DealBook: Liberty Global Reaches Deal for Virgin Media

8:07 p.m. | Updated

LONDON – Liberty Global, the international cable company owned by the American billionaire John C. Malone, agreed on Tuesday to buy the British cable company Virgin Media for about $16 billion.

The deal gives Liberty Global access to Europe’s largest cable market, and pits Mr. Malone against Rupert Murdoch, his longtime rival and biggest shareholder in Britain’s largest pay-TV provider British Sky Broadcasting.

Under the terms of the deal, Liberty Global said it had offered a package of cash and stock that it valued at $47.87 for each share in Virgin Media, a 24 percent premium over Virgin Media’s closing price on Monday.

The takeover ranks as one of the 10 largest cable deals of all time, according to figures from the data provider Thomson Reuters.

“Virgin Media will add significant scale and a first-class management team in Europe’s largest and most dynamic media and communications market,” Mike Fries, Liberty Global’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.

“After the deal, roughly 80 percent of Liberty Global’s revenue will come from just five attractive and strong countries — the U.K., Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands.”

News of the talks, confirmed earlier in the day in a statement by Virgin Media, came amid heightened merger and acquisition activity in the European television business. As European broadcasters suffer from stagnant or falling advertising revenue, American media conglomerates, looking to expand their international presence, are playing a significant role.

Mr. Malone and Mr. Murdoch have gone head-to-head before. From 2004 to 2006, they fought for control of DirecTV, the American satellite television provider.

The clash ended with Mr. Malone yielding a stake that he had built up in News Corporation. But the Liberty Group, which has operations in 13 countries, completed its purchase of a controlling stake in DirecTV from News Corporation in a cash-and-equity deal worth roughly $11 billion.

In recent years, Liberty Global has been expanding its presence in Europe and has operations from Ireland to Romania, though it failed last month in its bid to acquire the Telenet Group of Belgium for $2.7 billion. Liberty Global owns a 58 percent stake in Telenet.

Since early 2010, Liberty has bought two German rivals to build its operations in Europe’s largest economy.

In response, News Corporation has been expanding its global cable business, including the $2.1 billion acquisition of Consolidated Media, the Australian pay-television company, late last year.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, Virgin Media, whose commercials feature the Olympic sprinting star Usain Bolt, has announced job cuts and invested in its broadband structure to reduce costs and increase its market share in Britain’s competitive cable market.

The company’s market capitalization stands at more than $10 billion. Including debt, its enterprise value is around $19.4 billion, according Thomson Reuters. Shares of Virgin Media, which are primarily traded on the Nasdaq, were up nearly 18 percent to $45.61 on the news of the Liberty talks.

Virgin’s shares have jumped almost 90 percent in the last 12 months, as more consumers sign up for so-called bundled services, including Internet and cellphone contracts. Virgin Media will announce its earnings on Wednesday.

Analysts warned that it would be difficult for Liberty Global to make additional savings between its current European operations and those of Virgin Media because Liberty does not have a business in Britain.

They said Liberty waited to make its move until Virgin made several upgrades to its network and restructured its debt. While Virgin has been gaining market share, it has 4.9 million customers, or roughly half the number of subscribers as its larger rival, BSkyB, according to filings by the companies.

The British billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin brand is used for a variety of products and services, including airlines and banks, owns less than 3 percent of Virgin Media.

News of the talks also came amid heightened merger and acquisition activity in the European television business. In December, Discovery Communications agreed to pay $1.7 billion for the Scandinavian operations of a large German commercial television company.

According to news reports this week, the majority owners of the German company are considering a sale. American media companies, including Time Warner, have been mentioned as potential buyers.

Analysts say the flurry of activity is driven by a desire among pay-television companies and broadcasters to diversify revenue sources that are coming under increased pressure. So broadcasters are setting up pay-television channels, and cable and satellite companies are looking to new content delivery platforms, like the Internet.

While commercial broadcasters remain powerful in Germany, Britain is the most lucrative pay-television market in Europe, according to Screen Digest, a research firm.

The deal for Virgin Media is expected to close during the second quarter of this year.

LionTree Advisors, Credit Suisse and the law firms Shearman & Sterling and Ropes & Gray advised Liberty Global, while Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and the law firms Fried Frank and Milbank advised Virgin Media.

Mark Scott reported from London, and Eric Pfanner from Paris.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the first name of the leader of News Corporation. He is Rupert Murdoch, not Richard.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/06/2013, on page B6 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Liberty Global Reaches Deal for Virgin Media That May Inflame Old Rivalry.

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Friends, investigators seek answers in killing of O.C. couple

They met in college, two highly regarded basketball players who seemed to have the same winning touch on the court and off.

After blazing through high school and college with her outside shot, Monica Quan became the assistant women's basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton. Keith Lawrence, whose highlight shots are still there on his college website, became a campus officer at USC.

Now police in Irvine are scrambling for an explanation — and friends are looking for a way to express their shock — after Quan and Lawrence were found shot to death in their parked car on the top floor of a parking structure in an upscale, high-security condominium complex near UC Irvine.

The two had just announced their engagement and had recently moved into a condominium complex near Concordia University, where they played basketball and had gone on to earn their degrees.

