A solution to La Jolla's smell problem proves elusive

LA JOLLA — There's a political stink rising in this seaside community, blown ashore from the rocks of La Jolla Cove, where myriad seabirds and marine mammals roost, rest and leave behind what animals leave behind.

The offal accumulation is offending noses at trendy restaurants, tourist haunts, and expensive condos perched on some of the most pricey real estate in the country. But finding a solution to the olfactory assault has proved elusive.

Environmental regulations have thwarted proposals to cleanse the rocks with a non-toxic, biodegradable solution. Even a low-tech idea to scrub the rocks with brooms may need official approval.

The state-protected cove area falls under the permitting jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission and San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Since wildlife is involved, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also have authority.

The normally low-key Sherri Lightner, who represents La Jolla on the San Diego City Council, has challenged — some say dared — Gov. Jerry Brown to tour the cove area in high stink season.

"Everybody is pointing fingers, and nobody is doing anything," said a La Jolla resident who strolled the sidewalk along the community's famed corniche on New Year's Day, tissue to her nose to battle the smell.

A San Diego park ranger assigned to the La Jolla beaches takes a more philosophic approach toward the excretory matter. "It's a natural process," said ranger Richard Belesky. "But would I want to buy a multimillion-dollar condo with the stink nearby? I don't think so."

The difficulty of reconciling the habits of sea creatures and the needs of humankind is not new to La Jolla. South of the La Jolla Cove is the Children's Pool where harbor seals lounge on the beach.

For two decades a legal and political dispute has raged between people who say the seals should be removed because they are blocking access to the water and those who say the seals should be allowed to stay, particularly during pupping season. Signs warn bathers that seal excrement has resulted in a high bacteria count that can cause disease.

At the La Jolla Cove, the droppings began to pile up after restrictions were put in place to keep people from climbing down the delicate bluffs to the rocks below. The birds and mammals suddenly had no reason to scatter.

The La Jolla Village Merchants Assn. gathered more than 1,000 signatures demanding an immediate solution. But immediate is not in the governmental lexicon when it comes to issues involving the ocean and wildlife.

To wash down the rocks would require a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. The city, probably the full City Council, would need to endorse a specific wash-down proposal — but that, according to Lightner's staff, would mean submitting the issue to an application process that could take at least two years, given the backlog at the water board.

And even if the water board approved the application, the issue would then proceed to the Coastal Commission, an agency not known for its speed.

In hopes of finding a faster, if more limited, solution, city officials are considering arming Park and Recreation Department employees with brooms to scrub down the rocks. They assure that steps will be taken to ensure that no runoff reaches the ocean and no birds or mammals are hurt.

Talks are planned with regional, state and federal agency staff members to see if such a limited approach could be taken without a full-tilt application process. A radio talk-show host has shown the way, taking his own broom to the cove.

Meanwhile, restaurateurs say the smell continues to discourage patrons. Some tourists complain that it mars their vacations. Shirley Towlson, a bookkeeper who arrived in La Jolla from Phoenix, was shocked at the smell along the promenade and outside her hotel.

"I thought La Jolla meant 'The Jewel,' '' she said. "This smells more like 'The Toilet.' "

Other tourists find the smell but a small downer amid the other joys of La Jolla as a seaside place of visual beauty, fine dining and chic shopping.

"It smells like fish," said Mark Bain, a general contractor from Sacramento, enjoying a New Year's week idyll. "It happens."

He said the smell is not nearly as noxious as when dead fish line the banks of the Sacramento River. "Now, that's really bad," he said.

tony.perry@latimes.com

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Handset makers scurry to join Year of the Phablet

SINGAPORE/HONG KONG (Reuters) – Call it phablet, phonelet, tweener or super smartphone, but the clunky mobile phone – closer in size to a tablet than the smartphone of a couple of years back – is here to stay.

A surprise hit of 2012, it is drawing in more users, more handset makers and is shaping the way we consume content.

“We expect 2013 to be the year of the phablet,” said Neil Mawston, UK-based executive director of Strategy Analytics‘ global wireless practice.

While Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has blazed a trail with its once-mocked Galaxy Note devices, now other manufacturers are scurrying to catch up.

At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Chinese telecommunications giants ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd will launch their own.

