In Gabon, Lure of Ivory Proves Hard to Resist

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

SEIZED AND DESTROYED Gabon burned 10,000 pounds of ivory in June to show its commitment against poaching, but elephants are still being slaughtered. More Photos »

OYEM, Gabon — This lush country, often called a “forest republic,” used to stand proudly apart from its shaky neighbors, like the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, tropical disaster zones where state failure, rebel marauders and loose weapons conspired to spell doom for endangered wildlife.

The Price of Ivory

This is the second installment in a series of articles exploring how the surge in poaching of African elephants both feeds off and fuels instability on the continent.

Gabon’s government, blessed with billions of dollars of oil money and miles and miles of virgin rain forest, has made many of the right moves to protect its animals by setting aside chunks of land for national parks, actually paying wildlife rangers on time (a rarity in Africa) and recently destroying a towering mountain of ivory in a statement of its refusal to look the other way.

But as the price of ivory keeps going up, hitting levels too high for many people to resist, Gabon’s elephants are getting slaughtered by poachers from across the borders and within the rain forests, proof that just about nowhere in Africa are elephants safe.

In the past several years, 10,000 elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by impoverished hunters creeping around the jungle with rusty shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces with chain saws. Gabon’s jails are filling up with small-time poachers and ivory traffickers, destitute men and women like Therese Medza, a village hairdresser arrested a few months ago for selling 45 pounds of tusks.

“I had no idea it was illegal,” Ms. Medza said, almost convincingly, from the central jail here in Oyem, in the north. “I was told the tusks were found in the forest.”

She netted about $700, far more than she usually makes in a month, and the reason she did it was simple, she said. “I got seven kids.”

It seems that Gabon’s elephants are getting squeezed in a deadly vise between a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory in Asia, where some people pay as much as $1,000 a pound, and desperate hunters and traffickers in central Africa.

It is a story of temptation — and exploitation — and it shows that the problem is not just about demand, but about supply as well. Poverty, as well as greed, is killing Africa’s elephants.

Across the continent, tens of thousands of elephants are being poached each year in what is emerging as one of the gravest wildlife crises in decades. Gabon’s elephants are among the last of the planet’s rare forest elephants, a subspecies or possibly a totally distinct species (scientists can’t agree), which makes the stakes particularly high here. Forest elephants are smaller than their savanna cousins and have an alluring, extra-hard pinkish ivory that is especially prized.

A few decades ago, there were perhaps 700,000 forest elephants roaming through the jungles of central Africa. Now there may be fewer than 100,000, and about half of them live in Gabon.

“We’re talking about the survival of the species,” said Lee White, the British-born head of Gabon’s national parks.

In June, Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, defiantly lighted a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the ivory trade was reprehensible, a public display of resolve that Kenya has put on in years past. It took three days for all the ivory to burn, and even after the last tusks were reduced to glowing embers, policemen vigilantly guarded the ashes. Ivory powder is valued in Asia for its purported medicinal powers, and the officers were worried someone might try to sweep up the ashes and sell them.

Some African countries, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, are sitting on million-dollar stockpiles of ivory (usually from law enforcement seizures or elephants that died naturally) that someday may be legal to sell. Gabon has the unusual luxury of kissing its ivory mountain goodbye because it has an even more lucrative resource: two billion barrels of crude oil.

But it is not clear how long Gabon will continue as this relatively prosperous, politically stable corner of Africa. Protesters recently began chaffing against Mr. Bongo’s rule, saying he rigged an election to ensure that he would take over from his father, who died in 2009 after 41 years in office.

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Recipes for Health: Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Penne with mushroom ragout and spinach.

​​Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.

 

1/2 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried porcini mushrooms

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 medium onion or 2 shallots, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 pound mixed regular and wild mushrooms or 1 pound regular white or cremini mushrooms, trimmed and cut in thick slices (or torn into smaller pieces, depending on the type of mushroom)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup fruity red wine, such as a Côtes du Rhone or Côtes du Luberon

2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme or a combination of thyme and rosemary

6 ounces baby spinach or 12 ounces bunch spinach (1 bunch), stemmed and thoroughly cleaned

3/4 pound penne

Freshly grated Parmesan to taste

 

