French Forces Needed Longer in Mali, U.S. Official Says

WASHINGTON — French military forces will probably be needed to carry out operations against militants in Mali even after a United Nations peacekeeping force is organized to secure the country, a senior State Department official told Congress on Thursday.

“There’s going to be an ongoing need for a counterterrorism operation in northern Mali, and that probably will always reside in the hands of the French and not in the hands of the United Nations,” Johnnie Carson, the top State Department official on Africa issues, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mr. Carson’s comments reflected extensive consultations between France and the United States regarding the military operation in Mali and suggested that there would be a longer-term role for French forces in the country. French officials declined to comment on Thursday night.

France rushed 4,000 troops to Mali in January, but French officials have made it clear they would like to hand over responsibility for the bulk of the mission to West African and Malian forces when the terrorist threat is reduced. Eventually these units are to be supplanted by a United Nations peacekeeping force made up of African troops.

In a brief interview after the hearing, Mr. Carson sketched out his vision of how the military operation might evolve, including a likely role for French counterterrorism forces in tracking down militants in the rugged northern part of Mali.

“It would be very separate and very different,” he said, making the point that while French forces might be in Mali at the same time as peacekeepers they would operate under a separate chain of command. “A bilateral agreement between the Malian government and French government would be able to do that.”

Edward R. Royce, the California Republican who is chairman of the panel, expressed concern that the mission might be handed over to the United Nations prematurely.

“We do not want to do that hastily,” Mr. Carson responded. “We think that over time the U.N. does have peacekeeping norms and standards that would be applicable and useful in Mali.”

The United States is barred by law from providing direct support to the Malian military after the coup there last year. But it has been providing intelligence, refueling French aircraft, flying equipment and troops to the region, and helping to train West African troops.

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How Ben Affleck & Jennifer Garner Are Making a Hollywood Marriage Work

By Michelle Tauber

02/14/2013 at 07:30 PM EST

Ben Affleck & Jennifer Garner

Ramey

He kept his arm tenderly around her back. She beamed as he told her "I love you" from the stage, and when the show was over, gently reminded him to take his jacket. For Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, the British Academy Film Awards in London on Feb. 10 was another successful date night – and a rare grown-ups' weekend getaway, with their three kids staying home with Garner's sister.

Well, almost: "He's just like a child!" Garner lovingly joked to a friend as she tugged her still-schmoozing husband–who won the night's two biggest honors for his film Argo – toward the exit. Could an Oscar for Best Picture be his next stop? "This is a second act for me," he said in his London acceptance speech. "I am so grateful and proud." As he told PEOPLE recently, "I am very lucky. I have to knock on wood about my life."

Especially about the woman who's a lock for Best Supporting Spouse. After seven years of marriage and three kids–Violet, 7, Seraphina, 4, and Samuel, who turns 1 on Feb. 27–Affleck and Garner, both 40, seem to have struck that rarest of things for a Hollywood couple: balance. It's an old-fashioned arrangement, with Garner handling most of the day-to-day responsibility for keeping the children's schedules humming while Affleck rides his Argo hot streak – including Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe wins, despite a snub for the Oscar directing category.

"I've got a great family; I'm really inspired by where my career is," Affleck says. "I've seen a lot of different things rambling around in this business, and I'm just really, really happy to find myself where I am."

Several sources who know the couple well say that both stars are at ease in their "quite traditional roles," as a Garner friend puts it. Garner dialed back on her own career to commit herself to making the ballet-karate-playdate rounds.

"She blows my mind," says Affleck's Argo costar Clea Duvall. "She's such an amazing mom and such an amazing wife and so supportive of him. It's just . . . they're kind of the ideal." Although Affleck has made his share of school runs during a busy awards season, in many ways he's an old-fashioned dad.

Says a source who knows the couple: "Have you ever seen Mad Men? That's how he approaches [marriage and kids] – providing for your family is your priority, and raising the kids day-to-day is the wife's priority." But when he's not working, he's plenty hands-on, reading to the girls at bookstores and taking them to the farmers' market. "His wife and family are the best things that ever happened to him," says an Affleck pal. "They have always come first and always will."

