For Cardinal Roger Mahony, social media is a powerful pulpit

As archbishop of Los Angeles, Roger Mahony responded to criticism of his handling of sexual abuse cases with a high-priced crisis management firm, full-page ads in Spanish and English newspapers, and a report naming accused priests.

In retirement, Mahony's public relations operation consists mainly of his thoughts and a computer keyboard. Since last month, when outrage flared anew over files showing he shielded abusers, the cardinal has thrown himself into social media to give the public his side of the story.

It was on his blog that Mahony defended himself against a public rebuke by his successor, and it was on Twitter that he confirmed, to the dismay of many critics, that he would attend the conclave to elect a new pope.

"Am planning to be in Rome and vote for the next Pope," he wrote hours after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation. He added, "Will be twee[t]ing daily."

It was an extraordinary pledge from a man who had tweeted just five times before and only sporadically updated his blog. But as Catholic groups, members of the public and even some Vatican officials continued to question Mahony's integrity, he became ever more prolific online.

From the Vatican on Monday, he posted his harshest assessment yet of those who have attacked him.

"I can't recall a time such as now when people tend to be so judgmental and even self-righteous, so quick to accuse, judge and condemn," he wrote. "And often with scant real facts and information."

Since the release of 12,000 pages of confidential church records, Mahony has been lambasted by church critics, victims' advocates and others. The criticism skyrocketed with Benedict's resignation and Mahony's insistence that he would cast his vote for the next pope despite having been removed by Archbishop Jose Gomez from all public duties.

Last week, three former top Vatican officials publicly discussed the propriety of Mahony attending the conclave, and a liberal Catholic group gathered 10,000 signatures online urging the cardinal to give up his vote.

The debate over his presence only grew when a British cardinal, Keith O'Brien, decided to stay home following allegations that he had engaged in "inappropriate acts" with priests decades earlier.

"I do not wish media attention in Rome to be focused on me — but rather on Pope Benedict XVI and on his successor," O'Brien said in a statement.

By contrast, Mahony has been reveling in his participation in the papal election, counting down the days and hours to his departure on his Twitter feed, slapping a Vatican City dateline on his first blog post after landing in Italy, and describing the "anticipation and expectation" on the streets there.

Mahony used Benedict's announcement as an opportunity to talk to the public about something other than the sex abuse scandal and to assert his relevance to the church two years after his retirement. As a cardinal, Mahony gets to cast a vote; Gomez, the man who rebuked him, does not.

When news of the pope's departure broke, Mahony quickly posted a personal tribute to Benedict on his blog and said he was looking forward to voting in the conclave. It would be six hours before the archdiocese press office put out an official statement from Gomez.

The post marked the start of a new level of social media engagement by Mahony. Since then, he has posted nearly daily on his blog and Twitter account.

"He obviously feels a need to be heard and understood," said Diane Winston, a professor of media and religion at USC.

Mahony launched his blog in 2009 after attending a Vatican conference on social media and was for years an occasional poster. He frequently wrote about his longtime cause, immigration, but sometimes detoured, such as one entry extolling a pizza joint in Rome.

"My favorite is the one with fresh sliced mushrooms as the main topping!" he wrote in 2009.

His recent entries have been personal, spiritual and tinged with aggrievement. In a blog post this month, he wrote that he had a religious epiphany on Ash Wednesday. With "all the storms" of the sex abuse scandal, God was calling him "to be humiliated, disgraced and rebuffed by many."

"In recent days, I have been confronted in various places by very unhappy people. I could understand the depth of their anger and outrage…," he wrote. "Thanks to God's special grace, I simply stood there, asking God to bless and forgive them."

Mahony's blog doesn't allow readers to post responses, but Twitter does, and the feedback has often been harsh. When Mahony on Monday said the weather forecast for Rome was pleasant and rain-free, one user replied, "a good day to hide from your guilty past. #pedophile #protector."

To a tweet in which Mahony discussed "loving your enemies," another user wrote "You're a good man. But this online pity party is unseemly. Don't just praise the 'silent Jesus', act like him."

Mahony has yet to respond to any tweets directed at him. Marketing and social media strategist David Meerman Scott said Mahony was practicing "one-way communication" rather than the dialogue that defines a successful online presence.

"He's not engaging with the public, he's talking to the public," Scott said. But he added that if people find the cardinal's posts to be genuine and forthcoming, they might come to see his perspective.

"It takes guts for people to put themselves out there.... It's very easy to be quiet and say nothing," he said.

At least nine other cardinals in the 116-member conclave have Twitter accounts. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is the most widely followed, with more than 84,000 subscribers. Dolan, however, follows just one account — the pope's. (Benedict, whose handle is @pontifex, counts more than 1.5 million followers.) After about a month of tweeting, Mahony has about 1,500 followers. He doesn't follow the pope or Gomez, but follows the L.A. Times food section and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Mahony's online missives will probably come to a temporary halt when he enters the Sistine Chapel next month to vote for the next pope. Those deliberations are secret, and the Vatican said this week that the penalty for revealing what happens during the conclave is excommunication.

victoria.kim@latimes.com

harriet.ryan@latimes.com

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Little Clarity in Italian Vote, Aside from Anger

Italians Head to the Polls:
Italians voted Sunday and Monday in a general election that is being closely watched to see whether a clear winner will emerge.