1. Place the dried mushrooms in a Pyrex measuring cup and pour on 2 cups boiling water. Let soak 30 minutes, while you prepare the other ingredients. Place a strainer over a bowl, line it with cheesecloth or paper towels, and drain the mushrooms. Squeeze the mushrooms over the strainer to extract all the flavorful juices. Then rinse the mushrooms, away from the bowl with the soaking liquid, until they are free of sand. Squeeze dry and set aside. If very large, chop coarsely. Measure out 1 cup of the soaking liquid and set aside.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy, nonstick skillet over medium heat and add the onion or shallots. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about 5 minutes. Turn up the heat to medium-high and add the fresh mushrooms. Cook, stirring often, until they begin to soften and sweat, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and salt to taste, stir together for about 30 seconds, then add the reconstituted dried mushrooms and the wine and turn the heat to high. Cook, stirring, until the liquid boils down and glazes the mushrooms. Add the herbs and the mushroom soaking liquid. Bring to a simmer, add salt to taste, and cook over medium-high heat, stirring often, until the mushrooms are thoroughly tender and fragrant. Turn off the heat, stir in some freshly ground pepper, taste and adjust salt.

3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt generously. Fill a bowl with ice water. Add the spinach to the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds only. Remove with a skimmer and transfer to the ice water, then drain and squeeze out water. Chop coarsely and add to the mushrooms. Reheat gently over low heat.

4. Bring the water back to a boil and cook the pasta al dente following the timing suggestions on the package. If there is not much broth in the pan with the mushrooms and spinach, add a ladleful of pasta water. Drain the pasta, toss with the mushrooms and spinach, add Parmesan to taste, and serve at once.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The mushroom ragout will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator and tastes even better the day after you make it.

Nutritional information per serving: 437 calories; 9 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 73 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 48 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste or Parmesan); 17 grams protein

​

Up Next: Spinach Gnocchi

 

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Jack Klugman dies at 90; star of TV's 'The Odd Couple,' 'Quincy'

Jack Klugman, the three-time Emmy Award-winning actor best known for his portrayals of slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison on TV's “The Odd Couple” and the title role of the murder-solving medical examiner on “Quincy, M.E.,” died Monday at his home in Woodland Hills. He was 90.

Klugman had been in declining health for the last year, his son Adam said.

He had withdrawn from a production of “Twelve Angry Men” at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J., in Marchfor undisclosed health reasons. He had undergone successful surgery for cancer of the larynx in 1989.

PHOTOS: 2012 notable deaths

Klugman was the last surviving member of the cast that played the jury in “12 Angry Men,” the classic 1957 movie drama about deliberations in a first-degree murder trial. He was also a veteran of live TV dramatic anthology series in the 1950s and appeared in several episodes of “Twilight Zone.”

On Broadway, Klugman played Ethel Merman's boyfriend, Herbie, in the hit musical “Gypsy,” which earned him a 1960 Tony Award nomination. He won his first Emmy in 1964 for a guest appearance on “The Defenders.”

In 1965, he was back on Broadway, replacing Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison in the original production of “The Odd Couple,” Neil Simon's classic comedy about two friends with polar-opposite personalities who become roommates — one is divorced and the other just broke up with his wife.

PHOTOS: Jack Klugman -- 1922 - 2012

But that's not why Klugman landed the role of the casually sloppy Oscar Madison in the TV version of “The Odd Couple” opposite Tony Randall's fussy neat-freak Felix Unger.

Randall, who had appeared in a production of “The Odd Couple” with Mickey Rooney, had wanted Rooney to play Oscar in the TV series. But executive producer Garry Marshall fought for Klugman.

In his 2005 book “Tony and Me: A Story of Friendship,” Klugman wrote that during the first rehearsals for the TV series, Marshall told him he'd never seen him play Oscar on Broadway.

“What!” said Klugman. “Then why did you fight for me?”

“I saw you in ‘Gypsy,’ “ said Marshall. “You did a scene with Ethel Merman and I was impressed because as she was singing to you, she was spitting a lot and it was getting on your clothes and your face and in your eyes. You never even flinched. I said to myself, ‘Now that's a good actor.’ “

Although “The Odd Couple” was not a hit when it aired on ABC from 1970 to 1975, it has had a long life in syndication and forever cemented the reputation of its two stars as one of TV's great comedy teams.

In TV Guide's 1999 listing of “TV's Fifty Greatest Characters Ever,” Felix and Oscar ranked No. 12.

“Many acting tandems have played Neil Simon's testosterone-and-teacup duo over the years on stage and screen,” the magazine observed. “But Tony Randall and Jack Klugman are the Felix and Oscar we love most. For five unflaggingly creative seasons, they were the most evenly matched ‘Odd Couple' imaginable.”

Although Randall claimed he was “very little like” Felix, Klugman said in a 1996 interview with The Times, that he was “pretty close” to Oscar.

In fact, when members of the wardrobe department initially sought to outfit the unkempt Oscar, they looked no further than Klugman himself.