Late Sunday, after a passerby noticed two people in the parked car, police said they found Lawrence slumped in the driver's side of his white Kia. Quan was next to him, also dead. The couple were shot multiple times, and authorities said they have tentatively ruled out the possibility of it being a murder-suicide or motivated by robbery. Nothing in the car, police said, seemed to be disturbed.

The couple's friends and family said they were shaken by the violent deaths of two people who seemed to have so much to offer.

Quan was a 2002 graduate of Walnut High School in the San Gabriel Valley, where she set school records for the most three-pointers in a season and a game. She played at Long Beach State and at Concordia, where she graduated in 2007. She went on to earn a master's degree before becoming the assistant coach at Fullerton.

Quan's father was the first Chinese American captain in the LAPD, and went on to become police chief at Cal Poly Pomona.

Quan was known for pulling students aside to offer encouragement, said Megan Richardson, a former player. Marcia Foster, the head basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton, described her assistant as a special person — "bright, passionate and empowering," she said.

Quan shared a love of basketball with her fiancee, Lawrence, whom she met at Concordia.

He too had been a standout basketball player, starting at Moorpark High, where he played point guard and shooting guard, said Tim Bednar, who coached Lawrence.

Bednar said that Lawrence, who came from a family of athletes, was talented, yet quiet and humble. After Lawrence graduated in 2003, he continued to participate in summer youth camps

When he returned for the camps, Bednar said, he was known as the "best basketball player that ever came through" the school.

"He was awesome with the kids," Bednar said. "They all wanted to be around Keith Lawrence."

Bednar heard from Lawrence when he needed a recommendation to become a police officer after graduating from the Ventura County Sheriff's Academy. In August, he was hired by USC's public safety department.

John Thomas, the executive director and chief of the department, said that Lawrence was an "honorable, compassionate and professional" member of the community.

"We are a better department and the USC campus community is a safer place as a result of his service," Thomas said in a statement.

On Monday night, Quan's friends gathered outside Walnut High School. One clutched a heart-shaped balloon, another carried a collage of her basketball playing days. Still another held a basketball.

Lawrence's friends and family put up a Facebook page. "RIP Keith Lawrence, you will be missed," it said simply. Within hours, 840 had left comments or indicated they "liked" it. Concordia put up a link to Lawrence's game-winning shot that carried the school into a post-season tournament.

Michelle Thibeault, 27, said in a Facebook message that she had known Quan for more than a decade. The two were on the same athletic teams and went to junior high and high school together. "Monica was loved by everyone," she said.

During a somber gathering at the Cal State Fullerton gymnasium Monday, Foster read a brief statement from Quan's brother Ryan.

"We just shared a moment of incredible joy on her recent engagement," he wrote, and then added: "A bright light was just put out."

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

kate.mather@latimes.com

lauren.williams@latimes.com

Times staff writer John Canalis contributed to this report.

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Late-Night Infomercial Reviews: The Horror of the WaxVac

When you’re an insomniac freelance writer who works from home, you end up seeing a lot of infomercials, and eventually, those things will wear you down. No matter how skeptical you might start off, you will eventually get to a point where you’ll start to wonder if there actually is somebody out there with a better way to fry eggs, chop tomatoes and make milkshakes in the comfort of your own home. I mean, television’s never lied to us before, has it? That’s why I wanted to actually check out a few of these things to see if they really were the life-changing innovations they purported to be. Today’s experiment: The WaxVac.

The Pitch

The WaxVac has what is unquestionably one of the best commercials on television, to the point where I actually get excited whenever it comes on. I just love how ludicrously confrontational it is right out of the gate, wasting no time at all in setting itself up as the only sensible alternative to the barbarism of using a Q-Tip to clean your ears. That they chose to do this by having a grown man jam a cotton swab into his ear and then shriek like he is being murdered with actual knives, a scene so great that they show it twice and then have a frowny doctor examine the damage? That, my friends, is just a truly beautiful bonus feature.

They do have a point, though. Every box of cotton swabs does, in fact, carry a warning about how you’re not actually supposed to use them to clean out the inside of your ear, which is weird when you consider that this is quite literally the only thing I have ever used them for. Apparently, that’s pretty dangerous, as evidenced by their 100% scientific animation of a Q-Tip shoving its way through your eardrum. I’m one of the very few lucky ones, it seems.

Really, though, I actually went into this one hoping it would work. My own ears are crazy sensitive to moisture, and if I so much as get a stray raindrop in there, they end up aching for days. It’s the reason I almost never go swimming. Well, that and the fact that I have exactly the body you’d expect from someone who watches infomercials all night. Either way, having something that could get all that moisture out of there before it could cause any problems would be nice, and keeping my earbuds from getting any more gross than they already are wouldn’t hurt either.

Obviously, I needed a tiny vacuum cleaner designed to suck earwax directly out of my head. What
could possibly go wrong with that?

The Process

According to the ad, you can get two WaxVacs — seen above with a copy of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand for scale — for ten bucks (plus shipping) by ordering it through their website. I’ll be honest with you, though: There was no way in hell I was going to plug my credit card number into the front page of a website selling earwax removal machines, no matter how charming their auto-playing videos may be. If you want my financial information without even the courtesy of a second webpage, then I’d better at least be seeing the hottest singles in my area naked.

