Inglewood educator returns to turn schools around

When he was a kid, Kent Taylor bounced from school to school in South Los Angeles until his family landed in Inglewood. In sixth grade, he started classes at an elementary school under the LAX flight path.

Thirty-six years later, he's back where he began.

"This very classroom set me on my course through life," he told students at Oak Street Elementary on a recent day. As some of them whispered, wondering if the slender African American man before them was President Obama, Taylor spoke of how he struggled to read and do math until one teacher singled him out.

"I understand what you are going through because I have been there, sitting right where you are sitting."

Named recently to turn around Inglewood's insolvent school system, Taylor is offering his life as a symbol for the change that can come to a district long mired in trouble.

But not everyone is cheering for Inglewood's would-be hometown hero, who is known for ruthlessly cutting bloated costs in another school district. One critic refers to his "quiet assassin style. You smile and grin a lot, but you are cutting people off at the knees."

Everyone agrees that Inglewood needs help. The district's standardized test scores are among the worst in California. At Inglewood High, for example, just 25% of students are at grade level in English, and 4% are proficient in math. Enrollment is in free fall, largely because students have been lured away by charter and private schools.

Because state funding is calculated largely based on attendance, the decline has left a gaping hole in the district budget. In September, Inglewood became the ninth school system to be taken over by the state. The district received a $55-million loan to shore up debts, and its leadership was stripped of power.

As state administrator, Taylor's mandate is to stabilize the district's finances — and offer some hope to its students.

In that classroom that had meant so much to him, he told the children he would be there for them. He said he'd keep coming back to their school, that he'd check on their progress. He'd even host a pizza party.

"I am you, many years from now," he said. "I want you to know that you can achieve your dreams — and I'm going to help you get there."

Taylor, the youngest of three, had a turbulent beginning. His father wasn't around much. His mother was an office clerk who at times survived on welfare. Nobody in his extended family had ever gone to college.

"Life was very hard on my son in his younger years, there's no way around that," said his mother, Ivory Wilborne, 70. "I tried my best to provide for them, but nothing was ever settled. It was hard just to pay for food. But life settled down once we got to Inglewood."

Taylor speaks mostly of his sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Fletcher, crediting her for seeing his promise. She spent extra time with the rambunctious boy who entered her classroom with poor academic skills.

"She didn't give up on me," Taylor said. "Her diligence pushed me to improve, literally gave me the foundation to succeed in later years.... Before that, honestly, I was headed for trouble."

By the time Taylor reached Inglewood High, he had become an "A" student, bookish and by-the-rules, able to read and do math better than most of his peers. He was named class president his freshman and sophomore years. Inglewood was beginning a hard struggle with gangs back then, but the gangs didn't bother kids like him — "the ones who spent our time lugging around heavy backpacks, proudly marching off to the library," he said. "That's the guy I became."

"There was something special inside him that made him stand out," said Mary Boykin, one of his English teachers. "I recall talking to him a great deal about his desire to go to college, his desire to be somebody. He was one of those you don't ever forget."

Taylor went on to UC Riverside, a big move for a kid who'd rarely ventured outside his working-class, mostly black neighborhood. He began to mix with other cultures and classes, even joining a predominantly white fraternity.

"This was another step, leaving Inglewood, expanding my view of the world," he said. "I wasn't sure if I would ever return."

Taylor's career in education took off in the 1990s. He worked as a special education teacher in San Bernardino, became a principal and then a district supervisor overseeing curriculum and intervention programs for struggling students.

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Egypt’s President Said to Limit Scope of Judicial Decree

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians stand near a burned out school, before the funeral of Mohammed Gaber Salah, an activist who died Sunday from injuries sustained during protests.

CAIRO — With public pressure mounting, President Mohamed Morsi appeared to pull back Monday from his attempt to assert an authority beyond the reach of any court. His allies in the Muslim Brotherhood canceled plans for a large demonstration in his support, signaling a chance to calm an escalating battle that has paralyzed a divided nation.

After Mr. Morsi met for hours with the judges of Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council, his spokesman read an “explanation” on Egyptian television that appeared to backtrack from a presidential decree that had placed Mr. Morsi’s official edicts above judicial scrutiny — even while saying the president had not actually changed a word of the statement.

