Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

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Chinese Man Pleads Guilty in Copyright Violation Case

Nearly five years ago, a Chinese man named Xiang Li registered several domain names, including www.crack99.com, and embarked on an ambitious, and ultimately illegal, venture.

Mr. Li, who was based in Chengdu, paid a network of computer experts to scour the Internet to find commercial software they could “crack,” meaning they bypassed security protocols designed to prevent unauthorized access or reproduction.

Ultimately, Mr. Li offered more than 2,000 pirated software products that could be used as applications in the military, engineering, space exploration, mathematics and explosive simulation, and sold them at a fraction of their retail price, which federal prosecutors said was over $100 million.

Among his biggest customers were an electronics engineer at NASA and the chief scientist at a government military contractor, but his clients also included students, inventors and small-business owners. Mr. Li sold the products for $20 to $1,200, accepting payments by Western Union and MoneyGram, according to government documents.

But Mr. Li’s criminal enterprise officially ended last year when he was arrested by undercover agents. On Monday, he pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Delaware to one count of conspiring to steal copyrighted software. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.

Mr. Li, who is 36, could not be reached for comment, nor could his lawyer, Mingli Chen. Mr. Li’s wife, Chun Yan Li, was also indicted on charges of participating in the illegal scheme; she remains at large, presumably in China, officials said.

Mr. Li was arrested in June 2011 in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands during a meeting that had been arranged by undercover agents posing as American businessmen. The agents arranged the meeting under the guise of picking up their purchase of pirated software, design packaging and 20 gigabytes of proprietary data, and to discuss a plan to transmit cracked software over the Internet so they could resell it to small businesses in the United States.

After the arrest, agents recovered six disks from Mr. Li containing an assortment of data pirated from an unidentified American software company, including military and civilian aircraft image models and a software module containing data about the International Space Station.

Edward J. McAndrew, one of the prosecutors on the case, said Mr. Li’s arrest was among the largest criminal copyright cases to be successfully prosecuted by the government.

Mr. McAndrew and his colleague, David L. Hall, explained in court documents that once Mr. Li obtained cracked software, he would advertise it on his Web sites, which also included www.cad100.net and www.dongle-crack-download.com. Mr. Li’s customers would then wire him money, some of which he deposited in an account at the Bank of China. From February 2008 to June 2011, Mr. Li and his customers exchanged more than 25,000 e-mails about pirated products, according to the government, which obtained a search warrant for his Gmail account.

Mr. Li used his Gmail account to orchestrate more than 500 illegal transactions with customers in at least 28 states and more than 60 foreign countries, according to court documents. Software was pirated from more than 200 manufacturers.

Mr. McAndrew said none of the pirated software obtained by the undercover agents from Mr. Li contained classified material. But Mr. McAndrew said the government could not determine whether any classified material was distributed to other buyers since it did not have access to all the pirated products that Mr. Li sold.

One of Mr. Li’s biggest customers was Cosburn Wedderburn, a NASA electronics engineer, who bought 12 cracked software programs with a retail value exceeding $1.2 million. Another was Dr. Wronald Best, chief scientist at an unidentified government contractor that provides services to the United States military and law enforcement, like radio transmissions, microwave technology and vacuum tubes used in military helicopters. Dr. Best exchanged more than 260 e-mails with Mr. Li to obtain 10 cracked software programs, with a retail value of more than $600,000, prosecutors said.

Both Mr. Wedderburn and Dr. Best pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Both are awaiting sentencing.

Starting in January 2010, undercover agents began buying pirated software from Mr. Li’s Web sites, receiving electronic files with the pirated software or hyperlinks that allowed the agents to download the software from servers in the United States.

In all, the agents paid the Lis $8,615 for the software.

For instance, in January 2010, the agents bought a pirated copy of Satellite Tool Kit 8.0, a software product from Analytical Graphics that has a retail value of more than $150,000. The software includes several functions used by the military and intelligence communities, including three-dimensional warfare simulations.