Fortunately, since this was ostensibly a work-related earwax maintenance purchase, I had the option of getting Wired editor Laura Hudson to buy it for me. This, incidentally, is the only part of this entire process that I would recommend to anyone: Getting your boss to buy you things.

As it turns out, my reluctance was entirely founded. The purchase went off the rails almost immediately, as the $10 turned out to actually be $23.98 ($6.99 shipping and handling for each WaxVac), which you probably won’t notice until after you’ve been charged since it’s down at the bottom of the page — below the form you use to order the product, in a markedly smaller font size.

To make matters even more fun, Laura got a call on her cell phone the next day from the fine folks at WaxVac offering her “$100 in gas vouchers” (which she described as “almost certainly bullshit”) and then informing her that they would be shipping the WaxVacs to the wrong address (despite having my place of residence right there on the receipt) and that they couldn’t change it to the right one.

Three weeks later, they arrived.

The Product

If I were to ask you to describe the most pleasant sound you could possibly hear after you got out of the shower first thing in the morning, I’m pretty sure that we’d all agree that it would be the high-pitched whine of a vacuum cleaner motor, right? Well what if I told you that you could have this sound directly against your ear for up to five minutes? I know! It’s like a dream come true!

To be fair, the WaxVac isn’t all that loud unless you hold it right up to your ear, but since that is in fact the entire reason for it to exist, I’m pretty comfortable calling that one a design flaw. Considering that it’s not that much worse than just using a hair dryer, I’d be willing to overlook that if the machine itself actually did what it was supposed to do, but that’s not the case either.

It’s entirely possible that I have some kind of hardcore militant earwax that’s dug in there and won’t come out without the weapon of ear canal mass destruction that is the Q-Tip, but the WaxVac was not up to the task. I think the only “moisture and debris” that it was able to pull out were the bits that were dislodged from poking the nozzle around in there, which is what I would’ve been doing with a Q-Tip anyway. Except that once I was done, I would’ve just thrown the Q-tip away and gone on with my life instead of field-stripping the WaxVac and sterilizing it with rubbing alcohol.

Seriously, this thing is the pits. I gave it another shot before I sat down to start writing, and I swear to you, it actually made my ears feel worse. I’m just going to go ahead and just keep on risking having to visit a frowny doctor and explain that I sometimes jam sticks into my ear canal and then stare at them as though they have betrayed me. Hell, if this is the alternative, then I might actually prefer to go with one of those mind control ear slugs that Khan has Star Trek II.The WaxVac definitely lives up to the ad, but unfortunately, it’s only the part about how much it sucks.

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Kiefer Sutherland honored by Harvard theater group

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Golden Globe-winning actor Kiefer Sutherland has been named Man of the Year by Harvard University‘s Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

Sutherland will be roasted and receive his ceremonial pudding pot at a ceremony scheduled for Friday.

The 46-year-old Sutherland has been in dozens of films but is perhaps best known for his role as Jack Bauer in the television series “24,” for which he won Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy awards. He is currently starring in the television show “Touch.”

Last year’s Man of the Year was Jason Segel.

The 2013 Woman of the Year, Marion Cotillard (koh-tee-YAR’), was honored last week.

Hasty Pudding Theatricals is the nation’s oldest undergraduate drama troupe.

The awards are presented annually to performers who have made a lasting and impressive contribution to entertainment.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Gluten-Free for the Gluten Sensitive

Eat no wheat.

That is the core, draconian commandment of a gluten-free diet, a prohibition that excises wide swaths of American cuisine — cupcakes, pizza, bread and macaroni and cheese, to name a few things.

For the approximately one-in-a-hundred Americans who have a serious condition called celiac disease, that is an indisputably wise medical directive.

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One woman’s story of going gluten-free.

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Now medical experts largely agree that there is a condition related to gluten other than celiac. In 2011 a panel of celiac experts convened in Oslo and settled on a medical term for this malady: non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

What they still do not know: how many people have gluten sensitivity, what its long-term effects are, or even how to reliably identify it. Indeed, they do not really know what the illness is.

The definition is less a diagnosis than a description — someone who does not have celiac, but whose health improves on a gluten-free diet and worsens again if gluten is eaten. It could even be more than one illness.

“We have absolutely no clue at this point,” said Dr. Stefano Guandalini, medical director of the University of Chicago’s Celiac Disease Center.

Kristen Golden Testa could be one of the gluten-sensitive. Although she does not have celiac, she adopted a gluten-free diet last year. She says she has lost weight and her allergies have gone away. “It’s just so marked,” said Ms. Golden Testa, who is health program director in California for the Children’s Partnership, a national nonprofit advocacy group.

She did not consult a doctor before making the change, and she also does not know whether avoiding gluten has helped at all. “This is my speculation,” she said. She also gave up sugar at the same time and made an effort to eat more vegetables and nuts.

Many advocates of gluten-free diets warn that non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a wide, unseen epidemic undermining the health of millions of people. They believe that avoiding gluten — a composite of starch and proteins found in certain grassy grains like wheat, barley and rye — gives them added energy and alleviates chronic ills. Oats, while gluten-free, are also avoided, because they are often contaminated with gluten-containing grains.