ROME — Italian voters delivered a rousing anti-austerity message and a strong rebuke to the existing political order in national elections on Monday, plunging the country into political paralysis after results failed to produce a clear winner.

Analysts said that the best-case scenario would be shaky coalition government, which would once again expose Italy and the euro zone to turmoil if markets question its commitment to measures that have kept the budget deficit within a tolerable 3 percent of gross domestic product. News of the stalemate sent tremors through the financial world, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 200 points.

Although analysts blamed the large protest vote on Italy’s political morass and troubled electoral system, the results were also seen as a rejection of the rapid deficit-reduction strategy set by the European Commission and European Central Bank — from a country too big to fail and too big to bail out.

“No doubt Italy has an imperfect political culture, but this election I think is the logical consequence of pursuing policies that have dramatically worsened the economic and social picture in Italy,” said Simon Tilford, the chief economist of the Center for European Reform, a London research institute.

“People have been warning that if they adhere to this policy there will be a political cost, there will be backlash,” he added. “It couldn’t have taken place in a more pivotal country.”

In an election marked by voter anger and low turnout, the center-left Democratic Party appeared to be leading in the Lower House with 29.6 percent, with 99 percent of the votes counted, and in the Senate with one-third of the votes counted by midnight local time.

But that outcome did not give the Democrats a clear victory because the center-right People of Liberty Party of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was leading in several populous regions that carry more Senate seats, potentially giving him veto power and raising the prospect of political gridlock.

 Even before the final result, the election was a clear victory for the Five Star Movement of the former comedian Beppe Grillo, which in its first-ever national elections appeared to win about 25 percent of the vote in the Lower House. Italians from both right and left — and the wealthier north and poorer south — were drawn to Mr. Grillo’s opposition to austerity measures and cries to oust the existing political order.

And it was a stinging defeat for the caretaker prime minister, Mario Monti, a newly minted politician whose lackluster civic movement appeared to win around 10 percent in both houses. “Grillo had a devastating success; the rest of the situation is very unclear,” said Stefano Folli, a political columnist for the daily business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

Either the Democratic Party and the People of Liberty Party “will form a grand coalition committed to reforms and changing the electoral law, which would be very difficult, or Italy will be ungovernable,” Mr. Folli added.

Mr. Monti’s caretaker government remains in place with full powers until a new government is formed. Appearing on television on Monday evening, Mr. Monti said he felt “tremendous regret” that during his tenure the political parties were not able to change Italy’s electoral law so as to guarantee more political stability. “It is a great responsibility of the political forces, and one of the reasons for the disaffection and distance from and the revindication of the political class,” he added.

Under Italy’s complex electoral laws, it is extremely hard for any one party to gain a strong ruling majority needed to manage an economy with rising unemployment and a credit crunch, let alone push through structural changes to the ossified economy. Instead, the parties have resisted change to protect their own power bases. 

The results of this election would appear to represent new depths of gridlock, and few experts expected any party to form a governing coalition strong enough to prevail for long. Nicolas Véron, an economist and a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based research institute, said that regardless of who ultimately controls the levers of government, “The key question is whether we can have serious structural reform.”

Italy “was a work in progress before the elections,” Mr. Véron added, “and I think investors understand that it will remain a work in progress for some time.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome, and Nicola Clark from Paris.

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PEOPLE Live at the Oscars - Pics and Tweets from the Inside!

02/25/2013 at 07:35 PM EST

The Oscars hit the Dolby Theatre in L.A. Sunday night – and PEOPLE was there!

Editor Peter Castro was on the red carpet with Modern Family's Rico Rodriquez for the live pre-show event Backstage Pass – plus we had editors at the after parties and more!

Check out our best Tweets and pics from the show:

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Koop, who transformed surgeon general post, dies

With his striking beard and starched uniform, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop became one of the most recognizable figures of the Reagan era — and one of the most unexpectedly enduring.

His nomination in 1981 met a wall of opposition from women's groups and liberal politicians, who complained President Ronald Reagan selected Koop, a pediatric surgeon and evangelical Christian from Philadelphia, only because of his conservative views, especially his staunch opposition to abortion.

Soon, though, he was a hero to AIDS activists, who chanted "Koop, Koop" at his appearances but booed other officials. And when he left his post in 1989, he left behind a landscape where AIDS was a top research and educational priority, smoking was considered a public health hazard, and access to abortion remained largely intact.