Mr. Li’s e-mails suggest he was aware of the illegality of his venture, prosecutors say. “I am not a crack production engineers (my job is to collect)(.) This is an international organization created to crack declassified document (s),” he said in a 2009 e-mail. In another he wrote, “I need to use your money to seek the help of experts to cracker master I earn 10 percent of the profits.”

One customer asked who did the cracking. “Experts crack,” Mr. Li wrote. “Chinese people. Sorry can not reveal more.”

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A Grand Central Market makeover? It could work

At 9 a.m. sharp, the man in the blue blazer swung a brass bell over his head, a rite that dates back to the Grand Central Market's opening day in 1917. A minute later, nearly every swivel chair at the China Cafe counter was filled, mostly by older men hunched over bowls of wonton soup.

"It's not a fancy place," said Concepcion Orellano, 57. "People come here because they are poor."

Owner Rinco Cheung, an experienced restaurateur and Hong Kong native, confided he didn't know what chop suey was until he took over China Cafe from his wife's cousin last year.

"It's very old-style," Cheung said, pointing out the menu boards overhead, which list several "egg fo yeung" dishes the owner also didn't recognize. "They love it like that," he added.

Which is precisely the problem. I too love the Grand Central Market: its Beaux Arts touches, the flowing script of the neon signs at each stall, the weird store names — "Jones Grain Mill" — the exposed pipes and pendant light fixtures.

And I'm a fan of the back-in-the-day comfort food and retro prices in the cavernous food hall between Broadway and Hill streets. On Friday, (small) avocados were on sale at one of the produce stands seven for $1, and Jose's Ice Cream Corner had cones for $1.50. The market, with its mix of Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern food, is one of the last holdouts of the $5-or-less lunch plate in downtown Los Angeles.

But landmarks cannot live on nostalgia alone. And even the most militant preservationist has to see it's time to shake up the venerable food emporium. Downtown's population has exploded, but the Grand Central Market clearly is failing to bring in many of its new, upscale urbanistas. Last week, I saw more vacant space than I can remember at any point in the last decade.

Alarms went off after The Times reported on the planned makeover by Adele Yellin, president of the development company started by her late husband, Ira. The news bounced around the blogosphere, drawing complaints about a loss of authenticity. Times staff writer Joseph Serna denounced the gentrification of the "people's market."

The minds behind the chichi Ferry Building, a foodie mecca in San Francisco, are involved; a consultant told Times reporter Betty Hallock his "fantasy" is a pocket cafe or sushi bar under the stairs.

The consternation seems somewhat misplaced. The basement's tenants now are a passport photo place and one of those ubiquitous 99-cent-style discount stores; I doubt they'll be missed much.

But our history of slash-and-burn urban renewal does not give comfort. It brings to mind the Vietnam War tag line: We had to destroy the village to save it.

Bunker Hill was flattened. Nothing was preserved of the magnificent Ambassador Hotel when Los Angeles Unified converted it to a public school. Instead, the district built kitschy facsimiles of the hotel's Paul R. Williams-designed coffee shop and Cocoanut Grove nightclub. The once-glamorous Brown Derby icon sits atop a strip mall in Koreatown, robbed of any history or meaning.

I talked to Yellin and her developer, Rick Moses, and I believe they are sincere about maintaining the character of the market. After all, her late husband kept his promise not to make the place "Westside cute" during an earlier overhaul in the 1990s. The changes thus far are modest: the sawdust was removed, and the floors, pipes and ceiling are being scrubbed and polished.

"Yes, we want to clean it up, but we don't want to change the feel of it," Moses told me.

But how about also committing to structuring rents so that at least some portion of the market's offerings remain affordable?

It's only fair. The public has a sizable stake in the Grand Central Market. Local agencies financed $44 million in bonds for Ira Yellin's renovation of the historic market and the Homer Laughlin Building above it. The market today still owes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the now-defunct L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency $32 million, Moses said.

People come downtown not simply for its historic charm, but because it's a beautiful mess — a hodgepodge of what came before, what's hot now, grit, glitz and authenticity.

