Secure Communities is optional, Harris says

SAN FRANCISCO — California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris told local law enforcement agencies Tuesday that they were not obligated to comply with a federal program whose stated goal is to deport illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes.

It was Harris' first public assessment of Secure Communities. Under the program launched in 2008, all arrestees' fingerprints are sent to immigration officials, who may ask police and sheriff's departments to hold suspects for up to 48 hours after their scheduled release so they can be transferred to federal custody.

Although the intent may have been to improve public safety, Harris said that a review of data from March through June showed that 28% of those targeted for deportation in California as a result were not criminals. Those numbers, she noted, had changed little since U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a year earlier pledged to reform the program to focus on the most serious offenders.

"Secure Communities has not held up to what it aspired to be," Harris said. The law enforcement bulletin she issued Tuesday stated that "immigration detainer requests are not mandatory, and each agency may make its own decision" about whether to honor them.

Harris said her office conducted its analysis after dozens of agencies across the state inquired about whether they were compelled to honor the ICE requests.

Some elected officials and local law enforcement have complained that — in addition to pulling in those found guilty of minor offenses or never convicted — Secure Communities had made illegal immigrants fearful of cooperating with police, even when they were the victims.

Harris, a former prosecutor, echoed that view Tuesday.

"I want that rape victim to be absolutely secure that if she waves down an officer in a car that she will be protected … and not fear that she's waving down an immigration officer," Harris said

While immigrant-rights advocates applauded her announcement, they said it did not go far enough. Allowing police chiefs and sheriffs to craft their own policies without state guidance, they said, could lead to disparate enforcement and enable racial profiling.

This "should eliminate the confusion among some sheriffs about the legal force of detainers," said Reshma Shamasunder, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. "The only logical next step is a strong, statewide standard that limits these burdensome requests."

One attempt by legislators to do just that unraveled in October with Gov. Jerry Brown's veto of the Trust Act. The proposed law by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) would have forbidden police departments to honor federal detainer requests except in cases in which defendants had been convicted of a serious or violent crime.

Ammiano on Monday reintroduced a modified version of the measure. Harris said she had opposed the bill's last iteration for going "too far" and had not seen the current version, but looked forward "to working with the governor and any of our lawmakers to take a look at what we can do to improve consistency."

"It's very difficult to create formulas for law enforcement," she said, noting that local agencies should have the freedom to determine which federal hold requests to honor. For example, she said, an inmate with five previous arrests for forcible rape but no convictions might still be deemed too great a risk for release.

Some law enforcement agencies, including the San Francisco Sheriff's Department and the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department, have declined to comply with federal requests to hold non-serious offenders. Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck followed suit last month, announcing that suspected illegal immigrants arrested in low-level crimes would no longer be turned over for possible deportation.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who opposed the Trust Act, is among those who have argued that compliance with Secure Communities was mandatory.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said that Harris' opinion was welcome guidance that may offer sheriffs more flexibility in how they deal with immigration detainees.

"The attorney general's opinion is going to be taken very seriously," Whitmore said. "The sheriff applauds it and is grateful for it." Baca, he added, has been working with the attorney general and the governor on the issue.

In a written response to Harris' announcement, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency's top priorities were the deportation of criminals, recent border-crossers and repeat violators of immigration law.

"The federal government alone sets these priorities and places detainers on individuals arrested on criminal charges to ensure that dangerous criminal aliens and other priority individuals are not released from prisons and jails into our communities," the statement said.

lee.romney@latimes.com

cindy.chang@latimes.com

Romney reported from San Francisco and Chang from Los Angeles.

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Habla el hombre que definió qué significa ser un hacker

“Soy un hacker.” La frase la pronuncia, sin titubeos, Pekka Himanen, un finlandés de 39 años que publicó, en 2001, La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información , un libro fundacional en su análisis de lo que significa la tecnología moderna en nuestra sociedad, y la influencia que tendrán los hackers en la sociedad futura.

La entrevista está por comenzar. El punto de encuentro es un hotel céntrico de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, pero en lugar de recibirnos en el salón exclusivo reservado con este fin, el filósofo Himanen (recibido en la universidad de Helsinki a los 20 años) prefiere reunirse en el café del hotel, rodeado de gente y atento a su entorno.

Este hombre, que hoy es profesor en la Universidad de Arte y Diseño de Helsinki, y profesor visitante de la Universidad de Oxford y el Instituto IN3 de Barcelona, y miembro del Instituto Helsinki para la Tecnología de la Información (HIIT) es autor, también, de El Estado del bienestar y la sociedad de la información: el modelo finlandés , que realizó junto con el sociólogo español Manuel Castells.

Himanen llegó a nuestro país invitado por la Universidad Nacional de San Martín, la Universidad Diego Portales y por la Fundación OSDE, pero además de esta convocatoria también lo trajo una de sus grandes pasiones: la investigación. “Estamos estudiando, junto con Manuel Castells, qué tipo de modelo de desarrollo nuevo se necesita después de la crisis mundial. Me refiero a un modelo de desarrollo económico combinado con desarrollo humano. Creo que es fundamental combinar una economía sustentable con el bienestar sustentable”, sostiene al comenzar la entrevista. Según cuenta el filósofo, Argentina es parte de un gran estudio que está llevando a cabo en distintos países de América latina, Asia, África, Estados Unidos y Europa.