ZTE, which collaborated with Italy’s designer Stefano Giovannoni for the Nubia phablet, is scheduled to launch its 5-inch Grand S, while Huawei brings out the Ascend Mate, sporting a whopping 6.1-inch screen, making it only slightly smaller than Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet.

“Users have realized that a nearly 5-inch screen smartphone isn’t such a cumbersome device,” said Joshua Flood, senior analyst at ABI Research in Britain.

Driving the phablet’s shift to the mainstream is a confluence of trends. Users prefer larger screens because they are consuming more visual content on mobile devices than before, and using them less for voice calls – the phablet’s weak spot.

And as WiFi-only tablets become more popular, so has interest among commuters in devices that combine the best of both, while on the move.

According to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report, the monthly data traffic for every smartphone will rise fourfold between now and 2018 to 1,900 megabytes.

The upshot is a market for phablets that will quadruple in value to $ 135 billion in three years, according to Barclays. Shipments of gadgets that are 5 inches or bigger in screen size will surge by nearly nine-fold to 228 million during the same period, though estimates vary because no one can agree on where smartphones stop and phablets start.

But that’s the point, some say.

“I think phone size was a preconceived notion based on voice usage,” said John Berns, a Singapore-based executive who works in the information technology industry. He recently upgraded his Note for the newer Note 2 and bought another for his girlfriend for Christmas. “Smaller was better until phones got smart, became visual.”

Samsung has been both the engine and beneficiary. While other players shipped devices with larger screens earlier – Dell Inc launched its Streak in 2010 – it was only when the Korean behemoth launched the Galaxy Note in late 2011, with its 5.3-inch screen, that users took an interest.

“The Streak was launched at a time when 3-inch smartphones were standard and the leap to a 5-inch Streak was a jump too far for consumers,” says Strategy Analytics’ Mawston.

“The Galaxy Note was launched when 4-inch smartphones had become commonplace, and the leap to 5-inch was no longer such a chasm.”

THE BIGGER, THE BETTER

Since then Samsung has bet big on bigger: its updated Note has a 5.5-inch screen and its flagship Galaxy S3 – the best-selling smartphone in the third quarter of 2012 – has a screen that puts it in the phablet category for some analysts.

Samsung accounted for around three quarters of all phablets shipped last year, according to Barclays’ Taipei-based analyst Dale Gai.

Samsung’s marketing heft has paved the way for others. LG Electronics Inc accounted for 14 percent of shipments in the third quarter of last year, according to Strategy Analytics.

HTC Corp’s 5-inch Butterfly – called the Droid DNA in the United States – has been selling well in places where Samsung is less dominant, according to Taipei-based Yuanta Securities analyst Dennis Chan. The first batch sold out soon after its December launch in Taiwan.

“I don’t think we can say that Samsung invented phablets,” said Lv Qianhao, head of handset strategy at ZTE. “But it did do a lot to promote this product category, which helped create tremendous demand.”

Phablets are also proving popular in emerging markets.

A poll of nearly 5,000 readers of Yahoo’s Indonesian website chose Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 as their favorite mobile phone of 2012, ahead of the iPhone 5.

Kristian Tjahjono, a technology journalist who posted the poll, said phablets were a natural fit for Indonesians who liked tablets but also liked making phone calls.

But while those in such markets who can afford them are going for the high-end devices, the door is opening for cheaper models. Tjahjono pointed to Lenovo’s 5-inch S880, which has a lower resolution screen and sells for about $ 250, which is around a third of the price of Galaxy Note 2.

SWEET SPOT

Falling component prices will add to demand. The total cost of an upper-end phablet, its bill of materials, will likely fall to 2,000 yuan ($ 323) this year, says Gai from Barclays, and will halve within two years.

“One thousand yuan is a very sweet spot for China,” he said.

India is also a fan.

Vivek Deshpande, who manages global strategy for Shenzhen-based mobile phone maker Zopo, says that while the Indian and Chinese markets are different, they both share a common appetite for aspirational devices: phones big enough for their owners to show off. This is changing the direction of lower end players.

“Zopo’s primary focus is now on phablets,” said Deshpande.

Even Samsung is pushing its own creation downmarket: In Las Vegas it will unveil the Galaxy Grand, a 5-inch device that lacks some of the resolution and muscle of its bigger brethren but will be aimed at markets like India. There is a version offering a dual SIM slot, a popular feature for those wanting to arbitrage cheaper call and data plans.