Retired computer systems engineer Daniel Kerr took the train in from San Clemente to visit the China Cafe on Friday for the wonton soup but also to take in the action.

"I like city life," he said. "There's so much to see and to do. it's just interesting." Being on a fixed income, he'll probably have to cut back on the China Cafe if a meal there goes up to $10 or more, he said.

"I think it's so cool here," said Adrian Aguilar, 25, an El Monte native who recently moved into a loft downtown. "I love sushi, but this is just like straight from the streets of L.A."

Aguilar, tattooed and dressed head to toe in black, said he had musician friends coming in from New York and was "all excited to bring them to places like this."

Moses and Yellin say there is no intention to purge existing tenants, just to fill the holes. As a sign of good faith, they recently signed Las Morelianas, of pig snout taco fame, to a new lease.

Cheung kept the old menu and employees when he took over the China Cafe. This, along with his beer license, the only one in the market, undoubtedly helped him hang on to old customers. He has high hopes the new style can blend with the old. "Why not mix it all together?" he said.

What a concept: a real mixed-used project.

gale.holland@latimes.com

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Intel bets big on thin PCs and phones at Las Vegas show

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Top chipmaker Intel Corp on Monday announced shipments of a new low-power chip and showed off next-generation ultra thin laptops and convertible tablets in its latest bid to prove that the struggling PC industry still has a bright future.

At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas , Intel said new energy-efficient processors for tablets and laptops are available now, and it outlined features like voice recognition and drastically improved battery life on future PCs.

“Absolutely all-day battery life where you just don’t have to bring your power brick at all anymore,” Kirk Skaugen, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, said of laptops built with the company’s upcoming Haswell processor.

While macroeconomic troubles have weighed on sales for several quarters, the growing popularity of tablets and smartphones is seen as an existential threat to the PC industry.

Anxious to breathe new life into PCs and prove a recent slump in sales is not permanent, Intel and PC manufactures in Las Vegas this week will display a range of ultra thin laptops, dubbed Ultrabooks, and hybrid devices that convert into tablets.

On a stage flanked by dozens of tablets and laptops with rotatable and detachable screens, Skaugen said Intel’s newly available chip based on its current Ivy Bridge architecture sips just 7 watts of energy, more efficient than a previously planned 10 watts of power.

NO-EXCUSES PHONE

The Santa Clara, California-based company has long been king of the PC chip market, particularly through its historic “Wintel” alliance with Microsoft Corp, which led to breathtakingly high profit margins and an 80 percent market share.

But it has struggled to adapt its powerful PC processors for battery-powered smartphones and tablets, a fast-growing market led by Qualcomm Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, ARM Holdings Plc and others.

Mike Bell, who co-heads Intel’s mobile and wireless business, introduced a new processor platform, code named Lexington, targeted at low-priced smartphones in emerging markets like Latin America and Asia.

“It’s designed to be a no-excuses multimedia phone,” he said.

Acer, Safaricom and Lava have already agreed to use the new chips in future phones, Bell said.

A handful of manufacturers and telecom carriers in Europe and Asia have already launched smartphones using Intel’s Medfield processors this year. Google’s Motorola Mobility in September launched the Razr i in Europe and Latin America as the first handset of a multi-device agreement between the two groups.

But Intel is fighting an uphill battle in a market where chips made using technology from ARM Holdings have become ubiquitous. Intel also has yet to release a chip for 4G telephone networks, keeping it out of the running for major smartphone design wins in the United States.

Sales of smartphone processors soared 58 percent in the third quarter, but Intel had just 0.2 percent of that market, according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics.

By comparison, worldwide PC shipments fell 8.6 percent in the third quarter, according to IDC.

Intel said 3D cameras would be integrated in future Ultrabooks to allow consumers to use gestures and facial recognition to control their devices. Upcoming Ultrabooks will also include voice interaction, Skaugen said.

“We’re basically going to give the PC the same human senses we’ve all had,” he said.

Intel and other tech companies are increasingly looking for ways to let PCs and other devices use cameras, GPS chips, microphones and other kinds of sensors to predict their users’ needs.

