Charlie Sheen downplays Baja encounter with L.A. mayor

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa found himself sucked deeper into the Charlie Sheen-TMZ-Hollywood gossip vortex Tuesday, with the actor speaking out again about the night they met up at a hotel in Mexico over the holidays.

Sheen made news last month after he tweeted a picture of himself with his arm around Villaraigosa the night of Sheen's bar opening in Baja California, Mexico. The former star of "Two and a Half Men" praised the mayor as a man who "knows how to party." But Villaraigosa downplayed the significance of the image, telling KNBC's Conan Nolan over the weekend that he had only "bumped into" Sheen and engaged in a three-minute conversation.

On Tuesday, Sheen challenged Villaraigosa's account, telling celebrity website TMZ that the mayor was drinking in Sheen's hotel suite in a room full of beautiful women, including at least one porn star. "I memorize 95 pages a week, so the last thing that I am is memory challenged," Sheen told the website. "We hung out for the better part of two hours."

Hours later, Sheen issued a more muted account, saying the mayor had spoken to many other people at the opening of the bar. "I am a giant fan of the mayor's and apologize if any of my words have been misconstrued," the statement said.

By then, however, Villaraigosa found himself fending off related questions at a news conference meant to be devoted to billionaire Eli Broad's new downtown art museum. "Can you just set the record straight for us?" asked one reporter. "What was it? Two hours or three minutes?" asked another. Then came the zinger: "Does what happens in Cabo stay in Cabo?"

Villaraigosa cackled at the Cabo crack but refused to take the bait. "I've said what I'm going to say on that, everybody," Villaraigosa declared. "You had fun. Let's talk about the important things, like a thousand jobs today" — a reference to construction work going on at Broad's museum.

Villaraigosa has frequently bristled at media questions about his personal life, going silent on some occasions and becoming visibly angry on others. Last week, he told KNBC's Nolan that Nolan had asked a "bozo question" about the Sheen photograph. He also noted that Nolan and other newsroom staffers have, like Sheen, asked the mayor to pose for pictures with them.

Sheen has been a TMZ staple, using the website as a platform to talk up his $100,000 gift to celebrity Lindsay Lohan and his porn star "goddesses." And Villaraigosa has glided easily between the world of politics and the entertainment industry since being elected in 2005.

"He's a celebrity mayor. And he's always wanted to be that," said Jaime Regalado, professor emeritus of political science at Cal State L.A. "If you're going to be a celebrity mayor, you have to take the good and the bad and everything in between" when it comes to news coverage.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

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Live at CES: Day 4

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Maura Tierney, Courtney B. Vance join Tom Hanks in Nora Ephron’s “Lucky Guy” on Broadway

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Maura Tierney and Courtney B. Vance have joined the cast of “Lucky Guy.

The story of a tabloid columnist in 1980s New York will mark Tom Hanks‘ Broadway debut.

The writer isn’t too shabby either. Nora Ephron, the screenwriter of “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” wrote the script before she died of cancer last year. Hanks starred in Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” and was one of the speakers at her New York City memorial last July.

Like Hanks, Tierney (left) will also be making her Broadway debut. She has appeared off-Broadway on stage and previously appeared in “ER” and “Newsradio,” earning an Emmy nomination for the former. She will play Hanks’ wife in “Lucky Guy.”

Vance is a stage veteran and a two-time Tony Award nominee. “Lucky Guy” will mark the first time he has appeared on Broadway since starring in August Wilson’s “Fences” and John Guare‘s “Six Degrees of Separation” in the 1980s. Vance is perhaps best known for his work on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” He will play Hanks’ editor.

George C. Wolfe (“Angels in America”) will direct the play, which also reunites Hanks with his “Bosom Buddies” co-star Peter Scolari.

“Lucky Guy” will play a limited engagement at the Broadhurst Theatre. It will open April 1, and previews will begin March 1.

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Cauliflower and Tuna Salad — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I have added tuna to a classic Italian antipasto of cauliflower and capers dressed with vinegar and olive oil. For the best results give the cauliflower lots of time to marinate.