Koop, who turned his once-obscure post into a bully pulpit for seven years during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and who surprised both ends of the political spectrum by setting aside his conservative personal views on issues such as homosexuality and abortion to keep his focus sharply medical, died Monday at his home in Hanover, N.H. He was 96.

An assistant at Koop's Dartmouth College institute, Susan Wills, confirmed his death but didn't disclose its cause.

Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as surgeon general a decade ago under President George W. Bush, said Koop was a mentor to him and preached the importance of staying true to the science even if it made politicians uncomfortable.

"He set the bar high for all who followed in his footsteps," Carmona said.

Although the surgeon general has no real authority to set government policy, Koop described himself as "the health conscience of the country" and said modestly just before leaving his post that "my only influence was through moral suasion."

A former pipe smoker, Koop carried out a crusade to end smoking in the United States; his goal had been to do so by 2000. He said cigarettes were as addictive as heroin and cocaine. And he shocked his conservative supporters when he endorsed condoms and sex education to stop the spread of AIDS.

Chris Collins, a vice president of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, said many people don't realize what an important role Koop played in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

"At the time, he really changed the national conversation, and he showed real courage in pursuing the duties of his job," Collins said.

Even after leaving office, Koop continued to promote public health causes, from preventing childhood accidents to better training for doctors.

"I will use the written word, the spoken word and whatever I can in the electronic media to deliver health messages to this country as long as people will listen," he promised.

In 1996, he rapped Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole for suggesting that tobacco was not invariably addictive, saying Dole's comments "either exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge of nicotine addiction or his blind support of the tobacco industry."

Although Koop eventually won wide respect with his blend of old-fashioned values, pragmatism and empathy, his nomination met staunch opposition.

Foes noted that Koop traveled the country in 1979 and 1980 giving speeches that predicted a progression "from liberalized abortion to infanticide to passive euthanasia to active euthanasia, indeed to the very beginnings of the political climate that led to Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen."

But Koop, a devout Presbyterian, was confirmed after he told a Senate panel he would not use the surgeon general's post to promote his religious ideology. He kept his word.

In 1986, he issued a frank report on AIDS, urging the use of condoms for "safe sex" and advocating sex education as early as third grade.

He also maneuvered around uncooperative Reagan administration officials in 1988 to send an educational AIDS pamphlet to more than 100 million U.S. households, the largest public health mailing ever.

Koop personally opposed homosexuality and believed sex should be saved for marriage. But he insisted that Americans, especially young people, must not die because they were deprived of explicit information about how HIV was transmitted.

Koop further angered conservatives by refusing to issue a report requested by the Reagan White House, saying he could not find enough scientific evidence to determine whether abortion has harmful psychological effects on women.

Koop maintained his personal opposition to abortion, however. After he left office, he told medical students it violated their Hippocratic oath. In 2009, he wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urging that health care legislation include a provision to ensure doctors and medical students would not be forced to perform abortions. The letter briefly set off a security scare because it was hand delivered.

Koop served as chairman of the National Safe Kids Campaign and as an adviser to President Bill Clinton's health care reform plan.

At a congressional hearing in 2007, Koop spoke about political pressure on the surgeon general post. He said Reagan was pressed to fire him every day, but Reagan would not interfere.

Koop, worried that medicine had lost old-fashioned caring and personal relationships between doctors and patients, opened his institute at Dartmouth to teach medical students basic values and ethics. He also was a part-owner of a short-lived venture, drkoop.com, to provide consumer health care information via the Internet.

Koop was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the only son of a Manhattan banker and the nephew of a doctor. He said by age 5 he knew he wanted to be a surgeon and at age 13 he practiced his skills on neighborhood cats.

He attended Dartmouth, where he received the nickname Chick, short for "chicken Koop." It stuck for life.

Koop received his medical degree at Cornell Medical College, choosing pediatric surgery because so few surgeons practiced it.

In 1938, he married Elizabeth Flanagan, the daughter of a Connecticut doctor. They had four children, one of whom died in a mountain climbing accident when he was 20.

Koop was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

He pioneered surgery on newborns and successfully separated three sets of conjoined twins. He won national acclaim by reconstructing the chest of a baby born with the heart outside the body.

Although raised as a Baptist, he was drawn to a Presbyterian church near the hospital, where he developed an abiding faith. He began praying at the bedside of his young patients — ignoring the snickers of some of his colleagues.

Koop's wife died in 2007, and he married Cora Hogue in 2010.

He was by far the best-known surgeon general and for decades afterward was still a recognized personality.

"I was walking down the street with him one time" about five years ago, recalled Dr. George Wohlreich, director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a medical society with which Koop had longstanding ties. "People were yelling out, 'There goes Dr. Koop!' You'd have thought he was a rock star."

___

Ring reported from Montpelier, Vt. Cass reported from Washington. AP Medical Writers Lauran Neergaard in Washington and Mike Stobbe in New York contributed to this report.

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A cosmic gift to L.A.

