Executive Order Aims to Facilitate Sharing of Information on Threats

President Barack Obama signed an executive order on Tuesday designed to make it easier to disseminate classified information on threats against critical infrastructure systems and to lay the groundwork for obtaining information from the private sector that would help the government protect critical infrastructures in the U.S.

The order, which runs eight pages (.pdf), directs the Attorney General’s office, the office of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and the Director of National Intelligence to issue instructions to their agencies that would “ensure the timely production of unclassified reports of cyberthreats to the U.S. homeland that identify a specific targeted entity” to Congress and also develop a program for providing “classified cyber threat and technical information from the Government to eligible critical infrastructure companies or commercial service providers that offer security services to critical infrastructure,” according to the document.

To that end, the order also calls for the government to expedite security clearances to appropriate personnel employed by critical infrastructure owners and operators, so that they can receive information necessary to protect their systems.

“It is the policy of the United States Government to increase the volume, timeliness, and quality of cyber threat information shared with U.S. private sector entities so that these entities may better protect and defend themselves against cyber threats,” the order states.

The order, published in conjunction with a new Presidential Directive on cybersecurity (.pdf), follows numerous failed attempts by Capitol Hill to pass controversial cybersecurity legislation that would have given private companies legal immunity to share information with the government.

The order still allows the private sector to share information with the government, but references established safeguards — such as the Fair Information Practice Principles — for protecting the privacy of customers whose information is shared and also carries some built-in limitations for the kind of information that companies will likely share. The order requires DHS’s chief privacy officer and its officer for civil rights and civil liberties to assess the privacy and civil liberties risks of the programs.

Civil liberties advocates praised the executive order in this regard, but said they will withhold judgment until they see how the information-sharing gets played out in practice.

“A lot of what this shows is that the president can do a lot without cybersecurity legislation,” said Mark Jaycox, policy analyst and legislative assistant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who points out that the executive order satisfies the need for information sharing without the privacy problems that existed under legislative proposals where loopholes would have allowed companies to dump large amounts of data on the government in an effort to obtain legal immunities. Without those immunities, companies will by nature be more circumspect about what they provide the government, thus limiting what they hand over Jaycox said.

“An [executive order] can’t grant broad immunities to companies … so it will tighten the information that can be shared, and the government won’t be on the receiving end of tons of tons of information,” Jaycox said. “Companies will be more mindful about what they share.”

Although the order comes after a number of failed attempts by Congress last year to pass cybersecurity legislation, the White House has indicated that it doesn’t see the executive order as a substitute for legislation, and the order even indicates that further legislation is not ruled out in addressing the critical infrastructure issue.

Not everyone is happy with the order, however. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) told the Washington Post that the president was out of line in bypassing legislation.

“It is a very dangerous road he’s going down contrary to the spirit of the Constitution,” Sen. Grassley said. “Just because Congress doesn’t act doesn’t mean the president has a right to act.”

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House last year but failed to gain support in the Senate, was one piece of legislation that garnered a lot of criticism from civil liberties groups who were happy to see it fail. EFF and others criticized the bill for failing to provide enough safeguards to protect the digital privacy of customers when private entities such as ISPs and others shared threat information with the government.

CISPA would have allowed companies to share sensitive and personal data with the National Security Agency and other government agencies without requiring companies to make reasonable efforts to protect their customers’ privacy. The bill also failed to adequately define how the government could use the data, saying only that it would be used for “national security” purposes.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland) plan on reintroducing CISPA this week.

Critical infrastructure sectors include chemical, communications, dams, critical manufacturing, emergency services, food and agriculture, energy, defense industrial base, healthcare and public health, government facilities, water and wastewater and transportation, among a few others.

DHS currently oversees the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, a 24-hour watch center tied in with other federal watch centers that parses threat information that comes in to the center and monitors government civilian networks for signs of cyber threats. DHS, along with the Department of Energy, also operates the Industrial Control System – Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which helps assess industrial control systems for vulnerabilities and maintains a flyaway team to assist critical infrastructure owners in the private sector with responding to suspected attacks on their networks.

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Alec Baldwin, wife expecting a baby this summer

NEW YORK (AP) — Alec Baldwin and his wife are expecting their first child together.

Publicist Matthew Hiltzik confirmed Tuesday that Hilaria Baldwin is due late this summer.

