State parks officials deliberately hid millions, report says

SACRAMENTO — Fear of embarrassment and budget cuts led high officials at the California parks department to conceal millions of dollars, according a new investigation by the state attorney general's office.

The money remained hidden for years until it was exposed by a new staff member who described a culture of secrecy and fear at the department.

The attorney general's report, released Friday, is the most detailed official account so far of the financial scandal at the parks department. The controversy broke last summer with the revelation that parks officials had a hidden surplus of nearly $54 million at a time when the administration was threatening to close dozens of the facilities.

Although much of the accounting issues appeared to stem from innocent mistakes and discrepancies, the report said, about $20 million had been deliberately stashed away.

The report said the problem seemed to begin with calculation errors more than a decade ago. But when those mistakes were discovered in 2002, officials made a "conscious and deliberate" decision not to reveal the existence of the extra money, the report said.

Parks officials concealed the funds partly because they were embarrassed, the report said. But they were also worried that their funding would be cut further if state number-crunchers knew they had a larger reserve, according to interviews conducted by a deputy attorney general.

Parks officials underreported the amount of money they had to the Department of Finance, preventing lawmakers from including the extra funds in state spending plans.

The money "was intended to be a safety net," said Manuel Lopez, a former deputy director at the department, who was interviewed in the probe. Lopez resigned in May while being investigated for a separate scheme allowing employees to be improperly paid for unused vacation days.

Multiple high-ranking officials were involved in concealing the parks money, including Lopez and Michael Harris, the chief deputy director who was fired after the scandal broke. Evidence suggests that the initial decision to keep the money secret was made by Tom Domich, an assistant deputy director who left the department in 2004, the report said.

Domich "unpersuasively denies … his role in the deception," according to the report. The Times was unable to reach Domich on Friday.

Staff members who pointed out financial problems were ignored by their bosses.

"Throughout this period of intentional non-disclosure, some parks employees consistently requested, without success, that their superiors address the issue," the report said.

It is unclear whether ousted director Ruth Coleman knew about the accounting problems, the report said. She declined to be interviewed for the investigation; participation was voluntary for former parks personnel.

Officials have not yet determined whether criminal charges will be filed. There's no evidence that any money was stolen or used improperly, the report said.

The accounting problems were eventually exposed by Aaron Robertson, who started an administrative job at the parks department in January 2012. He told a deputy attorney general that people felt uncomfortable raising concerns at the department.

"There was a great deal of distrust," he said. "People felt somewhat fearful of coming forward with information."

John Laird, the California natural resources secretary who oversees the parks department, said new policies and staff are in place to prevent similar problems in the future.

"It is now clear that this is a problem that could have been fixed by a simple correction years ago, instead of being unaddressed for so long that it turned into a significant blow to public trust in government," Laird said in a statement.

A new parks director, retired Marine Maj. Gen. Anthony Jackson, was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to replace Coleman in November. Robertson was promoted to become his deputy.

The attorney general's investigation is the third report on the parks department in the last month. One more report, from the state auditor, is due this month.

chris.megerian@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 5

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.

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And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

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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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Madonna, Bruce Springsteen biggest 2012 world tours

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop and rock music legends bested their younger chart-topping competition on the concert trail in 2012, according to data released on Friday by trade publication Pollstar.

Pop matriarch Madonna, 54, led all competition, grossing some $ 296.1 million in ticket sales in her 88-show world tour. She topped Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band ($ 210.2 million) and Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters ($ 186.4 million).

The elder statesmen of the music world, while no longer topping the charts or scoring radio hits, are doing well because their older audiences can afford to pay higher ticket prices, Gary Bongiovanni, Pollstar editor, told Reuters.

“Certainly the older acts charge more because they can get away with it,” he said.

The Rolling Stones were able to command an eye-popping $ 529.51 average ticket price. Their five-show tour in November and December grossed $ 35.5 million, good enough for No. 33 on the list.

British rockers Coldplay were No. 4 on the list, taking in $ 171.3 million. Lady Gaga placed fifth grossing $ 161.4 million while at No. 6 Cirque Du Soleil‘s tribute to late King of Pop Michael Jackson grossed $ 140.2 million during a 172-show tour.

Teen sensation Justin Bieber, who played a 35-show tour, failed to crack the top 20, taking in $ 40.2 million, at No. 23.

Acts that cemented their reputations decades ago dominated the top-grossing tours even while playing fewer shows.

Country stars Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw placed seventh grossing $ 96.5 million in 23 shows, while heavy metal pioneers Metallica were one spot lower at $ 86.1 million over 30 shows.