Though details of the talks remained hazy, and it was not at all clear whether the opposition or even the court would accept his position, Mr. Morsi’s gesture was another demonstration that Egyptians would no longer allow their rulers to operate above the law. But there appeared little chance that Mr. Morsi’s gesture alone would be enough to quell the crisis set off by his perceived power grab.

How far that gesture might go toward alleviating the political crisis, however, remained uncertain. Protesters remained camped in Tahrir Square, and the opposition was moving ahead with plans for a major demonstration on Tuesday.

In a televised statement, the presidential spokesman, Yasser Ali, said for the first time that Mr. Morsi had sought only to assert pre-existing powers already approved by the courts under previous precedents, not to give himself carte blanche from judicial oversight.

He said that the president meant all along to follow an established Egyptian legal doctrine suspending judicial scrutiny of presidential “acts of sovereignty” that work “to protect the main institutions of the state.” Mr. Morsi had maintained from the moment of his decree that his purpose was to empower himself to protect the constitutional assembly from threats that Mubarak-appointed judges might dissolve the constituent assembly, which is led by his fellow Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The courts have already dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament and an earlier constituent assembly.

But the text of the original decree has exempted all presidential edicts from judicial review until the ratification of a constitution, not just those edicts justified as “acts of sovereignty.”

Legal experts said that the spokesman’s “explanations” of the president’s intentions, if put into effect, would amount to a revision of the decree he had issued last Thursday. But lawyers said that the verbal statements alone carried little legal weight.

How the courts would apply the doctrine remained hard to predict. And Mr. Morsi’s political opposition indicated it was holding out for far greater concessions, including the breakup of the Islamist-led constituent assembly.

Speaking at a news conference while Mr. Morsi was meeting with the judges, the opposition activist and intellectual Abdel Haleem Qandeil called for “a long-term battle,” declaring that withdraw of Mr. Morsi’s new powers was only the first step toward the opposition’s goal of “the withdrawal of the legitimacy of Morsi’s presence in the presidential palace.” Completely withdrawing the edict would be “a minimum,” he said.

Most in the opposition focused on the spokesman’s declaration that the president had not revised the text of his decree. Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate, pointed to the growing crowd of protesters camped out in Tahrir Square for a fourth night. “Reason here means that the one who did the action has to take it back,” Mr. Ali said.

Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University, said Mr. Morsi appeared to be trying to save face with a strategic retreat. “He is trying to simply say, ‘I am not a new pharaoh, I am just trying to stabilize the institutions that we already have,’ ” he said. “But for the liberals, this is now their moment, and for sure they are not going to waste it, because he has given them an excellent opportunity to score.”

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Gabriel Aubry: Olivier Martinez Threatened to Kill Me

By Mike Fleeman

11/26/2012 at 08:25 PM EST

Olivier Martinez and Gabriel Aubry with Halle Berry

Getty (3)

Gabriel Aubry has come back swinging – this time in court papers.

Halle Berry's ex alleges that it was her fiancé Olivier Martinez who started their Thanksgiving Day fight, unleashing profanities and threats as well as fists.

Aubry claims that during their scrape Gabriel said, "You cost us $3 million. When you see the judge, you're going to tell him you're going to Paris or I'm going to kill you."

Aubry has been tangling in court with Berry over her request to move with their 4½-year-old daughter Nahla to France, where Martinez is a citizen. The judge recently ruled against Berry.

The allegations are contained in Aubry's application for a restraining order against Martinez, which the court granted. Attached to his application were gruesome photos of Aubry's injuries, including a black eye and cuts and bruises to his face.

Martinez has not commented. Aubry's account is disputed by a source close to Berry.

"This incident arose as a result of a fight initiated by Mr. Aubry when Nahla was delivered for Thanksgiving and Mr. Martinez attempted to have a discussion with him," the source tells PEOPLE.

Aubry, himself, faces an emergency restraining order to stay 100 yards away from Martinez, Berry and Nahla.

Aubry alleges in his court papers that as he drove up to Berry's house with Nahla in the backseat, he saw Martinez and thought it was odd since Martinez is not usually at the house during custodial hand-offs.

Aubry claims Nahla said, "Olivier is here. I'm scared."

After handing off Nahla to somebody named Miriam, who took the child indoors, Martinez appeared and told Aubry, "We need to talk," Aubry alleges.