Alec Baldwin already is the father of a 17-year-old daughter, Ireland, from his previous marriage to actress Kim Basinger (BAY’-sing-ur). Hilaria Baldwin is a special correspondent for the TV show “Extra.” The couple wed last June after a three-month engagement.

Alec Baldwin recently won a SAG Award for best actor in a TV series for the NBC comedy “30 Rock,” which concluded its seven-year run two weeks ago.

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Well: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

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Media Decoder Blog: Comcast Buys Rest of NBC in Early Sale

8:53 p.m. | Updated Comcast gave NBCUniversal a $16.7 billion vote of confidence on Tuesday, agreeing to pay that sum to acquire General Electric’s remaining 49 percent stake in the entertainment company. The deal accelerated a sales process that was expected to take several more years.

Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, said the acquisition, which will be completed by the end of March, underscored a commitment to NBCUniversal and its highly profitable cable channels, expanding theme parks and the resurgent NBC broadcast network.

“We always thought it was a strong possibility that we’d some day own 100 percent,” Mr. Roberts said in a telephone interview.

He added that the rapidly changing television business and the growing necessity of owning content as well as the delivery systems sped up the decision. “It’s been a very smooth couple of years, and the content continues to get more valuable with new revenue streams,” he said.

Comcast also said that NBCUniversal would buy the NBC studios and offices at 30 Rockefeller Center, as well as the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Those transactions will cost about $1.4 billion.

Mr. Roberts called the 30 Rockefeller Center offices “iconic” and said it would have been “expensive to replicate” studios elsewhere for the “Today” show, “Saturday Night Live,” “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” and other programs produced there. “We’re proud to be associated with it,” Mr. Roberts said of the building.

With the office space comes naming rights for the building, according to a General Electric spokeswoman. So it is possible that one of New York’s most famous landmarks, with its giant red G.E. sign, could soon be displaying a Comcast sign instead.

When asked about a possible logo swap on the building, owned by Tishman Speyer, Mr. Roberts told CNBC, that is “not something we’re focused on talking about today.” Nevertheless, the sale was visible in a prominent way Tuesday night: the G.E. letters, which have adorned the top of 30 Rock for several decades, were not illuminated for an hour after sunset. But the lights flickered back on later in the evening.

Comcast, with a conservative, low-profile culture, had clashed with the G.E. approach, according to employees and executives in television. Comcast moved NBCUniversal’s executive offices from the 52nd floor to the 51st floor — less opulent space that features smaller executive offices and a cozy communal coffee room instead of General Electric’s lavish executive dining room.

Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in early 2011 by acquiring 51 percent of the media company from General Electric. The structure of the deal gave Comcast the option of buying out G.E. in a three-and-a-half to seven-year time frame. In part because of the clash in corporate cultures, television executives said, both sides were eager to accelerate the sale.

Price was also a factor. Mr. Roberts said he believed the stake would have cost more had Comcast waited. Also, he pointed to the company’s strong fourth-quarter earnings to be released late Tuesday afternoon, which put it in a strong position to complete the sale.

Comcast reported a near record-breaking year with $20 billion in operating cash flow in the fiscal year 2012. In the three months that ended Dec. 31, Comcast’s cash flow increased 7.3 percent to $5.3 billion. Revenue at NBCUniversal grew 4.8 percent to $6 billion.

“We’ve had two years to make the transition and to make the investments that we believe will continue to take off,” Mr. Roberts said.

The transactions with General Electric will be largely financed with $11.4 billion of cash on hand, $4 billion of subsidiary senior unsecured notes to be issued to G.E. and a $2 billion in borrowings.

Even with the investment in NBCUniversal, Comcast said it would increase its dividend by 20 percent to 78 cents a share and buy back $2 billion in stock in 2013.

When it acquired the 51 percent stake two years ago, Comcast committed to paying about $6.5 billion in cash and contributed all of its cable channels, including E! and some regional sports networks, to the newly established NBCUniversal joint venture. Those channels were valued at $7.25 billion.

The transaction made Comcast, the single biggest cable provider in the United States, one of the biggest owners of cable channels, too. NBCUniversal operates the NBC broadcast network, 10 local NBC stations, USA, Bravo, Syfy, E!, MSNBC, CNBC, the NBC Sports Network, Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, and a long list of other media brands.