 

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Study: Fish in drug-tainted water suffer reaction

BOSTON (AP) — What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.

It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.

The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.

"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.

Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places.

"We know that in a predator-prey relation, increased boldness and activity combined with decreased sociality ... means you're going to be somebody's lunch quite soon," said Gregory Moller, a toxicologist at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. "It removes the natural balance."

Researchers around the world have been taking a close look at the effects of pharmaceuticals in extremely low concentrations, measured in parts per billion. Such drugs have turned up in waterways in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere over the past decade.

They come mostly from humans and farm animals; the drugs pass through their bodies in unmetabolized form. These drug traces are then piped to water treatment plants, which are not designed to remove them from the cleaned water that flows back into streams and rivers.

The Associated Press first reported in 2008 that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans carries low concentrations of many common drugs. The findings were based on questionnaires sent to water utilities, which reported the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and other drugs.

The news reports led to congressional hearings and legislation, more water testing and more public disclosure. To this day, though, there are no mandatory U.S. limits on pharmaceuticals in waterways.

The research team at Sweden's Umea University used minute concentrations of 2 parts per billion of the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam, similar to concentrations found in real waters. The drug belongs to a widely used class of medicines known as benzodiazepines that includes Valium and Librium.

The team put young wild European perch into an aquarium, exposed them to these highly diluted drugs and then carefully measured feeding, schooling, movement and hiding behavior. They found that drug-exposed fish moved more, fed more aggressively, hid less and tended to school less than unexposed fish. On average, the drugged fish were more than twice as active as the others, researcher Micael Jonsson said. The effects were more pronounced at higher drug concentrations.

"Our first thought is, this is like a person diagnosed with ADHD," said Jonsson, referring to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "They become asocial and more active than they should be."

Tomas Brodin, another member of the research team, called the drug's environmental impact a global problem. "We find these concentrations or close to them all over the world, and it's quite possible or even probable that these behavioral effects are taking place as we speak," he said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Most previous research on trace drugs and marine life has focused on biological changes, such as male fish that take on female characteristics. However, a 2009 study found that tiny concentrations of antidepressants made fathead minnows more vulnerable to predators.

It is not clear exactly how long-term drug exposure, beyond the seven days in this study, would affect real fish in real rivers and streams. The Swedish researchers argue that the drug-induced changes could jeopardize populations of this sport and commercial fish, which lives in both fresh and brackish water.

Water toxins specialist Anne McElroy of Stony Brook University in New York agreed: "These lower chronic exposures that may alter things like animals' mating behavior or its ability to catch food or its ability to avoid being eaten — over time, that could really affect a population."

Another possibility, the researchers said, is that more aggressive feeding by the perch on zooplankton could reduce the numbers of these tiny creatures. Since zooplankton feed on algae, a drop in their numbers could allow algae to grow unchecked. That, in turn, could choke other marine life.

The Swedish team said it is highly unlikely people would be harmed by eating such drug-exposed fish. Jonsson said a person would have to eat 4 tons of perch to consume the equivalent of a single pill.

Researchers said more work is needed to develop better ways of removing drugs from water at treatment plants. They also said unused drugs should be brought to take-back programs where they exist, instead of being flushed down the toilet. And they called on pharmaceutical companies to work on "greener" drugs that degrade more easily.

Sandoz, one of three companies approved to sell oxazepam in the U.S., "shares society's desire to protect the environment and takes steps to minimize the environmental impact of its products over their life cycle," spokeswoman Julie Masow said in an emailed statement. She provided no details.

___

Online:

Overview of the drug: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682050.html

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Aisles of treats from the Emerald Isle

When the luck of the Irish holds, the lovers buy Claddagh rings for their valentines, frat boys gearing up for St. Paddy's Day go for Guinness caps with built-in bottle openers — and come Christmas, there's a run on plum pudding and St. Nicks in Kelly green.

But holidays alone don't explain how a small Irish store survives year after year in a Hollywood mini-mall.

The plain brown shopping complex set back from Vine Street houses the usual suspects: a pawnshop, check cashing, Thai massage, tattoos. You see them without really seeing them — which makes the one surprise easy to miss.