One night on Mt. Wilson about 1908, a short, powerfully built man with a handlebar mustache looked through the largest telescope in the world. What he saw transformed him, and would put Los Angeles at the forefront of a movement to make astronomy the people's science.

We may never know whether Col. Griffith J. Griffith saw the rings of Saturn or another celestial object with the then-new 60-inch reflector telescope, but we can be sure that it inspired his vision of a world-class observatory for the people of Los Angeles, allowing the masses a glimpse of the heavens.

"If all mankind could look through that telescope," he said that night, "it would change the world."

PHOTOS: Images of space

Griffith's contribution was not just his namesake observatory, but his rejection of the notion more common in his time that an observatory belonged on a remote mountaintop and should be restricted to scientists.

Griffith sought to make astronomy a public science — a notion embodied by Griffith Observatory, built near what is now the middle of the city, where it is accessible to anyone.

Or, as observatory Director Ed Krupp says: "Location, location, location."

The observatory has embraced this public-spirited view of science in other ways too: From its beginning in the 1930s, it was popularized by Hollywood, becoming a movie icon in its own right.

"Griffith had an inkling of the power of motion pictures and he wanted a motion picture theater of some kind incorporated into this public observatory," Krupp says. "The planetarium hadn't been invented at the time ... and so a movie theater was really the closest thing that he could imagine to an immersive experience in astronomy and in science."

The 1955 film "Rebel Without a Cause" made the observatory an international emblem of the city, but even before the building opened in 1935, it was used to film scenes in Gene Autry's bizarre cowboy-science fiction mash-up "The Phantom Empire," Krupp says. "At the time, the building seemed classic yet futuristic, and that made it a draw for science fiction," Krupp says. "It was, in fact, the palace of Ming the Merciless on the Planet Mongo in the Flash Gordon space opera."

Today, "its stardom attracts a steady stream of visitors from all over the planet," he says.

Griffith and the observatory were a main focus of a program titled "Making Astronomy Public, Los Angeles Style" held during the American Astronomical Society meeting held earlier this year in Long Beach.

Speakers at the meeting sought to expand the conventional view of Griffith, who donated about 3,000 acres for a city park in 1896, shot his wife in the head in 1903 and served two years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon.

He was a despised character in Los Angeles after the shooting, says Anthony Cook, an astronomer at the observatory who spoke at the conference. But although many have questioned whether the observatory was an attempt to buy back the goodwill of the city, Cook says the gift was sincere.

"He came out of San Quentin after two years really a reformed person. He stayed away from alcohol, he actually supported his ex-wife, any philanthropic enterprise that she wanted to do, helped his son maintain caring for her, and also turned his attentions to what he hoped would benefit everybody, which was by developing Griffith Park."

A onetime newspaper reporter who covered mining and became wealthy as an expert on the subject, Griffith remained a popularizer throughout his life. In drafting the observatory's detailed specifications, he had lengthy discussions with George Ellery Hale, who with Andrew Carnegie founded the first astrophysical telescope in Los Angeles, and Walter Adams, who later became director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Although an observatory — or at least a tower with a telescope — had been suggested for the highest point in the park as early as 1897, it wasn't until Griffith's epiphany on Mt. Wilson that he broadened his vision into an ambitious plan for a large observatory and hall of science.

"Griffith was very civic-minded," Cook says. "He wanted to do things unifying the huge, diverse population settled in Los Angeles."

Before Griffith died in 1919, he established a generous trust fund to build an observatory in Griffith Park — when the time was right. Perhaps due to his lingering notoriety, nothing was done until the 1930s, when a handful of major U.S. cities began building the newly invented planetariums. But unlike those being constructed elsewhere, Los Angeles' planetarium would be a part of what is primarily an observatory.

A competition was held for the design of the building — Richard Neutra proposed a sleek Art Deco structure that raises tantalizing possibilities of what might have been — and prominent civic architects John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley were chosen.

The result was what the Smithsonian Institution's David DeVorkin — a former observatory tour guide — calls "the hood ornament of Los Angeles."

True to its public aspirations, the observatory emphasized showmanship. The facility's Hollywood connections meant it could tap skilled studio artists and technicians for exhibits and planetarium shows.

The philosophy from the beginning was to turn visitors into observers in a building full of scientific instruments, Krupp says. In fact, the $93-million renovation and expansion of the observatory in 2006 was guided by the concept that the entire building is an instrument.

Krupp returned to Griffith's famous quote on Mt. Wilson: "If all mankind could look through that telescope it would change the world."

It reflects Griffith's view that seeing into the cosmos could affect people personally, and perhaps transform society. That's what makes his observatory so special, Krupp says: "He wanted a place that would make the universe intelligible to the public through personal engagement with the sky."

larry.harnisch@latimes.com

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Afghanistan Order U.S. Troops From Key Province

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

An Afghan soldier and resident of Maidan Wardak Province, which the government has decreed off limits to United States forces.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government barred elite American forces from operating in a strategic province adjoining Kabul on Sunday, citing complaints that Afghans working for American Special Operations forces had tortured and killed villagers in the area.