Mr. Roberts and Michael J. Angelakis, vice chairman and chief financial officer for the Comcast Corporation, led the negotiations that began last year with Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, and Keith Sharon, the company’s chief financial officer. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Centerview Partners and CBRE provided financial and strategic advice.

The sale ends a long relationship between General Electric and NBC that goes back before the founding days of television. In 1926, the Radio Corporation of America created the NBC network. General Electric owned R.C.A. until 1930. It regained control of R.C.A., including NBC, in 1986, in a deal worth $6.4 billion at the time.

In a slide show on the company’s “GE Reports” Web site titled “It’s a Wrap: GE, NBC Part Ways, Together They’ve Changed History,” G.E. said the deal with Comcast “caps a historic, centurylong journey for the two companies that gave birth to modern home entertainment.”

Mr. Immelt has said that NBCUniversal did not mesh with G.E.’s core industrial businesses. That became even more apparent when the company became a minority stakeholder with no control over how the business was run, according to a person briefed on G.E.’s thinking who could not discuss private conversations publicly.

“By adding significant new capital to our balanced capital allocation plan, we can accelerate our share buyback plans while investing in growth in our core businesses,” Mr. Immelt said in a statement. He added: “For nearly 30 years, NBC — and later NBCUniversal — has been a great business for G.E. and our investors.”

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Dorner may have fled to Mexico, court records say

A fugitive former Los Angeles police officer wanted in connection with a deadly shooting rampage may have fled to Mexico as a massive manhunt was gearing up to capture him, according to federal court records obtained Monday by The Times.

The records state how authorities developed "probable cause" that Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33, was possibly trying to escape to Mexico and provide new details on his actions since he allegedly killed three people, including a police officer, in a shooting rampage that police say began Feb. 3 in Irvine.

Dorner may have been helped by an associate identified only as "JY" in the criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles late last week after the former police officer was suspected of fleeing from authorities.

As the manhunt continued Monday, the Riverside County district attorney's office filed murder and attempted murder charges against Dorner, who is accused of killing one police officer and wounding two others in that county before his burning pickup was found near Big Bear.

Dorner allegedly attempted to steal a boat in San Diego and, after subduing the captain, said he was taking the vessel to Mexico, according to an affidavit filed with the federal complaint. Dorner is accused of telling the captain that he could recover his boat in Mexico.

"The attempt failed when the bow line of the boat became caught in the boat's propeller, and the suspect fled," according to the affidavit by Inspector U.S. Marshal Craig McClusky.

After authorities interviewed the boat captain early Thursday, they found Dorner's wallet and identification cards "at the San Ysidro Point of Entry" near the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the court records. That same day, a guard at the Point Loma Naval Base told authorities he had spotted a man matching Dorner's description trying to sneak onto the base, according to the filing.

Federal authorities told The Times on Monday night that the court papers, filed late last week, reflected their thinking at the time, but they stressed that Dorner could be anywhere.

The possibility that Dorner received help from the associate was raised in McClusky's affidavit. The Marine Corps and San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department investigators were conducting a surveillance operation of an Arrowbear Lake property owned by a family member of the associate Thursday and discovered a burning vehicle nearby that matched the gray Nissan pickup used by Dorner. 

The charges filed Monday in Riverside County on Monday accuse Dorner of opening fire, unprovoked, on Riverside police Officer Michael Crain, 34, a married father of two who served two tours in Kuwait as a rifleman in the U.S. Marines.

Dorner faces three additional counts of attempted murder of a peace officer for allegedly shooting and critically injuring Crain's partner and firing upon two Los Angeles police officers stationed in Corona to protect an LAPD official named in an online manifesto authorities attribute to Dorner. One of the LAPD officers was grazed on the head by a bullet.

Riverside County Dist. Atty. Paul Zellerbach said the murder charge includes two special circumstance allegations that make Dorner eligible for the death penalty — killing a peace officer and discharging a firearm from a vehicle.

Filing criminal charges will ensure that if Dorner is caught, either out of the state or out of the country, the outstanding arrest warrant would clear the way for a rapid extradition.

"I want to cover all my bases. I want to make sure when he is located and arrested, he can be extradited back to California as soon as possible," Zellerbach said after holding a noon news briefing.

The district attorney believes that Dorner, if he is still alive, is not done with his quest for revenge and thirst for the public's attention.