“It’s this combination of computer devices doing things before you ask them to do it, in that they’re smart enough to know based on their sensors,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

(Reporting By Noel Randewich; Editing by Dan Grebler)

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“Downton Abbey” sets PBS record with 7.9 million viewers

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – British period drama “Downton Abbey” scored rave reviews and a record 7.9 million viewers for public broadcasting channel PBS as viewers tuned in to watch a wedding and financial calamity during the award-winning show’s third season U.S. premiere on Sunday.

Fans witnessed the wedding of Matthew and Lady Mary Crawley, after two seasons in which viewers were kept wondering if they would ever tie the knot.

According to PBS, the ratings for season 3 quadrupled the average viewings for PBS primetime shows, which usually is 2 million viewers, and nearly doubled the premiere of the second season, which kicked off with 4.2 million viewers in January 2012.

The joy over the wedding was offset by news that Lord Grantham, the owner of the grand estate, had lost his fortune to bad investments.

American actress Shirley MacLaine debuted in the role of the feisty Martha Levinson, the mother of Lord Grantham’s American wife Cora. She entertained viewers with her witty exchanges with Downton matriarch Violet Crawley, played by Maggie Smith.

“Downton Abbey,” created by British screenwriter Julian Fellowes, has become both a critical success and a cult favorite among its many U.S. fans.

It has won seven Emmy awards and will be going into Sunday’s Golden Globe awards with three nominations in major television categories including best drama series.

Vanity Fair, which live-tweets humorous comments during the show, leads a strong online following of fans who discuss aspects of the show ranging from dresses and dances to the dramatic twists.

“The Subcommittee on Preventing Edith’s Happiness resolves to kill off her boyfriend, put thumbtacks in her evening shoes,” the magazine tweeted, referring to the unlucky-in-love Lady Edith Crawley.

PBS said that the show garnered nearly 100,000 tweets during its Sunday premiere.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Eric Walsh)

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Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level

Todd Korol/Reuters

An oil sands mine Fort McMurray, Alberta.

OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.

The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.

Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.

The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.

“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.

He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.

Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”

He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-bit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.

Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.

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American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip

David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, arrived in Pyongyang on Monday.

SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, led a private delegation including Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to North Korea on Monday, a controversial trip to a country that is among the most hostile to the Internet.

Kim Kwang Hyon/Associated Press

Bill Richardson with journalists on Monday after arriving in Pyongyang, North Korea. Mr. Richardson, who has visited the North several times, called his trip a private humanitarian mission.

Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission and said he would try to meet with Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old South Korean-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of “hostile acts” against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.

“I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back,” Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. “I doubt we can do it on this trip.”

In a one-sentence dispatch, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group’s arrival in Pyongyang, calling it “a Google delegation.”

Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders, and to visit universities.

Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept quiet about why Mr. Schmidt joined the trip, which the State Department advised against, calling the visit unhelpful. Mr. Richardson said Monday that Mr. Schmidt was “interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect,” but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.

Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against the infiltration of outside information in the isolated country, which it sees as a potential threat to its totalitarian grip on power.

Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as “imperial,” North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts that foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.

Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea, and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launching last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology.

North Korea has often required visits by high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.

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Critics slam Chuck Hagel's likely nomination as Defense secretary

WASHINGTON—

— With former Sen. Chuck Hagel's nomination as Defense secretary imminent, conservatives denounced his views on Israel and Iran as out of step with mainstream foreign policy, underscoring the difficulty he is likely to face winning Senate confirmation.

An administration official said Sunday that Hagel — a decorated Vietnam veteran, a Republican and a former two-term senator from Nebraska — would be nominated Monday to succeed Leon E. Panetta. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House planning.

The nomination is likely to set up a bruising confirmation fight. Critics on all sides already have been complaining about Hagel, with Republicans leading the charge.

Speaking on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) predicted that Hagel would be "the most antagonistic secretary of Defense toward the state of Israel in our nation's history" and called it an "in-your-face nomination."