"All of a sudden, Mr. Martinez jumped me on the side of my body, and punched me such that he had taken me down to the ground," Aubry alleges. "He continued to punch me at least two or three times, kicked me in the ribs with his knee or foot, and took my head in his hands and slammed it to the concrete driveway. It all happened so fast and so suddenly; I did not see Mr. Martinez's actions coming, and thus, I was not ready for it and was not able to defend myself."

As Martinez allegedly threatened to kill Aubry, Martinez also said, "From now on you're going to do drop offs on the street. I'm not just some f––ing actor, you don't know me," Aubry claims in the court papers.

Police officers arrived and arrested and handcuffed Aubry after Martinez told them that Aubry had attacked him several times, Aubry claims. (Martinez also was treated at the hospital for hand and neck injuries).

Aubry told the officers that the incident could have been captured on Berry's security cameras and that they should obtain the tapes before they're erased.

Aubry says he was kept in handcuffs while being transported to the hospital.

"I was handcuffed to the bed while I was being examined and treated, and was not allowed to make a phone call," he says in a declaration. "I ended up suffering a fractured rib, multiple bruises on my face and my forehead, an area under my left eye, and three areas in my mouth required stitches."

• Reporting by KEN LEE

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Bounce houses a party hit but kids' injuries soar

CHICAGO (AP) — They may be a big hit at kids' birthday parties, but inflatable bounce houses can be dangerous, with the number of injuries soaring in recent years, a nationwide study found.

Kids often crowd into bounce houses, and jumping up and down can send other children flying into the air, too.

The numbers suggest 30 U.S. children a day are treated in emergency rooms for broken bones, sprains, cuts and concussions from bounce house accidents. Most involve children falling inside or out of the inflated playthings, and many children get hurt when they collide with other bouncing kids.

The number of children aged 17 and younger who got emergency-room treatment for bounce house injuries has climbed along with the popularity of bounce houses — from fewer than 1,000 in 1995 to nearly 11,000 in 2010. That's a 15-fold increase, and a doubling just since 2008.

"I was surprised by the number, especially by the rapid increase in the number of injuries," said lead author Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Amusement parks and fairs have bounce houses, and the playthings can also be rented or purchased for home use.

Smith and colleagues analyzed national surveillance data on ER treatment for nonfatal injuries linked with bounce houses, maintained by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Their study was published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Only about 3 percent of children were hospitalized, mostly for broken bones.

More than one-third of the injuries were in children aged 5 and younger. The safety commission recommends against letting children younger than 6 use full-size trampolines, and Smith said barring kids that young from even smaller, home-use bounce houses would make sense.

"There is no evidence that the size or location of an inflatable bouncer affects the injury risk," he said.

Other recommendations, often listed in manufacturers' instruction pamphlets, include not overloading bounce houses with too many kids and not allowing young children to bounce with much older, heavier kids or adults, said Laura Woodburn, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Amusement Ride Safety Officials.

The study didn't include deaths, but some accidents are fatal. Separate data from the product safety commission show four bounce house deaths from 2003 to 2007, all involving children striking their heads on a hard surface.

Several nonfatal accidents occurred last year when bounce houses collapsed or were lifted by high winds.

A group that issues voluntary industry standards says bounce houses should be supervised by trained operators and recommends that bouncers be prohibited from doing flips and purposefully colliding with others, the study authors noted.

Bounce house injuries are similar to those linked with trampolines, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended against using trampolines at home. Policymakers should consider whether bounce houses warrant similar precautions, the authors said.

___

Online:

Pediatrics: http://www.pediatrics.org

Trade group: http://www.naarso.com

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

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Cemetery tour guide loves her dead-end job

With her chiseled features, 1940s-style black dress, retro sunglasses and lacy black parasol, tour guide Karie Bible strolls the 60 acres of Hollywood Forever Cemetery looking as if she might be a wayward mourner from the funeral of Tyrone Power or another Tinseltown luminary.

She answers the obvious questions that, yes, her name really is Karie Bible, and, yes, she really was born on Halloween, saying, "I can't make this up."

Being a cemetery tour guide may seem an unlikely avocation. But it's the logical fusion of two of Bible's childhood influences: horror films and family vacations to Civil War battlefields.