As phablets slide into the mainstream, handset makers are trying to find ways of differentiating.

As well as hiring Italian designer Giovannoni better known for his minimalist, sleek bathrooms, ZTE also came up with an onscreen keypad that inclines to one side of the screen, depending on whether the user is left- or right-handed.

Samsung, however, not only has first mover advantage, it can also build on its expertise in display.

Barclay’s Gai says Samsung is expected to introduce a thinner, unbreakable AMOLED screen which will leave room for bigger batteries.

“That will put Samsung in good stead to still dominate the market,” he said. Despite pressure in China, Gai estimates Samsung’s share of smartphones with 5-inch or larger screens to fall only from 73 percent in 2012 to 58 percent in 2016, which is still the lion’s share.

By then consumers will see the phablet for what it is, says Horace Dediu, a Finnish analyst who runs a technology blog asymco.com. Its rise is part of a wider march of computing power into wherever we reside – the living room, the train, bed or work.

“It makes sense that we’re moving towards a time where we are served not by a computer or a netbook or a phone, but rather that we have these screens scattered around and available for us to play with,” he said. “In a way the phablet is not a bulky phone but a very delicate computer.”

(Editing by Emily Kaiser)

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NBC execs say it's not a 'shoot-'em-up' network

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — NBC executives said Sunday they are conscious about the amount of violence they air in the wake of real-life tragedies like the Connecticut school shooting, but have made no changes in what has gone on the air or what is planned.

NBC isn't a "shoot-'em-up" network, said network entertainment President Jennifer Salke.

The level of violence on television, in movies and video games has been looked at as a contributing factor — along with the availability of guns and a lack of mental health services — in incidents such as the Dec. 14 attack in a Newtown, Conn., school where 20 first-graders and six educators were killed.

Like many in Hollywood, NBC questioned a link between what is put on the air and what is happening in society.

"It weighs on all of us," said NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt. "Most of the people at this network have children and really care about the shows that we're putting out there. It's always something that's been on our mind but this brought it to the forefront."

NBC hasn't needed to take any tangible steps like minimizing violence in its programming or deemphasizing guns, Salke said, because NBC didn't have much violence on the air. It might be different "if we were the 'shoot-'em-up' network, she said.

She didn't name such a network, but said violence might be an issue on a network that airs many crime procedural shows. That's a staple of CBS' lineup. Greenblatt, who was head of Showtime when the "Dexter" series about a serial killer was developed, said CBS' "Criminal Minds" is "worse than 'Dexter' ever was."

Within an hour after both executives spoke, NBC showed reporters at a news conference highlights of its show "Revolution" that included a swordfight, a standoff between two men with guns, a bloodied man, a building blown up with a flying body and a gunfight.

Later clips of the upcoming series "Deception" featured several shots of a bloodied, dead body.

NBC also is developing a drama, "Hannibal," based on one of fiction's most indelible serial killers, Hannibal Lecter. An airtime for the show hasn't been scheduled, but it could come this spring or summer.

Salke said there is more violence in Fox's upcoming drama "The Following," also about a serial killer, than there will be in "Hannibal." Much of the violence in the upcoming NBC show, created by former "Heroes" producer Bryan Fuller, is implied and not gratuitous.

"We respect the talent and like what he is doing, so we are standing behind him," Salke said. She said there's been a spate of programs about creepy killers because they've been such indelible characters.

Greenblatt said he wasn't trying to be glib, but one of the best tonics for people upset about real-life violence is to watch an episode of NBC's "Parenthood." He said it's a great example of a family that loves each other and grapples with many issues.

"Ultimately, I think you feel good at the end of the day," he said.

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Drug-Testing Company Tied to N.C.A.A. Draws Criticism

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A wall in one of the conference rooms at the National Center for Drug Free Sport displays magazine covers, each capturing a moment in the inglorious history of doping scandals in sports.

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

The National Center for Drug Free Sport, in Kansas City, Mo., tries to deter doping with programs for high school, college and professional leagues.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Don Catlin, formerly of U.C.L.A.’s Olympic Analytical Lab, has raised questions about drug testing at colleges.

The images show Ben Johnson, the sprinter who lost his 1988 Olympic gold medal after testing positive; and Barry Bonds, the tarnished home run king; and Lyle Alzado, one of the first pro football players to admit to steroid use.

