U.S. Franciscan friars go digital, accept prayer requests via text

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The largest group of Franciscan friars in the United States is offering the faithful a new way to pray in the digital age by accepting prayer requests via text messages.

The Friars of Holy Name Province, who staff 40 parishes and have colleges, soup kitchens and food centers along the eastern seaboard, as well as groups in Peru and Tokyo, are among a few religious groups offering this type of digital service.

Its “Text a Prayer Intention to a Franciscan Friar” initiative, which is described as faith at your fingertips, is a novel way for Roman Catholics to connect.

“People are always saying to friars, ‘Can you say a prayer for me?’ Or ‘Can you remember my mother who has cancer?’” Father David Convertino, the New York-based executive director of development for the Franciscan Friars of the Holy Name Province, said in an interview.

“I was thinking that a lot of people text everything now, even more than email, so why not have people have the ability to ask us to pray for them … by texting.”

The faithful simply text the word ‘prayer’ to 306-44, free of charge. A welcome message from the friars comes up along with a box to type in the request. When the it is sent, the sender receives a reply.

The intentions are received on a website and will be included collectively in the friars’ prayers twice a day and at Mass.

It is one of several ways the friars hope to reach a younger audience, increase the number of faithful and spread the faith. They have already renovated their website and the next step is moving into Facebook and tweeting.

“If the Pope can tweet, friars can text,” said Father David.

The friars also have a presence on LinkedIn and have been streaming some of their church services.

“We’re trying,” said Father David when asked if the friars are well into the digital age, adding that they were “rushing madly into the 19th century.”

Most of the 325 friars, whose average age is about 60, are comfortable with the technology.

“We have a friar who is 80 who was texting today,” said Father David.

The friars are following the example of 85-year-old Pope Benedict, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, whom the Vatican said had 2.1 million followers on Twitter just eight days after sending his first tweet.

The Pontiff tweets in several languages, including Arabic, and plans to add Latin and Chinese to them.

“We’re really excited about this working,” said Father David, about the new program. “I think we’ll be able to keep up (with all the intentions). That’s what we do, we pray for people.”

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy)

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Kangaroo Gets Loose at Melbourne Airport

People Pets

01/08/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Travelers passing through Australia's Melbourne Airport on Monday may have been greeted by an unexpected baggage handler.

At around 7 a.m., a 3-year-old eastern gray kangaroo was spotted in the airport's parking garage, where it hopped around for almost two hours, giving security officers the slip in the process.

Wildlife officer Manfred Zabinskas was then called in to catch the young animal, who was tranquilized in order to be transported to safety. Analyzing the critter, Zabinskas noted he had been away from his natural habitat for some time, and that the romp through the parking garage had done some damage to his feet. Prior to being re-released into the wild, the kangaroo will be looked at by a veterinarian.

This is the second time a kangaroo has paid a visit to the Melbourne Airport. Last October, another marsupial made its way up to the fifth floor of the parking garage before being spotted.

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Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.

Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.

"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.

But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.

Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.

The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.

Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.

Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.

But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.

Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.

Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.

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Getting up to date on a 19th century L.A. activist

Under the watchful eye of a librarian at the Huntington, Paul Bryan Gray gently turns the delicate pages of an 1855 edition of El Clamor Público, Los Angeles' first newspaper published entirely in Spanish.

These bound volumes are like old friends for Gray, who spent two years reading every line during more than a decade of work on his new book "A Clamor for Equality," a biography of El Clamor's remarkable 18-year-old editor, Francisco P. Ramirez.

"I was fascinated by this guy Ramirez," says Gray, 74. "He was a civil rights activist when people didn't talk about it. He was a community organizer before there was such a thing.... He was opposed to slavery when most people weren't. He favored co-education, that girls and boys should both be educated, a very advanced attitude. And I just liked him. He was earnest, sympathetic, intelligent. He seemed like a really appealing individual."

And he was outspoken. Like most newspapers of that era, El Clamor was known for its spirited writing and Ramirez editorialized freely.