The ban was scheduled to take effect in two weeks in the province, Maidan Wardak, which is seen as a crucial area in defending the capital against the Taliban. If enforced, it would effectively exclude the American military’s main source of offensive firepower from the area, which lies southwest of Kabul and is used by the Taliban as a staging ground for attacks on the city.

By announcing the ban, the government signaled its willingness to take a far harder line against abuses linked to foreign troops than it has in the past. The action also reflected a deep distrust of international forces that is now widespread in Afghanistan, and the view held by many Afghans, President Hamid Karzai among them, that the coalition shares responsibility with the Taliban for the violence that continues to afflict the country.

Coalition officials said they were talking to their Afghan counterparts to clarify the ban and the allegations that prompted it. They declined to comment further.

Afghan officials said the measure was taken as a last resort. They said they had tried for weeks to get the coalition to cooperate with an investigation into claims that innocent civilians had been killed, abducted or tortured by Afghans working for American Special Operations forces in Maidan Wardak. But the coalition was not responsive, the officials said.

The officials said that without information from the coalition, they could provide few specifics about who was accused or which units they were working with.

A statement from the presidential palace suggested that abuses may have been committed by American Special Operations troops, and not just by Afghans working alongside them. But in interviews after the announcement, Afghan officials indicated that the Afghans were the main suspects, and that the Americans were seen as enabling the abuses rather than perpetrating them.

Throughout the war, the United States military and the C.I.A. have organized and trained clandestine militias. A number still operate, and remain beyond the knowledge or control of the Afghan government. Aimal Faizi, the spokesman for Mr. Karzai, said it was time for foreign forces to hand over control of the “parallel structures,” as he called them, to the government.

Much of the work done by American Special Operations forces in Afghanistan or anywhere else is highly classified, and information about it is closely guarded. A senior American military officer, for instance, said he did not know whether such forces were based in Maidan Wardak or were based elsewhere and were flown in periodically for missions.

Afghan officials are, for the most part, told even less, and many in the Karzai administration no longer wish to allow Americans to continue “running roughshod all around our country,” said a person who is close to Mr. Karzai.

As additional evidence of that sentiment, the person close to Mr. Karzai, who asked not to be identified because he was discussing internal deliberations, cited an order issued earlier this month by Mr. Karzai sharply curtailing the circumstances in which Afghan forces could call in coalition airstrikes.

That order, however, simply brought Afghan forces into line with the rules that coalition troops have followed since last year. Neither Afghan nor foreign military commanders believe its impact will be far-reaching.

It will probably be harder to assess the effects of the ban decreed on Sunday, and the competing views on the matter illustrate just how far apart Afghan and coalition officials are when it comes to charting a course for the war.

With the withdrawal of American forces picking up pace, most of the coalition’s conventional forces in eastern Afghanistan, including in Maidan Wardak, have shifted into advisory roles. Among coalition troops, offensive operations are increasingly becoming the sole purview of the Special Operations forces.

United States officials, in fact, are planning to rely heavily on the elite troops to continue hunting members of Al Qaeda and other international militants in Afghanistan after the NATO mission here ends in 2014.

Afghans have expressed far less enthusiasm about foreign forces, either conventional or Special Operations troops, continuing to operate in Afghanistan for years to come. “The international forces, they are also factors in insecurity and instability — it’s not only the insurgency,” said Mr. Faizi, the presidential spokesman.

As for concerns that the new ban could reduce pressure on the Taliban, Mr. Faizi said that the Afghan Army and the police would “certainly be able to handle this work.”

Habib Zahori and Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.

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And the Oscar Goes To ...

01/20/2012 at 06:00 AM EST

Credit: Warner Bros.; Universal; Sony

Best Motion Picture – Drama

• Argo


• Les Misérables


• Zero Dark Thirty


• Amour


• Beasts of the Southern Wild


• Django Unchained


• Life of Pi


• Lincoln


• Silver Linings Playbook

Credit: Weinstein Co.; Dreamworks; Universal

Best Actor

• Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook


• Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln


• Hugh Jackman, Les Misérables


• Joaquin Phoenix, The Master


• Denzel Washington, Flight

Sony; Weinstein Co.; Summit

Best Actress

• Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty


• Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook


• Naomi Watts, The Impossible


• Emmanuelle Riva, Amour


• Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Credit: Warner Bros.; Weinstein Co.(2)

Best Supporting Actor

• Alan Arkin, Argo


• Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook


• Christoph Waltz, Django UnchainedWINNER


• Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master


• Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

Credit: Weinstein Co.; Dreamworks; Universal

Best Supporting Actress

• Amy Adams, The Master


• Sally Field, Lincoln


• Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables


• Helen Hunt, The Sessions


• Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook

Credit: Twentieth Century Fox; Dreamworks; Weinstein Co.