The Irish Import Shop, which opened 50 years ago, is wedged between a dry cleaner and a nail salon. It has a neon shamrock in the window, and the blinds stay partly drawn to save the tapestries and woolens from fading.

Open the door and you might well sniff the scent of an Irish hearth — which, granted, is really a thumbnail tab of peat in a ceramic, cottage-shaped incense burner. Still, there's real Irish music playing (if the stereo's not on the fritz). And the lady behind the counter has a brogue, if slightly faded by years in California.

The phone rings, and Anne Colburn answers with a lilt. And here you discover the shop's secret, even today where on the Internet you can get anything without talking to anyone.

"It certainly is, and I know who this is," Colburn says. "Yeh, now, wait a minute here now — how much tea will you be wanting?"

Longing for home when you're far from it can take many forms.

You might yearn for familiar sounds, the hills and valleys of your people's speech.

You might miss the easy shorthand of shared experience.

You might desperately crave particular tastes, especially the comfort foods of childhood.

Throughout the store are many balms for the far-from-Ireland blues: Celtic crosses, Kerry capes, socks from Connemara, embroidered "ABCs of Ireland" baby books (P as in potatoes), hangings with the Irish blessing that starts, "May the road rise up to meet you…"

In the import shop's northernmost aisle, however, are more international cures.

Here are Irish and British teas shipped straight (and so not modified for American tastes), Cadbury Curly Wurly bars, Rowntree's Fruit Pastilles, McVitie's Jaffa Cakes and tall bottles of Ribena, a drink syrup made with black currants. A freezer holds Irish sausage, thick slabs of Irish-style bacon, tubes of black pudding and white pudding. And then there is the stack of canned Heinz baked beans — British style, in tomato sauce.

Into this aisle each day come the Brits and the Australians, people from the Caribbean, Canada, South Africa — many linked by lifelong habits of eating said beans on toast.

When Kessa Taylor, pregnant and homesick, walked in a few months ago, "I stood in the aisle and cried," she said.

"It's stuff that you were raised on. It runs so deep," said the 33-year-old who grew up in Wales and London.

Annie Jones started the shop with her husband, Richard, known as Jonesy, back when the Irish emigrated in large numbers and Jonesy still drove a bus. On Sundays, he had an Irish radio show, and people wanted to buy the music he played.

But it was the shop's food offerings that really took off.

"The English and the Irish," Annie Jones said when she stopped by recently for a visit. "They definitely agree on the tea and the biscuits and the bacon."

And as they stand together in the aisle, admiring the tins of custard and the digestive biscuits and the marmalades and the Marmite, they invariably agree on other things too — not least of which that in this little shop, they find themselves wonderfully at home.

nita.lelyveld@latimes.com

Follow City Beat @latimescitybeat on Twitter and at Los Angeles Times City Beat on Facebook.

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In Japan, the Fax Machine Is Anything but a Relic

Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times

Yuichiro Sugahara, whose company delivers bento lunchboxes, mostly through fax orders.

TOKYO — Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But it also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology — the fax machine — that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks and cassette tapes in the dustbin of outmoded technologies.

Last year alone, Japanese households bought 1.7 million of the old-style fax machines, which print documents on slick, glossy paper spooled in the back. In the United States, the device has become such an artifact that the Smithsonian is adding two machines to its collection, technology historians said.

“The fax was such a success here that it has proven hard to replace,” said Kenichi Shibata, a manager at NTT Communications, which led development of the technology in the 1970s. “It has grown unusually deep roots into Japanese society.”

The Japanese government’s Cabinet Office says that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011.

Yuichiro Sugahara learned the hard way about his country’s deep attachment to the fax machine, which the nation popularized in the 1980s. A decade ago, he tried to modernize his family-run company, which delivers traditional bento lunchboxes, by taking orders online. Sales quickly plummeted.

Today, his company, Tamagoya, is thriving with the hiss and beep of thousands of orders pouring in every morning, most by fax, many with minutely detailed handwritten requests like “go light on the batter in the fried chicken” or “add an extra hard-boiled egg.”