“People always assume that it’s the athletes at the top of their sport or the top of their game that are using,” said Frank Uryasz, Drug Free Sport’s founder and president. “But I can assure you that’s not the case. There’s always that desire to be the best, to win. That permeates all level of sport — abuse where you just wouldn’t expect it.”

Over the past quarter-century, athletes like Johnson, Bonds and Alzado stirred widespread concern about doping in sports.

Professional leagues without drug-testing programs have put them in; leagues with drug-testing programs have strengthened them. Congress and medical experts have called on sports officials at all levels to treat doping like a scourge.

It was in this budding American culture of doping awareness that Uryasz found a niche business model. He has spent the past decade selling his company’s services to the country’s sports officials.

The company advises leagues and teams on what their testing protocols should look like — everything from what drugs to test for to how often athletes will be tested to what happens to the specimens after testing. It also handles the collection and testing of urine samples, often with the help of subcontractors.

Drug Free Sport provides drug-testing programs for high school, college and professional leagues.

A privately held company with fewer than 30 full-time employees, it counts among its clients Major League Baseball, the N.F.L., the N.B.A., the N.C.A.A. and about 300 individual college programs.

Many, if not all, of the players on the field Monday night for the Bowl Championship Series title game between Alabama and Notre Dame have participated in a drug-testing program engineered by Drug Free Sport.

Uryasz says his company’s programs provide substantial deterrents for athletes who might consider doping.

Critics, however, question how rigorous the company’s programs are. They say Drug Free Sport often fails to adhere to tenets of serious drug testing, like random, unannounced tests; collection of samples by trained, independent officials; and testing for a comprehensive list of recreational and performance-enhancing drugs.

The critics, pointing to a low rate of positive tests, question Drug Free Sport’s effectiveness at catching athletes who cheat. Since the company began running the N.C.A.A.’s drug-testing program in 1999, for example, the rate of positive tests has been no higher than 1 percent in any year — despite an N.C.A.A. survey of student-athletes that indicated at least 1 in 5 used marijuana, a banned substance. (The N.C.A.A. tests for marijuana at championship competitions but not in its year-round program.)

Uryasz said the rate of positive tests was not meaningful. “I don’t spend a lot of time on the percent positive as being an indicator of very much,” he said.

Independent doping experts contend that having a contract with Drug Free Sport allows sports officials to say they take testing seriously without enacting a truly stringent program.

Don Catlin, the former head of U.C.L.A.’s Olympic Analytical Lab, best known for breaking the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative doping ring, oversaw the testing of many of Drug Free Sport’s urine samples when he was at U.C.L.A. He said the work by Drug Free Sport and similar companies could be used to mislead fans.

“The problem with these schools is they all want to say they’re doing drug testing, but they’re not really doing anything I would call drug testing,” he said.

A Company’s Origins

Uryasz said he became interested in working with student-athletes while tutoring them as an undergraduate at Nebraska. After he graduated, he earned an M.B.A. from Nebraska and worked in health care administration in Omaha. He said he heard about an opening at the N.C.A.A. through a friend.

Driven in part by scandals in professional sports, the N.C.A.A. voted at its 1986 annual convention to start a drug-testing program.

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'Texas Chainsaw 3D' is strong No. 1; 'Promised Land' disappoints

"Texas Chainsaw 3D" easily sliced through the competition at the box office this weekend — not that its rivals were particularly threatening.

As the only new film to hit theaters nationwide, the reboot of the 1974 horror flick only had to contend with a handful of movies that have been out for weeks. Still, the low-budget movie did better than expected, collecting a robust $23 million during its opening weekend, according to an estimate from distributor Lionsgate.

Heading into the weekend, pre-release audience polling suggested that "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" would claim No. 1 for the fourth consecutive weekend, while "Chainsaw" looked poised to finish second with around $16 million. Instead, Peter Jackson's film grossed $17.5 million, raising its domestic total to $263.8 million.

PHOTOS: All-time box office leaders

Meanwhile, both "Django Unchained" and "Les Misérables crossed the $100-million milestone. Since being released on Christmas Day, Quentin Tarantino's film has sold $106.4 million, while the film version of the Broadway musical is up to $103.6 million. The continued performance of the movies helped to start the year off on a positive note, as ticket sales were up 7% compared with the same weekend in 2012.

