Pathway to citizenship likely to be rocky

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — When Jessica Bravo came here this month to talk to her congressman, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), about expanding rights for illegal immigrants, their meeting ended in a shouting match and tears.

Bravo, an 18-year-old community college student at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, was smuggled over the border from Mexico by her parents when she was 3. She recently joined hundreds of other young illegal immigrants in a campaign to confront members of Congress and ask them to vote for a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants.

"I just wanted him to know who I was," Bravo said of Rohrabacher, who has a long record of voting against such measures.

In the scheduled meeting with Rohrabacher, Bravo said the congressman stiffened when she said she and her parents came to the U.S. unlawfully. Five minutes into the meeting, Rohrabacher's face turned red, she said, adding that he said he represents citizens and hates illegals.

Rohrabacher disputed her account and said the meeting became heated when a community organizer with Bravo implied he was racist.

"I don't hate anyone," Rohrabacher said in a telephone interview. "Just because you are a wonderful person doesn't mean you deserve to be an American citizen."

Over the next few months, hundreds of illegal immigrants are planning to come to Washington to push for an overhaul of immigration laws. Despite signs that GOP leaders want to change the party's approach to the issue, many of the immigrants will face lawmakers who have long-standing positions against a legalization program.

"We will engage them regardless of their voting record," said Maria Fernanda Cabello, a national organizer for United We Dream, an organization that represents young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children.

The organization's members last fall voted to expand its mission beyond passing the Dream Act and decided to push for the broader objective of making it possible for illegal immigrants to become citizens. In March, the group is planning to launch protests in 23 states under the slogan "Eleven Million Dreams."

"We will keep including our parents," said Cabello, whose mother works at a fast-food restaurant in Houston and whose father is a welder. Both are undocumented. Cabello, who came to Texas with her parents when she was 12, was granted a legal work permit in the fall under the Obama administration's "deferred action" program.

"All they are saying is, 'My dream is based on my mom and my dad and my family,'" said Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who plans to join rallies in New Jersey, Florida, Texas and California in March to push for full citizenship for such residents.

Dozens of organizations that represent illegal immigrants have come together to declare March "National Coming Out of the Shadows Month." Protests are planned for next month in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City and Atlanta.

Groups of lawmakers from both parties in the House and the Senate are working behind closed doors to hammer out a bill. A bipartisan group of eight senators has agreed that citizenship must be part of the solution, along with more investment in border security. In the House group, however, some Republicans are considering a program that would legalize illegal immigrants without creating a new way for them to become citizens.

"The people that came here illegally knowingly — I don't think they should have a path to citizenship," Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said during a radio interview earlier this month. Labrador, one of two members of the House from Idaho, has been working with the House group to draw up legislation.

"That is not going to fly with us," said Louie Cortes, a 24-year-old law student at the University of Idaho. Cortes was brought to the U.S. unlawfully from Mexico by his parents when he was 1 year old. He was given a work permit in December.

The Idaho agricultural industry relies on illegal immigrants for a lot of its workforce, said Cortes, who is a member of the Dream Bar Assn., an organization of law students who are illegal immigrants. Over the next few weeks, Cortes plans to help organize workers in apple orchards, dairy farms and meat processing plants to launch public rallies in the state.

"Not having the full pathway to citizenship will still deny a lot of immigrants the benefits of being here — like voting," said Cortes.

brian.bennett@latimes.com

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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DealBook: Prosecutors, Shifting Strategy, Build New Wall Street Cases

Criticized for letting Wall Street off the hook after the financial crisis, the Justice Department is building a new model for prosecuting big banks.

In a recent round of actions that shook the financial industry, the government pushed for guilty pleas, rather than just the usual fines and reforms. Prosecutors now aim to apply the approach broadly to financial fraud cases, according to officials involved in the investigations.

Lawyers for several big banks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were already adjusting their defenses and urging banks to fire employees suspected of wrongdoing in the hope of appeasing authorities.

But critics question whether the new strategy amounts to a symbolic reprimand rather than a sweeping rebuke. So far, the Justice Department has extracted guilty pleas only from remote subsidiaries of big foreign banks, a move that has inflicted reputational damage but little else.

The new strategy first materialized in recent settlements with UBS and the Royal Bank of Scotland, which were accused of manipulating interest rates to bolster profit. As part of a broader deal, the banks’ Japanese subsidiaries pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud.

The settlements present a significant shift. Authorities have long avoided guilty pleas over fears they will destroy the banks and imperil the broader economy. By going after a subsidiary, prosecutors shield the parent company from losing its license, but still send a warning to the financial industry.