"Even though he may have gone underground now, given the nature of his conduct and his words and his actions, he's going to reappear," Zellerbach said. "I don't think he's done.... He's trying to send a message, and it would be my belief that his message is not completed yet.''

Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz has called Dorner's attack on his two officers early Thursday a "cowardly ambush." Dorner allegedly opened fire as the officers sat in a patrol car, stopped at a red light.

The surviving officer, 27, who was being trained by Crain, continues to recover from surgery. He has been with the department less than a year.

"He's in a lot of pain. He's going to be facing a lot of surgeries in the coming weeks and months," Diaz said. "We don't know if he'll be able to return to active duty. We certainly hope so."

Dorner's alleged rampage began with the Feb. 3 shooting deaths of Monica Quan, a Cal State Fullerton assistant basketball coach, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, a USC public safety officer.

Quan was the daughter of a retired LAPD captain whom Dorner apparently accused online of not representing him fairly at a hearing that led to his firing. In what police said was his posting on a Facebook page, Dorner allegedly threatened the retired captain and others he blamed for his firing.

More than 50 LAPD families remained under police guard Monday.

A scaled-down search for Dorner continued Monday in woods west of Big Bear Lake, where his burning truck was found on a forest road Thursday. About 30 officers are searching vacation homes and cabins in "an even more remote area," and the search will resume Tuesday with the same number of law enforcement personnel, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.

On Sunday, Los Angeles officials announced a $1-million reward for information leading to the capture and arrest of Dorner. The reward — raised from local governments, police departments, civic organizations, businesses and individuals — is thought to be the largest ever offered locally.

kate.mather@latimes.com

phil.willon@latimes.com

Times staff writer Robert J. Lopez contributed to this report.

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Bloomberg Lauds Companies for Cutting Salt Content

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in the midst of a long-running campaign to change the eating habits of New Yorkers and consumers across the country, declared a victory against salt on Monday, as 21 companies, from Kraft and Goya to FreshDirect, said they had met the first stage in reductions in salt content in foods.

After focusing on reducing trans fats and smoking, Mr. Bloomberg turned his attention to salt in 2010, announcing that about 30 companies had signed up to reduce salt in foods by 25 percent within five years, as a way of lowering consumers’ blood pressure and saving lives lost to heart attack and stroke.

“These companies have a huge presence on our shelves and in our diets,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall as he announced the results, surrounded by a half-dozen executives of food companies.

The first stage focused on the low-hanging fruit — salsa, dips, bacon, ketchup, barbecue sauce, cold cuts, processed cheese, salad dressing, canned beans and pizza — foods whose salt content is so high that reducing it up to a point probably would not be noticed by many consumers.

Mr. Bloomberg called them “some of America’s most beloved and iconic foods,” suggesting that the cuts might have a disproportionately salutary effect. But Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said he did not know how much salt the results so far had removed from the average person’s diet.

One side effect of the salt reduction drive is that food companies are looking for salt substitutes to make food taste better.

The main way to do that is to add potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride, said Russ Moroz, vice president for research at Kraft Foods. But because potassium tends to have a bitter, mineral taste, other ingredients have to be added. He said these were proprietary secrets, and he declined to name them.

Potassium is good, Dr. Farley said, because it lowers blood pressure and most people do not get enough of it. It is removed from fruits and vegetable during processing, he said. Mr. Bloomberg said he thought fears of additives were overdone.

But a salt industry scientist said Monday that too much potassium could be bad for the kidneys, and that the “cocktail of chemical constituents” added to balance the bitterness and enhance the salty taste could present unknown risks, as those ingredients were undisclosed.

“They do it with one eye on the lab and the other eye on the label,” said Morton Satin, vice president for science and research at the Salt Institute, a trade association. “They make sure it’s below the level that the F.D.A. requires for it to be on the label.”

Mr. Satin said that the link between high blood pressure and salt was just “a theory,” and that reducing salt too much could have harmful effects, like iodine deficiency in children, a cause of mental retardation, and diabetes.

Some companies said reducing salt proved to be a popular marketing tool. Goya reported that it had reduced salt in its regular canned beans by 5 or 6 percent, without any drop in sales. “We tasted them, and you really wouldn’t notice the difference,” Joseph Perez, senior vice president of Goya Foods, said Monday.