1 large or 2 small or medium cauliflowers, broken into small florets

1 5-ounce can water-packed light (not albacore) tuna, drained

1 plump garlic clove, minced or pureéd

1/3 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

3 tablespoons capers, drained and rinsed

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

3 tablespoons sherry vinegar or champagne vinegar

6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Place the cauliflower in a steaming basket over 1 inch of boiling water, cover and steam 1 minute. Lift the lid for 15 seconds, then cover again and steam for 5 to 8 minutes, until tender. Refresh with cold water, then drain on paper towels.

2. In a large bowl, break up the tuna fish and add the cauliflower.

3. In a small bowl or measuring cup, mix together the garlic, parsley, capers, lemon juice, vinegar, and olive oil. Season generously with salt and pepper. Add the cauliflower and toss together. Marinate, stirring from time to time, for 30 minutes if possible before serving. Serve warm, cold, or at room temperature.

Yield: Serves 6 as a starter or side dish

Advance preparation: You can make this up to a day ahead, but omit the parsley until shortly before serving so that it doesn’t fade. It keeps well in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.

Nutritional information per serving: 188 calories; 15 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 10 grams monounsaturated fat; 10 milligrams cholesterol; 8 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 261 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 9 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Online Banking Attacks Were Work of Iran, U.S. Officials Say

SAN FRANCISCO — The attackers hit one American bank after the next. As in so many previous attacks, dozens of online banking sites slowed, hiccupped or ground to a halt before recovering several minutes later.

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

James A. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington believes that recent online attacks on American banks have been the work of Iran.

But there was something disturbingly different about the wave of online attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of fire-breathing Godzillas.

The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced United States government officials and security researchers that they are the work of Iran, most likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.

“There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks,” said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Mr. Lewis said the amount of traffic flooding American banking sites was “multiple times” the amount that Russia directed at Estonia in a monthlong online assault in 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation.

American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their claims, but computer security experts say the recent attacks showed a level of sophistication far beyond that of amateur hackers. Also, the hackers chose to pursue disruption, not money: another earmark of state-sponsored attacks, the experts said.

“The scale, the scope and the effectiveness of these attacks have been unprecedented,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks on behalf of banks and cloud service providers. “There have never been this many financial institutions under this much duress.”

Since September, intruders have caused major disruptions to the online banking sites of Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC, Capital One, Fifth Third Bank, BB&T and HSBC.

They employed DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks, named because hackers deny customers service by directing large volumes of traffic to a site until it collapses. No bank accounts were breached and no customers’ money was taken.

By using data centers, the attackers are simply keeping up with the times. Companies and consumers are increasingly conducting their business over large-scale “clouds” of hundreds, even thousands, of networked computer servers.

These clouds are run by Amazon and Google, but also by many smaller players who commonly rent them to other companies. It appears the hackers remotely hijacked some of these clouds and used the computing power to take down American banking sites.

“There’s a sense now that attackers are crafting their own private clouds,” either by creating networks of individual machines or by stealing resources wholesale from poorly maintained corporate clouds, said John Kindervag, an analyst at Forrester Research.

How, exactly, attackers are hijacking data centers is still a mystery. Making matters more complex, they have simultaneously introduced another weapon: encrypted DDoS attacks.

Banks encrypt customers’ online transactions for security, but the encryption process consumes system resources. By flooding banking sites with encryption requests, attackers can further slow or cripple sites with fewer requests.

A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has claimed in online posts that it was responsible for the attacks.

The group said it attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad, and pledged to continue its campaign until the video was scrubbed from the Internet. It called the campaign Operation Ababil, a reference to a story in the Koran in which Allah sends swallows to defeat an army of elephants dispatched by the king of Yemen to attack Mecca in A.D. 571.

But American intelligence officials say the group is actually a cover for Iran. They claim Iran is waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for a series of cyberattacks on its own systems. In the last three years, three sophisticated computer viruses — called Flame, Duqu and Stuxnet — have hit computers in Iran. The New York Times reported last year that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.

“It’s a bit of a grudge match,” said Mr. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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LAPD force exceeds 10,000 for the first time, officials say

For the first time in the city's history, Los Angeles' police force now exceeds 10,000 officers, city officials said Monday.

Appearing with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck to discuss the continued drop in crime last year, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the department is budgeted for 10,023 officers, up from the 9,963 authorized over the last three years, during a deep budget crisis.

The staffing increase took effect Jan. 1, when 60 sworn officers moved into the LAPD from the General Services Department, which patrols parks, libraries and other municipal buildings, said Villaraigosa spokesman Peter Sanders. Those officers will continue to patrol city facilities, budget officials said.