"Texas Chainsaw 3D" is the sixth film to feature the villain Leatherface since the original horror film was released almost four decades ago. The new movie posted the second-highest opening of any "Chainsaw" film — not adjusting for inflation — behind 2003's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the Jessica Biel film which ultimately sold a strong $80.6 million.

Financed by Avi Lerner's Millennium Pictures for about $20 million, "Texas Chainsaw 3D" is being distributed by Lionsgate. The movie — which has notched only a 23% fresh rating on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes — received an average grade of C+ from opening-weekend moviegoers, according to market research firm CinemaScore. However, horror films often receive poor CinemaScores and still go on to do good business at the box office.

The film attracted a young audience, 64% of whom were under the age of 25. Of those in that age group, 1 out of 3 said the main reason they showed up to see the film was because the musical artist Trey Songz had a role in it. "Chainsaw" is the first film the 28-year-old Grammy nominee has starred in, and he has been heavily promoting the picture to his 5.6-million Twitter followers in recent weeks.

PHOTOS: Horror movie locations around Los Angeles

Also this weekend, the Matt Damon-John Krasinski collaboration "Promised Land" got off to a bad start. The environmental picture, which was co-written by and stars the actors, expanded from 25 theaters to 1,676 locations but brought in a lackluster $4.3 million.

The Focus Features production about a town with natural gas reserves only cost the studio and co-financier Participant Media about $15 million to produce. But with middling reviews and a B CinemaScore, it's a long shot that the film will end up being a hit even given its modest budget.

Another film that expanded this weekend was "The Impossible," the $40-million production about a family in the aftermath of the 2004 Thailand tsunami. Playing in 572 locations, the Summit Entertainment release collected a so-so $2.8 million. However, the picture is faring far better overseas. Already a hit in Spain, where its filmmaker hails from, the movie debuted in the United Kingdom this weekend and grossed $6.4 million. Overall, the movie has grossed $81.2 million abroad and $3.4 million in the U.S. and Canada.

ALSO:

The wizardry behind "The Impossible's" tsunami

'Texas Chainsaw 3D' to get nicked by 'Hobbit' at the box office

"Texas Chainsaw 3D" director: Leatherface abused, stunted, lethal

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Guatemala official takes on nation's ugly past, violent present

GUATEMALA CITY — She holds one of the most dangerous jobs in this spectacularly dangerous country, confronting the most feared and powerful men of the Guatemalan present: gang leaders; dirty public officials; shot-callers in the Mexican drug cartels who have bled in from the north.

She is also taking on the titans of Guatemala's past: military men and security chiefs whom she has accused of human rights abuses during the nation's brutal 35-year civil war. Guatemala's emblematic 20th century strongman, Efrain Rios Montt, has been under house arrest since January, when her office charged him with genocide and crimes against humanity.

Claudia Paz y Paz, a 46-year-old former human rights lawyer, has served as attorney general since December 2010, earning a reputation as the most aggressive prosecutor the Central American nation has seen since the war's end in the mid-1990s.

The challenges she faces are formidable: The Guatemalan homicide rate has roughly doubled in the last decade, because of ghastly cartel slayings in the countryside and a rise in crime, much of it gang-related, in and around Guatemala City, the capital.

Moreover, she inherited an office tarnished by scandal and a dismal conviction rate. Her critics, meanwhile, accuse her of re-fighting the civil war in the courts on behalf of the Guatemalan left, not administering justice, they say, so much as settling scores.

If the pressure gets to her, it does not show. On a recent afternoon, a smiling Paz y Paz slipped quietly into a casual downtown cafe for an interview, wrapped in an oversize shawl. She could have been a Latin protest singer from the 1970s.

Small of stature, with a voice smaller still, she spoke of the criminal charges she had brought against men once considered untouchable here. She referred to them by last name only, in the hard-boiled shorthand of cops and prosecutors everywhere.

"Lopez Fuentes," a general. "De la Cruz," a former national police chief. "Arredondo," another police chief. "Mejia Victores," another general.

"Rios Montt."

The case of Rios Montt stands apart. He ruled for 17 months in the early 1980s when the civil war was at its ugliest, and he went on to play a major role in Guatemalan public life for years, as a congressman and political shot-caller. Some Guatemalans still believe he saved the country from ruin with his ferocious crackdown on communist rebels, his "hard hand" crime-fighting measures and his moralizing evangelical sermons, televised nationwide on Sundays.