"We went to Vicksburg, Miss., one summer ... and I remember the docent had this beautiful antebellum gown on even though it was a billion degrees, and she let me touch a cannonball that was lodged in the wall of this old antebellum mansion," Bible said. "Going to those battlefields is just history brought to life. As a kid, that was just the most exciting thing in the world to me."

At home, she consumed old horror movies broadcast on television. "I didn't like Barbie, but I loved Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Those were my little girlhood heroes," Bible said. After earning a film degree from what is now the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Bible headed west. "I came out here in 2000 and fell in love with this cemetery," she said.

She walks the cemetery like a historian exploring a Civil War battlefield. Unlike the usual rumor-laden Hollywood death tour, there's not an ounce of fiction as she tells visitors about the famous and nearly forgotten, from Vampira to Valentino, among the cemetery's roughly 89,000 residents.

"There's this sense that you can write anything you want about a Hollywood star and people take it at face value," she said. "You couldn't write a trashy, sleazy tell-all about someone like Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln…. But if you write that about Joan Crawford or Valentino, people just believe it."

Not that the facts are always easy to discern. Consider the erroneous birth year on Jayne Mansfield's cenotaph (the actress is actually buried elsewhere, but her fans wanted her to have a marker in Hollywood). "Lying about your age is common in Hollywood, even unto death," Bible said.

Every Aug. 23, on the anniversary of Rudolph Valentino's 1926 death, Bible dons a period costume to evoke Hollywood's iconic Lady in Black, who mourned at the silent film star's crypt, but she considers herself more of a "Historian in Black."

"I really endeavor to humanize these people," she said. "They're not just tabloid fodder. They are real flesh-and-blood people who lived and walked the earth and mattered." And although she was born in the 1970s, "way too late to meet a lot of these amazing people," the next best thing is meeting their families and asking questions. The research for her tours never ends, she said.

The variety of monuments placed at Hollywood Forever, mostly hidden behind a strip mall on Santa Monica Boulevard, offers a rebuttal to the popular wisdom that death is the great equalizer. There's a towering obelisk at the grave of Griffith J. Griffith — who notoriously shot his wife and donated land for Griffith Park — and there's a black-and-gold spire at the tomb of fashion critic Mr. Blackwell. But Hollywood giant John Huston's headstone, with a crack across one corner, is about the same size as those of his more obscure neighbors.

"That's the weird thing about this place," Bible said of the contrast. "It's not what you'd expect. But I guess in L.A., things aren't always what they seem."

Among the stops on Bible's standard two-hour tour (she also offers "Hidden Hollywood" and "Jewish Heritage" tours) are Florence Lawrence, the first movie star, whose grave was unmarked until actor Roddy McDowall paid for a headstone, and David White of the TV show "Bewitched," who is buried in a niche with his son Jonathan, a victim of the 1988 bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

And then there is Virginia Rappe, whose mysterious 1921 death resulted in murder charges and three trials for film comic Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle before he was acquitted on allegations of manslaughter.

"To me, she had a sad life," Bible said of Rappe, who is buried next to her fiance, Henry Lehrman. "She never knew the identity of her father; her mom was a chorus girl who died when she was about 13 years old. She was left to be raised by her grandma, who died when she was 20."

Today, Rappe's story is best known by the lurid account in "Hollywood Babylon," Kenneth Anger's notoriously sleazy book about studio scandals, frustrating people like Bible who seek to set the record straight.

"I had a lady on my tour who kept correcting me in front of everybody. She'd say, 'That's not what's was written in "Hollywood Babylon."' And I wanted to be polite as possible, but I said, 'You know what? Just because something makes it into a book doesn't mean it's true,'" Bible said.

In her 10 years of leading tours at the cemetery, she had a chance encounter with Anjelica Huston tending the grave of her father, John; stood by as a group of French tourists sang at the grave of French pop star Joe Dassin; and saw people leave plastic fangs on the headstone of Vampira (Maila Nurmi), who introduced horror movies on local TV in the 1950s. Today, Nurmi is mostly remembered for one day's work in a non-speaking role in Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space," sometimes described as the worst movie ever made.

Of all the monuments at Hollywood Forever, Valentino's grave, still marked with lipstick prints, is the most celebrated, visited and talked-about, Bible said.

"People still constantly kiss that grave," Bible said. "When I get younger people that maybe don't know about him, I kind of compare it to the recent death of Michael Jackson." Some of the cemetery's residents were famous only in their time, but Valentino, who died at 31, is one who transcends his era, she said.