Some artists have been enticed to jack-up their own ticket prices after seeing how much more re-sellers were able to command, Bongiovanni explained.

“Now it’s a matter of how much money can I make,” he said. “Some artists like Springsteen are very popular but if you look at their average ticket price it’s nowhere near Roger Waters, Madonna and Lady Gaga.”

The average face-value ticket price for a Springsteen concert was $ 91.95, which was well below the $ 140.38 average for Madonna and $ 110.96 for Roger Waters.

Eight separate Cirque Du Soleil shows appeared in the top 50, which did not include the circus company’s non-traveling shows in Las Vegas and elsewhere. All told, the Canadian company may have earned close to $ 1 billion in gross ticket sales, Bongiovanni said.

Elton John ($ 69.9 million) and Red Hot Chili Peppers ($ 57.8 million) rounded out the top 10.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant)

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Massachusetts Plans Stricter Control of Compounding Pharmacies

BOSTON — New laws to strengthen state control of compounding pharmacies were proposed on Friday by Gov. Deval Patrick, in hopes of preventing another public health disaster like the current outbreak of meningitis caused by a contaminated drug made in Massachusetts.

The laws will be among the strongest in the country, said Kevin Outterson, a law professor at Boston University and a member of the expert panel that advised the state on how to curb abuses by companies like the New England Compounding Center, the Framingham pharmacy that made the tainted drug responsible for the nationwide meningitis outbreak.

The legislation would establish strict licensing requirements for compounding sterile drugs; let the state assess fines against pharmacies that break its rules; protect whistle-blowers who work in compounding pharmacies; and reorganize the state pharmacy board to include more members who are independent of the industry and fewer who are part of it.

Alec Loftus, a spokesman for the state’s Office of Health and Human Services, said that Mr. Patrick expected the new legislation to be passed quickly.

Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard, said the proposed laws seemed sound and comprehensive. But he warned that if other states did not take similar steps, compounding pharmacies engaging in shoddy practices would just move to places with the weakest laws and the least oversight.

“The remaining question is not what Massachusetts is doing or will do, but will there be a minimum level of regulation like this in the rest of the states?” Professor Carpenter said.

The meningitis outbreak, first detected in September, was caused by contaminated batches of a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center. The drug was injected into about 14,000 people’s spinal area to treat back and neck pain.

As of Dec. 28, 656 people in 19 states had become ill with meningitis or other infections, like severe internal abscesses in the area where the drug was injected. Some have had both meningitis and spinal infections. The case count is expected to keep rising. Thirty-nine have died.

The New England Compounding Center was shut down, and inspections found extensive contamination. Investigations uncovered a long history of questionable practices that had drawn warnings from the state and the Food and Drug Administration.

On Dec. 21, the company announced that it had filed for bankruptcy. Numerous lawsuits have been filed against it.

At the heart of the problem have been gaps in regulation that have allowed such companies to avoid both state and federal controls. The company called itself a pharmacy, and pharmacies are generally regulated by states, while large drug companies are regulated federally, by the Food and Drug Administration.

Compounding pharmacies mix their own drug preparations, like skin creams and cough syrups, supposedly for individual patients with special needs. But the New England Compounding Center began to act like a manufacturer, making and shipping large amounts of injectable drugs, for which sterility is essential. No state law required it to obtain a license for this type of large-scale compounding, to follow good manufacturing processes or to let the state know it was shipping all over the country.

Dr. Lauren Smith, interim commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said the company “was a manufacturer in pharmacy clothing.”

Governor Patrick said, “The tragic meningitis outbreak has shown us all that the board’s governing authority has not kept up with an industry that has evolved from corner drugstores to the types of large manufacturers that have been at the center of so much harm.”

Dr. Smith said she thought the most important part of the new legislation was the requirement of a license for sterile compounding. “Now we are going to have the ability to develop specialty licenses that will allow us to track and identify those pharmacies that are engaged in different practices that could potentially put higher numbers of individuals at risk, such as those who engage in sterile compounding,” she said.

Professor Carpenter said a particularly powerful part of the proposal is that it requires licensure for out-of-state pharmacies that ship medication to Massachusetts. The state, he said, is a huge market for injectable drugs.

“Basically, if you think about the large hospitals, the amount of medical care that goes on in the state, it’s in a sense using the purchasing power of the state of Massachusetts to induce changes elsewhere,” he said.

The state has also taken other steps recently to rein in compounding, apart from the new legislation. It began conducting surprise inspections, and has required compounding pharmacies to report how much medication they are shipping and where, so that it can keep tabs on those that begin acting like manufacturers. It also requires the pharmacies to report when they become subjects of regulatory actions by other states or the federal government.