The Justice Department plans to continue the campaign as it pursues guilty pleas from other bank subsidiaries suspected of reporting false interest rates, according to the prosecutors and the lawyers who requested anonymity to discuss the cases. Authorities are scrutinizing Citigroup, whose Japanese unit is suspected of rate manipulation, and prosecutors recently accused one former trader there of colluding with other banks in a vast rate-rigging conspiracy.

Prosecutors want the rate-rigging investigation to serve as a template for other financial fraud cases. Two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described a plan to eventually wring an admission of guilt from an entire bank.

“This Department of Justice will continue to hold financial institutions that break the law criminally responsible,” Lanny A. Breuer, the departing head of the agency’s criminal division, said in an interview.

The strategy will face significant roadblocks.

For one, banking regulators are likely to sound alarms about the economy. HSBC avoided charges in a money laundering case last year after concerns arose that an indictment could put the bank out of business. In the first interest rate-rigging case, prosecutors briefly considered criminal charges against an arm of Barclays, but they hesitated given the bank’s cooperation and its importance to the financial system, two people close to the case said.

The Justice Department will also face resistance from Wall Street. In meetings with authorities, banks are trying to distinguish their activities from the bad behavior at UBS and Barclays, according to the industry lawyers. One lawyer who represents Deutsche Bank acknowledged that Wall Street was girding for battle over the push for guilty pleas.

Some lawyers posit that the new approach amounts to a government shakedown, because institutions may plead guilty to dodge an indictment. “I think it’s a step in the wrong direction,” said James R. Copland, the director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute.

Complicating matters, lawmakers and consumer advocates will continue to complain that banks get off too easily. In the rate manipulation cases, critics have clamored for more potent penalties, seeking convictions against parent companies.

The problems “should provide motivation to prosecutors, regulators and Congress to do more to ensure that this type of behavior is stopped, and that banks and their executives who manipulate markets are held accountable,” said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Critics point to the UBS case. Before UBS signed the deal, Japanese authorities assured the bank that a guilty plea would not cost the subsidiary its license, a person involved in the case said. While the case has weighed on the stock price, the subsidiary is operating normally and clients have stayed put, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.

Prosecutors defend their effort, saying it was born from painful experiences over the last decade.

After Arthur Andersen was convicted in 2002, the accounting firm went out of business, taking 28,000 jobs with it. The Supreme Court later overturned the case, prompting the government to alter its approach.

Prosecutors then turned to deferred-prosecution agreements, which suspend charges against corporations in exchange for certain concessions and a promise to behave. But the Justice Department took heat for prosecuting few top bank executives after the financial crisis. A recent “Frontline” documentary portrayed prosecutors as Wall Street apologists.

So the government is seeking a balanced approach, aiming to hold banks accountable without shutting them down. Prosecutors consulted federal policies that required them to weigh action with “collateral consequences” like job losses. Mr. Breuer also collected input from staff, including the head of his fraud unit, Denis J. McInerney, a former defense lawyer who represented Arthur Andersen.

Mr. Breuer eventually deployed a strategy built on guilty pleas for subsidiaries. He imported the model, in part, from his foreign bribery actions and pharmaceutical cases.

“Extracting a guilty plea from a wholly owned subsidiary finally enables the Justice Department to look tough on financial institutions while sparing them from the corporate death penalty,” said Evan T. Barr, a former federal prosecutor who now defends white-collar cases as a partner at Steptoe & Johnson.

As the Arthur Andersen cases fades from memory, some prosecutors say their new approach will lay the groundwork for parent companies to plead guilty.

But first, officials say, they are testing the strategy in the interest rate-rigging case. Authorities suspect that more than a dozen banks falsified reports to influence benchmark interest rates like the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which underpins the costs for trillions of dollars in financial products like mortgages and credit cards.

Prosecutors focused on Japanese units because e-mail traffic exposed how traders there had routinely manipulated rates to increase profits, officials say. The units also have few ties to American arms of the banks, containing any threat to the economy.

After the Barclays case, authorities shifted to UBS, given the scope of the evidence and the bank’s past brushes with authorities, according to officials. The bank’s Japanese subsidiary was also a hub of rate-rigging activity. “The Justice Department had a clear view on the past of this institution,” said one executive who met with government officials.

Along with paying $1.5 billion in fines, the bank agreed to bolster its controls and have its Japanese unit plead guilty. It was the first big global bank subsidiary to plead guilty in more than two decades.