"There's something incredibly romantic about dying young," Bible said, comparing him to James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow. "You don't get old, you don't get heavy, you don't make bad movies, you're kind of frozen in time. I think there's something incredibly romantic about that."

As for Hollywood Forever, Bible said: "I feel such a sense of peace when I'm here…. I'm not a ghost chaser. I'm not into psychic stuff. I've been to certain [cemeteries] where I don't have a good feeling. Here I do. I feel peace."

larry.harnisch@latimes.com

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Bangladesh Fire Kills More Than 100 and Injures Many

MUMBAI, India — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.

It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.

“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”

Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have easily been avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.

Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.

“These brands have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement. “Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”

The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high, with the top three floors under construction, according to a garment industry official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, the industry official said, as many as 600 workers were still inside working overtime.

The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.

Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not enough exits. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire Department, according to The Associated Press.

In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from a cigarette.

In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tazreen Fashions, said he was too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.

Television news reports showed badly burned bodies lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.

The industry official said that many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.

One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way down.

“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”

A document posted on Tazreen Fashions’ Web site indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged “violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would not receive any Walmart orders for a year.

A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”

But the International Labor Rights Forum, which tracks fires in the Bangladesh garment industry, said documents and logos found in the debris indicated that the factory produced clothes for Walmart’s Faded Glory line as well as for other American and foreign companies.

Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the world’s lowest-paid, with entry-level workers making the government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month or slightly above.

Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Stephanie Clifford and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Nokia imaging chief to quit

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Nokia‘s long-time imaging chief Damian Dinning has decided to leave the loss-making cellphone maker at the end of this month, the company said in a statement.

The strong imaging capabilities of the new Lumia smartphone models are a key sales argument for the former market leader, which has been burning through cash while losing share in both high-end smartphones and cheaper handsets.

Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop has replaced most of the top management since he joined in late 2010 and Dinnig is the latest of several executives to leave.

Dinning did not want to move to Finland as part of the phonemakers’ effort to concentrate operations and will join Jaguar Land Rover to head innovations in the field of connected cars, he said on Nokia’s imaging fan site PureViewclub.com.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki, editing by William Hardy)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Tom Cruise Films Helicopter Scene in Empty Trafalgar Square

11/25/2012 at 05:15 PM EST

Tom Cruise in Trafalgar Square

FameFlynet

Back to work!

After spending Thanksgiving with daughter Suri, 6, Tom Cruise filmed scenes for the sci-fi action film All You Need Is Kill in London on Sunday.

The actor, who plays alien fighter Lt. Col. Bill Cage, landed in a helicopter in the middle of the usually bustling Trafalgar Square, which was shut down for the scene, in the heart of London.

Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's novel, the movie follows Cage as he battles the Mimics, a violent race of alien invaders, while stuck in a time loop.

Emily Blunt also stars in the film as Special Forces fighter Rita Vrataski, who according to Deadline.com, has destroyed more Mimics than anyone else on earth.

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AP PHOTOS: Simple surgery heals blind Indonesians

PADANG SIDEMPUAN, Indonesia (AP) — They came from the remotest parts of Indonesia, taking crowded overnight ferries and riding for hours in cars or buses — all in the hope that a simple, and free, surgical procedure would restore their eyesight.

Many patients were elderly and needed help to reach two hospitals in Sumatra where mass eye camps were held earlier this month by Nepalese surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit. During eight days, more than 1,400 cataracts were removed.

The patients camped out, sleeping side-by-side on military cots, eating donated food while fire trucks supplied water for showers and toilets. Many who had given up hope of seeing again left smiling after their bandages were removed.

"I've been blind for three years, and it's really bad," said Arlita Tobing, 65, whose sight was restored after the surgery. "I worked on someone's farm, but I couldn't work anymore."

Indonesia has one of the highest rates of blindness in the world, making it a target country for Ruit who travels throughout the developing world holding free mass eye camps while training doctors to perform the simple, stitch-free procedure he pioneered. He often visits hard-to-reach remote areas where health care is scarce and patients are poor. He believes that by teaching doctors how to perform his method of cataract removal, the rate of blindness can be reduced worldwide.

Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness globally, affecting about 20 million people who mostly live in poor countries, according to the World Health Organization.