¿Usted se considera un hacker?

Sí, claro que sí. Para mí un hacker es alguien creativamente apasionado por lo que hace y quiere hacerlo con otros. No necesariamente tiene que tener que ver con las computadoras, se puede ser hacker del conocimiento o de cualquier otro campo. Es importante decir que utilizo el término hacker en el sentido original del término, que no quiere decir delincuente informático.

¿Y usted es hacker en qué área o con qué especialización?

Yo diría en la filosofía, investigación y quizás en la vida.

¿Cómo es eso?

La etica del hacker es un libro que también habla sobre la filosofía de vida, es decir, uno tiene que preguntarse a sí mismo: ¿cuál es mi pasión creativa? ¿Qué es lo que le da significado a mi vida? Esas son grandes preguntas que todos deberíamos considerar.

Popularmente el término hacker tiene una mala connotación pero según usted explica, es un error. En su libro menciona otro término: cracker ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre ambos?

Hacker quiere decir que la persona es creativamente apasionada por lo que hace, y lo quiere realizar con lo que yo denomino “interacción enriquecedora”, es decir con otras personas. Cracker, en cambio, es el delincuente informático, la persona que ingresa en los sistemas informáticos y esparce virus, entre otros delitos.

¿Por qué, entonces, los hackers son considerados delincuentes?

Todo comenzó en los medios de comunicación, en los inicios del software. Por aquel entonces los medios tomaron la palabra hacker y comenzaron a utilizarla como sinónimo de delincuente informático para hacerlo más atractivo y dar impacto en sus noticias, pero la palabra hacker no tiene nada que ver con la delincuencia informática.

Según su libro los hackers informáticos ponen a disposición gratuita de los demás su creación para que la utilicen, pongan a prueba y la desarrollen. ¿Cómo un hacker se transforma en Bill Gates? En otras palabras, ¿cómo se transforma un hacker en un hombre de negocios?

La ética hacker es una ética de trabajo creativa en la era informática que reemplaza lo que Max Weber describió como “ética de trabajo industrial” pero después depende de cuán abierto es uno en el desarrollo de otras cosas. No necesita ser cerrado para ser un éxito, por ejemplo Linus Torvalds está a favor de la apertura total y también ha tenido mucho éxito. Internet corre en Linux, tres de cada cuatro smartphones en el mundo corren en Linux, porque Android está basado en Linux. Pero más allá de eso no hay contradicciones, porque uno puede tener pasión creativa como empresario. Lo importante es dar suficiente nivel de apertura.

¿Cómo ayudan a la sociedad los hackers y las redes sociales en situaciones de conflicto, injusticia social o cuando no hay libertad de expresión?

En situaciones como la guerra de Kosovo o en la Primavera Árabe -levantamientos populares de países árabes realizados entre 2010 y 2012- la difusión de lo que estaba pasando fue a través de las redes sociales. Y es muy importante tener en cuenta que las redes sociales tienen un impacto en la vida real. Si pensamos en la Primavera Árabe, por ejemplo, algunos de los peores dictadores que nosotros pensamos que nunca dejarían el poder, colapsaron. Y las redes sociales colaboraron mucho en la caída de estos dictadores porque la Primavera Árabe estuvo organizada a través de Internet. También en Europa se produjeron hechos similares. Las redes sociales tuvieron gran protagonismo en el movimiento de “Los Indignados”, que produjeron cambios políticos en España y en Grecia.

¿Le parece que lo que escribió hace más de una década sigue vigente?

Sí. El libro es más actual ahora. Si uno toma, por ejemplo, el capítulo de open source o de código abierto, su utilización ha crecido exponencialmente si tenemos en cuenta que Internet corre en software en código abierto y se diseminan en varios equipos como teléfono, grabadores digitales y televisores. Probablemente uno no se de cuenta que está utilizando código abierto, pero todos lo estamos utilizando. En cuanto al trabajo empresarial, la nueva ética de pasión creativa enriquecedora está impulsando al Silicon Valley.

¿Cómo ve a la sociedad futura?

Creo que la gran pregunta es lo que hoy estamos investigando en el proyecto que estoy realizando, donde nos damos cuenta que el viejo modelo de desarrollo ha llegado a su fin y ahora tenemos que replantear las prácticas grandes en la economía, la sustentabilidad ecológica. Creo que vamos a necesitar del potencial completo de la cultura de la creatividad y hemos de desarrollar esa nueva forma de bienestar sustentable, especialmente la sustentabilidad ecológica. Debemos tener en cuenta que el planeta no tiene problema en cuanto al cambio climático, puede continuar sin nosotros, pero nosotros no podemos continuar sin el planeta.