The Royal Bank of Scotland met a similar fate. The bank’s conduct was less severe than the actions of UBS, but it too had a rogue Japanese subsidiary. The bank announced a $612 million settlement with authorities this month, including a guilty plea in Japan.

Using the settlements as a template, prosecutors are building cases against other banks ensnared in the investigation, people involved in the case said, and guilty pleas are likely. Deutsche Bank is expected to settle with authorities by late 2013, the people said.

Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, two American banks under scrutiny, pose a thornier challenge. So far, authorities have flexed their newfound muscle with foreign banks.

American regulators may warn that extending the campaign to Citigroup would threaten the company’s stock and prompt an exodus of clients. Japan’s regulators, some feeling upstaged by the recent actions, might raise similar concerns. Citigroup’s lawyers will also push back, people involved in the case said, citing the bank’s cooperation with investigators and emphasizing that wrongdoing never reached upper levels of management. The bank fired the trader recently charged by the Justice Department.

Authorities could counter that Citigroup’s Japanese unit is a repeat offender. It butted heads with Japanese regulators three times over the last decade.

“This is hard-nosed negotiation,” said Samuel W. Buell, a former prosecutor who is now a professor at Duke Law School. “It’s a game of chicken.”

Mark Scott contributed reporting from London and Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo.

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Seawater desalination plant might be just a drop in the bucket

CARLSBAD, Calif. — Dreamers have long looked to the Pacific Ocean as the ultimate answer to California's water needs: an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in the state's backyard. In the last decade, proposals for about 20 desalting plants have been discussed up and down the coast.

But even with construction about to begin on the nation's largest seawater desalination facility, 35 miles north of San Diego, experts say it is doubtful that dream will ever be fully realized.

"While this Poseidon adventure may work out, I don't look for a lot of that," said Henry Vaux Jr., a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of resource economics who contributed to a 2008 National Research Council report on desalination.

The reasons boil down to money and energy. It takes a lot of both to turn ocean water into drinking water, driving the average price of desalinated supplies well above most other sources.

The purified water produced by the Poseidon Resources plant will cost the San Diego County Water Authority more than twice what it now pays the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California for supplies from Northern California and the Colorado River. Over the authority's 30-year contract with Poseidon, San Diego County ratepayers will pay between $3 billion and $4 billion for the desalted water, which is expected to provide no more than a tenth of their overall supply.

Seawater desalination is not new to California. There are number of small coastal plants, used mostly for research or industrial purposes, and a few, such as one on Catalina Island, that provide municipal supplies.

For reasons unique to the region, San Diego County will be the first to stick a big straw into the Pacific. It is at the end of the line for imported water, doesn't have much local groundwater and is perennially battling with Metropolitan, Southern California's wholesaler of imported supplies.

"I do believe it is worth it," said Tom Wornham, board chairman of the county water authority. "I would rather be apologizing to people in 10 years for the rate than the fact they would have no water."

Up the coast, other places have taken a pass on the Pacific. Los Angeles and Long Beach recently shelved seawater desalting plans after concluding that other water sources, such as conservation or recycling, are cheaper and easier to pursue.

Poseidon, a small, privately held company based in Stamford, Conn., started talking about developing a desalination plant in Carlsbad in late 1998. The road to construction has been so long and twisting that Global Water Intelligence, which covers the international water industry, last year listed the project among the "Top 10 Desalination Disasters" of all time.

It took years for the company to get the necessary state and local permits. Environmentalists filed multiple legal challenges, the last of which was only recently resolved in Poseidon's favor. A deal with a number of local water agencies in San Diego County fell apart.

In the end, the Poseidon supplies — up to 56,000 acre-feet a year — will sell for roughly $2,000 an acre-foot, more than double the company's 2004 estimate. (One acre-foot is enough to supply two average homes for a year.) The price will rise with inflation; if energy costs go up, so will the price of water.

On the other side of the Pacific, Australia offers a sobering lesson in the perils of diving too deeply into desalination.

When years of withering drought emptied the country's reservoirs, Australia commissioned six big coastal desalting plants, including some of the world's largest. Then the rains returned. Just as some of the operations were coming on line, they were no longer needed.

Four of the six plants are being idled because cheaper water is available. Australian politicians are bemoaning the desalination binge, complaining that it saddled ratepayers with "hyper-expensive" white elephants they have to pay for regardless of whether the plants are used.

"That's certainly the risk — that we build them when they're not necessary or we build them, frankly, too soon," said Heather Cooley of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland think tank.