“They paid me $360 for everything in my closet, and I still made a profit on the deal,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2005.

As Oscar, Klugman won Emmys in 1971 and 1973 for outstanding continued performance by an actor in a leading role in a comedy series.

After “The Odd Couple” ended its run in 1975, Klugman said the last thing on his mind was doing another TV series.

Having “spent five years in the best situation comedy ever devised” and having worked with Randall, “the nicest guy in this business,” Klugman said, he turned down one pilot series script after another, particularly those for sitcoms.

But when he received the script for “Quincy, M.E.,” he said, he saw “potential in it — the gimmick of a doctor who solves crime for the police by medical and scientific deduction. It was not just another cop show.”

And with “Quincy, M.E.” which ran on NBC from 1976 to 1983 and earned Klugman four Emmy nominations, he saw a way to raise issues such as incest, child abuse, drunk driving and elderly abuse.

“I'm a muckraker,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. “I saw the possibilities in ‘Quincy': We could entertain with what was essentially a good murder mystery but also do important shows on important subjects. This was why I got into the business.”

One of six children, Klugman was born in Philadelphia on April 27, 1922. His father, a financially struggling house painter, died when Klugman was 12. A year later, after a stint selling newspapers, Klugman began taking horse bets to earn extra money.

“The dealer said, ‘These guys will give you slips of paper. Just put them in the tin,'“ he recalled in a 1971 interview with The Times. “Then I was taking bets on the phone.”

A lifelong track aficionado, Klugman later owned a horse farm in Temecula, and his racehorse, Jaklin Klugman, finished third in the 1980 Kentucky Derby.

Back home in 1945 after serving in the Army during World War II, Klugman lost the $3,000 he had saved in U.S. savings bonds by betting on baseball games. Worse, he owed $500 to a loan shark and faced serious bodily injury unless he made a payment within three days.

Unable to come up with the cash, Klugman skipped town and moved to Pittsburgh, where he was accepted into the drama department of what is now Carnegie Mellon University. A few years later he moved to New York, where he landed parts in off-Broadway and summer stock.

He appeared in films such as “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” and also starred in two short-lived situation comedies: “Harris Against the World” and “You Again?”

In 1989, Klugman, a heavy smoker, underwent surgery for cancer of the larynx in which the center of his right vocal cord was removed. Afterward, the actor famous for his raspy growl initially was unable to speak above a whisper.

After going public with his story a year-and-a-half later, he worked with voice specialist Gary Catona who put Klugman on a regimen of daily vocal exercises to strengthen his left vocal cord so that it could stretch to touch what was left of his right vocal cord and produce a sound.

His old friend Randall also played a key role in his return to acting in 1991.

After beginning his vocal exercises, Randall called Klugman to suggest that they do a one-night benefit performance of “The Odd Couple” on Broadway for Randall's new National Actors Theatre.

“I said to Tony, ‘I can't even talk. I don't know how I can do it,' “ Klugman recalled in a 1993 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

But, as he wrote in his memoir, after six months of working on his voice “like Rocky worked on his body,” the whisper “became a sound, and in time, the sound became a little voice. But was it enough to perform on Broadway?”

Nervous about facing an audience and hating the way he sounded, Klugman, who wore a small microphone on stage, was encouraged after getting his first laugh.

At the end of the performance, he took his bow to a standing ovation.

“After that, I knew I was back,” he said.

Klugman married actress and comedienne Brett Somers in 1953. They had been separated for many years when she died in 2007.

In addition to son Adam, he is survived by his wife, Peggy; son David; and two grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

McClellan is a former staff writer.

news.obits@latimes.com

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Army Goes Goth With 'Super-Black' Materials

Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.

In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn’t really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an “antireflective coating or surface treatment process for metals” to absorb stray light “in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared regions.” This, the Army hopes, will boost the quality of high-resolution cameras, while also cooling down sensitive electronics. Or to put it another way: The Army needs the color black to reflect its icy-cold heart.

Another curious thing is that the program is being run out of the Army’s Program Executive Office Ammunition at the Picatinny Arsenal, a main center for the Pentagon’s experiments in all sorts of weapons: from rifles and tank cannons to directed-energy weapons. But the purpose of the solicitation isn’t much more specific than described. “Simply put, it’s too early yet to speculate on where the technology(s) will go,” Frank Misurelli, an Army spokesman at Picatinny said in a statement provided to Danger Room. ”Possibly in a few months, after an contract has been awarded, more information may become available.”