Por último, ¿qué trata de decirnos con su libro?

Para mí la clave es que todos debemos preguntarnos: ¿cuál es mi pasión creativa, cuál es mi propósito significativo en esta vida?

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Capitalism and socialism wed as words of the year

NEW YORK (AP) — Thanks to the election, socialism and capitalism are forever wed as Merriam-Webster's most looked-up words of 2012.

Traffic for the unlikely pair on the company's website about doubled this year from the year before as the health care debate heated up and discussion intensified over "American capitalism" versus "European socialism," said the editor at large, Peter Sokolowski.

The choice revealed Wednesday was "kind of a no-brainer," he said. The side-by-side interest among political candidates and around kitchen tables prompted the dictionary folk to settle on two words of the year rather than one for the first time since the accolade began in 2003.

"They're words that sort of encapsulate the zeitgeist. They're words that are in the national conversation," said Sokolowski from company headquarters in Springfield, Mass. "The thing about an election year is it generates a huge amount of very specific interest."

Democracy, globalization, marriage and bigot — all touched by politics — made the Top 10, in no particular order. The latter two were driven in part by the fight for same-sex marriage acceptance.

Last year's word of the year was austerity. Before that, it was pragmatic. Other words in the leading dictionary maker's Top 10 for 2012 were also politically motivated.

Harken back to Oct. 11, when Vice President Joe Biden tangled with Mitt Romney running mate Paul Ryan in a televised debate focused on foreign policy — terror attacks, defense spending and war, to be specific.

"With all due respect, that's a bunch of MALARKEY," declared Biden during a particularly tough row with Ryan. The mention sent look-ups of malarkey soaring on Merriam-webster.com, Sokolowski said, adding: "Clearly a one-week wonder, but what a week!"

Actually, it was more like what a day. Look-ups of malarkey represented the largest spike of a single word on the website by percentage, at 3,000 percent, in a single 24-hour period this year. The company won't release the number of page views per word but said the site gets about 1.2 billion overall each year.

Malarkey, with the alternative spelling of "y'' at the end, is of unknown origin, but Merriam-Webster surmises it's more Irish-American than Irish, tracing it to newspaper references as far back as 1929.

Beyond "nonsense," malarkey can mean "insincere or pretentious talk or writing designed to impress one and usually to distract attention from ulterior motives or actual conditions," noted Sokolowski.

"That's exactly what Joe Biden was saying. Very precise," especially in conversation with another Irish-American, Sokolowski said. "He chose a word that resonated with the public, I think in part because it really resonated with him. It made perfect sense for this man to use this word in this moment."

An interesting election-related phenom, to be sure, but malarkey is no dead Big Bird or "binders full of women" — two Romneyisms from the defeated candidate's televised matchups with Obama that evoked another of Merriam-Webster's Top 10 — meme.

While malarkey's history is shaded, meme's roots are easily traced to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a Brit who coined the term for a unit of cultural inheritance, not unlike genes and DNA. The retired professor at the University of Oxford made up the word in 1976 for "The Selfish Gene," a book he published light years before the Internet and social media's capacity to take memes viral.

Sokolowski said traffic for meme more than doubled this year over 2011, with dramatic spikes pegged to political-related subjects that included Romney's Big Bird and binders remarks, social media shares of images pegged to Hillary Clinton texting and Obama's "horses and bayonets" debate rebuke of Romney in an exchange over the size of the Navy.

Dawkins, reached at home in Oxford, was tickled by the dictionary shoutout.

"I'm very pleased that it's one of the 10 words that got picked out," he said. "I'm delighted. I hope it may bring more people to understand something about evolution."

The book in which he used meme for the first time is mostly about the gene as the primary unit of natural selection, or the Darwinian idea that only the strongest survive. In the last chapter, he said, he wanted to describe some sort of cultural replicator.

And he wanted a word that sounded like "gene," so he took a twist on the Greek mimeme, which is the origin of "mime" and "mimesis," a scientific term meaning imitation.

"It's a very clever coinage," lauded the lexicographer Sokolowski.

Other words in Merriam-Webster's Top 10 for 2012:

— Touche, thanks in part to "Survivor" contestant Kat Edorsson misusing the word to mean "tough luck" rather than point well made, before she was voted off the island in May. Look-ups at Merriam-webster.com were up sevenfold this year over 2011.

— Schadenfreude, made up of the German words for "damage" and "joy," meaning taking pleasure in the misery of others, was used broadly in the media after the election. Look-ups increased 75 percent. The word in English dates to 1895.

— Professionalism, up 12 percent this year over last. Sokolowski suspects the bump might have been due to the bad economy and more job seekers, or a knowing "glimpse into what qualities people value."

___

Online: http://www.merriam-webster.com/

___

Follow Leanne Italie on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie

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Extended Use of Breast Cancer Drug Suggested

The widely prescribed drug tamoxifen already plays a major role in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. But a new study suggests that women should be taking the drug for twice as long as is now customary, a finding that could upend the standard that has been in place for about 15 years.