Santa Barbara had a similar experience in the early 1990s, when it built a desalination plant during a severe statewide drought that ended before the facility was finished. The $34-million plant, with a tenth of the capacity of the Carlsbad facility, was never used beyond the testing phase, though it could still be brought into service in an emergency.

The $954-million Carlsbad project is being financed with $781 million in tax-exempt construction bonds sold by Poseidon and the water authority. The balance is coming from investors who anticipate a return of about 13%. IDE Americas Inc., the subsidiary of an Israeli firm that runs some of the world's largest coastal desalination facilities in the Middle East, has been hired to design and operate the plant, slated for completion in 2016.

The fresh water will be produced through reverse osmosis, an energy-intensive process that separates salts and contaminants from seawater by forcing it through sand filters and tightly coiled, synthetic membranes peppered with billions of tiny holes a fraction of the width of a human hair. The water will then be pumped inland for distribution — the opposite direction that drinking supplies are usually moved — requiring construction of a 10-mile underground pipeline that the water authority will own and operate.

Poseidon chose the Carlsbad location, next to the Encina Power Station, so it could draw from the power plant's cooling water discharge — thus avoiding the environmental harm of operating its own ocean intake.

But new federal and state environmental regulations are pushing coastal power plants to phase out the use of huge volumes of ocean water for cooling, thwarting that strategy. Poseidon expects the Encina station to be replaced within the decade with a new generating facility employing a different cooling system.

That will mean the desalter will have to pump directly from the ocean, sucking 300 million gallons a day. Of that, 100 million gallons will go through the reverse osmosis process, with half converted to fresh water and half to a concentrated brine. The brine, twice as salty as the sea, will be diluted in a mixing pool with the other 200 million gallons of intake and discharged to the ocean.

Destruction of marine life is a major environmental concern of ocean desalination. Raw seawater is full of tiny organisms, including plankton that form a critical part of the food chain and the young stages of fish and invertebrates. When the water they live in is pumped into a plant, they die.

The Coastal Commission is requiring Poseidon to restore 55 acres of marine wetlands in south San Diego Bay to compensate for the plant's projected effects. The State Water Resources Control Board is also developing new seawater desalination regulations that could force Poseidon to change its intake and discharge systems.

"They took a big risk in building this before the rules are finalized," said Joe Geever of the Surfrider Foundation, which tenaciously fought the Carlsbad proposal in court and argues that water agencies should turn to the ocean only as a last resort — after more environmentally benign sources such as recycling and storm-water capture have been aggressively pursued.

Poseidon, which is trying to line up customers for a similar-size desal plant proposed in Huntington Beach, says it is peddling more than water. "What we're selling is ... a reliability premium that's locally controlled, drought-proof," said Carlos Riva, the company's chief executive.

But even Poseidon doesn't predict that the Pacific will become California's dominant water supply. The state has too many other sources.

"We have quite a bit of water to move around," said Peter MacLaggan, the Poseidon executive who is overseeing the Carlsbad project. "I don't think it's ever going to be a majority of supply or anywhere close to that."

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

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Record sales double for Grammy performers, young and old

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Grammy performers did not go home with just trophies last weekend. Winning bands like indie-pop trio fun. and British folk band Mumford & Sons saw sales of their singles and albums more than double after appearing on the music industry honors show.

Sales figures released on Friday by Nielsen showed a 182 percent increase in sales of fun.’s hit single “We Are Young” following their Song of the Year and Best New Artist Grammy victories on Sunday.

Album of the Year winner’s Mumford & Sons saw sales of its “I Will Wait” single shoot up 116 percent, while Australian artist Gotye’s “Making Mirrors” album from 2011 increased 124 percent from the week before the annual music telecast.

Rising R&B star Frank Ocean, who took home two Grammys, saw sales of his album “Channel Orange” climb 140 percent.

The numbers mostly reflect a single night of sales increases from the prior week, predominantly digital downloads, immediately following the Grammy Awards show in Los Angeles on February 10.

Sales figures for the full week will be released as usual by Nielsen SoundScan on Wednesday and will include both digital and physical album sales.

Grammy winners were not the only ones to benefit from the annual music industry showcase.

Veteran rockers The Band saw its greatest hits package climb 203 percent after a multi-artist tribute at the show to late drummer Levon Helm.

Sales of “Take Five,” the distinctive 1959 tune by jazz pianist Dave Brubeck who died in December, shot up 248 percent after a tribute by fellow jazz musicians Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Kenny Garrett, according to Nielsen.

The Grammys also proved a boost for the blossoming career of 26 year-old southern California artist Miguel. After performing his single “Adorn” on the show, sales rose 229 percent compared with the week prior.