Others see the popularity of gluten-free foods as just the latest fad, destined to fade like the Atkins diet and avoidance of carbohydrates a decade ago.

Indeed, Americans are buying billions of dollars of food labeled gluten-free each year. And celebrities like Miley Cyrus, the actress and singer, have urged fans to give up gluten. “The change in your skin, physical and mental health is amazing!” she posted on Twitter in April.

For celiac experts, the anti-gluten zeal is a dramatic turnaround; not many years ago, they were struggling to raise awareness among doctors that bread and pasta can make some people very sick. Now they are voicing caution, tamping down the wilder claims about gluten-free diets.

“It is not a healthier diet for those who don’t need it,” Dr. Guandalini said. These people “are following a fad, essentially.” He added, “And that’s my biased opinion.”

Nonetheless, Dr. Guandalini agrees that some people who do not have celiac receive a genuine health boost from a gluten-free diet. He just cannot say how many.

As with most nutrition controversies, most everyone agrees on the underlying facts. Wheat entered the human diet only about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture.

“For the previous 250,000 years, man had evolved without having this very strange protein in his gut,” Dr. Guandalini said. “And as a result, this is a really strange, different protein which the human intestine cannot fully digest. Many people did not adapt to these great environmental changes, so some adverse effects related to gluten ingestion developed around that time.”

The primary proteins in wheat gluten are glutenin and gliadin, and gliadin contains repeating patterns of amino acids that the human digestive system cannot break down. (Gluten is the only substance that contains these proteins.) People with celiac have one or two genetic mutations that somehow, when pieces of gliadin course through the gut, cause the immune system to attack the walls of the intestine in a case of mistaken identity. That, in turn, causes fingerlike structures called villi that absorb nutrients on the inside of the intestines to atrophy, and the intestines can become leaky, wreaking havoc. Symptoms, which vary widely among people with the disease, can include vomiting, chronic diarrhea or constipation and diminished growth rates in children.

The vast majority of people who have celiac do not know it. And not everyone who has the genetic mutations develops celiac.

What worries doctors is that the problem seems to be growing. After testing blood samples from a century ago, researchers discovered that the rate of celiac appears to be increasing. Why is another mystery. Some blame the wheat, as some varieties now grown contain higher levels of gluten, because gluten helps provide the springy inside and crusty outside desirable in bread. (Blame the artisanal bakers.)

There are also people who are allergic to wheat (not necessarily gluten), but until recently, most experts had thought that celiac and wheat allergy were the only problems caused by eating the grain.

For 99 out of 100 people who don’t have celiac — and those who don’t have a wheat allergy — the undigested gliadin fragments usually pass harmlessly through the gut, and the possible benefits of a gluten-free diet are nebulous, perhaps nonexistent for most. But not all.

Anecdotally, people like Ms. Golden Testa say that gluten-free diets have improved their health. Some people with diseases like irritable bowel syndrome and arthritis also report alleviation of their symptoms, and others are grasping at gluten as a source of a host of other conditions, though there is no scientific evidence to back most of the claims. Experts have been skeptical. It does not make obvious sense, for example, that someone would lose weight on a gluten-free diet. In fact, the opposite often happens for celiac patients as their malfunctioning intestines recover.

They also worried that people could end up eating less healthfully. A gluten-free muffin generally contains less fiber than a wheat-based one and still offers the same nutritional dangers — fat and sugar. Gluten-free foods are also less likely to be fortified with vitamins.

But those views have changed. Crucial in the evolving understanding of gluten were the findings, published in 2011, in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, of an experiment in Australia. In the double-blind study, people who suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, did not have celiac and were on a gluten-free diet were given bread and muffins to eat for up to six weeks. Some of them were given gluten-free baked goods; the others got muffins and bread with gluten. Thirty-four patients completed the study. Those who ate gluten reported they felt significantly worse.

That influenced many experts to acknowledge that the disease was not just in the heads of patients. “It’s not just a placebo effect,” said Dr. Marios Hadjivassiliou, a neurologist and celiac expert at the University of Sheffield in England.

Even though there was now convincing evidence that gluten sensitivity exists, that has not helped to establish what causes gluten sensitivity. The researchers of the Australian experiment noted, “No clues to the mechanism were elucidated.”

What is known is that gluten sensitivity does not correlate with the genetic mutations of celiac, so it appears to be something distinct from celiac.

How widespread gluten sensitivity may be is another point of controversy.

Dr. Thomas O’Bryan, a chiropractor turned anti-gluten crusader, said that when he tested his patients, 30 percent of them had antibodies targeting gliadin fragments in their blood. “If a person has a choice between eating wheat or not eating wheat,” he said, “then for most people, avoiding wheat would be ideal.”

Dr. O’Bryan has given himself a diagnosis of gluten sensitivity. “I had these blood sugar abnormalities and didn’t have a handle where they were coming from,” he said. He said a blood test showed gliadin antibodies, and he started avoiding gluten. “It took me a number of years to get completely gluten-free,” he said. “I’d still have a piece of pie once in a while. And I’d notice afterwards that I didn’t feel as good the next day or for two days. Subtle, nothing major, but I’d notice that.”