Mr. Bloomberg said it might surprise many people to know that bread and rolls were the “biggest contributor” to salt in the diet. Eating a muffin, he said, could be worse than eating a small bag of Lays potato chips.

Bread makers are hard to spot on the list of companies that have pledged to reduce salt, perhaps, Mr. Satin said, because it is more difficult to make bread without salt. However, some companies, like Au Bon Pain, have reduced salt in some baked goods.

On an irreverent note, Mr. Bloomberg said that he loved Subway sandwiches and would eat his favorite, the Italian B.M.T. — it includes salami, pepperoni and ham — regardless of the salt content, but that he was glad that it now contained 27 percent less.

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Bits: Where the Singles Are: A Dating Guide by ZIP Code

At Trulia, a residential real estate Web site, the analysts are constantly crunching data — home and apartment listings, prices, school ratings, crime rates and other numbers.

With Valentine’s Day coming this week, Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist and head of analytics, decided to sift through household, gender, city and neighborhood data in America. If you’re looking for someone single of the opposite sex, where are your chances best and worst, statistically speaking?

He posted his findings on the Trulia Trends site on Monday.

According to Trulia’s analysis, men living alone most outnumber women living alone in Las Vegas; Honolulu; Palm Bay, Fla.; Gary, Ind.; and San Jose, Calif.

Women most outnumber men in Bethesda, Md.; Washington; Boston; New York; and Raleigh, N.C.

At the broader metropolitan level, Mr. Kolko said in an interview, labor markets are typically the determining factor. Men outnumber women in regions that have a higher proportion of technology, manufacturing and construction jobs. Women outnumber men most in places with more professional services jobs and in bigger cities.

The data sets for many thousands of ZIP codes, Mr. Kolko explained, all came from the 2010 census and were downloaded onto a laptop, then sliced, diced and manipulated using Stata data analysis and statistical software.

The data was massaged a bit. Only people living alone were counted; an earlier survey showed singles prefer to date someone who lives alone. And this time, Mr. Kolko factored out the gay and lesbian population, using the assumption that the share of gay or lesbian singles in neighborhoods would be roughly equal to same-sex couples living in those neighborhoods. (Last year, Mr. Kolko did an analysis of the ZIP code neighborhoods with the highest shares of gays and lesbians.)

Local industries may play a large role in gender populations for cities as a whole. But neighborhoods, Mr. Kolko said, are a more genuine reflection of where people want to live. So for each of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, he calculated the ZIP codes with the highest ratio of men to women, and women to men.

Men, Mr. Kolko observed, tend to settle near downtown or in recently redeveloped neighborhoods like the Waterfront in Boston or Long Island City in New York. Women are more likely to live in residential areas, including the Marina in San Francisco and Queen Anne in Seattle, and neighborhoods that are seen as safe and are more affluent, like the Upper East Side of New York and Upper Connecticut Avenue in Washington.

More women in high-income neighborhoods? Is this another sign of the much-discussed trend of women doing better than men? Mr. Kolko did not push the data that far. “It probably says more about where men and women choose to live in a given city rather than which gender is more successful,” he said.

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Venice program gives the homeless a place to keep belongings

Bone-chilling fog swirled along Venice Beach one recent afternoon when Robert and Nani Valencia and Ana Maria Reyes stopped by the long, metal storage container beside the sand.

After they showed IDs and claim checks, a volunteer wheeled out two blue recycling bins in which the three recent arrivals from Texas had stashed their suitcases. They pulled out toiletries, sweaters and blankets and stuffed them into reusable grocery bags.

"It makes us feel a lot better to store our things here," said Nani Valencia, 37. "When you have all your [suitcases] with you, people treat you like you have rabies."

With bags in hand, she, her husband and his 64-year-old mother joined dozens of others waiting for a bus to take them to a shelter. The three would rest, eat dinner and have a shower that night at the West Los Angeles National Guard Armory on Federal Avenue; most of their meager possessions would remain locked up at the beach.

In the wake of court rulings that bar cities from randomly seizing and destroying homeless people's property, communities such as Venice are seeking long-term storage options to keep their streets and alleys clean.

"We're not going to let [homeless people] keep items on the beach anymore," said Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who represents Venice. "We're going to bag and tag [them]. We want to make it inconvenient but within the law."

Contributing to the problem was a rule governing use of the city's Westside winter shelter.