But for whatever the Army wants to fade to black, it seems that regular black isn’t good enough. This is because most black paint will absorb only around 90-95 percent of light, with the other 5-10 percent reflected back outwards. For a high-resolution camera, that stray light can bounce back into the lens and interfere with the quality of an image. It’s even a problem for NASA’s ultra-deep-space sensors. In the extreme coldness of space, black paint turns a silver-y color, which increases heat and can interfere with infrared-detecting instruments.

But wait, doesn’t black get really hot when hit with light, like wearing black clothes during the summer? The answer is: sorta. Black is really good at absorbing heat, but is also really good at radiating heat away. This is why cooling fins, radiators and engines for cars and trucks are often painted black. In 2011, NASA developed a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbed between 98-99.5 percent of light, depending on the wavelength. Nor do the coating’s thin layers of nanotubes change color in extreme cold. They absorb more light, and help radiate heat away from instruments, keeping them cold.

The Army could go another route. A second option uncovered by Britain’s National Physical Laboratory involves immersing an object in a solution of nickel and sodium for several hours, which blackens the color, and then taking it out and dunking it in nitric acid for a few seconds. According to New Scientist, this creates an alloy pock-marked with tiny microscopic craters that prevent light from bouncing away.

Finally, the Army also hopes to expand the materials to “optical glass surfaces” — camera lenses, in other words — while testing to see whether “it will be able to survive in a military environment.” The material should also come in “multiple surface colors” and be able to “selectively exhibit earth color instead of broadband absorption.” And another hope is to use the materials to absorb water to cool down equipment. See, it’s tough out there being goth, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it in comfort.

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Holiday music stops at Irving Berlin’s NY door

NEW YORK (AP) — A caroling group that for 35 years has performed the Irving Berlin classic “White Christmas” on Christmas Eve outside the New York City home where he lived has cancelled the tradition.

A group spokesman says the plans were abruptly cancelled last week for lack of space at the Manhattan home, which now serves as the Luxembourg consulate.

The tradition started in the late 1970s with one cabaret singer outside the home. In 1983, Berlin invited the singers inside for cocoa and cookies.

Berlin died in 1989 at age 99.

Luxembourg Consul-General Jean-Claude Knebeler tells the New York Post the ballroom where the group performed is filled with office equipment because the consulate expanded. He says he hopes the tradition resumes in another year in the consulate’s library.

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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?

Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.

Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.

That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.

Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.

In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.

In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.

Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.

But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.

The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.

The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.

Other rumors also spring from real events.

In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.

Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.

So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.

Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.

In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.

The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”

The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.

The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.

The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.

The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.

The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.

In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.

In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.

Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.

But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

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U.S. Tennis Assn. reinstates umpire who was suspended

Lois "Lolo" Goodman was reinstated last week as a professional tennis umpire in the wake of a decision by prosecutors to drop charges that she fatally bludgeoned her husband, her attorney said.

Goodman, a fixture on the U.S. Tennis Assn. circuit for a couple of decades, had been sidelined since October after her arrest in New York on suspicion of killing her husband, Alan Goodman, 80.

Last month, prosecutors decided to drop a murder charge against Goodman without revealing their reasons. The move was made before her defense attorneys submitted a pathology report disputing coroner's findings that her husband was deliberately killed and citing a heart attack as the cause of his death.

"This is a wonderful holiday gift for Lolo and her family," Kelly Gerner, one of her attorneys, said Friday after the announcement of her reinstatement. "Lolo thanks the USTA for their prompt action, and she wishes a happy holiday to her many friends and supporters."

Goodman's arrest in August made international headlines when police apprehended her in New York as she was on her way to referee qualifying matches for the U.S. Open.

Her lawyers said the USTA informed her Friday morning that they were lifting her suspension.

Although prosecutors have dropped the charges, Ed Winter, deputy chief of coroner's investigations, said Alan Goodman's April 17 death remains listed as a homicide and it remains an open police case.

Goodman, 70, said she found her husband dead at their Woodland Hills home. She told authorities that she came home and found a bloody trail up the stairs to their bedroom. She believed he had fallen, then made his way to bed. Responding officers believed her and the home was cleaned up.

But three days later, a coroner's investigator visited the mortuary to sign the death certificate and reported he found "deep penetrating blunt force trauma" on Alan Goodman's head and ears. The observations led to a homicide investigation. In a search warrant, a detective described how investigators had found blood throughout the home.

Lois Goodman's lawyers later revealed that the tennis umpire's DNA wasn't found on the alleged murder weapon, a coffee cup. She also passed a defense-arranged polygraph test conducted by a former FBI examiner, according to her lawyers.

On the day the case was dismissed, Goodman said: "I feel wonderful!"