But Suzy Badaracco, president of Culinary Tides, Inc., a consulting firm, said fewer people these days were citing the benefits of gluten-free diets. She said a recent survey of people who bought gluten-free foods found that 35 percent said they thought gluten-free products were generally healthier, down from 46 percent in 2010. She predicted that the use of gluten-free products would decline.

Dr. Guandalini said finding out whether you are gluten sensitive is not as simple as Dr. O’Bryan’s antibody tests, because the tests only indicate the presence of the fragments in the blood, which can occur for a variety of reasons and do not necessarily indicate a chronic illness. For diagnosing gluten sensitivity, “There is no testing of the blood that can be helpful,” he said.

He also doubts that the occurrence of gluten sensitivity is nearly as high as Dr. O’Bryan asserts. “No more than 1 percent,” Dr. Guandalini said, although he agreed that at present all numbers were speculative.

He said his research group was working to identify biological tests that could determine gluten sensitivity. Some of the results are promising, he said, but they are too preliminary to discuss. Celiac experts urge people to not do what Ms. Golden Testa did — self-diagnose. Should they actually have celiac, tests to diagnose it become unreliable if one is not eating gluten. They also recommend visiting a doctor before starting on a gluten-free diet.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 4, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Thomas O'Bryan. It is O'Bryan, not O'Brien.

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You're the Boss Blog: Our Vision: Make Sales to End Sweatshops

There have been a lot of grim stories lately involving the manufacture of clothing.

Over the last few months, there have been factory fires in Bangledesh that have taken the lives of hundreds of men and women who endured depressing sweatshop environments in order to feed their families. These factories were producing products for global brands like Wal-Mart, Disney, and Enyce. And a recent study by Greenpeace International concluded that Calvin Klein, GAP, Zara, Diesel, and other top apparel brands produce clothes that contain high levels of dangerous chemicals.

Does it make sense that these and other brands are allowed to make products that expose people throughout their supply chains — cotton farmers to garment workers to consumers — to cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting agents that can cause birth defects, learning disorders, and even death? If clothing were food, wouldn’t there be a recall?

In most cases, these brands have little to fear in the way of regulation. What they do fear is a loss of sales – and that is where my start-up, Fashioning Change, hopes to play a role. We have built a marketplace that offers stylish, money-saving, safe, sustainable, and sweatshop-free alternatives. Our goal is to support manufacturers that are doing things right – and to leave the big brands no option but to adopt authentic practices that protect health, the Earth, and human rights. That’s our plan, any way.

When we share that plan with venture capitalists, we are often told, “but shoppers won’t pay more for products that are green or socially responsible.” And we don’t think they should have to. That’s why, in addition to showcasing socially responsible brands, we are using our marketplace to demonstrate that shopping “green” doesn’t have to mean spending more or compromising on style and quality.

To prove our point, we built a feature on our Web site that we call Wear This, Not That (see photo above). Here’s how it works: We look for styles that are trending within mainstream brands, and then we review the Fashioning Change catalog for items that are comparable in price and style. When we find a match, we feature a side-by-side comparison of the Fashioning Change alternative to the mainstream product. Every comparison presents the fashion aesthetics and the price and also highlights the brand’s manufacturing process. Here’s an example, Wear This, Not That: Reuse Jeans vs Guess.

We did an analysis comparing more than 100 products from 27 mainstream brands to the Fashioning Change equivalent, and the data showed that shoppers can save an average of 27 percent with our alternatives. From Black Friday through Cyber Monday, we calculated that shoppers buying through Fashioning Change saved $25,509.84 — the difference between our retail price and what these shoppers would have spent on the mainstream option.

All of this may sound simple but making it happen isn’t easy, especially when you don’t have a huge budget to spend on marketing. To help us connect with each member of our growing audience, we built a targeted e-mail system that reviews shared preferences and site behavior to help us understand what e-mail content is relevant for each person. We use that data to share relevant information with each person who signs up for Fashioning Change. Every day, we work to increase our relevancy to each person so that we can make more sales while reducing pollution and the use of sweatshops.

So far, all of the money we make goes back into building Fashioning Change. My co-founder Kevin and I have forgone salaries until we can get Fashioning Change to profitability (something we look forward to in the near future). In order to live without a salary, I gave up my two-bedroom apartment, sold all of my furniture, and moved into my parent’s guest room. I lived there for more than a year on savings while getting the company started. Now I split time between the Fashioning Change house in Santa Monica and my parent’s house in San Diego. (I also gave up health insurance, which I will discuss in my next post.)

We see fashion as just the beginning for us. We have built a Web platform that will eventually allow us to provide access to authentic, great-looking, money-saving, sustainable, and sweatshop-free alternatives to almost everything that goes on (or in) our bodies, in our homes, or into our communities: clothes, food, detergents, cars, bedding, toothpaste, etc. While we could start adding all different types of products, I believe our success will lie in attacking one vertical at a time. We will see how quickly our vision gains momentum.

Some of the older investors we meet seem skeptical that we can create this mix of business and ethics. We’re looking forward to proving them wrong.

Questions? Thoughts? Lets connect, talk shop, and build some original and meaningful start-ups in the process. You can leave a comment below, or e-mail me at adriana@fashioningchange.com. You can also find me on Twitter at @adriana_herrera.