“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” said Mr. Sugahara, 43.

Japan’s reluctance to give up its fax machines offers a revealing glimpse into an aging nation that can often seem quietly determined to stick to its tried-and-true ways, even if the rest of the world seems to be passing it rapidly by. The fax addiction helps explain why Japan, which once revolutionized consumer electronics with its hand-held calculators, Walkmans and, yes, fax machines, has become a latecomer in the digital age, and has allowed itself to fall behind nimbler competitors like South Korea and China.

“Japan has this Galápagos effect of holding on to some things they’re comfortable with,” said Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian who is writing a book on the machine’s rise and fall. “Elsewhere, the fax has gone the way of the dodo.”

In Japan, with the exception of the savviest Internet start-ups or internationally minded manufacturers, the fax remains an essential tool for doing business. Experts say government offices prefer faxes because they generate paperwork onto which bureaucrats can affix their stamps of approval, called hanko. Many companies say they still rely on faxes to create a paper trail of orders and shipments not left by ephemeral e-mail. Banks rely on faxes because, they say, customers are worried about the safety of their personal information on the Internet.

Even Japan’s largest yakuza crime syndicate, the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, has used faxes to send notifications of expulsion to members, the police say.

After the deadly earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011, there was a small boom in fax sales to replace machines that had been washed away. One of the hottest sellers is a model that is powered by batteries so it will keep working during power failures caused by natural disasters.

At Tamagoya, Mr. Sugahara has turned his company’s reliance on the fax and standard telephones into an art form. Every morning, orders for about 62,000 lunches pour in, about half by fax. Most of those lunches are cooked and put onto trucks even before the last order is taken. A small army of 100 fax and telephone operators carefully coordinate deliveries, and fewer than 60 lunches — or 0.1 percent — are wasted.

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.

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Lady Gaga Cancels Born This Way Ball Tour Due to Severe Injury

02/13/2013 at 08:50 PM EST

It's a somber week for Lady Gaga – and her Little Monsters.

Following Tuesday's Facebook announcement that she was "devastated and sad" because she couldn't walk and had to postpone several Born This Way Ball concerts, the pop star, 26, has officially canceled the remaining dates of her world tour.

"After additional tests this morning to review the severity of the issue, it has been determined that Lady Gaga has a labral tear of the right hip," the singer's rep told PEOPLE Wednesday in a statement. "She will need surgery to repair the problem, followed by strict down time to recover. This unfortunately, will force her to cancel the tour, so she can heal."

Refunds for the cancelled performances will be available at point of purchase starting on Thursday.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," she wrote the previous day of postponing the dates. "I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

Get well, Gaga!

•Reporting by CHUCK ARNOLD

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Clues to why most survived China melamine scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists wondering why some children and not others survived one of China's worst food safety scandals have uncovered a suspect: germs that live in the gut.

In 2008, at least six babies died and 300,000 became sick after being fed infant formula that had been deliberately and illegally tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. There were some lingering puzzles: How did it cause kidney failure, and why wasn't everyone equally at risk?

A team of researchers from the U.S. and China re-examined those questions in a series of studies in rats. In findings released Wednesday, they reported that certain intestinal bacteria play a crucial role in how the body handles melamine.

The intestines of all mammals teem with different species of bacteria that perform different jobs. To see if one of those activities involves processing melamine, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Shanghai Jiao Tong University gave lab rats antibiotics to kill off some of the germs — and then fed them melamine.

The antibiotic-treated rats excreted twice as much of the melamine as rats that didn't get antibiotics, and they experienced fewer kidney stones and other damage.

A closer look identified why: A particular intestinal germ — named Klebsiella terrigena — was metabolizing melamine to create a more toxic byproduct, the team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Previous studies have estimated that fewer than 1 percent of healthy people harbor that bacteria species. A similar fraction of melamine-exposed children in China got sick, the researchers wrote. But proving that link would require studying stool samples preserved from affected children, they cautioned.

Still, the research is pretty strong, said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the new study.

More importantly, "this paper adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that microbes in the body play a significant role in our response to toxicity and in our health in general," Gilbert said.