Others consider Rios Montt a criminal, the man responsible for the army's burning of villages, massacres of civilians, and the death or internal displacement of tens of thousands of Guatemalans, many of them indigenous Maya. By one estimate, about 86,000 people were killed during Rios Montt's brief tenure as head of state.

He says he is innocent of genocide. His attorneys have been maneuvering to keep him out of court. But the retired general, now 86, is relegated to his rock-walled compound on the tony side of the capital, unable to step out even for the morning paper.

Paz y Paz figures it is a waiting game.

"It's important, because any country that wants to avoid massive human rights violations has to adjudicate them," she said. "If not, you run the risk of repeating them."

***

Since 1996, when a peace accord ended the fighting between the government and Marxist rebels, Guatemala has tried to heal its old wounds. But they run deep. A 1999 report by the country's truth and reconciliation commission estimated that more than 200,000 people died in the conflict, and that 93% of the widespread human rights violations were committed by the government or its paramilitary allies.

Current President Otto Perez Molina, elected in November 2011, is a former army general who commanded troops in a civil war hot spot. Some on the Guatemalan left have accused him of war crimes. None of the accusations have been proved.

Then there are Paz y Paz's critics.

"The problem," said Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, who heads a group called the Foundation Against Terrorism, "is when you take your ideology to the public prosecutor's office, to seek vengeance."

Mendez, a 53-year-old Guatemala City businessman, says he was kidnapped and tortured in 1982 by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, one of the main armed leftist groups during the war. At the time, his father, a military officer, was serving as Rios Montt's interior minister.

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Honduras removes its ambassador to Colombia amid party scandal

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) – Honduras has removed its ambassador to Colombia amid reports his personal aide was involved in a wild party held at the embassy of Honduras in Bogota which, according to media, was attended by prostitutes and where cell phones and computers were stolen.

Ambassador Carlos Rodriguez quit his post on Saturday, Honduras’ foreign ministry said in a release, after the government requested his withdrawal.

Rodriguez’s personal aide went out with friends on December 20, picking up some prostitutes in Bogota’s red district before going to the embassy, where they consumed alcohol and trashed the facilities, El Heraldo daily reported.

It was not clear if Rodriguez was present, but the ministry said an investigation was under way.

Last year, about a dozen U.S. Secret Service employees were accused of misconduct for bringing women, some of them prostitutes, back to their hotel rooms ahead of a visit to Colombia by President Barack Obama, in the biggest scandal to hit the agency.

(Reporting By Gustavo Palencia; Editing by Vicki Allen)

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Poet-performer Jayne Cortez dies in NY at age 78

NEW YORK (AP) — Jayne Cortez, a forceful poet, activist and performance artist who blended oral and written traditions into numerous books and musical recordings, has died. She was 78.

The Organization of Women Writers of Africa says Cortez died of heart failure in New York on Dec. 28. She had helped found the group and, while dividing her time between homes in New York and Senegal, was planning a symposium of women writers to be held in Ghana in May.

Cortez was a prominent figure in the black arts movement of the 1960s and '70s that advocated art as a vehicle for political protest. She cited her experiences trying to register black voters in Mississippi in the early '60s as a key influence.

A native of Fort Huachuca, Ariz., she was raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles. She loved jazz since childhood and would listen to her parents' record collection. Musicians including trumpeter Don Cherry would visit her home and through them she met her first husband, Ornette Coleman, one of the world's greatest jazz artists. They were married from 1954 to 1964.

Her books included "Scarifications" and "Mouth On Paper," and she recorded often with her band the Firespitters, chanting indictments of racism, sexism and capitalism. Its members included her son, drummer Denardo Coleman, and several other members of Ornette Coleman's electronic Prime Time band, guitarist Bern Nix and bassist Al McDowell.

Cortez, who described herself as a "jazz poet," performed all over the world and her work was translated into 28 languages. At the time of her death, she was living with her second husband, the sculptor Melvin Edwards.

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The New Old Age: Murray Span, 1922-2012

One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.

So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”

And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.

But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.

Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.

His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.

So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.

On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.

When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.

But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.

All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.

Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.

His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.

“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”

Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.

These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.

I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.

