S.F. mourns a twin with a passion for fashion









SAN FRANCISCO — They were known simply as the San Francisco Twins.


At 5-foot-1 and about 100 pounds apiece, the fashion enthusiasts were an integral part of the city fabric for four decades. With matching furs, hats and high-end purses, they completed each other's sentences, posed for countless tourist snapshots and modeled for the likes of Reebok, Joe Boxer and IBM.


Now one is gone.





Vivian Brown, 85, who had Alzheimer's, died in her sleep Wednesday, leaving behind Marian, who was eight minutes younger. The illness, and news of the twins' financial distress, brought an outpouring of support from city residents in recent months.


Donations managed by Jewish Family and Children Services helped Vivian move into an elegant assisted living facility in Lower Pacific Heights and provided for a car service so Marian could visit "as much as she wanted to," Development Director Barbara Farber said. "The community really responded.…It's been a beautiful thing."


At a benefit concert for the twins in August, the Go-Go's Jane Wiedlin and other musicians honored Marian. Cash flowed in to cover her meals at Uncle Vito's Pizza on Nob Hill, long one of the ladies' regular haunts.


On Friday, fans offered collective condolences as they swallowed some bitter medicine: The sightings that brought joy to many — of the twins in leopard-print cowboy hats parading up and down Powell Street and window shopping at Union Square — are forever a thing of the past.


In saying goodbye to Vivian, the city has ushered out an era of style.


"All of that has gone, and that's true of all cities," said Ann Moller Caen, the widow of Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, who wrote often about the twins. "They've lost the elegant few."


Mayor Ed Lee echoed residents' grief in online postings throughout the day, saying that "San Francisco is heartbroken" over Vivian's passing and was "fortunate to have called her a true friend."


The twins, who were born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and held degrees in business administration, moved to San Francisco in 1973, prompted by Vivian's chronic bronchial condition. Once on the West Coast, Vivian became a legal secretary and Marian worked at a bank.


But fashion was their passion, and they cut a striking double image.


There were the fitted white suit jackets with pleated skirts, veiled hats and white fur coats; the red wool Ellen Tracy suits with black felt hats and black gloves.


"When you first came to the city and saw them, you might think it was a little joke. But it really wasn't," Caen said Friday. "They were very warm and very pleasant to everyone, and they just loved Herb. And he loved them."


Evelyn Adler recalled that her father, who sold shoes at the Emporium on San Francisco's Market Street in the 1970s, had regularly waited on "the girls," as he called them.


"They were always at the very height of sometimes ridiculous fashion," said Adler, 82. Her father, she said, had talked of how years of wearing pointy shoes left the twins with overlapping toes. (They later embraced lower heels that were "much more suited to their feet," Adler said.)


As a volunteer for Jewish Family Services, Adler recently shopped for a new wardrobe for Vivian — and was taken aback by the sight of the twins in separate outfits. About a quarter-century ago, the twins admitted to an interviewer that after a six-month attempt to dress differently in their 20s, they had abandoned the project forever. Even their lingerie matched.


They had their regular haunts, which Marian now frequents solo.


David Dubiner, owner of Uncle Vito's Pizza, said the sisters began coming in nearly two decades ago. They always sat at the table by the window, chatting with tourists for so long that their food had to be reheated.


Vivian often did more talking, Dubiner said, but Marian now holds court for two.


On Thursday evening, Marian arrived alone at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Union Square to "have a glass of champagne and toast her sister goodbye," said Tom Sweeney, chief doorman at the hotel who for the last 37 years watched the twins descend the four blocks from their Nob Hill apartment.


"They're quite the personalities of San Francisco," Sweeney said. "We'll definitely miss Vivian."


lee.romney@latimes.com





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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 12











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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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!


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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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Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.



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Alicia Keys, Katy Perry top bill at Obama inauguration parties






WASHINGTON (Reuters) – R&B singer Alicia Keys, country guitar slinger Brad Paisley and pop star Katy Perry are some of the A-list performers who will entertain partygoers at President Barack Obama’s inaugural celebration, organizers said on Friday.


Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder, two prominent elder statesmen of American music, also will perform at one of the three official parties planned for the onset of Obama’s second term in office, the inaugural committee said.






Other performers include salsa singer Marc Anthony, rappers Far East Movement and Nick Cannon, pop band fun., R&B singers Usher and John Legend, gospel choir Soul Children of Chicago, and members of the cast of the TV show “Glee.”


Obama’s swearing-in ceremony on January 21 is expected to draw up to 800,000 people, less than half of the 1.8 million who flocked to Washington in 2009 to celebrate the United States’ first African American president.


That historic event featured 10 official balls. This time around, organizers are planning only two – one for military servicemembers and one for the general public. Organizers also plan a children’s concert for the Saturday before the event.