In the study, patients who continued taking tamoxifen for 10 years were less likely to have the cancer come back or to die from the disease than women who took the drug for only five years, the current standard of care.

“Certainly, the advice to stop in five years should not stand,” said Prof. Richard Peto, a medical statistician at Oxford University and senior author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Wednesday and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Breast cancer specialists not involved in the study said the results could have the biggest impact on premenopausal women, who account for a fifth to a quarter of new breast cancer cases. Postmenopausal women tend to take different drugs, but some experts said the results suggest that those drugs as well might be taken for a longer duration.

“We’ve been waiting for this result,” said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “I think it is especially practice-changing in premenopausal women because the results do favor a 10-year regimen.”

Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that even women who completed their five years of tamoxifen months or years ago might consider starting on the drug again.

Tamoxifen blocks the effect of the hormone estrogen, which fuels tumor growth in estrogen receptor-positive cancers that account for about 65 percent of cases in premenopausal women. Some small studies in the 1990s suggested that there was no benefit to using tamoxifen longer than five years, so that has been the standard.

About 227,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and an estimated 30,000 of them would be in premenopausal women with ER-positive cancer and prime candidates for tamoxifen. But postmenopausal women also take tamoxifen if they cannot tolerate the alternative drugs, known as aromatase inhibitors.

The new study, known as Atlas, included nearly 7,000 women with ER-positive disease who had completed five years of tamoxifen. They came from about three dozen countries. Half were chosen at random to take the drug another five years, while the others were told to stop.

In the group assigned to take tamoxifen for 10 years, 21.4 percent had a recurrence of breast cancer in the ensuing nine years, meaning the period 5 to 14 years after their diagnoses. The recurrence rate for those who took only five years of tamoxifen was 25.1 percent.

About 12.2 percent of those in the 10-year treatment group died from breast cancer, compared with 15 percent for those in the control group.

There was virtually no difference in death and recurrence between the two groups during the five years of extra tamoxifen. The difference came in later years, suggesting that tamoxifen has a carry-over effect that lasts long after women stop taking it.

Whether these differences are big enough to cause women to take the drug for twice as long remains to be seen.

“The treatment effect is real, but it’s modest,” said Dr. Paul E. Goss, director of breast cancer research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tamoxifen has side effects, including endometrial cancer, blood clots and hot flashes, which cause many women to stop taking the drug. In the Atlas trial, it appears that roughly 40 percent of the patients assigned to take tamoxifen for the additional five years stopped prematurely.

Some 3.1 percent of those taking the extra five years of tamoxifen got endometrial cancer versus 1.6 percent in the control group. However, only 0.6 percent of those in the longer treatment group died from endometrial cancer or pulmonary blood clots.

“Over all, the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Trevor J. Powles of the Cancer Center London, said in a commentary published by The Lancet.

Dr. Judy E. Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber, said many women have a love-hate relationship with hormone therapies.

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Netflix buys exclusive rights to Disney movies

Netflix Inc. has acquired exclusive U.S. rights to movies from Walt Disney Studios in a deal that catapults the Internet video-on-demand service into direct competition with pay TV giants such as HBO and Showtime.

The three-year agreement takes effect in 2016 and is a blow to the pay channel Starz, which currently has the rights to broadcast Disney movies, including its Pixar animated films and Marvel superhero pictures, about eight months after they are released in theaters.

Starz's sole remaining movie provider is now Sony Pictures. That partnership ends in 2016.

VIDEO: Disney buys Lucasfilm - Mickey meet Darth Maul

Disney has also agreed to give Netflix nonexclusive streaming rights to more of its older titles — including "Dumbo," "Pocahontas" and "Alice in Wonderland" — starting immediately.

Netflix's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, called the deal "a bold leap forward for Internet television."

"We are incredibly pleased and proud this iconic family brand is teaming with Netflix to make it happen," he said.

Netflix stock soared on the news, rising $10.65, or 14%, to $85.65.

Shares in Starz's parent company, Liberty Media Corp., fell $5.49, or 5%, to $105.56.

Currently, Netflix has nonexclusive rights to movies from Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer via a deal with pay channel Epix, as well as an array of library titles from other studios. Its only exclusive movie rights come from independent studios such as Relativity Media and DreamWorks Animation. It also has a wide variety of television reruns.

Sarandos and Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings have long said the company wanted to get exclusive pay TV rights to films from one of Hollywood's six major studios to boost its online entertainment service.

PHOTOS: Disney without Pixar

However, Hastings has also at times downplayed the importance of new movies. Netflix previously had streaming rights to Disney and Sony movies via a deal with Starz. In January, investors expressed their concerns that the pending disappearance of those movies would hurt the service. Hastings said in a letter to investors that Disney films accounted for only 2% of domestic streaming and the loss would not be felt.

Since then, though, the Disney movie slate has become more attractive. At that time, Netflix did not have access to movies from Disney's Marvel superhero unit or the "Star Wars" titles from its pending acquisition of Lucasfilm Ltd.