Abby Goodnough reported from Boston, and Denise Grady from New York.

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Services Still the Backbone of Job Growth, Data Shows

Reports on Friday on the nation’s job market, factory activity and the service sector painted a picture of a national economy that was growing late last year. This was despite the concern that the economy might be tipped back into recession by a federal budget dispute that was settled on Tuesday.

Barton Silverman/The New York Times

More than 90 percent of jobs created since January were in the service sector, like restaurants.

Employers added 155,000 jobs in December, approximately matching the solid but unspectacular monthly rate of the last two years.

Companies increased their orders in November for manufactured goods, reflecting investment plans, even though total orders were unchanged for the month, the Commerce Department said in a second report.

Back-to-back increases in core capital goods followed a period of weakness that raised concerns about business investment, which has been a driving force in the economic rebound.

Analysts say they think that companies will increase spending on computers and other equipment to expand and modernize now that Congress and President Obama have reached a deal on taxes, removing uncertainty that had been weighing on business investment.

In a third report, a gauge of service companies’ activity expanded in December by the most in nearly a year, driven by an increase in new orders and hiring, a trade group said.

The industry group, the Institute for Supply Management, said its index of nonmanufacturing activity rose to 56.1 in December from 54.7 in November. It was the highest level since February and above the 12-month average of 54.7. Any reading above 50 indicates expansion.

Companies had a “year-end surge” in orders, in the words of one executive surveyed by the institute.

Services have been a crucial source of job growth, creating about 90 percent of the net jobs added since January. For all of 2012, the economy added 1.69 million service jobs, about the same as in 2011. Many of the new jobs are in low-paying retail and restaurant industries. The increase conflicted with a Labor Department report Friday that said the economy added just 109,000 service jobs last month, the fewest since June. One important difference between the two reports is the inclusion of construction jobs in the institute’s index. The government index excludes that category, which would have raised the December total by 30,000.

The institute’s report measures service growth in industries that cover 90 percent of the work force, including retail, construction, health care and financial services.

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Youngest Holocaust survivors look to next generation

She was an orphan, a 14-year-old Jewish girl, when she went to the Berlin train station on a summer day in 1939, leaving behind all that she had ever known.

She had already experienced loss: her parents claimed by illness, her brother taken by the Nazis. Now Dora Gostynski was about to get on a train that would take her and hundreds of other Jewish children to safety — but they had to go without the comfort of their parents.

She remembered the other children's sobs as they embraced their parents, who had made the agonizing decision to give their children a chance at life, even if meant never seeing them again. And she remembered the parents who relented when their child didn't want to leave them. They walked away from the train station, and back into a world of danger.

"There was like an ocean of people and an ocean of tears," she said.

She was escaping Nazi Germany through the rescue mission Kindertransport, which carried about 10,000 youths to Britain and elsewhere for shelter during the Holocaust. Many — more than 60%, according to various estimates — never saw their parents again.

As they grew older, they sought out one another, drawn by a wrenching, shared experience. They founded the Kindertransport Assn., and kinder from around the world have gathered every other year for the last two decades.

The kinder are among the youngest Holocaust survivors, yet even they are now mostly in their 80s, a group thinned by the passing years. With each gathering, there are whispers that it could be the last.

At the most recent gathering, in an Irvine hotel, a much older Dora recalled the train station on that day more than 73 years ago. She recognized one of her classmates, a girl named Fritzy Hacker. Fritzy's mother hugged each of the girls tightly before they boarded the train together. "She said goodbye to the two of us like she was my mother too," she said.

But Dora couldn't stop thinking about her sister, Ida. They had applied for the Kindertransport mission together. But as they waited for word to arrive, her sister had turned 17. She missed being able to qualify by two months.

As the train chugged toward the Dutch border, she and Fritzy told themselves they were going on a field trip. The other passengers wept. She thought of her sister. She didn't know if she would ever see her again.

::

Dora — now Doris Small — is 89, and a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. She was one of the remaining kinder who had come to share their stories of survival with one another and their children in the hopes that their history isn't forgotten after they are gone.

"My generation is dying off," said Michael Wolff, who at 76 is one of the youngest. He was 2 when his mother handed him over to a teenage girl to carry him to Scotland. When his father visited him months later, he did not recognize him.

The conference in Irvine represented a passing of a torch to the survivors' children and grandchildren to maintain the Kindertransport story. The gathering drew three dozen survivors, and for the first time, the gathering was organized by the second generation — "KT2," as they are called. More than half of those attending were the survivors' children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.