Homeless individuals who choose to sleep at the shelter are allowed to take with them only the items they can carry on their laps. And some were reluctant to leave their possessions for fear they would be stolen or seized. That meant many of the shelter's 160 beds went unused.

Rosendahl and a local social services agency — Venice Community Housing Corp. — launched a pilot program late last month called Check-in Storage. The initiative allows individuals to store personal belongings in the container for a week at a time and retrieve them between 3 and 5 p.m. daily. (The program is slated to end March 1, when the shelter closes.)

To publicize the service, volunteers and social service agencies distributed bright orange fliers: "If your stuff will fit into a big trash can," they read, "bring it to our storage container." The flier noted that the program would not accept medicine, identification, weapons or "anything illegal."

The storage option, said Steve Clare, executive director of Venice Community Housing, is modeled on successful programs in downtown L.A.'s skid row and cities including San Francisco, San Diego and Costa Mesa.

In September, a federal appeals court ruled in a lawsuit filed against the city of Los Angeles that seizing and destroying property left temporarily unattended on public sidewalks was unconstitutional. Personal possessions may be removed only if the items pose an immediate threat to public safety or health or constitute criminal evidence, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found.

Even then, the city must notify owners where they can pick up their property.

On the afternoon the Valencias and Reyes retrieved some items, about half of the 25 bins were in use. Also there for safekeeping was a Schwinn bicycle. Its owner, Love Sha Un of Nigeria, came by to check on his $215 purchase and thank the volunteers. Without the storage option, he said, "it might have gone missing."

Not everyone is pleased with the program.

Mark Ryavec, a Venice resident who lobbied against overnight parking by RV dwellers, said the city should have sought a permit from the California Coastal Commission before plopping a storage container at the beach. Marc Saltzberg, vice president of the Venice Neighborhood Council, said the program was implemented without a public process that would have enabled residents and other interested parties to weigh in.

Rosendahl said he hoped to notify street denizens of a new location by the end of February and have a new program up and running by March. He said he was working with the Los Angeles city attorney's office to ensure that any seizures of items would be done legally.

martha.groves@latimes.com

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150 Boom Boxes and the Best Dance Party You've Never Been To

Finding the right place to stage a Decentralized Dance Party is more art than science. Which is why Gary Lachance is standing against a railing near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, looking perplexed. It’s nearly midnight and he’s just beginning what will be an all-night search of the city, looking for locations to flood with revelers for tomorrow night’s mobile bash. He might be tired—he just arrived in California today after a brutal 50-hour RV drive from Houston—but that doesn’t change the fact that he has less than 24 hours to find locations and plan a route. The wharf is just one of the possible stops as the party snakes through the city.

The sounds of foghorns and sea lions ripple through the darkness. He stares at the empty wharf, visualizing an ocean of revelers swarming it tomorrow night. His mind brushes past possible logistical snags until it sticks on one in particular. “Too many sea lions,” he says.

As coinventor of what is officially known as Tom and Gary’s Decentralized Dance Party, Lachance has to balance the meticulousness of an urban planner with the conviviality of a good host. Since 2009 he’s held more than 50 semi-spontaneous outdoor throw-downs in major cities, insisting on a leave-no-trace ethos, noise complaints and perturbed marine mammals included. It looks like Pier 39 won’t make the cut after all. Lachance gets back on his bike, as do his ridemates—a group of superpowered partyers who help scout locations in each city and keep the events running smoothly. They’re called the Elite Banana Task Force. And, yes, they wear banana suits. “It’s impossible to have a bad time in a banana suit,” Lachance says.

If you flipped on the local news last year, you may have caught snippets of DDP’s latest exploits. Its goal: to free us from our humdrum nightlife. In Austin, a partygoer dressed in a lab coat leans into the YNN news camera: “I could be spending $30 going to a bar and doing the same-old, same-old,” he says in a hoarse voice. “This is something different. This is something new. And it’s free!” In the video, you can see people carrying daisy-chained boom boxes, their tuner knobs duct-taped into place to ensure that all stay locked to a vacant radio frequency. That’s what lets them groove to the crowd-fueled PA system: volumes cranked, the DDP’s pirate radio broadcasts anything from booty bass to Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy.”