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume described the choice as "very peculiar," saying on "Fox News Sunday" that Hagel did not have "a particularly distinguished record."

And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), while promising Hagel would get a "fair hearing," said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he would get "tough questions" in a confirmation process.

Hagel is viewed with suspicion by many in his party for past comments he has made calling on Israel to negotiate with Palestinians and for his opposition to some sanctions aimed at Iran. Since his possible nomination was floated late last year, he has come under attack by conservatives.

He also has been criticized on the left for a remark he made in 1998 that a Clinton administration nominee for ambassador was "openly, aggressively gay." Hagel recently apologized for that comment and pledged support for lesbian and gay military families.

Hagel, an Army veteran with two Purple Hearts, said in a recent interview with the history magazine Vietnam: "I'm not a pacifist. I believe in using force, but only after a very careful decision-making process. ... I will do everything I can to avoid needless, senseless war."

In the Senate, Hagel voted to give the George W. Bush administration authority to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but later he harshly criticized the conduct of both wars, irritating fellow Republicans and making him popular with Democrats critical of those wars.

Critics have focused on his calls for direct negotiations with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that the U.S. and Israel refuse to deal with directly, and his votes against some Iran sanctions.

And Hagel rankled many with comments he made in a 2006 interview with author and former State Department Mideast peace negotiator Aaron David Miller. "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," Hagel said, but "I'm a United States senator. I'm not an Israeli senator."

Graham told CNN on Sunday, "Quite frankly, Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking, I believe, on most issues regarding foreign policy."

He added, "This is an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel."

Miller, who had interviewed Hagel for a book he was writing on Mideast peace negotiations, wrote recently that attempts to use his comment about the "Jewish lobby" to paint Hagel as anti-Semitic were "shameful and scurrilous." He noted that in the same interview, Hagel emphasized "shared values and the importance of Israeli security."

Backers say Hagel showed his support for Israel by voting repeatedly to provide it with military aid and by calling for a comprehensive peace deal with Palestinians that should not include any compromise regarding Israel's Jewish identity and that would leave Israel "free to live in peace and security."

They note that he also supported three major Iran sanctions bills: the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act of 1998, the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 and the Iran Freedom Support Act of 2006.

When Hagel left the Senate four years ago, McConnell praised his "clear voice and stature on national security and foreign policy," ABC's George Stephanopoulos reminded the Senate minority leader on "This Week."

But McConnell declined to reiterate that view Sunday.

"He's certainly been outspoken in foreign policy and defense over the years," he said. "The question we will be answering, if he's the nominee, is: Do his views make sense for that particular job? I think he ought to be given a fair hearing, like any other nominee, and he will be."

matea.gold@latimes.com

Christi Parsons in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

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Alarm in Albuquerque Over Plan to End Methadone for Inmates

Mark Holm for The New York Times

Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.

ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.

Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.

“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”

For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.

At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.

Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.

In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.

Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.

Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.

“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”

Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.

Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.

The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.

Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.

“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.

“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.

Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.

Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.

While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”

In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.

Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.

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Looking Ahead: Economic Reports for the Week of Jan. 7

ECONOMIC REPORTS Data to be released this week includes consumer credit for November (Tuesday); weekly jobless claims and wholesale trade inventories for November (Thursday); and the trade deficit for November and import prices for December (Friday).

CORPORATE EARNINGS Companies scheduled to release quarterly earnings reports include Monsanto and Alcoa (Tuesday); Constellation Brands (Wednesday); and Wells Fargo (Friday).

IN THE UNITED STATES On Tuesday, the Consumer Electronics Show begins in Las Vegas and will run through Friday, and the JPMorgan Health Care Conference starts in San Francisco and will take place through Thursday.

On Thursday, Herbalife executives will respond to accusations by the investor William A. Ackman that their company operates a pyramid scheme.

On Friday, the Agriculture Department will issue its monthly crop report.

OVERSEAS On Tuesday, the European Union statistics office will report on euro area unemployment.

On Thursday, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England will issue decisions about interest rates, and the United Nations will release its global food price index for December.

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