Best Director

• Ang Lee, Life of Pi


• Steven Spielberg, Lincoln


• David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook


• Michael Haneke, Amour


• Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Credit: Weinstein Co.; Focus Features; Sony

Best Original Screenplay

• Django Unchained


• Moonrise Kingdom


• Zero Dark Thirty


• Amour


• Flight

Credit: Warner Bros.; Twentieth Century Fox; Dreamworks

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Argo


• Life of Pi


• Lincoln


• Beasts of the Southern Wild


• Silver Linings Playbook

Best Animated Film

• BraveWINNER


• Frankenweenie


• Wreck-It Ralph


• ParaNorman


• The Pirates! Band of Misfits

Best Foreign Language Film

• Amour, Austria


• Kon-Tiki, Norway


• War Witch, Canada


• No, Chile


• A Royal Affair, Denmark

Credit: Focus Features; Warner Bros.; Twentieth Century Fox

Production Design

• Anna Karenina


• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey


• Life of Pi


• Les Misérables


• Lincoln

Credit: Focus Features; Twentieth Century Fox; Columbia Pictures

Cinematography

• Anna Karenina


• Life of Pi


• Skyfall


• Django Unchained


• Lincoln

Credit: Focus Features; Dreamworks; Universal

Costume Design

• Anna Karenina


• Lincoln


• Snow White and the Huntsman


• Les Misérables


• Mirror Mirror

Credit: Warner Bros.; Weinstein Co.; Sony

Editing

• Argo


• Silver Linings Playbook


• Zero Dark Thirty


• Life of Pi


• Lincoln

Credit: Sony; Columbia Pictures; Weinstein Co.;

Sound Editing

• Zero Dark Thirty


• Skyfall


• Django Unchained


• Argo


• Life of Pi

Sound Mixing

• Argo


• Les Misérables


• Lincoln


• Life of Pi


• Skyfall

Credit: Focus Features; Twentieth Century Fox; Columbia Pictures

Original Score

• Life of Pi


• Skyfall


• Anna Karenina


• Argo


• Lincoln

Credit: Twentieth Century Fox; Columbia Pictures; Universal

Original Song

• "Pi's Lullaby" from Life of Pi


• "Skyfall" from Skyfall


• "Suddenly" from Les Misérables


• "Before My Time" from Chasing Ice


• "Everybody Needs a Best Friend" from Ted

Documentary Feature

• 5 Broken Cameras


• How to Survive a Plague


• The Invisible War


• The Gatekeepers


• Searching for Sugar Man

Documentary Short

• Open Heart


• Inocente


• Kings Point


• Mondays at Racine


• Redemption

Credit: Fox; Warner Bros.; Universal

Makeup

• Hitchcock


• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey


• Les Misérables

Animated Short Film

• Adam and Dog


• Maggie Simpson in "The Longest Daycare"


• PapermanWINNER


• Fresh Guacamole


• Head Over Heels

Live Action Short Film

• Buzkashi Boys


• Curfew


• Henry


• Asad


• Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw)

Credit: Warner Bros.; Twentieth Century Fox; Universal

Visual Effects

• Life of Pi


• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey


• Snow White and the Huntsman


• Marvel's The Avengers


• Prometheus

On Newsstands Now

• Mindy McCready: A Tragic Life's Troubled End


• Princess Kate: Back with a Bump!


• Exclusive: Miley's Wedding Plans

Pick up your copy on newsstands

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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.

Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.

"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."

Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.

The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.

Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.

FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.

Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.

FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer

Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.

Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.

Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.

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Breathing life into a dying language

The Uchinaaguchi class opened with a "good morning."

"Ukimi soo chii," said the teacher, Chogi Higa.

"Ukimi soo chii," the students repeated.

For student Tokie Koyama, the greeting was a bittersweet echo of her childhood on Okinawa.

"It makes me cry," she told the class. "I miss home."

Famous for its military bases and World War II battlefields, the Japanese island chain of Okinawa is also home to a language as different from Japanese as English is from German. A Japanese speaker in Higa's class would be lost from the get-go — "good morning" in Japanese is "ohayo gozai masu."

These days, the lingua franca of the Okinawan islands is Japanese, not Uchinaaguchi. Higa's students are studying a dying language. But for them, it is a language full of emotional triggers, conjuring up parents who used it so their children wouldn't understand, or grandparents thrilled to hear the younger generation speak a few words in the mother tongue.

The youngest student is in high school; the oldest, an octogenarian. Most are second-, third- or fourth-generation Okinawan Americans, though a few are drawn by an interest in island music and culture. Twice a month, they greet each other with a "Hai sai" and wrestle with such phrases as "Uganjuu-yamiseemi" — "How are you?" — that are tongue twisters for English and Japanese speakers alike. Higa's Gardena classroom is perhaps the only place in the continental United States to learn Uchinaaguchi.