He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.

He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.

As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.

In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.

The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.

We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.

We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Vast cache of Kaiser patient details was kept in private home

Federal and state officials are investigating whether healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente violated patient privacy in its work with an Indio couple who stored nearly 300,000 confidential hospital records for the company.

The California Department of Public Health has already determined that Kaiser "failed to safeguard all patients' medical records" at one Southern California hospital by giving files to Stephan and Liza Dean for about seven months without a contract. The couple's document storage firm kept those patient records at a warehouse in Indio that they shared with another man's party rental business and his Ford Mustang until 2010.

Until this week, the Deans also had emails from Kaiser and other files listing thousands of patients' names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and treatment information stored on their home computers.

The state agency said it was awaiting more information from Kaiser on its "plan of correction" before considering any penalties.

Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began looking into Kaiser's conduct last year after receiving a complaint from the Deans about the healthcare provider's handling of patient data, letters from the agency show. Kaiser said it hadn't been contacted by federal regulators, and a Health and Human Services spokesman declined to comment.

Kaiser said it remained confident that this patient information was never disclosed or accessed inappropriately. It said that some employees were disciplined because company policies were not followed and that it had informed regulators of the steps it had taken to ensure this type of incident didn't happen again.

"Kaiser Permanente is committed to protecting the medical and personal privacy of its patients," spokesman John Nelson said. "In retrospect, we certainly wish we'd never done business with Mr. Dean."

Even with tougher government oversight of medical privacy in recent years, this case underscores how confidential patient information remains vulnerable in the hands of big healthcare institutions and legions of outside contractors.

"Kaiser has shown extraordinary recklessness in this situation," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "Healthcare companies have to make sure their contractors adhere to ironclad security practices."

Federal and state laws impose strict standards on anyone dealing with patient information. The privacy rule of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, bans the unauthorized disclosure of individuals' medical records and requires healthcare providers and vendors, such as billing and storage companies, to protect the information.

Despite those rules, personal medical information of 21 million people nationwide has been improperly exposed since 2009, according to federal data. Last year, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee agreed to pay $1.5 million to resolve allegations it violated federal law after 57 computer hard drives with patient information were stolen from an outside facility.

In October, Kaiser sued the Deans in Riverside County Superior Court, accusing them of violating their contract by not returning all of its patient information two years ago when Kaiser picked up the paper records.

In court filings, Kaiser said the Deans put patient data at risk by leaving two computer hard drives in their garage with the door open. In response, Stephan Dean moved them to a spare room. On a recent day they sat next to a red recliner where Ziggy, the family's black-and-white cat, curled up for a nap. Dean said those hard drives contained spreadsheets on thousands of Kaiser patients, prepared at the company's request.

At one point, Dean told Kaiser he was planning to contact patients about the whereabouts of their medical information because he felt Kaiser hadn't taken proper precautions. The company sought a temporary restraining order against Dean, barring him from disclosing any confidential information. A Superior Court judge granted Kaiser's request until Thursday, when another hearing is scheduled.

Dean, 47, got his foot in the door at Kaiser from his previous work labeling paper folders for courthouses, hospitals and doctors.

But the demand for folders was slipping as hospitals and doctors used computers more. Kaiser was at the forefront of this as it invested billions of dollars in its HealthConnect system, which it bills as the largest private-sector electronic health record in the world. Kaiser, with more than 9 million customers, is the nation's largest nonprofit insurer and hospital system.

Dean said his small business, Sure File Filing Systems, got a big break when Kaiser acquired the Moreno Valley Community Hospital in 2008. The company needed to organize and clear out thousands of old patient files and it gave the job to the Deans, Kaiser records show.

In August 2008, the Deans started packing up thousands of files from Moreno Valley and moving them to the warehouse in Indio.

Hospital clerks routinely messaged Dean asking him to pull records on specific patients, emails sent by Kaiser to Sure File show. Dean said some Kaiser employees would put the patient's full name in the subject line of the email, and other messages listed the patient's Social Security number, date of birth, doctors' names and treatment dates. One message started, "Good Morning Sure File," and requested adoption records for a child.

Dean said Kaiser showed little concern for patient privacy in handling those requests. Only one out of more than 600 emails from Kaiser was password-protected with encryption, he said. Many medical providers use such technology so information isn't visible to others.

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