Mumford & Sons, Frank Ocean, Gotye and The Band record on labels owned by Universal Music Group; the music of Miguel and the late Dave Brubeck is released by units of Sony Music, and FUN. is signed to record label Fueled by Ramen, a unit of privately-held Warner Music.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Project Seeks to Build Map of Human Brain

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses.

Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.

The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected to be part of the president’s budget proposal next month. And, four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project.

The details are not final, and it is not clear how much federal money would be proposed or approved for the project in a time of fiscal constraint or how far the research would be able to get without significant federal financing.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government should “invest in the best ideas.”

“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,” he said. “Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.”

Story C. Landis, the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said that when she heard Mr. Obama’s speech, she thought he was referring to an existing National Institutes of Health project to map the static human brain. “But he wasn’t,” she said. “He was referring to a new project to map the active human brain that the N.I.H. hopes to fund next year.”

Indeed, after the speech, Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, may have inadvertently confirmed the plan when he wrote in a Twitter message: “Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU.”

A spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy declined to comment about the project.

The initiative, if successful, could provide a lift for the economy. “The Human Genome Project was on the order of about $300 million a year for a decade,” said George M. Church, a Harvard University molecular biologist who helped create that project and said he was helping to plan the Brain Activity Map project. “If you look at the total spending in neuroscience and nanoscience that might be relative to this today, we are already spending more than that. We probably won’t spend less money, but we will probably get a lot more bang for the buck.”

Scientists involved in the planning said they hoped that federal financing for the project would be more than $300 million a year, which if approved by Congress would amount to at least $3 billion over the 10 years.

The Human Genome Project cost $3.8 billion. It was begun in 1990 and its goal, the mapping of the complete human genome, or all the genes in human DNA, was achieved ahead of schedule, in April 2003. A federal government study of the impact of the project indicated that it returned $800 billion by 2010.

The advent of new technology that allows scientists to identify firing neurons in the brain has led to numerous brain research projects around the world. Yet the brain remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries.

Composed of roughly 100 billion neurons that each electrically “spike” in response to outside stimuli, as well as in vast ensembles based on conscious and unconscious activity, the human brain is so complex that scientists have not yet found a way to record the activity of more than a small number of neurons at once, and in most cases that is done invasively with physical probes.

But a group of nanotechnologists and neuroscientists say they believe that technologies are at hand to make it possible to observe and gain a more complete understanding of the brain, and to do it less intrusively.

In June in the journal Neuron, six leading scientists proposed pursuing a number of new approaches for mapping the brain.

One possibility is to build a complete model map of brain activity by creating fleets of molecule-size machines to noninvasively act as sensors to measure and store brain activity at the cellular level. The proposal envisions using synthetic DNA as a storage mechanism for brain activity.

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Deasy wants 30% of teacher evaluations based on test scores

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced Friday that as much as 30% of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student test scores, setting off more contention in the nation's second-largest school system in the weeks before a critical Board of Education election.

Leaders of the teachers union have insisted that there should be no fixed percentage or expectation for how much standardized tests should count — and that test results should serve almost entirely as just one measure to improve instruction. Deasy, in contrast, has insisted that test scores should play a significant role in a teacher's evaluation and that poor scores could contribute directly to dismissal.

In a Friday memo explaining the evaluation process, Deasy set 30% as the goal and the maximum for how much test scores and other data should count.

In an interview, he emphasized that the underlying thrust is to develop an evaluation that improves the teaching corps and that data is part of the effort.

"The public has been demanding a better evaluation system for at least a decade. And teachers have repeatedly said to me what they need is a balanced way forward to help them get better and help them be accountable," Deasy said. "We do this for students every day. Now it's time to do this for teachers."

Deasy also reiterated that test scores would not be a "primary or controlling" factor in an evaluation, in keeping with the language of an agreement reached in December between L.A. Unified and its teachers union. Classroom observations and other factors also are part of the evaluation process.

But United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher expressed immediate concern about Deasy's move. During negotiations, he said, the superintendent had proposed allotting 30% to test scores but the union rejected the plan. Deasy then pulled the idea off the table, which allowed the two sides to come to an agreement, Fletcher said. Teachers approved the pact last month.

"To see this percentage now being floated again is unacceptable," the union said in a statement.

Fletcher described the pact as allowing flexibility for principals, in collaboration with teachers, first to set individual goals and then to look at various measures to determine student achievement and overall teacher performance.

"The superintendent doesn't get to sign binding agreements and then pretend they're not binding," Fletcher said.