"Being Okinawan is so different from being just pure Japanese, though of course, I'm American first," said Joan Oshiro, 68. Oshiro is fluent in Japanese but heard only snippets of Uchinaaguchi growing up in Hawaii. "Spanish may be more practical, but this is a way to learn a little bit about yourself and pass it on to your children."

Higa remembers wearing a wooden plaque labeled "dialect user" as punishment for speaking Uchinaaguchi at school — a common memory for older Okinawans. In the postwar years, mainstream radio and television programs in Japanese saturated the airwaves. Bombarded by these influences, Okinawans didn't pass their language to the next generation. Japanese became the language of the home, the school and the workplace.

In the islands, elderly Okinawans still shoot the breeze with one another in Uchinaaguchi. The folk music wafting out of open pub doors is still sung in the old tongue. But the language needs help to survive. Revival efforts in recent years have included speech contests and radio programs. Thousands of miles away in Southern California, Higa is doing his part.

For many years, he hosted an Uchinaaguchi program on a Los Angeles Japanese-language radio station. He has been teaching the Uchinaaguchi class, open to members of the Okinawa Assn. of America, for more than a decade. Between the two sessions, he has about 40 students.

"The performing arts are very popular. Young people are taking Okinawan dance, learning folk songs, the sanshin, but they don't know the language of the songs," said Higa, 72. "We're trying to educate those born here, so they can carry on Okinawan culture."

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Uchinaaguchi is believed to have split from Japanese between the 2nd and 8th centuries. It contains archaic traits, such as the consonant "p," that no longer exist in modern Japanese. The long "o" in Japanese is a long "u" in Uchinaaguchi, and the letter "e" often becomes "i."

Some words are similar. Sensei — teacher in Japanese — is shinshii in Uchinaaguchi.

But arigato — thank you — is nifee-deebiru. The word for "goodbye" in Japanese, sayonara, is guburii-sabira in Okinawan.

There are almost as many variants of the Okinawan language as there are islands in the Okinawan chain. Some are nearly as different from one another as they are from Japanese. UNESCO's list of endangered languages includes five from Japan's southernmost islands — Kunigami, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni in addition to Uchinaaguchi.

Shoichi Iwasaki, an applied linguistics professor at UCLA, is studying Ikema, spoken on the Miyako islands in southern Okinawa. He and several colleagues are compiling a dictionary, even as they realize that the language is unlikely to survive.

Uchinaaguchi, on the other hand, has a chance. It is the language of the main Okinawan island. If nothing else, it will live on in the lyrics of popular songs, much as Cajun French does through Louisiana-born musicians like Wayne Toups and Michael Doucet.

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The Lede: Reeva Steenkamp, Steve Biko and the Quest for Justice in South Africa

LONDON – The title of the presiding judge 35 years ago was the same, chief magistrate of Pretoria, and the venue for the hearing, a converted synagogue, was not far from the modern courthouse seen on television screens around the world in recent days as Oscar Pistorius, the gold medal-winning Paralympic athlete, fought for bail in the killing of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

The case that unfolded in the last weeks of 1977, like the one featuring Mr. Pistorius, centered on a death that captured global attention. Then, too, it was the role of the chief magistrate, a jurist of relatively minor standing in South Africa’s legal system, to weigh whether it was a case of murder or mishap. Then, too, there were constituencies, inside the courtroom and beyond, that clamored passionately for their version of the truth.

The similarities – and dissimilarities – will have pressed in on anyone who was present in the Pretoria courtroom those decades ago, when the proceeding involved was an inquest, and the death that of Steve Biko, a 30-year-old black activist who was a popular youth leader of the anti-apartheid movement. By the miserable manner of his dying, alone, naked, and comatose on the floor of a freezing prison cell, Mr. Biko became, in death still more than in life, a powerful force for an end to South Africa’s institutionalized system of racial repression.

A British television report from South Africa in 1977, eight days after Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist, was beaten to death in police custody.

The two cases, of course, will find widely different places on history’s ladder. Mr. Pistorius, awarded bail on Friday after a hearing that was sensational for what it revealed of his actions in shooting Ms. Steenkamp, and for the raw emotions the athlete displayed in the dock, became a global celebrity in recent years for his feats as the Blade Runner, a track star who overcame the disability of being born with no bones in his lower legs.

But for all that it has been a shock to the millions who have seen his running as a parable for triumph in adversity, Mr. Pistorius’s tragedy — and still more, Ms. Steenkamps’s — has been a personal one. Mr. Biko’s death was considered at the time, as it has been ever since, as a watershed in the history of apartheid, a grim milestone among many others along South Africa’s progress towards black majority rule, which many ranked as the most inspiriting event in the peacetime history of the 20th-century when it was finally achieved in 1994.

Still, for a reporter who covered the Biko inquest for the Times as the paper’s South Africa correspondent through the turbulent years of the 1970’s, there were strong resonances in the week’s televised proceedings in Pretoria. Among them was the sheer scale of the media coverage, and the display of how live-by-satellite broadcasting and the digitalization of the print press, with computers, cellphones and Twitter feeds, have globalized the news business.