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Suspected child molester left L.A. archdiocese for L.A. schools

A former priest and suspected child molester left employment with the Los Angeles archdiocese to work for the L.A. Unified School District, officials confirmed Sunday.

The former clergyman, Joseph Pina, did not work with children in his school district job, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said. He added that, as a result of the disclosures, Pina would no longer be employed by the nation's second-largest school system.

Over the weekend, Deasy was unable to pull together Pina's full employment history, but said the district already was looking into the matter of Pina's hiring.

"I find it troubling," he said of the disclosures about Pina. "And I also want to understand what knowledge that we had of any background problems when hiring him, and I don't yet know that."

L.A. Unified itself has come under fire in the last year for its handling of employees accused of sexual misconduct.

Pina, 66, was laid off from his full-time district job last year, but returned to work episodically to organize events. One event he may have helped organize was a ribbon-cutting Saturday for a new education facility. School district officials over the weekend, however, could not confirm that. Pina did not attend the event, and the district could not confirm payment for any help he may have provided.

Pina's name emerged in documents released by the archdiocese to comply with a court order. His case was one of many in which church officials failed to take action to protect child victims and in which first consideration was given to helping the offending priests rather than their victims, according to the documentation.

A just-released, internal 1993 psychological evaluation states that Pina "remains a serious risk for acting out." The evaluation recounts how Pina was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he saw her in a costume.

"She dressed as Snow White ... I had a crush on Snow White, so I started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. "I felt like I fell in love with her. I got sexually involved with her, but never intercourse. She was about 17 when we got involved sexually, and it continued until she was about 19."

In a report sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse was never reported to authorities.

Pina's evaluation also includes a recommendation "to take appropriate measures and precautions to insure that he is not in a setting where he can victimize others." Pina continued to work as a pastor as late as March 1998.

School district officials could not verify Pina's hiring date over the weekend, but he took a job with L.A. Unified as the school system was carrying out the nation's largest school construction program. His job involved community outreach, building support for school projects, while also finding out communities' concerns and trying to address them, officials said. Such work was crucial to the program, because even though communities wanted new schools, their locations and other elements could prove controversial. Such projects frequently involved tearing down homes or businesses, environmental cleanups, and the blocking of streets and other disruptions.

"His duties were to rally community support and elicit community comments regarding schools in a neighborhood," district spokesman Tom Waldman said.

Pina's work did bring him into contact with families, frequently at public meetings organized to hear and address their concerns.

Projects that Pina worked on included a new elementary school in Porter Ranch and a high school serving the west San Fernando Valley, Waldman said. The high school, in particular, generated substantial public debate as a district team and a local charter school competed aggressively for control of the site.

The $19.5-billion building program is winding down, and, as a result, many jobs attached to it have come to an end. Pina's was among them.

The dedication he may have helped organize Saturday was for the Richard N. Slawson Southeast Occupational Center in Bell. Participants told KCET-TV, which first reported Pina's school employment, that he had assisted with community outreach on that project. The adult education and career technical education facility has 29 classrooms as well as health-career labs and child care for students. The school opened in August 2012.

Pina "was slated for some additional temporary work when the issue came to our attention last week and that work was canceled," Deasy said.

It may have been Pina who first alerted district officials that his name appeared in disclosed documents, Deasy said. Pina called a senior administrator in the facilities division. So far, no untoward issues have emerged regarding Pina's work for L.A. Unified.

howard.blume@latimes.com

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Apple Shows Signs a Major Interface Overhaul Is Coming

The Jony Ive era is upon us.

It has become increasingly clear since the ouster of Scott Forstall as Apple’s iOS chief, and the elevation of design wunderkind Ive to oversee both product industrial and user experience, that Apple is planning an iOS and OS X interface overhaul.

“I don’t think Apple will ever stop refining their OS’s and interfaces, and with Jony Ive at the helm we should expect to see improvements,” Gartner analyst Brian Blau told Wired. While Apple issues yearly updates to its OS, and minor updates at other points during the year, Blau said the “timing is anyone’s guess.”

The latest sign that changes are afoot is a job listing seeking senior software engineers for Apple’s iLife suite. The posting calls for “an enthusiastic Cocoa engineer to help us re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work.” That doesn’t sound like a simple facelift. That sounds like the ground-up revamping of a core software suite — iLife, included in every new Mac, includes iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.

Apple also is looking for someone to create character-driven dialog for Siri and help the digital assistant develop a distinct personality. Another job listing calling for someone to help create a new set of APIs and frameworks, suggesting big changes are coming to the iOS platform.

While a redesign seems to be in the works, that doesn’t mean it would happen overnight.

“Updates to major portions of the user interfaces aren’t easy; they don’t want to break what is effective today nor can they break how their developers integrate with the platform,” Blau said, “yet maybe there are additional features and functions that would offer more flexibility, usability and performance within the context of supporting the large library of third-party apps.”