"We get only one life, and that life is very short. I am blessed by God to have this opportunity," said Ruit, who runs the Tilganga Eye Center in Katmandu, Nepal. "The most important of that is training, taking the idea to other people."

During the recent camps, Ruit trained six doctors from Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

Here, in images, are scenes from the mobile eye camps:

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Central Valley residents tire of receiving L.A.'s urban waste

ARVIN, Calif. — Every day, the trucks rumble into the Central Valley by the dozens, chugging over the Grapevine loaded with lawn clippings from Beverly Hills, sewage sludge from Los Angeles and rotting yogurt and vegetables from around Southern California.

Los Angeles officials and others say the daily caravan is an essential step toward recycling thousands of tons of urban waste and turning it into compost and fertilizer in California's vast agrarian middle. But increasingly, residents of the Central Valley and other rural areas object to the stream of semis and their unpleasant cargo.

"You guys in Los Angeles are dumping all your waste on us," said Sarah Sharpe, the environmental health program director at Fresno Metro Ministry, a nonprofit group that advocates for environmental justice. "We just don't think it's fair."

Simmering for more than a decade, the issue has flared up in the last year after two young workers died from exposure to toxic fumes at one of the state's largest composting operations in Kern County. Community Recycling & Resource Recovery's facility outside Arvin was full of yard waste from Los Angeles, and had also been under fire for allegedly putting plastic on fields in violation of local land use rules.

Kern County's supervisors ordered the operation shut, setting off a legal battle between the county and the operator.

Thirty-nine of California's 58 counties shipped more than 5% of their trash and recycling across county lines last year. Much of it goes to the Central Valley, which has the vast acreage to handle it. A Times analysis of state recycling data shows that more than 60% of all non-agricultural compost in the state winds up in the region, which is home to just 14% of the population.

Processing waste regionally is the only way cities can meet state goals that call for diverting half their waste away from landfills, state and metropolitan officials say. There is not enough space in urban centers like San Francisco and Los Angeles, nor is there a large market there for compost.

But some officials said that when the waste gets to rural areas, recycling facilities don't always sufficiently protect the environment and neighbors' quality of life.

"A lot of these disposal facilities don't want to use the most modern technology because it costs more," said Kern County's planning director, Lorelei Oviatt. "Our residents want to know why they have to endure the impacts merely to save money for some people in Los Angeles."

The debate is only expected to escalate: A law approved last year calls for the state to aim to recycle or otherwise reduce 75% of its waste by 2020. Los Angeles has vowed to go even further, expanding recycling so much that the city will be "zero waste" by 2025.

::

One of the most bitter battles in California is over sludge, the batter-like material left over after treatment plants finish cleaning and draining what is flushed down the toilet or washed down the sink.

Sludge used to get dumped in the ocean — but that was banned in the 1980s because of concerns about pollution.

In 2000, the city of Los Angeles bought 4,600 acres in Kern County, just off Interstate 5 near Taft, and has been sending up more than 20 truckloads a day of "wet cake" from the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant near LAX.

Private companies in Kern County are also in the business, including the South Kern Industrial Center, operated by Synagro and Liberty Composting, both permitted to take hundreds of thousands of tons a year, according to officials at the regional waterboard.

Los Angeles officials and those at major wastewater treatment plants in the state say that spreading such "biosolids" on land or composting it as fertilizer is good for the city and good for the farm. They note that sludge is heated to 131 degrees for several days until harmful bacteria and pathogens are destroyed or removed.

Los Angeles' land in Kern County features a red barn and a sign: "Green Acres Farm." The city's website proudly describes the corn, alfalfa and oats that are grown there.

"To me, it's completing a circle, putting back to the earth what came from it, and doing it very protectively and beneficially," said Greg Kester, biosolids program manager for the California Assn. of Sanitation Agencies. "Biosolids do enrich the soil in Kern County."

Kern County officials don't see it that way. They fear groundwater will be contaminated and that metals and pharmaceuticals will leach into the soil.

Most experts say recycled products such as sludge and compost are safe if handled properly. But Kern County officials filed court declarations from scientists who are skeptical. Portland State University engineer Gwynn Johnson, for instance, said research shows that biosolids contain metals, antibiotics and flame retardants, and that more study is needed to determine the implications for "human health and the environment."

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