For example, in 1856 he wrote several impassioned pieces about the sensational murder of Evening Bulletin editor James King of William by corrupt San Francisco City Supervisor James P. Casey. (Casey was given a fair trial and hanged, Gray says).

Gray translates: "Mr. King has died for having told the truth! A noble sacrifice! While he occupied the editorial chair, he denounced evil-doers and did everything possible to protect the public."

Ramirez was so outspoken that by the time El Clamor ceased publication after 41/2 years, he had alienated nearly everyone in Los Angeles. He angered whites, many of whom were Southern sympathizers, with his attacks on slavery and calls for racial equality for Mexicans, blacks, Chinese and Indians. He antagonized what Gray calls the wealthy "ranchero elite" by opposing their conservative politics.

"And the Mexicans didn't like him," Gray says. "He kept trying to get them to change from this hidebound traditional society, very conservative, owned by the ranchero elite, into a more vibrant, democratic world."

And so Ramirez faded into obscurity until emerging in Leonard Pitt's landmark text "The Decline of the Californios," which Gray read while in law school in 1966. In concluding his chapter on El Clamor, Pitt dispensed with Ramirez after 1872 by saying "thereafter, one hears nothing of him in Los Angeles."

"And I thought, wait a minute," Gray says. "He didn't just disappear. What happened to him?"

It was no easy task to reconstruct the life of a man who died in anonymity. Gray began reading Los Angeles newspapers of the period, finding traces of Ramirez. "Then I lost track of him in 1880. He just seemed to disappear off the planet," he says.

So Gray embarked on a journey to libraries from UC Berkeley to archives in Hermosillo, Mexico. No detail was too trivial to pursue. Gray even located the site of Ramirez's boyhood home and its adjoining vineyard just east of downtown near the 101 Freeway, along Ramirez Street, which was named for the family. "If you are standing in the parking lot of Denny's restaurant and look at the freeway, dead south, the original Ramirez adobe was in the No. 4 lane of the westbound freeway," Gray says.

Gray eventually discovered that the crusading, idealistic Ramirez, by this time an attorney in Los Angeles, had become involved in helping a man cash a fraudulent certificate of deposit. Before Ramirez could come to trial, he fled to Mexico, where he died in Ensenada in 1908, Gray says.

And why is an obscure editor of a nearly forgotten newspaper relevant today? Gray explains: "When Ramirez started his work, Los Angeles County was overwhelmingly Mexican. Now... Los Angeles County is more than 50% — I would like to say Mexican but probably it's Latino."

The average Angeleno may find the Raymond Chandler era appealing, with its noirish cast of characters and glitter of old Hollywood. But Gray prefers the days of the adobes, when life centered on the Plaza, with the Mexican Sonoratown on one side and the Anglos on the other.

"I've always thought that it was very interesting to see when cultures come in contact and what happens," he says. "I was really interested in reading about the first Americans to arrive in California back when it was Mexican territory and what they did."

What Gray discovered was that the first Americans adopted the local customs, used the Spanish form of their names, converted to Catholicism, learned Spanish and married Mexicans.

"And the question arose in my mind: If there had never been a Gold Rush, how far would this thing have gone? Would we form a new culture, a new society? Would we have some sort of garden spot in Southern California where people spoke Spanish and English interchangeably? Where both cultures had fused? And it damn near happened."

That is, until the arrival of the railroads, which brought an influx of Anglos by the mid-1880s.

"The railroad ended the world as we knew it," he says, citing the example of Judge Ignacio Sepulveda, who resigned in 1883 and was essentially the last Mexican elected to the bench in Los Angeles for 74 years.

Now that his book on Ramirez is finished, Gray has taken on a new, ambitious project: A two-volume history of the Mexican people in California. He was approached about updating W.W. Robinson's landmark book "Lawyers of Los Angeles," but he declined. "Can you imagine plodding through all the old law records? " he asks.