“Nightclubs are too forced,” says Kyle Del Bonis, who attended a New Year’s Eve DDP in LA. “Most DJs sit around like lumps, unengaged with their audience.” Decentralized Dance Parties attempt to subvert that formula utterly, burning the velvet rope and bringing the inside out. What makes them sustainable for the organizers, though, is how mobile they are. Once DDP arrives in a city—heralded by Twitter and Facebook and with travel costs underwritten via Kickstarter or Indiegogo crowdfunding—the nerve center of the operation can be carried by a single person. A high-powered FM transmitter hooks into an antenna, which in turn is rigged to a backpack. Inside is a vintage disco mixer (held in place with a rubber band), mic receivers, a 12-volt battery, and a separate Ramsey FM transmitter—and a blue slipper “for good luck.”

And all of it is controlled (symbolically) by a Nintendo Power Glove—an old-school videogame peripheral that is as revered by nostalgic ’80s babies as it was ignored in its day. Over the years, the Power Glove has become a symbol of DDP’s abandon. The glove was at a DDP when people skied down subway escalators and when DDP-goers swarmed ferryboats with pogo sticks and trampolines. It was there in February 2011, coaxing 20,000 Canadians out of taverns onto Vancouver’s streets. And it’ll be here tomorrow night when DDP’s San Francisco party—the theme is “strictly business”—hits the streets.

Right now, though, Ryan Stomberg bikes alongside Lachance on Market Street’s sidewalk. A guy named Tom Kuzma was Lachance’s original partner and cofounder. But after they had a falling-out, a different person took over the role of “Tom”—the 27-year-old Stomberg is the third. (Lachance looks to be in his thirties but will give his age only as “18 till I die.”) Stomberg’s orange flannel fanny pack—the JammyPack—plays music continuously amid the gentle hum of the overnight street sweepers. He points northeast. “I don’t think we’re gonna have any problem parading down that block,” he says. Farther east is the contorted Lego-block sculpture and fountain in Justin Herman Plaza, the party’s intended endpoint. Lachance computes all of this, and the Bananas ride on. Thanks in no small part to this type of extensive preparty legwork, DDP has had no difficulty with law enforcement—indeed, officers often end up escorting the crowd along city streets. “Cops expect to find a Jäger-guzzling frat boy leading this,” says Lachance’s friend Kerry Leonard, another Banana. Instead they find a deep-thinking Canadian whose vision of street-level abandon is part of what he calls a “Libertarian mindset” about how the world should be.

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Media Decoder Blog: NPR Campaign Seeks the Quirky Listener

Are you a sky diving algebra teacher? A Sudoku-playing barista? NPR has a new ad campaign aimed at you.

The pilot campaign, in four cities, is intended to bring new listeners to local public radio stations, and in turn NPR’s national programs, by matching a show to even the quirkiest interests.

The three-month campaign, financed with a $750,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and developed by Baltimore agency Planit, includes billboards, as well as television spots, social media outreach and rail, print and digital ads aimed at adults 25 to 54, with at least some college education. Ads point to a Web site, interestingradio.com, where visitors can take a poll, discover shows and click through to a live stream from a local station.

The ads will run in the Dallas/Fort Worth, San Diego, Indianapolis and Orlando, Fla., markets, chosen because they offer geographic diversity, as well as stations that are strong and growing, said Emma Carrasco, who joined NPR two months ago as chief marketing officer, a new position.

The campaign comes as listenership for “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” — NPR’s two top programs and the radio news programs that reach the most people nationwide each week — declined from spring 2011 to spring 2012, the last period for which national ratings are available.

Year-to-year, the cumulative weekday audience for “Morning Edition” declined 5 percent to 12.3 million listeners a week, from 13 million, NPR officials said, citing Arbitron ratings figures, while “All Things Considered” was off 4 percent, to 11.8 million weekly listeners, compared with 12.3 million in spring 2011.

Preliminary fall 2012 estimates showed year-to-year audience increases for those two shows, NPR said, but the figures were for major markets only.

Local public radio stations have undertaken similar efforts in recent years. WQXR’s modest 2011 “Obeythoven” campaign used TV spots to get audiences thinking about New York City classical music radio in a new way. Chicago’s WBEZ this month began a cheeky campaign called “2032 Membership Drive” encouraging audiences to procreate and raise a new generation of listeners.

If NPR’s new ads are deemed successful, NPR will seek additional funds to expand them to more markets, Ms. Carrasco said.

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