Some questioned the significance of the staffing milestone, since the overall number of sworn officers employed by the city hasn't grown.

"It's an increase for show," said Kevin James, a candidate for mayor in the March 5 election who has questioned Villaraigosa's LAPD hiring goals. "The mayor really wanted to get to 10,000 one way or the other before he left office, and this was the way he could do it under the current budget constraints."

Los Angeles experienced a 10.5% decrease in gang crime and an 8.2% drop in violent crime last year, compared with 2011. The city had the lowest number of violent crimes per capita of any major city, including New York and Chicago, Villaraigosa said.

The mayor attributed those numbers — and a decade-long decline in crime — in large part to the expansion of the police force.

Villaraigosa originally promised to add 1,000 new officers to the department during the 2005 election campaign, criticizing then-Mayor James K. Hahn for failing to do so. Since then, he has succeeded in adding 800 officers, Sanders said. On Monday, Villaraigosa suggested that the addition of the final 200 will not be achieved until after June 30, when he leaves office.

"I would hope that the next mayor would, as we get out of this economic crisis, increase our Police Department to that 1,000," he said.

While Villaraigosa has been pushing for continued hiring at the LAPD, Beck has warned in recent weeks that the LAPD would lose 500 officers if voters fail to approve Proposition A, a half-cent sales tax measure on the March 5 ballot. That would represent more than half of the LAPD buildup accomplished by Villaraigosa.

Despite Beck's warnings, Villaraigosa said he is not ready to endorse Proposition A until the council makes a series of cost-cutting moves, such as turning over operation of the city zoo to a private entity.

Since Villaraigosa took office, homicides have decreased 38% and gang crime has dropped by a similar amount. The number of slayings has stayed largely the same over the last three years, with 297 homicides in 2010, 297 in 2011 and 298 last year. Overall crime dropped 1.4% last year. Property crimes, which are more numerous than violent crimes, increased for the first time in several years — driven in part by a 30% increase in cell phone thefts, officials said.

With little money to pay officers for overtime, the department has been compensating them with time off. The resulting staffing loss has been the equivalent of about 450 officers at any given time, according to department figures — a hit that has complicated crime-fighting strategies.

Preserving LAPD funding has become increasingly challenging for council members. For nine months they have debated whether to lay off dozens of civilian LAPD employees while continuing to hire enough police officers to maintain current staffing levels.

Councilman Paul Koretz, who opposed the layoffs, said the movement of the 60 building patrol officers to the LAPD was "a little smoke and mirrors." He questioned whether the LAPD buildup in the Villaraigosa era was financially sustainable.

"It just seems like we really never did the analysis to see if we could afford it," he said.

A defeat of the sales tax increase, which is projected to generate roughly $215 million in new revenue, would leave council members no choice but to roll back the size of the LAPD, Koretz said.

But Villaraigosa warned that would be dangerous, saying other California cities have seen upticks in crime after cutting back on officers.

"I know some people think that 10,000 cops is a magical illusion, a meaningless number, that more officers don't necessarily lead to a reduction in crime," said the mayor, adding: "Those critics talk a lot, but they're just plain wrong."

david.zahniser@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com

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Live at CES: Day 3

Christmas is over

When we arrived on Friday, the whole town was decked out in Yuletide glory. It’s been coming down but by bit. Tonight, the big glass tree in front of the Venetian says goodbye.

The Great Late-Night CES Pizza Hunt

It’s late. I’m tired. My feet hurt.

But damn, I could really go for some pizza. Dragging Nate with me.

Here we go…

12:15am: there’s supposed to be pizza at the mall across the street. It looks closed.

12:17am: Yeah it’s closed. Moving forward for pizza.

12:24am: $18 for a personal pizza? Hahahahahaha, no.

12:45am: Just hit the wall. So tired. To hell with pizza. We found Mexican food.

12:49am: Nate just got the largest order of quesadillas fries ever. It’s a half order.

1:10am: Nate put a sizable dent in his gigantic order of fries. We’ll be lucky if we make it back to our hotel without falling asleep on the strip.

1:15am: Just ate the world’s hottest chili. It actually burned the back of my throat. Calling poison control.

1:45am: Back in the room. Pizza was a bust, but the mexican food was delicious. At least I think it was delicious. I’m too tired to tell.  Tomorrow morning will be the first day on the CES floor.