Oscar Pistorius facing the media during his bail hearing this week in Pretoria.

For the Pistorius hearing, there was a frenzied, tented camp of television crews outside the court, a crush among reporters struggling to get into the hearing, and platoons of studio commentators eager to have their say.

The crush among reporters outside the bail hearing for Oscar Pistorius this week in Pretoria.

On each of the 13 days the Biko inquest was in session, I had no trouble finding myself a seat in the airy courtroom. I took my lunch quietly with members of the Biko family’s legal team, and loitered uneasily during adjournments in an outside passageway, eavesdropping on the policemen who were Mr. Biko’s captors in his final days as they fine-tuned the testimony they were to give in court.

In the Pistorius case, the police again emerged poorly, having, as it seemed, bungled aspects of the forensic investigation in ways that could complicate the prosecution’s case that Ms. Steenkamp’s death was a case of premeditated murder — and having assigned the case to an officer who turned out to be under investigation in a case of attempted murder himself. But nothing in that bungling could compare with the sheer wretchedness of the security police officers in the Biko case, who symbolized, in their brutal and callous treatment of a defenseless man, and in the jesting about it I heard in that courtroom passageway, just how far below human decency apartheid had descended.

There was, too, the extraordinary contrast in the deportment of the magistrates in their rulings in the two cases, and what that said about the different South Africas of then and now. Desmond Nair, presiding at the Pistorius hearing, took more than two hours to review the evidence in the killing of Ms. Steenkamp, swinging back and forth in a meandering — and often bewildering — fashion between the contending accounts of Ms. Steenkamp’s death offered by Mr. Pistorius’s legal counsel and those put forward by the police.

Marthinus J. Prins, the chief magistrate in the Biko inquest, took an abrupt three minutes to deliver his finding, a numbing, 120-word exculpation of the policemen and government doctors who ushered Mr. Biko to his death on the stone-flagged floor of the Pretoria Central Prison. “The court finds the available evidence does not prove the death was brought about by any act or omission involving any offense by any person,” Mr. Prins said, reading hurriedly from a prepared statement before leaving the courtroom and slipping away by a rear door.

In finding that nobody was to blame in the black leader’s death, the magistrate brushed aside testimony suggesting what the policemen and doctors involved acknowledged many years later to have been true, when they petitioned for amnesty under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process that sought to heal the wounds of apartheid: that Mr. Biko had been beaten in police custody, suffering a severe brain injury that was left untreated until he died.

The utter lack of compassion, and of anything resembling justice, was expressed in the dull-eyed satisfaction of Mr. Prins when I caught up with him an hour or so after the verdict in his vast, dingy office a few blocks from the courtroom.

“To me, it was just another death,” he said, pulling off his spectacles and rubbing his eyes. “It was just a job, like any other.”

Mr. Prins, who rose to his position through the apartheid bureaucracy, without legal training, appeared at that moment, as he had throughout the inquest, to be disturbingly sincere, yet utterly blinded. Faithful servant of the apartheid system, he had given it the clean bill of health it demanded, and freed the police to continue treating black political detainees as they chose. Among the country’s rulers, the verdict was embraced as a triumphal vindication, while those who chose to see matters more clearly understood it to be a tolling of history’s bell.

Listening to Mr. Nair delivering his ruling in the Pistorius case, there will have been many, in South Africa and abroad, who will have found his monologue on Friday confusing, circular in its argument, and numbingly repetitive. As an exercise in jurisprudence, it was something less than a stellar advertisement for a South African legal system that, at its best, is a match for any in the world, as it was back in 1977.

Sydney Kentridge, lead counsel for the Biko family at the inquest, moved seamlessly to England in the years that followed, and became, by widespread reckoning among his peers, Britain’s most distinguished barrister, still practicing in London now, at 90.

In the 2011 Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town, Sydney Kentridge spoke about the inquest into his death in 1977.

A host of other South African expatriates who fled apartheid have made outstanding careers as lawyers and judges in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, but many others stayed at home, and continue to serve a court system that has fared rather better, in recent years, than many other institutions in the new South African state.

But even if Mr. Nair, in granting Mr. Pistorius bail, seemed no match in the elegance of his argument for South Africa’s finest legal minds, he nonetheless did South Africa proud. In the chaotic manner of his ruling, which sounded at times like a man grabbing for law books off a shelf, he was, indisputably, doing something that Mr. Prins, all those years before, had not even attempted: looking for ways to steer his course to justice. People will disagree whether Mr. Pistorius deserved the break he got in walking free from that courtroom, but nobody could reasonably contest that what we saw in his case was the working of a legal system that strives for justice, and not to rubber-stamp the imperatives of the state.

This post was revised to make it clear that Sydney Kentridge, the lawyer who represented Steve Biko’s family in 1977 and practiced law well into his 80s, is now 90.

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