All of this follows that shakeup in Apple’s senior leadership. Beyond moving Forstall aside and putting Ive in charge of Apple’s overall look and feel, the company put Craig Federighi, formerly the head of Mac software engineering, in charge of both the iOS and OS X development teams. With Federighi leading the technical side, covering things ranging from user interface and applications to developer frameworks, and Ive championing Apple’s “human interface” and industrial design, the iOS and Mac operating systems could sync together much more closely in the future and share far more design elements and experiences.

iOS has remained largely unchanged since it launched in 2007: A simple home screen populated by square icons that have rounded corners, and a dock of four permanent icons at the bottom. Things have gotten shinier, sure — the experience is more polished, the icons have more shading, detail, and nuance. But it’s nothing revolutionary. It’s the same story with OS X, which launched with Cheetah in 2001. The last major redesign came in 2007 with Leopard, which has for the most part given us OS experience we’re now used to. Snow Leopard, Lion, and, most recently, Mountain Lion added features, cloud integration, and track pad gestures, but these were evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes.

We’ve been using touchscreen smartphones for half a decade now, and PCs, for some of us, for three decades. And yet, things like the calendar, notes, and to-do lists (among other applications) still harken back to analog days when those tasks were done on paper.

Times are changing. A hallmark of the Forstall era, a design feature known as skeumorphism, surely will be kicked to the curb as Ive takes the reins on Apple user experience. Skeumorphism basically brings in design elements from the real world into the digital, and it can end up looking kitschy. A music player that mimics the look of a record or cassette player or a notepad app accented with a torn edge like a ripped sheet of paper are perfect examples of skeumorphic design. Steve Jobs loved this aesthetic. The leather stitching so prominent in iCal reportedly apes the leather in Jobs’ Gulfstream jet. So what’s the problem?

They’re metaphors of the past, as Wired’s Clive Thompson wrote in February. They stifle innovation and limit imagination and can end up looking haphazard and messy.

“Clean edges, flat surfaces will likely replace the textures that are all over the place right now,” an anonymous Apple designer told The New York Times of what we could expect from Ive following Forstall’s firing in late October.

The early days of the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad perhaps necessitated skeumorphic design to acclimate users to new apps and programs that accomplished tasks in new ways. But it’s no longer needed. The concept of the desktop and the graphical user interface isn’t foreign anymore. We’re grown comfortable with the swipes, double taps and myriad other gestures that can dismiss applications or open up shortcuts in the blink of an eye. With these gestures in mind, gorgeous, simple apps like Clear can exist and show that a to-do list on a touchscreen device need not resemble its paper counterpart — and be far better for it.

The next era of Apple user interface should embrace the touchscreen and trackpad inputs that have become indelible with their respective operating systems. With a generation coming upon us that may have never seen a record player, a rotary dial phone, or even a paper notepad, these nostalgic nods to times past have not only lost their relevance, but become a hindrance. Unfettered by such real world design hangups, the sky is the limit for the future of Apple’s computer interfaces under Ive.

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Bolshoi ballet chief heads to Germany after attack

MOSCOW (AP) — The artistic director of the Bolshoi ballet said he knows who ordered an acid attack that left him with severe burns to his eyes and face but won’t say, voicing hope that investigators will soon name the perpetrator.

Sergei Filin checked out of a Moscow hospital Monday and headed to Germany for further rehabilitation.

Filin, 42, wore shades and a bandage on his head, and skin on his face was red and swollen from burns. But he spoke energetically and seemed to be in a good mood as he walked out of the hospital accompanied by his wife.

“My body is full of strength and energy,” he told reporters.

Filin earlier told Russian state television that he knew who ordered the attack but wouldn’t give names. “My heart tells me who did it,” Filin told Rossiya 24 television in an interview broadcast late Sunday.

He said that investigators would visit him in Germany as part of the continuing probe.

An attacker threw sulphuric acid in Filin’s face in Moscow on Jan. 17, as he was returning home from work.

“I felt enormous, unbearable pain,” Filin recalled in the television interview. “I fell face down in the snow and started rubbing my face and eyes with snow.”

His colleagues said the attack on Filin could be in retaliation for his selection of certain dancers over others for the prized roles.

The Bolshoi has been plagued by intrigue and infighting that have led to the departure of several artistic directors over the past few years.

Filin told reporters Monday as he was leaving the hospital that he’s still seeing as if through a mist as his eye treatment is continuing, and added that he will have to undergo further eye surgery in Germany.

“I don’t care about my face, my hair, my looks,” he said in the television interview. “I’m ready to be completely bald, look like a Frankenstein. It will have no impact on my heart, on my soul. All my inner self, all my energy is focused on recovering eyesight.”

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The New Old Age Blog: Therapy Plateau No Longer Ends Coverage

Ellen Gorman, 72, a New York psychotherapist, can’t walk very far and gets around the city mainly by taxi, “which is really expensive,” she said. Twice since 2008 her physical therapy was discontinued because she wasn’t progressing. But after a knee replacement last year, she is getting physical therapy again, exercising with her therapist and building up her endurance by walking in the hallway of her Manhattan apartment building.

“Before this, I was getting weaker and weaker, and I just kept caving in,” she said.

Because of an action by Congress and a recent court settlement, Medicare probably won’t cut off Ms. Gorman’s physical therapy again should her progress level off — as long as her doctor says it is medically necessary.