"My first love is Mexican California. What it is and what it should have been," he says. "I'd rather write this history of Mexican people in California. I might just have enough time left to do it."

larry.harnisch@latimes.com

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Iran’s Oil Exports and Sales Down 40 Percent, Official Admits

Iran’s oil minister acknowledged for the first time on Monday that petroleum exports and sales had fallen by at least 40 percent over the past year, contradicting his previous denials and providing an unusual public admission that the cumulative impact of Western economic sanctions has grown more severe.

The acknowledgment by the oil minister, Rostam Qasemi, came as new restrictions from the sanctions are threatening to further choke Iran’s ability to sell oil, its most important export. Under provisions of an American law that takes effect in February, importers of Iranian oil that have been exempted from the sanctions cannot send the money used to buy it to Iran without risking penalties in the United States. The result could impound billions of dollars’ worth of Iran’s expected oil revenue in the banks of those importing countries.

Additional punitive measures, which President Obama signed into law last week, broaden the list of blacklisted Iranian industries to include all energy, shipping and shipbuilding enterprises and seek to restrict barter transactions that Iran has been using to circumvent earlier sanctions. Some critics of the new steps say they nearly amount to a trade embargo.

In another consequence of the sanctions’ impact, the Oil Ministry on Monday stopped the sale of jet fuel to Iran’s heavily indebted domestic airlines unless they pay cash. The semiofficial Mehr news agency reported that most commercial airline flights inside the country had been canceled as a result.

Mr. Qasemi, a former Revolutionary Guards commander who was appointed oil minister more than a year ago, had consistently asserted that Iran had no problem selling its oil. In September, in an address to the Parliament, he said that oil exports were rising, despite outside data that showed a sharp drop. At other times, he has threatened to halt all oil exports in retaliation for the sanctions, apparently in a vain effort to raise oil prices by frightening global oil traders.

Both the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, of which Iran is a major member, and the International Energy Agency, a group of mostly Western oil-importing countries, have reported that Iran’s crude exports fell to roughly a million barrels a day by the end of 2012, compared with 2.4 million a year earlier.

Other Iranian officials have said it is clear that the country’s oil exports have suffered.

Economists knowledgeable about Iran’s sanctions problems said Mr. Qasemi’s acknowledgment of the export decline, made at a parliamentary meeting on finances, was inevitable because the government must find a way to fill a large gap in the budget — a gap that revenue from oil exports had been expected to fill.

The Iranian Students’ News Agency quoted the minister as telling lawmakers that “there has been a 40 percent decrease in oil sales and a 45 percent decrease in repatriating oil money.” The agency also quoted him as forecasting further decreases without specifying how much.

“It’s common knowledge in Iran that oil exports have fallen,” said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economics professor at Virginia Tech, who visited his native Iran last month. “I don’t know if the oil minister had been in denial.”

Dr. Salehi-Isfahani suggested that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government might have to resolve the budget deficit problem with an accounting maneuver that would recalculate the value of Iran’s oil sales at half the official foreign-exchange rate — 25,000 rials per dollar instead of the central bank’s artificial rate of 12,260 rials per dollar.

That change would be much closer to the rial’s actual value and essentially double the amount — in rials — gained from Iranian oil exports. But such a move would also concede the sanctions’ severe inflationary impact, which has caused a steep fall in the value of the Iranian currency this past year.

Many Iranians have suffered from the rial’s decline, which has essentially made them poorer by raising the price of imported goods. Iran’s inflation also has left many Iranian businesses unable to pay wages or bills. The problem surfaced in a new way on Monday with the abrupt cancellation of domestic flights by Iranian airlines, which had been buying fuel on credit.

The head of the Airlines Association, Seyyed Abdol Reza Musavi, told Mehr that flights in Tehran, Kish, Mashhad and other airports had been halted because the carriers failed to repay their debts, and that fuel would now be provided “on a cash-only basis.” It was unclear how long the flight suspensions would last.

The sanctions on Iran have been intensifying for the past few years because of its disputed nuclear program, which Iran says is for peaceful use but which Western countries and Israel suspect is meant to develop the ability to make nuclear weapons.

Thomas Erdbrink contributed reporting from Tehran.