When Deasy settled on 30%, his decision was in line with research findings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has examined teacher quality issues across the country. Some experts have challenged that work.

The test score component would include a rating for the school based on an analysis of all students' standardized test scores. Those "value-added" formulas, known within L.A. Unified as Academic Growth Over Time, can be used to rate a school or a teacher's effectiveness by comparing students' test scores with past performance. The method takes into account such factors as family income and ethnicity.

After an aggressive push by the Obama administration, individual value-added ratings for teachers have been added to reviews in many districts. They make up 40% of evaluations in Washington, D.C., 35% in Tennessee and 30% in Chicago.

But Los Angeles will use a different approach. The district will rely on raw test scores. A teacher's evaluation also may incorporate pass rates on the high school exit exam and graduation, attendance and suspension data.

Deasy's action was met Friday with reactions ranging from guarded to enthusiastic approval within a coalition of outside groups that have pushed for a new evaluation system. This coalition also has sought to counter union influence.

Elise Buik, chief executive of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, said weighing test scores 30% "is a reasonable number that everyone can be happy with."

The union and the district were under pressure to include student test data in evaluations after L.A. County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant ruled last year that the system was violating state law by not using test scores in teacher performance reviews.

A lawsuit to enforce the law was brought by parents in Los Angeles, with support from the Sacramento-based EdVoice advocacy organization.

If the "actual progress" of students is taken into account under Deasy's plan, "it's a historic day for LAUSD," said Bill Lucia, the group's chief executive.

All of this is playing out against the backdrop of the upcoming March 5 election. The campaign for three school board seats has turned substantially into a contest between candidates who strongly back Deasy's policies and those more sympathetic toward the teachers union. Deasy supporters praise the superintendent for measures they say will improve the quality of teaching. The union has faulted Deasy for limiting job protections and said he has imposed unwise or unproven reforms.

In the upcoming election, the union and pro-Deasy forces are matched head to head in District 4, with several employee unions behind incumbent Steve Zimmer and a coalition of donors behind challenger Kate Anderson.

Anderson had high praise for Deasy's directive, saying it struck the right balance and that teachers and students would benefit.

Zimmer said that although he understands that principals need guidance, "I worry about anything that would cause resistance or delay in going forward. I hope this use of a percentage won't disrupt what had been a collaborative process."

howard.blume@latimes.com

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Livestrong Tattoos as Reminder of Personal Connections, Not Tarnished Brand

As Jax Mariash went under the tattoo needle to have “Livestrong” emblazoned on her wrist in bold black letters, she did not think about Lance Armstrong or doping allegations, but rather the 10 people affected by cancer she wanted to commemorate in ink. It was Jan. 22, 2010, exactly a year since the disease had taken the life of her stepfather. After years of wearing yellow Livestrong wristbands, she wanted something permanent.

A lifelong runner, Mariash got the tattoo to mark her 10-10-10 goal to run the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 10, 2010, and fund-raising efforts for Livestrong. Less than three years later, antidoping officials laid out their case against Armstrong — a lengthy account of his practice of doping and bullying. He did not contest the charges and was barred for life from competing in Olympic sports.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Mariash, of Wilson, Wyo., said of the antidoping officials’ report, released in October, and Armstrong’s subsequent confession to Oprah Winfrey. “When I look at the tattoo now, I just think of living strong, and it’s more connected to the cancer fight and optimal health than Lance.”

Mariash is among those dealing with the fallout from Armstrong’s descent. She is not alone in having Livestrong permanently emblazoned on her skin.

Now the tattoos are a complicated, internationally recognized symbol of both an epic crusade against cancer and a cyclist who stood defiant in the face of accusations for years but ultimately admitted to lying.

The Internet abounds with epidermal reminders of the power of the Armstrong and Livestrong brands: the iconic yellow bracelet permanently wrapped around a wrist; block letters stretching along a rib cage; a heart on a foot bearing the word Livestrong; a mural on a back depicting Armstrong with the years of his now-stripped seven Tour de France victories and the phrase “ride with pride.”

While history has provided numerous examples of ill-fated tattoos to commemorate lovers, sports teams, gang membership and bands that break up, the Livestrong image is a complex one, said Michael Atkinson, a sociologist at the University of Toronto who has studied tattoos.

“People often regret the pop culture tattoos, the mass commodified tattoos,” said Atkinson, who has a Guns N’ Roses tattoo as a marker of his younger days. “A lot of people can’t divorce the movement from Lance Armstrong, and the Livestrong movement is a social movement. It’s very real and visceral and embodied in narrative survivorship. But we’re still not at a place where we look at a tattoo on the body and say that it’s a meaningful thing to someone.”