"I want to thank my family and my attorneys, my friends. Their support has been wonderful. And I want to thank the D.A.'s office for doing the right thing. I have always maintained my innocence."

richard.winton@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 24

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

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Bethenny Frankel and husband of 2 years separating

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bethenny Frankel and husband Jason Hoppy are separating.

The 42-year-old TV personality, chef, author and entrepreneur told The Associated Press Sunday that the split brings her “great sadness.”

“This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family,” Frankel said. “We have love and respect for one another and will continue to amicably co-parent our daughter who is and will always remain our first priority. This is an immensely painful and heartbreaking time for us.”

Frankel and Hoppy were married in 2010 and have a daughter, Bryn, who was born that same year. The couple’s courtship and marriage were documented in two reality series, “Bethenny Getting Married?” and “Bethenny Ever After…” Frankel gained fame as a star of “The Real Housewives of New York City.” Since her stint on the Bravo show, she has written four books, released a fitness video and founded her Skinnygirl line of cocktails, shapewear and nutritional supplements.

She launched a talk show, “Bethenny,” over the summer that is set to air nationally on Fox stations in 2013.

___

AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/APSandy .

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N.Y.U. and Others Offer Shorter Courses Through Medical School

Training to become a doctor takes so long that just the time invested has become, to many, emblematic of the gravity and prestige of the profession.

But now one of the nation’s premier medical schools, New York University, and a few others around the United States are challenging that equation by offering a small percentage of students the chance to finish early, in three years instead of the traditional four.

Administrators at N.Y.U. say they can make the change without compromising quality, by eliminating redundancies in their science curriculum, getting students into clinical training more quickly and adding some extra class time in the summer.

Not only, they say, will those doctors be able to hang out their shingles to practice earlier, but they will save a quarter of the cost of medical school — $49,560 a year in tuition and fees at N.Y.U., and even more when room, board, books, supplies and other expenses are added in.

“We’re confident that our three-year students are going to get the same depth and core knowledge, that we’re not going to turn it into a trade school,” said Dr. Steven Abramson, vice dean for education, faculty and academic affairs at N.Y.U. School of Medicine.

At this point, the effort involves a small number of students at three medical schools: about 16 incoming students at N.Y.U., or about 10 percent of next year’s entering class; 9 at Texas Tech Health Science Center School of Medicine; and even fewer, for now, at Mercer University School of Medicine’s campus in Savannah, Ga. A similar trial at Louisiana State University has been delayed because of budget constraints.

But Dr. Steven Berk, the dean at Texas Tech, said that 10 or 15 other schools across the country had expressed interest in what his university was doing, and the deans of all three schools say that if the approach works, they will extend the option to larger numbers of students.

“You’re going to see this kind of three-year pathway become very prominent across the country,” Dr. Abramson predicted.

The deans say that getting students out the door more quickly will accomplish several goals. By speeding up production of physicians, they say, it could eventually dampen a looming doctor shortage, although the number of doctors would not increase unless the schools enrolled more students in the future.

The three-year program would also curtail student debt, which now averages $150,000 by graduation, and by doing so, persuade more students to go into shortage areas like pediatrics and internal medicine, rather than more lucrative specialties like dermatology.

The idea was supported by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to President Obama, and a colleague, Victor R. Fuchs. In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, they said there was “substantial waste” in the nation’s medical education. “Years of training have been added without evidence that they enhance clinical skills or the quality of care,” they wrote. They suggested that the 14 years of college, medical school, residency and fellowship that it now takes to train a subspecialty physician could be reduced by 30 percent, to 10 years.

That opinion, however, is not universally held. Other experts say that a three-year medical program would deprive students of the time they need to delve deeply into their subjects, to consolidate their learning and to reach the level of maturity they need to begin practicing, while adding even more pressure to a stressful academic environment.

“The downside is that you are really tired,” said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting agency for medical schools in the United States and Canada. But because accreditation standards do not dictate the fine points of curriculum, the committee has approved N.Y.U.’s proposal, which exceeds by five weeks its requirement that schools provide at least 130 weeks of medical education.

The medical school is going ahead with its three-year program despite the damage from Hurricane Sandy, which forced NYU Langone Medical Center to evacuate more than 300 patients at the height of the storm and temporarily shut down three of its four main teaching hospitals.

Dr. Abramson of N.Y.U. said that postgraduate training, which typically includes three years in a hospital residency, and often fellowships after that, made it unnecessary to try to cram everything into the medical school years. Students in the three-year program will have to take eight weeks of class before entering medical school, and stay in the top half of their class academically. Those who do not meet the standards will revert to the four-year program.

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