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Live blog: Samsung’s new gear at CES 2013

yep thats how apple works now, but can you stream network flash players thru your i pad via apple tv , answer = no , same with google tv. hook the comp directly to the comp get a wireless keayboard and an air mouse , and fyi windows media player can be streamed wirelessly from any pc all you need is a 50 dollar blue ray player , if you want to stream media from a hard drive wirelessly it just has to be one built to the standard like any wd home drive , but dont go usb get one that connects via gigabit

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Justin Bartha Is Dating Trainer Lia Smith

01/07/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Lia and Justin in Hawaii New Years Day

Pacific Coast News

Justin Bartha's "mystery woman" is in fact his girlfriend, trainer Lia Smith, a source reveals to PEOPLE.

The pair recently enjoyed a cozy trip to Smith's native Hawaii and were snapped basking in the sun on Maui on New Year's Day, which got people buzzing about her identity.

"They were very cute with each other," says an eyewitness. "They had their arms around each other and were kissing."

The couple also spent time with Smith's parents on Oahu. Bartha, who currently stars on The New Normal, was previously linked to Scarlett Johansson and dated Ashley Olsen for two years before breaking up in 2011.

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Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.

Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.

"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.

But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.

Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.

The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.

Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.

Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.

But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.

Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.

Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.

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LAPD officers allegedly forced women to have sex with them

Two Los Angeles Police Department officers are under investigation for allegedly preying on women over a period of five years, luring them into an unmarked car and forcing them to perform sex acts, according to court records.

Detectives from the LAPD’s internal affairs unit suspect that Officers Luis Valenzuela and James Nichols targeted at least four women whom they had arrested previously or who worked for them as informants, according to a search warrant reviewed by The Times.

The pair repeatedly used the threat of jail to get women into their car and drove them to secluded areas where one of the officers demanded sex while the other kept watch, the warrant alleges.

Valenzuela and Nichols worked together until recently as narcotics officers in the Hollywood Division. Investigators have identified four women who encountered the pair and made similar independent accusations against them.

The warrant cites sexually explicit text messages that one alleged victim claims she exchanged with the officers after their encounters. Last month, investigators obtained the woman’s cellphone and computers in hopes of finding the messages the officers are alleged to have written. The department has yet to examine the electronic devices, a police official said.

Investigators had planned to confront the officers in a surprise operation early next week, but were forced to accelerate those plans Thursday, when one of the women unexpectedly filed a lawsuit against the officers. Fearing that Valenzuela and Nichols might destroy evidence, investigators rushed to sequester the officers and seize their computers and phones, police confirmed.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck emphasized Thursday that the investigation was ongoing, but added that he was “saddened by the allegations. If they are true, it would be horrific,” he said.

Valenzuela, a 15-year department veteran, and Nichols, a 12-year veteran, were expected to be assigned to their homes pending the outcome of the probe, the head of the internal affairs group said. The officers could not be reached for comment.

The first woman to accuse Valenzuela and Nichols came forward in January 2010, when she told a supervisor in their narcotics unit that the officers had stopped her more than a year earlier, according to the warrant. The woman, who worked as a confidential informant for the narcotics unit and knew the men, said they were dressed in plainclothes and driving a Volkswagen Jetta. Valenzuela threatened to take the woman to jail if she refused to get in the car, then got into the back seat with her and exposed himself, telling the woman to touch him, the warrant said.

An investigation into the woman’s claim went nowhere when the detective assigned to the case was unable to locate her, according to the warrant.

A year later, however, another woman demanded to speak to a supervisor after being arrested and taken to the LAPD’s Hollywood station. Sometime in late 2009, according to the warrant, two officers driving a Jetta pulled up alongside her as she was walking her dog in Hollywood. The officers, whom she recognized as the same cops who had arrested her in a previous encounter, ordered her into the car, the woman recounted. It is not known why she was arrested.

Believing that the officers were investigating a case, the woman said she felt compelled to comply. Valenzuela then got into the back seat with the woman and handed her dog to Nichols, who drove the car a short distance to a more secluded area. “Why don’t you cut out that tough girl crap,” the woman recounted Valenzuela saying as he “unzipped his pants and forced [her] head down toward his lap and physically held her head down” as he forced her to perform oral sex on him, according to police records contained in the warrant.