The end of the Starz agreement accelerated a trend that has seen Netflix evolve into a television company, with reruns of shows such as "Mad Men" accounting for about two-thirds of the content streamed by users.

With several original programs launching next year, including the Kevin Spacey political drama "House of Cards," and a direct connection to a growing number of Internet-enabled televisions, Netflix is on the verge of standing on par with many TV networks.

Netflix charges $8 a month for its streaming service, while premium cable networks such as HBO cost $13 to $18 a month, and that's on top of a monthly bill for other channels that typically exceeds $50. It remains to be seen whether the addition of Disney products and more original programming could lead Netflix to increase its price.

PHOTOS: Hollywood back lot moments

The Netflix spending spree could continue, with Sarandos telling Bloomberg News on Monday that his company would bid for rights to Sony movies when its Starz deal expires.

Netflix might have a tougher time wresting away the rights to Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox or Universal Pictures releases from their current deals with HBO, which like Warner is part of Time Warner Inc. Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM are almost certain to stick with Epix, of which the trio are co-owners.

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Mexico port picks up slack from strike at L.A., Long Beach complex

ENSENADA — This sluggish port city is coming alive.

Standing atop a pier with a hulking cargo ship behind him, dock manager Rogelio Valenzuela Gonzalez motioned Monday toward four cranes as they plucked metal containers from the vessel.

Operators swiveled the cranes toward a line of flatbed trucks. Supervisors in reflective vests and hard hats watched from below, using two-way radios to dispatch trucks as they filled up.

Not even during the peak fall shipping season is this port so busy.

But a strike that has effectively shut down rival ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach has diverted ships south of the border. It has become a windfall for the port located about 50 miles from the border, its workers and the region's struggling economy.

"It's good for the workers' families," said Gonzalez, adding that the extra work will pay for additional Christmas presents. "We all know it's temporary, but it definitely helps out at the end of the year."

The Southern California strike ended its first week Monday, with negotiations continuing but no signs of an immediate resolution.

The strike by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit, which handles paperwork for incoming and outgoing ships, has crippled the nation's two busiest cargo ports.

The dispute centers on the charge by the union that employers — large shipping lines and terminal operators — have steadily outsourced jobs through attrition. The union says the employers have transferred work from higher-paid union members to lower-paid employees in other states and countries.

The employers dispute that claim, saying they've offered the workers full job security and generous wage and pension increases. Though the union has only 800 members, the 10,000-member dockworkers union is honoring the picket lines.

Economists estimate the effect of the work stoppage at $1 billion a day in forfeited worker pay, missing revenue for truckers and other businesses and the value of the cargo that hasn't been able to reach its destination. The two ports are directly responsible for an estimated 595,000 jobs in Southern California.

But while thousands of Southern California workers sit idle in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the walkout is giving Ensenada a hoped-for chance to showcase itself.

Collectively, Los Angeles and Long Beach handle 100 times more cargo each year than Ensenada.

Long seen as a backup port, Ensenada is eager to win more business from shippers inconvenienced by the second major work dispute at the L.A. and Long Beach ports in a decade.

"It's a great opportunity to show that the Port of Ensenada presents an alternative method for bringing in products from Asia and the Pacific Rim," said Kenn Morris, president of Crossborder Group, a San Diego consulting firm. "The Ensenada port can really show itself off as being something a lot of people hadn't expected."

Uncertain how long the strike may last, retailers have scrambled to find alternate ways to get their products onto shelves. Given their typically thin profit margins, retailers are concerned about the added shipping costs.

"These blockages are dead-weight losses to the system," said Carl Voigt, an international business professor at USC. "They raise costs for everybody. Everybody's goods and services are more expensive."

Ensenada is used to seeing the occasional cruise ship and maybe half a dozen cargo ships a week. Two ships have made unplanned dockings and unloaded cargo here in the last week. Three others have docked in Manzanillo, a Mexican port city 1,200 miles to the south of Ensenada.

Altogether, 17 ships bound for the L.A. or Long Beach port have been diverted elsewhere, including nine to Oakland, one to Mazatlan, Mexico, and one to Panama.

In Ensenada, dockworkers made quick work unloading 100 cargo containers from the Maersk Merlion. The giant cargo vessel was diverted over the weekend and docked early Monday morning.

Since late last week, Ensenada has been preparing for a hoped-for influx of diverted ships. The port has 200 dockworkers when operating at capacity, and an additional hundred clerical and customs workers.

Equipment is on standby. Workers are at the ready. And trucking lines have been placed on alert that cargo may need to be hauled.

"It's hard to guess how many ships we'll receive, but we are preparing for more," said Juan Carlos Ochoa, the port's trade development manager.

Ensenada is still handicapped by longer-standing obstacles, primarily its lack of railway access to move goods.

And for now, the cargo unloaded from the Maersk Merlion will sit at the port as the shipping line weighs whether to move it by truck to its final destination or have another ship pick up the containers at a later date.

The strike "is an extraordinary situation," Gonzalez said. "But it'll show our clients that this port is a good option. It's efficient, reliable and secure."