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Report excoriates L.A. County agency in child deaths, torture

A stifling bureaucracy and inept workforce have crippled Los Angeles County's child protective agency, resulting in a system that allowed children to remain in unsafe homes, sometimes to die at the hands of their caretakers, according to a confidential county report.

The investigation, conducted by an independent counsel for the Board of Supervisors, looked at 15 recent child deaths and a torture case. In all but two instances, investigators found that casework errors began with the agency's first contact with the children and contributed to their deaths.

The report is the harshest assessment of the Department of Children and Family Services in recent memory, echoing complaints from child advocates that the county has rejected for years.

Investigators largely blamed the department's problems on its decision to place its least experienced social workers in its most crucial job: assessing dangers to children. Many of those workers — facing a total of 160,000 child abuse hot line calls each year — are "just 'doing their time,'" according to the report.

Supervisors are poorly qualified and often disregard policy, creating a situation akin to "the blind leading the blind," with workers rarely held accountable for "egregious" errors, the report said.

The result has been deaths that might have been prevented had social workers taken basic steps to assess the risks.

Two-year-old Abigail, for example, was returned to her parents after social workers failed to look into their extensive abuse history and question their weekend stays in jail for prior offenses.

A month later, Abigail was found dead, covered in bruises that the parents allegedly attempted to conceal with blue paint.

Viola Vanclief, 2, allegedly was killed by her foster mother, Kiana Barker. Before Viola's death, the county's child abuse hot line received seven complaints about Barker. Each time, the investigating social worker was unaware of the previous calls, according to the report, which was obtained by The Times through a source.

Philip Browning, who became the agency's permanent director two months before the report was completed in April, recently embarked on a reorganization involving new assignments, training and procedures for many of the department's 6,800 employees.

The report's lead author, Amy Shek Naamani, has been hired by Browning and placed in a senior position to help guide the effort.

The four-year blueprint for reform — the first comprehensive effort in a decade — covers many of the recommendations outlined in the report. Browning said his goal was to restore "common sense, accountability and critical thinking" to the county's child welfare network.

"It's important for people to know that this can't happen overnight," he added.

The report found that many of the department's errors were rooted in its guiding strategy to keep children with their families and avoid "detention" — putting them in foster care.

Though that preference is necessary when the child is not at substantial risk, social workers became blind to dangerous family situations, according to the report.

"Individual offices and leadership [within the agency] celebrated as their number of detentions decreased and individual social workers were praised for low detention numbers; all while more children were dying while left in their parent(s) care," the report said.

Investigators focused on weaknesses in the department's emergency response section, which looks into complaints to the child abuse hot line and often is the first posting for rookie social workers.

The report found a "general lack of skill" among those caseworkers. Rules requiring master's degrees in social work have been waived for half of the department's frontline personnel and all of their supervisors.

Once hired, "every warm body" was "passed through" by the department's training academy, spending just four hours learning how to pull information from often reluctant subjects, the report said.

Investigations tend to rely on bureaucratic rules, not common sense and close observation, the report found. The department has issued more than 4,000 pages of policies detailing how social workers should do their jobs.

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Cardinal Dolan a Dark Horse to Succeed Pope

But suddenly, he found himself in even more rarefied company, with his name mentioned alongside those of more long-serving cardinals as a potential next pope, even though, by all accounts, his chances are slim.

The news on Monday of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation came as a surprise to Cardinal Dolan, as it did to most of the world. But within hours, his life was already changed. As he continued to go about his regular business as archbishop, he found himself even more in the spotlight to which he has become accustomed, facing a glare that will quite likely continue at least through the conclave in Rome next month.

On Monday, when he dedicated a chapel in Rockland County and attended a prayer meeting in the Bronx, he also ricocheted between media appearances, beginning at 7 a.m. on “Today,” the NBC show, then holding a news conference, writing an op-ed, and granting interviews to ABC and CBS. He was still talking to reporters as night fell, holding an impromptu news conference outside the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South before going inside for a fund-raiser. Both Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo fielded questions from reporters about the possibility that Cardinal Dolan could become pope; on late-night television, Stephen Colbert offered his endorsement (what he called a “Colbert bump”) for Cardinal Dolan for pope.