The woman said she didn’t report the incident immediately because she felt humiliated, thought no one would believe her and feared for her safety. Police noted that the woman displayed erratic behavior while recounting the events. Later, she made violent threats while in custody and was transported to a hospital.

Based on this allegation, the department reopened the investigation into the pair. The investigator assigned to the case interviewed this second accuser and managed, as well, to find the first woman who had come forward the year before. She, too, gave a statement, saying she had refused Valenzuela’s commands to fondle him.

For reasons not explained in the warrant, the department’s investigation made little progress for the next 18 months. During this time, police records show, the officers were transferred, with Valenzuela being reassigned to the Olympic Division and Nichols to the Northeast Division. (Nichols was involved in the high-profile arrest last year of Brian C. Mulligan, an executive at Deutsche Bank, who alleged he was the victim of excessive force. Police contend that Mulligan, while deranged on drugs, charged at Nichols and suffered injuries while Nichols and his partner took him into custody).

Cmdr. Rick Webb, who heads the LAPD’s internal affairs group, declined to comment on the specifics of the probe, but said such cases are often difficult to complete.

The case picked up steam again in July 2012, when a man left a phone message for the vice unit at the Northeast station, saying he was a member of the Echo Park neighborhood watch and had been told by a prostitute that patrol officers in the area were picking up prostitutes and letting them go in exchange for oral sex, the warrant said.

Two more months passed before a third internal affairs officer was assigned to look into the Echo Park claim. The investigator was aware of the earlier allegations against Valenzuela and Nichols and “thought the circumstances and location were very similar.”

It is not clear how, but the investigator identified another two women who reported encounters in which Nichols and Valenzuela had sought sexual favors in exchange for leniency.

One said Nichols had detained her in July 2011, handcuffed her and driven her to a quiet location. Removing the restraints, Nichols exposed himself and said, “You don’t want to go to jail today, do you?” the woman recalled. Fearing she would be arrested, the woman performed oral sex on Nichols, who then released her, she said. She said Nichols had done the same thing to her six years earlier.

The other woman discovered by the internal affairs investigator alleged that she became a confidential informant for Valenzuela and Nichols after she was arrested, according to the warrant. Valenzuela, she said, told her that having sex with him would help her avoid jail, according to the warrant. She alleged that she had sex with the officer twice, once when he was off duty at her apartment in Los Angeles, and the second time in the back seat of an undercover police car while he was on duty. She said she was afraid he would send her back to jail if she refused.

She said Nichols contacted her in January 2011 and told her he would cancel her obligation to inform for him if she would have sex with him.

The woman filed a lawsuit against the city Wednesday, alleging that the officers forced her to have sex with them several times in exchange for keeping her out of jail. The Times in general does not name the victims of alleged sex crimes.

That lawsuit was first reported by City News Service. Despite the officers’ promises, the woman was sentenced to jail in April 2011 and remains there, the lawsuit alleged. A district attorney’s spokeswoman said the woman is serving more than seven years in jail for possession of cocaine with intent to sell and identity theft.

ALSO:

Superman caught on video flying along Carlsbad beach

Teens drugged parents to use Internet past curfew, police say

Rare river otter a celebrity after settling near Golden Gate Bridge

-- Joel Rubin and Jack Leonard

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Chinese Newspaper, Southern Weekend, Challenges Censors

Pool photo by

Xi Jinping at a meeting in Beijing in December. Unrest at an influential newspaper, Southern Weekend, has caught the public’s attention.

BEIJING — Turmoil at one of China’s leading newspapers is posing an early challenge to the measured political program of the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping, pitting a pent-up popular demand for change against the Communist Party’s desire to maintain a firm grip.

The unrest at the influential newspaper Southern Weekend began last week when censors appeared to have toned down the paper’s New Year’s letter to readers — traditionally a call for progress in the new year. That caused journalists and their supporters — including students at nearby Sun Yat-sen University — to issue open letters expressing their outrage.