Congress continued for another year a little-known process that allows exceptions to what Medicare pays for physical, occupational and speech therapy. The Medicare limits before the exceptions are $1,900 for physical and speech therapy this year, and $1,900 for occupational therapy.

In addition, the settlement of a class-action lawsuit last month now means that Medicare is prohibited from denying patients coverage for skilled nursing care, home health services or outpatient therapy because they had reached a “plateau,” and their conditions were not improving. That will allow people with Medicare who have chronic health problems and disabilities to get the therapy and other skilled care that they need for as long as they need it, if they meet other coverage criteria.

The settlement is expected to affect thousands, and possibly millions, of Medicare beneficiaries with chronic health problems like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries. It could also help families, as well as the overburdened Medicare budget, delay costly nursing home care by enabling seniors to live longer in their own homes.

“Under this settlement, Medicare policy will be clarified to ensure that claims from providers are reimbursed consistently and appropriately and not denied solely based on a rule-of-thumb determination that a beneficiary’s condition is not improving,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Medicare program.

The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Medicare Advocacy and Vermont Legal Aid on behalf of four Medicare patients and five national organizations, including the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Parkinson’s Action Network and the Alzheimer’s Association. A tentative settlement had been reached in October and on Jan. 24 a federal judge in Vermont approved the deal.

For seniors getting skilled services at home under a doctor’s order, the settlement means Medicare’s home health coverage has no time limit, Margaret Murphy told lawyers attending the annual meeting of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys in Washington, D. C., shortly after the then-tentative settlement was announced.

The coverage “can go on for years and years, if your doctor orders it,” said Ms. Murphy, the center’s associate director, who added that patients must be homebound (though not bedbound) and need intermittent care — every couple of days or weeks – that can only be provided by a physical therapist, nurse or other trained health care professional. When physical therapy is provided as part of Medicare’s home health benefit, the therapy dollar limits may not apply.

The settlement ensures that nursing home residents will also get coverage for skilled care regardless of improvement, but does not change the duration, which is still limited to up to 100 days per “benefit period.” That begins when a patient is admitted as an inpatient to a hospital or a nursing home for skilled care and ends after 60 days without skilled care. The agreement preserves the requirement that they must also have spent at least three days as inpatients in a hospital.

Federal officials say the settlement is not a change in Medicare coverage rules, but that statement may surprise many beneficiaries and providers.

“If someone isn’t making progress, I say, ‘Listen, I’m sorry but Medicare’s not going to cover this so you can come in for a few more sessions but then I have to let you go,’ ” said Greg Babiec, a physical therapist and one of the owners of Evolve, a private therapy practice with offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He had not heard about the settlement.

Beneficiaries also often lose Medicare coverage for outpatient therapy because they hit the payment limit. But under the exceptions process Congress continued for another year, the health care provider can put an additional code on the claim that indicates further treatment above the $1,900 limit is medically necessary. When treatment costs reach $3,700, the provider can submit medical documentation to support a request for another exception to cover 20 more sessions. (A Medicare fact sheet provides some additional details, but has not been updated for 2013.)

In 2011, nearly five million seniors received therapy services at a cost of $5.7 billion, and about one out of every four received an exception to the then-$1,870 limit, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent government agency that advises Congress.

Just a few hours before the settlement was approved, Rachel DeGolia learned that her 87-year-old father in Chicago was going to have to stop therapy because he stopped showing improvement — again.

“Every time he stops going to physical therapy, he starts to backslide in terms of his balance, his strength and his mobility,” said Ms. DeGolia, executive director of the Universal Health Care Action Network, a national advocacy group in Cleveland. His physical therapist did not know Medicare will cover therapy to prevent her father’s condition from getting worse.

Under the settlement, Medicare officials have until next January to straighten things out by notifying health care providers. Beneficiaries are not among those to be contacted, and so far the federal officials have not issued a formal statement on the settlement.

But patients don’t have to wait for their provider to get the official word, said Judith Stein, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs and executive director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy. “This isn’t a clandestine settlement,” she said.

The center’s Web site offers free “self-help” packets explaining how to challenge a denial of coverage that is based on the lack of improvement. Ms. Stein also advises beneficiaries to show a copy of the settlement — also available from the Web site — to your health care provider at your next physical therapy appointment if you are concerned about losing Medicare coverage. (If you follow this advice, let us know what happens.)

The Web site also explains how beneficiaries can request a review of their case if they received skilled nursing or therapy services in a skilled nursing facility, at home or as outpatients and were denied Medicare coverage because of a lack of progress after Jan. 18, 2011, when the lawsuit was filed.

Dean Lerner relied on the settlement last month to ensure that his brother-in-law would continue to receive Medicare physical therapy coverage.

“My brother-in-law in St. Louis suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and has for many years, and my sister is having a devil of a time helping him as his disease progresses,” said Mr. Lerner, a retired lawyer and state health official in Des Moines, who is also a Medicaid consultant.

A physical therapist teaches his brother-in-law to stand, turn and use a walker and maintain what little strength he still has. But because his condition hasn’t improved, the therapist said Medicare would not pay for additional sessions.

“But for my being an attorney, the outcome may well have been very different, and that shouldn’t be,” he said. “Why should you have to fight?”

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