Through it all, the cardinal approached the speculation about “Pope Dolan” with his typical self-deprecating humor. Asked what he would do if he found himself among the finalists, he said, “I’ll tell them they have the wrong guy.”

“Don’t bet your lunch money on that one,” he added of his steep odds. “Bet on the Mets.”

On Tuesday, Cardinal Dolan’s schedule returned to a relative normal, as he headed to Camden, N.J., to attend the installation of his former deputy, Dennis J. Sullivan, as bishop. On Wednesday, he plans to visit the bread line at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Manhattan in the morning, bestow ashes on the faithful for Ash Wednesday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral at noon, and then attend a wake on Staten Island.

“Honestly, we could do nothing but media — all day, every day — at this point,” said his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling. “He understands the value of it, he likes to do it. But he knows that as archbishop of New York, he’s got a lot of other things he has to attend to.”

The likelihood of Cardinal Dolan becoming the next pope is low, many observers say. “I would put him in the — what’s less than a dark horse?”  category, said Christopher M. Bellitto, a papal historian at Kean University in New Jersey.

“He is arguably going to be, if he is not already, the voice and face of the American church, though whether he can translate that to higher office is another matter,” Professor Bellitto said.

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, put Cardinal Dolan’s odds at “100 to 1.” But, he added, “Anything can happen.”

Cardinal Dolan is considered an unlikely pope for several reasons. Most obviously, he is a citizen of the United States, and the College of Cardinals has been reluctant to choose a pope from a superpower. This year, some Vatican watchers believe the cardinals might choose someone from North America as a compromise between taking the historic step to electing a pope from the developing world and the more conventional choice of someone from Europe. But even if that is the case, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a Canadian who heads the influential Congregation for Bishops in Rome, seems “a more logical choice,” Professor Bellitto said.

Also, although Cardinal Dolan once served as the rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, a seminary for priests, he has never headed a Vatican department, which has often been a credential of a future pope. And, while Cardinal Dolan speaks Italian well enough to converse and deliver speeches, his Spanish is much more basic; many candidates for pope speak multiple languages.

But Cardinal Dolan has strengths as well. He “left an enormously positive impression when he was in Rome last February for the consistory, when he became a cardinal,” said John L. Allen Jr., the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter. For the first time in memory, Italian newspapers were raising the possibility of an American pope, charmed by the “backslapping, baby-kissing, beer-swilling freak-of-nature that is Cardinal Dolan,” Mr. Allen said.

“I think he is a long shot, probably a remote possibility,” Mr. Allen added, “but I do think he will be in the conversation. And that, in and of itself, is something of a novelty for an American cardinal.”

Cardinal Dolan said that, when he first heard about Pope Benedict’s resignation Monday morning, he was in the middle of reading one of the pope’s books on the life of Christ. “That’s how much of my day he is,” he recalled that evening. “So I haven’t really thought to the next one, but I will sure miss him.”

He said he expected to be headed to Rome for the conclave as early as the beginning of March, but like everyone else, was still waiting to hear the exact date. “ ’Cause first of all, I’m a rookie,” Cardinal Dolan said, and also because the church itself is still working out how to handle the rare circumstance of a pope stepping down. “So what will happen now?” he wondered aloud. “I don’t know.”

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Lady Gaga: I Can't Walk Due to Injury

02/12/2013 at 06:45 PM EST

Lady Gaga is feeling like a little monster for postponing concerts because of an injury.

"I barely know what to say," she writes on her Facebook page, Tuesday. "I've been hiding a show injury and chronic pain for some time now, [and] over the past month it has worsened. I've been praying it would heal. I hid it from my staff. I didn't want to disappoint my amazing fans. However, after last night's performance I could not walk and still can't."

The pop star, 26 – whose Twitter page explains that she has a case of synovitis, which is severe inflammation of the joints – was forced to postpone two concerts in Chicago, one in Detroit and one in Hamilton, Ontario.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," the rest of her Facebook post says. "I'm devastated & sad. It will hopefully heal as soon as possible. I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

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