“Our yielding and our silence has not brought a return of our freedom,” the students said in their petition on Sunday, according to a translation by Hong Kong University’s China Media Project. “Quite the opposite, it has brought the untempered intrusion and infiltration of rights by power.”

By Sunday night, the protests had transformed into a real-time melee in the blogosphere — a remarkable development in a country where protests of all kinds are tightly controlled and the media largely know the boundaries of permissible debate.

In this case, the newspaper’s economics and environmental news staffs appeared to declare that they were on strike, while editors loyal to the government shut down or took control of the paper’s official microblogs. One widely distributed staff declaration with 90 signatures said the publication’s microblogs were no longer authentic.

“I don’t know whether it will be a full strike, but I do know the joint statement about the confiscation of the Weibo account has widespread support,” said one former editor, referring to a microblogging site and speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The turmoil at the Guangzhou-based newspaper resonates especially strongly among politically aware Chinese because Mr. Xi chose southern China for a tour after taking power in November. He made a pilgrimage to nearby Shenzhen, where the father of China’s economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, initiated them two decades ago.

Indeed, Mr. Xi seems to be casting himself in the mold of Deng, who was known for bold economic reforms but who also brooked no opposition to the rule of the Communist Party.

The latest indication was a speech Mr. Xi made that also was published in newspapers on Sunday. Speaking to senior leaders, Mr. Xi repeatedly invoked Deng, especially on the need to adhere to “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a phrase often used to mean a combination of pragmatic policies and one-party rule. He also praised the prereform era, in what appeared to be an effort to appeal to harder-line Communists.

But part of the reason for the clamor for reforms are hopes that Mr. Xi himself has raised. So far he has won praise by calling for China’s constitutional protections to be put in effect, ordering officials to cut pomp and setting in motion an anticorruption campaign.

These actions seem to have prompted the calls for even bolder reforms.

Beyond the unrest at Southern Weekend, editors of the edgy historical journal Yanhuang Chunqiu published a cover article last week arguing that the existing Constitution offered a basis for political reform and that the party’s failure to abide by it was a central cause of political instability. On Friday, the magazine’s Web site was shut down, with officials claiming that it had failed to update its registration.

A message posted by the journal about the shutdown was forwarded 31,000 times, provoking many scathing criticisms of the government. The chief editor, Wu Si, said the journal’s staff had filed the paperwork and could be back online in 10 days.

Optimists say they hope the measures against the two publications were the result of recalcitrant officials appointed by the departing team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, whose decade in power was marked by an overriding desire for stability. Many members of Mr. Xi’s team will not take office until the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in March, and it could take years for Mr. Xi to put allies into important positions of power.

“If Xi does not remove people and promote some officials, his new policies — if he has any — will be sunk by the old people,” said a senior editor at a top party newspaper who asked to remain anonymous because of the delicacy of the subject. “The conflicts between the old and the new have just emerged.”

Chinese politics since Deng’s time have been defined by similar tensions between liberalization and reaction. But Mr. Xi also confronts millions of increasingly outspoken Internet users whose outpourings can confound even China’s heavy censorship.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of media at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the public anger showed how expectations had risen. “Currently in China people are unusually sensitive to developments like this, and so the reaction has been quite intense,” Mr. Zhan said.

Some are less sure that the atmosphere is more open, saying the media shutdowns have occurred because Mr. Xi has avoided taking a clear position.

“There are still no clear rules on the media, and so officials stick to using their habitual ways to control the media,” said Li Datong, a prominent Chinese newspaper editor fired for his views. “There won’t be any change until Xi Jinping enunciates any ideas about major change.”

Other commentators doubt this will happen. They note that in previous jobs Mr. Xi upheld the status quo and that now that he has reached the pinnacle of his career he is unlikely to support systemic reform.

“This is a traditional viewpoint: if you change the emperor you’ll have a change of policy and maybe some new, hopeful things,” said the exiled Chinese political commentator Zhang Ping, who goes by the pen name Chang Ping. “But I don’t think this is likely, because you still have an emperor.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong.

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