The conference reflected the push to connect generations, with sessions on writing memoirs and ethical wills and conversations in which moderators prompted open dialogue after years of silence. It was time for their children — and the world — to know their legacy.

"This is a story of survivors," said Wolff's son, Jeffrey, who was the conference chairman. He said they are "strong characters because they had to adjust, they had to adapt, they had to survive."

They were linked by traumatic experience, but the gathering, in some ways, had the feel of a high school reunion.

They reconnected with people they hadn't seen since they were children. The kinder and their children walked around with scrapbooks, flipping through pages of black and white photos hoping to identify the other children on their ship.

There was also a message board, where the kinder and their descendants left notes in hopes of finding others on the same voyage or track down those they haven't heard from since the war.

Did anyone stay in Cornwall during war and after in orphanage/hostel? Pls contact Linda

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 4

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."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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R&B singer Frank Ocean cited for pot possession

BRIDGEPORT, Calif. (AP) — Grammy-nominated R&B singer Frank Ocean is facing a marijuana possession charge after police say he was pulled over on New Year’s Eve in California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada for driving more than 90 mph in a 65 mph zone.

The Mono County Sheriff’s Department says officers stopped Ocean’s black BMW at about 4:30 p.m. Dec. 31 as he was heading southbound on U.S. 395.

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jennifer Hansen says a strong odor of marijuana wafted out as a deputy approached the vehicle.

Hansen says the deputy found a small bag of marijuana on the 25-year-old Ocean, whose legal name is Christopher Breaux (broh).

She says the Beverly Hills resident was cited for marijuana possession and released.

Calls and an email message sent to Ocean’s representatives Thursday were not immediately returned.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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An Inquiry Into Tech Giants’ Tax Strategies Nears an End

Congressional investigators are wrapping up an inquiry into the accounting practices of Apple and other technology companies that allocate revenue and intellectual property offshore to lower the taxes they pay in the United States.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations inquiry now drawing to a close began more than a year ago and involves at least a half dozen technology companies, according to people with firsthand knowledge of it, who declined to be identified.

Those people said the subcommittee had subpoenaed or otherwise asked the companies to explain methods they used to avoid domestic taxes. They said Apple had become a focus of the inquiry and was cooperating with the subcommittee, which is expected to issue wide-ranging recommendations that are likely to play a significant role in Congressional tax code negotiations.

Apple’s domestic tax bill has drawn the interest of corporate tax experts and policy makers because although the majority of Apple’s executives, product designers, marketers, employees, research and development operations and retail stores are in the United States, in the past Apple’s accountants have found legal ways to allocate about 70 percent of the company’s profits overseas, where tax rates are often much lower, according to corporate filings.

Apple, in a statement on Thursday, said the company was “one of the top corporate income taxpayers in the country, if not the largest.” The statement said the company “conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules.”

It is unclear how broadly Senate investigators are looking into the technology industry, if any laws are thought to have been broken and how many companies are involved. The subcommittee is also known to be looking at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and firms in such fields as biotechnology.

The subcommittee, which is overseen by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, has been interested in the impact on the budget deficit of offshore tax strategies. Representatives from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard testified at a subcommittee hearing on the subject in September. Both companies were criticized sharply by Senator Levin for using accounting rules to allocate revenue to other nations to avoid paying taxes in the United States.

“This subcommittee has demonstrated in hearings and comprehensive reports how various schemes have helped shift income to offshore tax havens and avoid U.S. taxes,” Senator Levin said at that hearing. “The resulting loss of revenue is one significant cause of the budget deficit, and adds to the tax burden that ordinary Americans bear.”Apple has long been a pioneer in developing innovative tax strategies that lessen its domestic taxes. At the September hearing, Senator Levin said the investigation indicated that Apple had deferred taxes on over $35.4 billion in offshore income between 2009 and 2011.

Tech companies are able to easily shift “intellectual property, and the profit that goes along with it, to tax havens,” said a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. “Apple went out of its way to try and ensure that its tax savings didn’t attract too much public attention, because tax avoidance of that magnitude — even though it’s legal and permissible — isn’t in keeping with the image of a socially progressive company.”

In its statement, Apple said it paid “an enormous amount of taxes” to local, state and federal governments. “In fiscal 2012 we paid $6 billion in federal corporate incomes taxes, which is 1 out of every 40 dollars in corporate income taxes collected by the U.S. government,” it said. In the 1980s, Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies. More recently, Apple has moved revenue to states like Nevada and overseas nations where the company pays less, or in some cases no, taxes.

