down, before we all get dragged into the mud of our own making,” Tristan Stewart-Robertson, a Glasgow-based journalist wrote in a blog on www.firstpost.com

(Editing by Michael Perry)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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