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

Lopez reported from Ensenada, and Hamilton from Los Angeles.

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Student group to go to court over Facebook privacy policy

VIENNA (Reuters) – An Austrian student group plans to go to court in a bid to make Facebook Inc, the world’s biggest social network, do more to protect the privacy of its hundreds of millions of members.

Campaign group europe-v-facebook, which has been lobbying for better data protection by Facebook for over a year, said on Tuesday it planned to go to court to appeal against decisions by the data protection regulator in Ireland, where Facebook has its international headquarters.

The move is one of a number of campaigns against the giants of the internet, which are under pressure from investors to generate more revenue from their huge user bases but which also face criticism for storing and sharing personal information.

Internet search engine Google, for example, has been told by the European Union to make changes to its new privacy policy, which pools data collected on individual users across its services including YouTube, gmail and social network Google+, and from which users cannot opt out.

Europe-v-facebook has won some concessions from Facebook, notably pushing it to switch off its facial recognition feature in Europe.

But the group said on Tuesday the changes did not go far enough and it was disappointed with the response of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), which had carried out an audit after the campaign group filed numerous complaints.

Facebook, due to hold a conference call later on Tuesday to answer customer concerns about its privacy policy, said its data protection policies exceeded European requirements.

“The latest Data Protection report demonstrates not only how Facebook adheres to European data protection law but also how we go beyond it, in achieving best practice,” a Facebook spokesman said in an emailed comment.

“Nonetheless we have some vocal critics who will never be happy whatever we do and whatever the DPC concludes.”

LOSING PATIENCE

Europe-v-facebook founder Max Schrems, who has filed 22 complaints with the Irish regulator, said more than 40,000 Facebook users who had requested a copy of the data Facebook was holding on them had not received anything several months after making a request.

“The Irish obviously have no great political interest in going up against these companies because they’re so dependent on the jobs they create,” Schrems told Reuters.

Gary Davies, Ireland’s deputy data protection commissioner, denied Facebook’s investment in Ireland had influenced regulation of the company.

“We have handled this in a highly professional and focused way and we have brought about huge changes in the way Facebook handles personal data,” he told Reuters.

Schrems also questioned why Facebook had only switched off facial recognition for users in the European Union, even though Ireland is the headquarters for all of Facebook’s users outside the United States and Canada.

Facebook is under pressure to reverse a trend of slowing revenue growth by selling more valuable advertising, which requires better profiling of its users.

Investors are losing patience with the social network, whose shares have dropped 40 percent in value since the company’s record-breaking $ 104 billion initial public offering in May.

Last month, Facebook proposed to combine its user data with that of its recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram, loosen restrictions on emails between its members and share data with other businesses and affiliates that it owns.

Facebook is also facing a class-action lawsuit in the United States, where it is charged with violating privacy rights by publicizing users’ “likes” without giving them a way to opt out.

A U.S. judge late on Monday gave his preliminary approval to a second attempt to settle the case by paying users up to $ 10 each out of a settlement fund of $ 20 million.

Europe-v-facebook said it believed its Irish battle had the potential to become a test case for data protection law and had a good chance of landing up in the European Court of Justice.

Schrems said the case could cost the group around 100,000 euros ($ 130,000), which it hoped to raise via crowd-funding – money provided by a collection of individuals – on the Internet.

(Additional reporting by Conor Humphries in Dublin; Editing by Mark Potter)

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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US reacts with joy to royal baby news

WESTPORT, Connecticut (AP) — An heir to the British throne is on the way — and Americans may be as enthralled as the Brits.

This former colony has been riveted by the royal news that the former Kate Middleton is pregnant — perhaps as much as Britain, where such regal developments are taken in stride.

"We don't really have a princess here," said Kathy Gitlin, an elementary school teacher in Connecticut who was thrilled to hear that Kate is with child. "I'm an Anglophile, I love England, and I think it's wonderful that two people in love wanted to get married and start a family. It's great."

There are several reasons for the American public's pleasure in Kate's news, manifested not only by the good wishes sent by President Obama but also by the breathless news coverage and the general good will toward the actually not-so-young young couple, who have both now reached 30.

First, and least complicated, is the fact that Kate seems a likeable and sensible young woman who married one of the world's most eligible bachelors without letting the power, prestige and A-plus jewelry go to her head.

Then there are the long ties between the two countries, so alike and so maddeningly different.

When Americans proudly declared their independence, they swore off sovereign kings and queens forever, yet several centuries later they find themselves drawn to the royals' pomp and pageantry, embracing the more colorful aspects of a system whose substance they had eagerly overthrown.

Finally, hardest to quantify, is the fading, almost ghostly, image of Princess Diana, who died so young. Americans want Diana's sons to flourish, and Kate seems to have made William very, very happy.

"I remember when Diana died, it was such a shock," said Gitlin, 52. "No one can ever take her place, but it's nice to have another person, someone this generation can look up to, and someone who William can love."