Geoff Livingston, a 40-year-old marketing professional in Washington, D.C., said that since Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey, he has received taunts on Twitter and inquiries at the gym regarding the yellow Livestrong armband tattoo that curls around his right bicep.

“People see it and go, ‘Wow,’ ” he said, “But I’m not going to get rid of it, and I’m not going to stop wearing short sleeves because of it. It’s about my family, not Lance Armstrong.”

Livingston got the tattoo in 2010 to commemorate his brother-in-law, who was told he had cancer and embarked on a fund-raising campaign for the charity. If he could raise $5,000, he agreed to get a tattoo. Within four days, the goal was exceeded, and Livingston went to a tattoo parlor to get his seventh tattoo.

“It’s actually grown in emotional significance for me,” Livingston said of the tattoo. “It brought me closer to my sister. It was a big statement of support.”

For Eddie Bonds, co-owner of Rabbit Bicycle in Hill City, S.D., getting a Livestrong tattoo was also a reflection of the growth of the sport of cycling. His wife, Joey, operates a tattoo parlor in front of their store, and in 2006 she designed a yellow Livestrong band that wraps around his right calf, topped off with a series of small cyclists.

“He kept breaking the Livestrong bands,” Joey Bonds said. “So it made more sense to tattoo it on him.”

“It’s about the cancer, not Lance,” Eddie Bonds said.

That was also the case for Jeremy Nienhouse, a 37-year old in Denver, Colo., who used a Livestrong tattoo to commemorate his own triumph over testicular cancer.

Given the diagnosis in 2004, Nienhouse had three rounds of chemotherapy, which ended on March 15, 2005, the date he had tattooed on his left arm the day after his five-year anniversary of being cancer free in 2010. It reads: “3-15-05” and “LIVESTRONG” on the image of a yellow band.

Nienhouse said he had heard about Livestrong and Armstrong’s own battle with the cancer around the time he learned he had cancer, which alerted him to the fact that even though he was young and healthy, he, too, could have cancer.

“On a personal level,” Nienhouse said, “he sounds like kind of a jerk. But if he hadn’t been in the public eye, I don’t know if I would have been diagnosed when I had been.”

Nienhouse said he had no plans to have the tattoo removed.

As for Mariash, she said she read every page of the antidoping officials’ report. She soon donated her Livestrong shirts, shorts and running gear. She watched Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey and wondered if his apology was an effort to reduce his ban from the sport or a genuine appeal to those who showed their support to him and now wear a visible sign of it.

“People called me ‘Miss Livestrong,’ ” Mariash said. “It was part of my identity.”

She also said she did not plan to have her tattoo removed.

“I wanted to show it’s forever,” she said. “Cancer isn’t something that just goes away from people. I wanted to show this is permanent and keep people remembering the fight.”

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The Education Revolution: In China, Families Bet It All on a Child in College

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Wu Caoying studied English under her father’s watchful eye in 2006. She is now a sophomore in college. More Photos »

HANJING, China — Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education.

His wife, Cao Weiping, toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during apple season in May and June. She earns $12 a day tying little plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going toward their daughter’s education.

Many families in the West sacrifice to put their children through school, saving for college educations that they hope will lead to a better life. Few efforts can compare with the heavy financial burden that millions of lower-income Chinese parents now endure as they push their children to obtain as much education as possible.

Yet a college degree no longer ensures a well-paying job, because the number of graduates in China has quadrupled in the last decade.

Mr. Wu and Mrs. Cao, who grew up in tiny villages in western China and became migrants in search of better-paying work, have scrimped their entire lives. For nearly two decades, they have lived in a cramped and drafty 200-square-foot house with a thatch roof. They have never owned a car. They do not take vacations — they have never seen the ocean. They have skipped traditional New Year trips to their ancestral village for up to five straight years to save on bus fares and gifts, and for Mr. Wu to earn extra holiday pay in the mines. Despite their frugality, they have essentially no retirement savings.

Thanks to these sacrifices, their daughter, Wu Caoying, is now a 19-year-old college sophomore. She is among the growing millions of Chinese college students who have gone much farther than their parents could have dreamed when they were growing up. For all the hard work of Ms. Wu’s father and mother, however, they aren’t certain it will pay off. Their daughter is ambivalent about staying in school, where the tuition, room and board cost more than half her parents’ combined annual income. A slightly above-average student, she thinks of dropping out, finding a job and earning money.