Organizers did not say who would perform at which event.


The inauguration committee previously announced performers for the swearing-in ceremony. R&B star BeyoncĂ© Knowles will sing the national anthem, while country singer Kelly Clarkson is scheduled to give a rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” Singer-songwriter James Taylor will perform “America the Beautiful.”


It will be BeyoncĂ©’s third inauguration performance. Four years ago, she serenaded the first couple with Etta James’ “At Last” at an inaugural ball, and in 2001 she performed at the children’s concert with her band, Destiny’s Child.


(Reporting by Andy Sullivan)


Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases





A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.




The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.


“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”


Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.


So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.


The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.


However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”


She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”


Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.


If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.


Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.


“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.


A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.


Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.


Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.


“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”


The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.


But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”


“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”


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Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales



The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.


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Lawsuit filed on behalf of 4 victims in Jenni Rivera plane crash









A company owned by the late Mexican American singer Jenni Rivera was named in a lawsuit filed Thursday on behalf of the four members of her entourage who were killed along with her in a Dec. 9 plane crash.


The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, seeks punitive damages against the current owners of the jet, as well as the previous owner, which sold the plane last year.


The negligence suit names Starwood Management, Rodatz Financial Group Inc., McOco Inc. and Jenni Rivera Enterprises Inc.





Attorneys named Rivera's company because of its role in choosing to use the 43-year-old Learjet 25.


The plane took off from Monterrey, Mexico, and crashed into mountainous terrain after nose-diving 28,000 feet in 30 seconds. Rivera, the four other passengers and the two pilots were killed.


"We cast a wide net to find out exactly who is responsible, and it may be that they're not," attorney Paul Kiesel said. "We have named Rivera Enterprises, who likely arranged the charter of this plane — in hindsight a very bad decision."


The lawsuit seeks punitive damages against current owners Starwood and Rodatz, as well as previous owner McOco, which sold the plane last June. The attorneys said they were not seeking punitive damages against the singer's company.


The suit was filed on behalf of the estates of publicist Arturo Rivera, makeup artist Jacobo Yebale, attorney Mario Macias and hairstylist Jorge "Gigi" Sanchez.


Pedro Rivera Jr., the singer's brother, said he was unaware of the lawsuit and doubted his sister's company would be found at fault.


"That will more likely have to do with the airplane itself," he said in Spanish via telephone. "Everyone has a right to file a lawsuit. They all had families."


Executives with Starwood told The Times shortly after the crash that the jet was perfectly maintained.


According to aviation records, the aircraft suffered "substantial" damage in 2005 when a fuel imbalance caused one wingtip to weigh as much as 300 pounds more than the other. The unnamed pilot lost control and struck a runway distance marker while landing in Amarillo, Texas. Nobody was injured.


The cause of December's fatal crash has not been determined, and it could take more than a year before the National Transportation Safety Board and Mexican authorities wrap up their investigations, Kiesel said, adding that it wasn't necessary to wait for the results before filing the suit.


At a downtown Los Angeles news conference Thursday, attorneys also took issue with the two pilots, 78-year-old Miguel Soto and 20-year-old Alejandro Torres. Although Soto had a lot of flying hours under his belt, he was not licensed to fly at altitudes above 18,000 feet, and Torres was not licensed to fly the jet, the lawsuit alleges.


"Neither pilot was licensed to operate this aircraft at the time and altitude it was flying," Kiesel said. He said the pilots weren't named in the suit because "the company is at fault, not the employees."


Starwood, Rodatz and McOco could not be reached for comment.


adolfo.flores@latimes.com


Times staff writer Scott Gold contributed to this report.





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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 11











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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Relatives of singer Jenni Rivera’s co-passengers sue over plane crash






LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Family members of four passengers who died with singer Jenni Rivera when her plane crashed in northern Mexico last year sued her corporation and the current and former owners of the aging Learjet they called a “bucket of bolts” on Thursday.


The plaintiffs alleged in their Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that the 43-year-old aircraft was unsafe and being flown by two unqualified pilots when it nosedived from 28,000 feet into mountainous terrain.






“We are trying to unravel the mystery of how this came to be. Who selected this plane, what condition was this plane in and how did these pilots get behind the stick of this aircraft?” plaintiffs’ attorney Paul Kiesel said.


“We want to provide answers for my clients and for the community mourning these brilliant lives,” he said.


Rivera and her fellow passengers were flying from Monterrey, Mexico, to an airport in the Mexico City suburb of Toluca in the early morning hours of December 9 when the Learjet 25 went down.


The 43-year-old California-born singer, best known for her work in the Mexican folk Nortena and Banda genres, had been headed to Mexico City for an appearance on the TV singing competition “The Voice Mexico.”