There's no doubt that many Britons are thrilled as well, and the country's embattled tabloid press certainly views a royal pregnancy (at Christmastime no less!) as a surefire circulation booster and a welcome diversion from a series of press scandals.

But some on Monday expressed a rather blasé attitude to the prospect of a new generation of Windsors seemingly bound for the throne. In the chill of early evening in north London's Camden market, young couples strolling among the stalls received the news of Kate's pregnancy with a shrug.

"I'm happy for them, but I don't really care," said Enya Lonergan, 19, who was visiting from Canterbury, south of London, with her friend Will Nichols, 20.

They could muster little enthusiasm for the news, noting that they had little in common with the royals, particularly in these bleak economic times.

"I don't think about them," Nichols said, adding that — naturally — he'd send them a gift. Or not.

Others said they were not interested and questioned the need for a royal family in the 21st century.

"I don't think it's a good thing," said Stephen Jowitt, 63, as he ambled down Camden High Street. "It reinforces a class system."

The news did provide a boost to one of Britain's national pastimes — finding new ways to wager money. Bookmakers are now taking bets on the gender of Kate's child, what the infant will be named and the color of his/her hair.

Joe Crilly, a spokesman for the William Hill bookmaker, said a high level of betting interest is expected, with favored names including Diana, Philip, Elizabeth and Sarah.

In America, ABC News even offered a poll, asking people to rate likely baby names.

Baby thoughts have been found in some less-than-fully-credible supermarket tabloids for months. They've been trumpeting "stories" about Kate's pregnancies for months, without any apparent basis in fact.

But that didn't keep the public from gobbling them up — the British royals, with their haughty glamour and slightly tragic air, have long captivated Americans.

"I'm always looking for any news of William and Kate," said 19-year-old Stacy McFacken, a clerk at a grocery store in Mentor, Ohio, in August when a number of tabloids offered screaming headlines about Kate's purported pregnancy.

"There's nothing like this in the States," she said. "It's just like all the fairy tales we read about as kids. We all want to be Kate."

Word of Kate's condition, including her hospitalization for complications, was top news on websites throughout the world. Her condition requires specialist treatment but if diagnosed early, it is unlikely to have long-term consequences for the mother or baby, and does not raise the risk of a miscarriage.

But while the parents might be anxious, world leaders stepped in to wish her well. The news was featured prominently on front pages in Argentina, India, France, South Africa and other countries. It sent Twitter into a tizzy, with the hashtag "royalbaby" trending worldwide and used more than 28,000 times in the first few hours following the official announcement. U.S. media websites such as People, Vanity Fair and the Daily Beast provided extensive coverage, with the Huffington Post launching a live blog to track developments.

"The whole wide world is excited," said Shao Hua Huang, a surgical nurse who practices in New York and Connecticut. "We're really happy for her. It's because of England and all the tradition. We Americans followed in their footsteps."

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Associated Press writers Paisley Dodds, Danica Kirka and Cassandra Vinograd in London contributed to this report.

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Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

For deaf students, this game of scientific Password has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like “organism” and “photosynthesis” — to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell terms — have no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

“Often times, it would involve a lot of finger-spelling and a lot of improvisation,” said Matthew Schwerin, a physicist with the Food and Drug Administration who is deaf, of his years in school. “For the majority of scientific terms,” Mr. Schwerin and his interpreter for the day would “try to find a correct sign for the term, and if nothing was pre-existing, we would come up with a sign that was agreeable with both parties.”

Now thanks to the Internet — particularly the boom in online video — resources for deaf students seeking science-related signs are easier to find and share. Crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, enabling people who are deaf to coalesce around signs for commonly used terms.

This year, one of those resources, the Scottish Sensory Centre’s British Sign Language Glossary Project, added 116 new signs for physics and engineering terms, including signs for “light-year,”  (hold one hand up and spread the fingers downward for “light,” then bring both hands together in front of your chest and slowly move them apart for “year”), “mass” and “X-ray” (form an X with your index fingers, then, with the index finger on the right hand, point outward). 

The signs were developed by a team of researchers at the center, a division of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that develops learning tools for students with visual and auditory impairments. The researchers spent more than a year soliciting ideas from deaf science workers, circulating lists of potential signs and ultimately gathering for “an intense weekend” of final voting, said Audrey Cameron, science adviser for the project. (Dr. Cameron is also deaf, and like all non-hearing people interviewed for this article, answered questions via e-mail.)

Whether the Scottish Sensory Centre’s signs will take hold among its audience remains to be seen. “Some will be adopted, and some will probably never be accepted,” Dr. Cameron said. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Ideally, the standardization of signs will make it easier for deaf students to keep pace with their hearing classmates during lectures. “I can only choose to look at one thing at a time,” said Mr. Schwerin of the F.D.A., recalling his science education, “and it often meant choosing between the interpreter, the blackboard/screen/material, or taking notes. It was like, pick one, and lose out on the others.”

The problem doesn’t end at graduation. In fact, it only intensifies as new discoveries add unfamiliar terms to the scientific lexicon. “I’ve had numerous meetings where I couldn’t participate properly because the interpreters were not able to understand the jargon and they did not know any scientific signs,” Dr. Cameron said.