“Every time my daughter calls home, she says, ‘I don’t want to continue this,’ ” Mrs. Cao said. “And I say, ‘You’ve got to keep studying to take care of us when we get old’, and she says, ‘That’s too much pressure, I don’t want to think about all that responsibility.’ ”

Ms. Wu dreams of working at a big company, but knows that many graduates end up jobless. “I think I may start my own small company,” she says, while acknowledging she doesn’t have the money or experience to run one.

For a rural parent in China, each year of higher education costs six to 15 months’ labor, and it is hard for children from poor families to get scholarships or other government financial support. A year at the average private university in the United States similarly equals almost a year’s income for the average wage earner, while an in-state public university costs about six months’ pay, but financial aid is generally easier to obtain than in China. Moreover, an American family that spends half its income helping a child through college has more spending power with the other half of its income than a rural Chinese family earning less than $5,000 a year.

It isn’t just the cost of college that burdens Chinese parents. They face many fees associated with sending their children to elementary, middle and high schools. Many parents also hire tutors, so their children can score high enough on entrance exams to get into college. American families that invest heavily in their children’s educations can fall back on Medicare, Social Security and other social programs in their old age. Chinese citizens who bet all of their savings on their children’s educations have far fewer options if their offspring are unable to find a job on graduation.

The experiences of Wu Caoying, whose family The New York Times has tracked for seven years, are a window into the expanding educational opportunities and the financial obstacles faced by families all over China.

Her parents’ sacrifices to educate their daughter explain how the country has managed to leap far ahead of the United States in producing college graduates over the last decade, with eight million Chinese now getting degrees annually from universities and community colleges.

But high education costs coincide with slower growth of the Chinese economy and surging unemployment among recent college graduates. Whether young people like Ms. Wu find jobs on graduation that allow them to earn a living, much less support their parents, could test China’s ability to maintain rapid economic growth and preserve political and social stability in the years ahead.

Leaving the Village

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'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius weeps as he faces murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee revered in South Africa for overcoming his disability to compete in the London Games last year, wept in court Friday as he faced a murder charge in connection with the fatal shooting of his girlfriend.

During the proceedings in Pretoria, Gerrie Nel, one of the National Prosecuting Authority’s most senior advocates, said he would argue the killing of model and law graduate Reeva Steenkamp was premeditated murder, the most serious category of offense under South African law.

Nel is known for prosecuting high-profile cases, including winning the conviction of former police chief and Interpol boss Jackie Selebi on corruption charges.

Pistorius, nicknamed the "Blade Runner" because of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he uses to compete, did not enter a formal plea and was remanded into custody at Brooklyn police station in Pretoria until Tuesday, when his bail application is to be heard.

Under South African law, a suspect charged with such a high-level offense would have to prove exceptional circumstances to be granted bail.

In a packed courtroom, members of Pistorius' family struggled to pass through a media scrum and to find seats. The hearing coincided with "Black Friday," a day when people were being urged to wear black to protest rapes and violence against women.

[Updated, 8:35 a.m. Feb. 15: The family and Pistorius' management company later issued a statement denying that the athlete had murdered his girlfriend, saying: "The alleged murder is disputed in the strongest possible terms."

Some details of Pistorius' argument and the state's case are expected Tuesday.]

The famed athlete's court appearance came as South African media reported that he shot Steenkamp, his girlfriend of several months, four times through a bathroom door.

Under South African law, a person who fatally shoots an intruder has to prove he or she had a reasonable fear that the intruder posed a real threat to his or her life.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the world, with killings of women by intimate partners the leading cause of female homicide in the country. About 57% of female homicide victims were killed by their partners in 2009, according to a report last year by the Medical Research Council.

One-third of female homicides were committed by partners with a history of prior violence against their partners, according to the report.

Friends of Steenkamp and Pistorius mourned the incident on social media.

"Drained, confused, I just can't wrap my head around things," one of Pistorius’ close friends, Alex Pilakoutas, posted on Twitter.

Darren Fresco, who described himself as one of Steenkamp’s best friends said he was hoping to wake from a nightmare and hear her infectious laughter again.

"We were just goofing off the other day talking to each other in only the way that we could to each other. My heart is on the verge of exploding with the pain of such a sudden loss of one of my best friends," Fresco, who said he was one of the last people to exchange tweets with Steenkamp, posted on Facebook.

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Oscar Pistorius remains in jail facing murder charge

Mexico finds fire-god figure at top of Pyramid of the Sun

Iranian general reportedly assassinated while traveling from Syria

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

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