Killed with her were publicist Arturo Rivera (no relation), make-up artist Jacobo Yebale, attorney Mario Macias Pacheco and hair stylist Jorge Armando “Gigi” Sanchez Vasquez, along with the pilot and co-pilot.


Since the plane was registered in the United States, members of the National Transportation Safety Board are taking part in the investigation, which was expected to last a year.


Representatives for Jenni Rivera Enterprises and for Starwood Management, the charter company that owned the aircraft at the time of the crash, could not be reached by Reuters for comment on the lawsuit.


A Starwood executive previously told the Los Angeles Times that the plane was properly maintained and suggested that the 78-year-old pilot, Miguel Perez Soto, might have suffered a heart attack or become incapacitated in some way.


According to the 22-page lawsuit, the multi-engine plane involved in the crash had been built in 1969 and “was such an old airplane that it was referred to as a ‘bucket of bolts.’”


The lawsuit says it struck a runway marker at an airport in Texas in 2005, which left the plane with structural damage.


The plaintiffs also say in the court papers that Soto was not licensed to fly the Learjet above 18,000 feet or with paying passengers. The co-pilot, 20-year-old Alejandro Jose Torres, also lacked certification for flying the plane under those conditions, according to the lawsuit.


(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Peter Cooney)


Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Parental Consent Rule May Proceed for a Circumcision Ritual, a Judge Says





New York City health officials may proceed temporarily with a plan to require parental consent before an infant may undergo a particular Jewish circumcision ritual, a federal judge ruled Thursday.




City officials say 12 cases of herpes simplex virus have likely resulted from the procedure, known as metzitzah b’peh, since 2000, including one Brooklyn case reported this week. Two infants died, and two suffered permanent brain damage. Most Jews no longer practice metzitzah b’peh, in which the circumciser uses his mouth to suck blood from the wound, but it remains common among some ultra-Orthodox communities.


Citing the risk of infection, health officials in September introduced a regulation that would require parents to provide written consent stating that they were aware of the health risks.


But the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, Agudath Israel of America, and the International Bris Association sued in October to stop the rule from taking effect, calling it an infringement of their constitutional rights. They also denied the procedure posed a risk and asked a federal court to put the rule on hold while the litigation proceeded.


In denying the request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the United States District Court for the Southern District wrote that the risks were clear.


“In light of the quality of the evidence presented in support of the regulation, we conclude that a continued injunction against enforcement of the regulation would not serve the public interest,” she wrote.


City lawyers said they were gratified by the ruling, but Andrew Moesel, a spokesman for the plaintiffs, said the groups would appeal. “We continue to believe that this case is a wrongful and unnecessary intrusion into the rights of freedom of religion and speech,” he said.


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Japan Approves $116 Billion in Emergency Economic Stimulus


TOKYO — The Japanese government approved emergency stimulus spending of more than $100 billion on Friday, part of an aggressive push by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to kick-start growth in Japan’s long-moribund economy.


Mr. Abe also reiterated pressure on Japan’s central bank to make a firmer commitment to stopping deflation by pumping more money into the economy — a measure the prime minister says is crucial to getting businesses to invest and consumers to spend.


“We will put an end to this shrinking, and aim to build a stronger economy where earnings and incomes can grow,” Mr. Abe told a televised news conference. “For that, the government must first take the initiative to create demand, and boost the entire economy.”


Under the plan, the Japanese government will spend about 10.3 trillion yen (about $116 billion) on public works and disaster mitigation projects, subsidies for companies that invest in new technology and financial aid to small businesses.


The government will seek to raise real economic growth by 2 percentage points and add 600,000 jobs to the economy, Mr. Abe said. The measures announced Friday amount to one of the largest spending plans in Japan’s history, he stressed.


By simply talking about stimulus measures, Mr. Abe, who took office late last month, has already driven down the value of the yen, much to the relief of Japanese exporters whose competitiveness benefits from a weaker currency.


But the government’s promises to spend its way out of economic stagnation also raise concerns over Japan’s public debt, which has already mushroomed to twice the size of its economy and is the largest in the industrialized world.


At the root of Japan’s debt woes was a similar attempt in the 1990s by Mr. Abe’s own Liberal Democratic Party to stimulate economic growth through government spending on extensive public works projects across the country.


Mr. Abe said, however, that the spending this time around would be better focused to bring about growth through investment in innovation. He said the government would also invest in measures that would help mitigate the fall in Japan’s population, by encouraging families to have more children.


“To grow in a sustainable way, we must help create a virtuous cycle where companies actively borrow and invest, and in so doing raise employment and incomes,” Mr. Abe said.


“For that, it is extremely important that we adopt a growth strategy that gives everyone solid hope that the future of the Japanese economy lies in growth.”


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