One general complaint about efforts to standardize signs for technical terms is the idea that, much like spoken language, sign language should be allowed to develop organically rather than be dictated from above.

“Signs that are developed naturally — i.e., that are tested and refined in everyday conversation — are more likely to be accepted quickly by the community,” said Derek Braun, director of the molecular genetics laboratory at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which he said was the first biological laboratory designed and administered by deaf scientists.

Since at least the 1970s, deaf scientists have tried to address the lack of uniformity by gathering common signs for scientific terms in printed manuals and on videotapes. The problem has always been getting deaf students and their interpreters to adopt them.

Often, at science conferences, “local interpreters that we never met before would often use different signs for the same terms, leading to confusion,” said Caroline Solomon, a biology professor at Gallaudet University who is deaf.

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Mexico port picks up slack from strike at L.A., Long Beach complex

ENSENADA — This sluggish port city is coming alive.

Standing atop a pier with a hulking cargo ship behind him, dock manager Rogelio Valenzuela Gonzalez motioned Monday toward four cranes as they plucked metal containers from the vessel.

Operators swiveled the cranes toward a line of flatbed trucks. Supervisors in reflective vests and hard hats watched from below, using two-way radios to dispatch trucks as they filled up.

Not even during the peak fall shipping season is this port so busy.

But a strike that has effectively shut down rival ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach has diverted ships south of the border. It has become a windfall for the port located about 50 miles from the border, its workers and the region's struggling economy.

"It's good for the workers' families," said Gonzalez, adding that the extra work will pay for additional Christmas presents. "We all know it's temporary, but it definitely helps out at the end of the year."

The Southern California strike ended its first week Monday, with negotiations continuing but no signs of an immediate resolution.

The strike by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit, which handles paperwork for incoming and outgoing ships, has crippled the nation's two busiest cargo ports.

The dispute centers on the charge by the union that employers — large shipping lines and terminal operators — have steadily outsourced jobs through attrition. The union says the employers have transferred work from higher-paid union members to lower-paid employees in other states and countries.

The employers dispute that claim, saying they've offered the workers full job security and generous wage and pension increases. Though the union has only 800 members, the 10,000-member dockworkers union is honoring the picket lines.

Economists estimate the effect of the work stoppage at $1 billion a day in forfeited worker pay, missing revenue for truckers and other businesses and the value of the cargo that hasn't been able to reach its destination. The two ports are directly responsible for an estimated 595,000 jobs in Southern California.

But while thousands of Southern California workers sit idle in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the walkout is giving Ensenada a hoped-for chance to showcase itself.

Collectively, Los Angeles and Long Beach handle 100 times more cargo each year than Ensenada.

Long seen as a backup port, Ensenada is eager to win more business from shippers inconvenienced by the second major work dispute at the L.A. and Long Beach ports in a decade.

"It's a great opportunity to show that the Port of Ensenada presents an alternative method for bringing in products from Asia and the Pacific Rim," said Kenn Morris, president of Crossborder Group, a San Diego consulting firm. "The Ensenada port can really show itself off as being something a lot of people hadn't expected."

Uncertain how long the strike may last, retailers have scrambled to find alternate ways to get their products onto shelves. Given their typically thin profit margins, retailers are concerned about the added shipping costs.

"These blockages are dead-weight losses to the system," said Carl Voigt, an international business professor at USC. "They raise costs for everybody. Everybody's goods and services are more expensive."

Ensenada is used to seeing the occasional cruise ship and maybe half a dozen cargo ships a week. Two ships have made unplanned dockings and unloaded cargo here in the last week. Three others have docked in Manzanillo, a Mexican port city 1,200 miles to the south of Ensenada.

Altogether, 17 ships bound for the L.A. or Long Beach port have been diverted elsewhere, including nine to Oakland, one to Mazatlan, Mexico, and one to Panama.

In Ensenada, dockworkers made quick work unloading 100 cargo containers from the Maersk Merlion. The giant cargo vessel was diverted over the weekend and docked early Monday morning.

Since late last week, Ensenada has been preparing for a hoped-for influx of diverted ships. The port has 200 dockworkers when operating at capacity, and an additional hundred clerical and customs workers.

Equipment is on standby. Workers are at the ready. And trucking lines have been placed on alert that cargo may need to be hauled.

"It's hard to guess how many ships we'll receive, but we are preparing for more," said Juan Carlos Ochoa, the port's trade development manager.

Ensenada is still handicapped by longer-standing obstacles, primarily its lack of railway access to move goods.

And for now, the cargo unloaded from the Maersk Merlion will sit at the port as the shipping line weighs whether to move it by truck to its final destination or have another ship pick up the containers at a later date.

The strike "is an extraordinary situation," Gonzalez said. "But it'll show our clients that this port is a good option. It's efficient, reliable and secure."

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

Lopez reported from Ensenada, and Hamilton from Los Angeles.

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