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes. However, technology companies are particularly well positioned to take advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill-suited to today’s digital economy.

Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft emerge from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software. At other times, products are digital, such as downloaded songs or movies. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers.

Although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most highly valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Dell — reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S.& P. companies’, according to a New York Times analysis. (Cash taxes may include payments for multiple years.)

Companies report their cash outlays for income taxes in their annual Form 10-K, but it is impossible from those numbers to determine precisely how much, in total, corporations pay to governments.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article included outdated information on Apple’s tax payments. The company paid $6 billion in federal corporate income taxes in fiscal year 2012, according to a company statement on Thursday; it did not pay $3.3 billion “last year.” (That was the amount of cash taxes the company paid in fiscal year 2011.)

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Bieber urges crackdown on paparazzi after photographer's death

Justin Bieber and his collection of exotic cars have been tantalizing targets for celebrity photographers ever since the young singer got his driver's license.

A video captured the paparazzi chasing Bieber through Westside traffic in November. When Bieber's white Ferrari stops at an intersection, the video shows the singer turning to one of the photographers and asking: "How do your parents feel about what you do?"

A few months earlier, he was at the wheel of his Fisker sports car when a California Highway Patrol officer pulled him over for driving at high speeds while trying to outrun a paparazzo.

This pursuit for the perfect shot took a fatal turn Tuesday when a photographer was hit by an SUV on Sepulveda Boulevard after taking photos of Bieber's Ferrari. And the singer now finds himself at the center of the familiar debate about free speech and the aggressive tactics of the paparazzi.

Since Princess Diana's fatal accident in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers, California politicians have tried crafting laws that curb paparazzi behavior. But some of those laws are rarely used, and attorneys have challenged the constitutionality of others.

On Wednesday, Bieber went on the offensive, calling on lawmakers to crack down.

"Hopefully this tragedy will finally inspire meaningful legislation and whatever other necessary steps to protect the lives and safety of celebrities, police officers, innocent public bystanders and the photographers themselves," he said in a statement.

It remained unclear if any legislators would take up his call. But Bieber did get some support from another paparazzi target, singer Miley Cyrus.

She wrote on Twitter that she hoped the accident "brings on some changes in '13 Paparazzi are dangerous!"

Last year, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge threw out charges related to a first-of-its-kind anti-paparazzi law in a case involving Bieber being chased on the 101 Freeway by photographer Paul Raef. Passed in 2010, the law created punishments for paparazzi who drove dangerously to obtain images.

But the judge said the law violated 1st Amendment protections by overreaching and potentially affecting such people as wedding photographers or photographers speeding to a location where a celebrity was present.

The L.A. city attorney's office is now appealing that decision.

Raef's attorney, Dmitry Gorin, said new anti-paparazzi laws are unnecessary.

"There are plenty of other laws on the books to deal with these issues. There is always a rush to create a new paparazzi law every time something happens," he said. "Any new law on the paparazzi is going to run smack into the 1st Amendment. Truth is, most conduct is covered by existing laws. A lot of this is done for publicity."

Coroner's officials have not identified the photographer because they have not reached the next of kin. However, his girlfriend, Frances Merto, and another photographer identified him as Chris Guerra.

The incident took place on Sepulveda Boulevard near Getty Center Drive shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday. A friend of Bieber was driving the sports car when it was pulled over on the 405 Freeway by the California Highway Patrol. The photographer arrived near the scene on Sepulveda, left his car and crossed the street to take photos. Sources familiar with the investigation said the CHP told him to leave the area. As he was returning to his vehicle, he was hit by the SUV.

Law enforcement sources said Wednesday that it was unlikely charges would be filed against the driver of the SUV that hit the photographer.

Veteran paparazzo Frank Griffin took issue with the criticism being directed at the photographer as well as other paparazzi.

"What's the difference between our guy who got killed under those circumstances and the war photographer who steps on a land mine in Afghanistan and blows himself to pieces because he wanted the photograph on the other side of road?" said Griffin, who co-owns the photo agency Griffin-Bauer.

"The only difference is the subject matter. One is a celebrity and the other is a battle. Both young men have left behind mothers and fathers grieving and there's no greater sadness in this world than parents who have to bury their children."

Others, however, said the death focuses attention on the safety issues involving paparazzi

"The paparazzi are increasingly reckless and dangerous. The greater the demand, the greater the incentive to do whatever it takes to get the image," said Blair Berk, a Los Angeles attorney who has represented numerous celebrities. "The issue here isn't vanity and nuisance, it's safety."

richard.winton@latimes.com

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

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