Now the foot-destroying fun starts. 

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Ryan Lochte gets E! reality show

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – You saw this one coming, right? Swimmer Ryan Lochte is getting a reality show on E!

The Olympic gold medal winner – known for his catchphrase “Jeah” (pronounced zh-yah) – will star in “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?” The series will follow him as he meets women, copes with the fallout of his mom saying he only has time for one-night stands, explores his interest in fashion, and even occasionally swims.

In scenes shown at the Television Critics Association winter press tour Monday, Lochte was seen going out partying the night before he was due to swim, flirted, and made up words as he tried to explain himself. It was pretty funny.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level

Todd Korol/Reuters

An oil sands mine Fort McMurray, Alberta.

OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.

The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.

Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.

The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.

“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.

He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.

Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”

He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-bit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.

Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.

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Richard Ben Cramer, Wrote of Presidential Politics, Dies at 62

Richard Ben Cramer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of “What it Takes,” a superbly detailed account of the 1988 presidential election considered among the finest books about American politics ever written, died in Baltimore on Monday night. He was 62.

His daughter, Ruby Cramer, said he died of complications from lung cancer at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.

Mr. Cramer was born on June 12, 1950, in Rochester, N.Y. He went to Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate and later studied at Columbia University’s Graduate of Journalism. He worked at The Baltimore Sun before joining The Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s, where he was a Middle East correspondent from 1977 to 1984. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his reporting there.

He went on to write for Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and Esquire, where in 1986, he wrote an article, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?,” about the iconic baseball player. The article, which seemed to strip Mr. Williams bare and reconstruct him anew in the eyes of his fans, became a hallmark of sports journalism.

“It was often said Ted would rather play ball in a lab, where fans couldn’t see,” Mr. Cramer wrote. “But he never blamed fans for watching him. His hate was for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t feel with him, his effort, his exultation, pride, rage, or sorrow.” But Mr. Cramer will be most remembered for “What it Takes,” a 1,000-page, vigorously researched tome that delved into the passions, idiosyncrasies and flaws of George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other candidates as they fought for the presidency in 1988.

As he reported for the book, he spent time with the candidates’ family members, college roommates and sometimes even their elementary schoolteachers.

He became close with the candidates themselves and in some cases forged friendships that endured after the election. Mr. Biden later gave him tips on fixing up an old farmhouse that he purchased in Maryland, he said in a 2010 interview with Politico.

“He made no bones about the fact that he became friendly with the people he reported on,” said his longtime friend Stuart Seidel, an editor at National Public Radio. “He liked Joe Biden and Bob Dole and both Bushes. He did not feel compromised by allowing himself to get close to them. He did not see himself in a confrontational reportorial role — he was telling a story.”

The book begins with Mr. Bush, then the vice president, throwing out the first pitch at a Houston Astros game in 1986.

“He’ll be cheered by 44,131 fans — and it’s not even a risky crowd, the kind that might get testy because oil isn’t worth a damn, Houston’s economy is down the crapper, and no one’s buying aluminum siding,” he wrote. “This is a playoff crowd, a corporate-perks crowd, the kind of fellows who were transferred in a few years ago from Stamford, Conn. You know, for that new marketing thing (and were, frankly, delighted by the price of housing), a solid GOP crowd, tax-conscious, white and polite.”

The book is in many ways the product of a bygone era, before quote approval and a micromanaged press corps, and when minute-by-minute coverage of a presidential campaign or anything else was a technological impossibility.

In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Cramer described political journalists in his day as wielding real power, a contrast with now, when campaigns can seem to hold reporters at their mercy.

“Even if you had the wherewithal to embarrass a reporter, there was no mechanism to do it,” Mr. Cramer said. “And in most cases, you might as well save your breath because the reporter had no shame anyway.”

“What it Takes” received poor reviews, and sales were initially poor. Fellow journalists were also slow to see its value. Disappointed, Mr. Cramer never again wrote as prodigiously about politics. Rather, he turned his attention to other interests. He wrote a biography about Joe DiMaggio and returned to the Middle East for a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Cramer lived in Chestertown, Md., with his wife, Joan Cramer, who survives him. He was previously married to Carolyn White, with whom he had his daughter, Ruby Cramer.

Jennifer M. Preston and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.

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