The royal family announced that Kate Middleton is pregnant! Plus, we take a look at the popularity of Anime in the U.S., and the success of animated feature films at the box office. Then, a new YouTube telenovela focused on HIV issues and much more.
New state legislature session dominated by Democrats
In just three hours, lawmakers will be sworn in for the newest session of the state legislature. Democrats now hold the coveted two thirds "supermajority" in both chambers.
To discuss this new power structure and some of the issues legislators expect to tackle this session, we're joined by John Myers, political editor for KXTV, an ABC affiliate in Sacramento.
Kate Middleton expecting a royal baby
Officials from the Royal family have announced Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is expecting a baby. We speak with KPCC's Patt Morrison.
Panel warns of problems with California's push for alternative energy
State law requires that California produces a third of its electricity from wind, solar and other renewable sources by 2020. But according to an independent state oversight agency, it could prove incredibly costly to taxpayers and have grave consequences for the environment.
We'll speak to David Schwarz, vice-chair of The Little Hoover Commission.
Swelling 'atmospheric rivers' may bring severe flooding to California
The last few days the entire state has been hammered by a series of storms, but they may have been caused by something few have heard of ... an atmospheric river.
These atmospheric rivers are large flows of vapor that form a mile high and reach 1,000 miles long in the atmosphere. These flows can carry as much as 10 Mississippi Rivers-worth of water and cause major flooding, as they did during a 43-day storm back in 1861.
According to scientists, every 200-250 years or so there are massive floods in California caused by these flows of moisture.
An article about atmospheric rivers will appear in the January edition of Scientific American. We talk with senior editor of Scientific American, Mark Fischetti.
LA's stormwater spider web heads to Supreme Court, as county, environmentalists plan for new runoff rules
Underneath Los Angeles County a spaghetti of drains carry rainfall runoff to the ocean. Whenever this stormwater system gets a workout, pollution at beaches rises, and under federal law, someone’s responsible for it. A dispute between environmentalists and the county’s flood control district reaches the U.S. Supreme Court this week but may not untangle that problem.
Five hundred miles of channels, 2800 miles of drains: it’s called a municipal separate storm sewer system, and that sprawl under LA is mostly run by the county’s flood control district, says the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Steve Fleishli.
"They operate more of this system than any other city in Los Angeles and more than all of the other cities combined," Fleishli says. "And so they collect all of this urban slobber and convey it into our local waterways."
That slobber is actually rainfall that mixes with bacteria, metals, oil, and animal feces when it hits pavement. Four years ago, the NRDC and Santa Monica Baykeeper (now renamed LA Waterkeeper) sued the county’s flood control district to clean it up. According to the district’s Gary Hildebrand, the county has long argued the problem starts outside storm drains.
"The pipes, the channels, clearly they’re not creating pollution," he says. "The pollution comes from the watersheds that drain to them."
Hildebrand says cities have storm systems of their own that connect to the county’s infrastructure, and those cities have more regulatory power to prevent pollutants from mixing into runoff.
"When you move out into the watershed, regulating the land uses and the activities in those watersheds that result in that pollution," Hildebrand says. "Land use regulation is the responsibility of those municipalities. The district has no land use authority."
Under federal law, the flood control district and more than 80 cities in LA county share a permit to operate the region’s stormwater system, but must limit pollutants in it. Still, runoff chronically contains too much lead, copper, cyanide, fecal bacteria and other nasty materials. NRDC’s Fleishli argues the county’s flood control district has tried to evade responsibility.
"They’ve even said that the stormwater could be so polluted that it was on fire and they wouldn’t be responsible for it under the permit," says Fleishli.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in favor of the NRDC and Waterkeeper last year. The county’s legal team appealed to the Supreme Court. But in a strange turn of events, the Supreme Court only agreed to hear a narrow part of the dispute, says UCLA law professor Sean Hecht.
"The question in front of the court is a question about when you have pollution in a body of water and you move it, you pump it, you somehow convey it, it ends up in a different part of that body of water, are you adding pollutants in a way that requires a permit," says Hecht.
Hecht says the problem with the Supreme Court’s question is that LA’s storm system isn’t set up like that.
"The particular question that the court is looking at has nothing to do with the facts of the case, he says. Hecht filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of activists including the Friends of the Los Angeles River. He has argued the court should dismiss the case because answering the question won’t resolve the dispute between the county and the NRDC.
Several other groups have weighed in offering similar arguments. Amanda Leiter teaches at American University’s Washington School of Law. A former Supreme Court clerk, she filed a brief on behalf of several law professors – and she says it’s surprising the case has gotten this far.
"Once you dig into the details of this case it presents complicated issues but issues having to do with the terms of a narrow permit where the Supreme Court is not particularly expert and whatever the resolution is, is not of relevance beyond those who are subject to this particular permit," Leiter says.
LA County insists the Supreme Court should make a decision, not just because the county seeks to overturn the 9th Circuit’s ruling. The flood control district’s Hildebrand says confusing language in that ruling could undermine protections for the Los Angeles River.
Complicating everything, while this case has wound upward through the court system, the regulators who set penalties for stormwater pollution have just issued a new permit to the county and cities that manage storm drains – the first in 11 years. It’s hard to predict how the Supreme Court’s action would influence runoff rules under this new regime. What is clear, says NRDC’s Steve Fleishli, is that the health of LA’s rivers and coastline depend on getting stormwater cleaned up.
"This permit that was issued by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board has importance in terms of its role enforcing the cleanup of this significant source of pollution," Fleishli says.
Officials for the county say they agree. This week the flood control district’s Gary Hildebrand and other officials began a massive public campaign for a parcel tax. County property owners would vote on the tax by mail. If it passes, the flood control district would reap more than 200 million dollars a year to spend on methods to capture, control, and filter stormwater before it hits the beach.
New study links repeated head injuries and permanent brain damage
Scientists at Boston University's School of Medicine have examined the brains of deceased athletes and military veterans who had suffered from repeated head injuries
The study found that 80 percent showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, also known as C.T.E.
We're joined by ESPN reporter Steve Fainaru, who is working on a book about football and brain injuries as well as an upcoming Frontline documentary on the same subject.
The difficult success of animated feature films
In the past few years, four or five of the top 10 highest-grossing movies have been animated films. For instance, this year, the Pixar Animation film "Brave" made more than half a billion in worldwide box office, all by itself.
Even though today's animated films are usually created with digital technology, the subject matter and target audience hasn't changed much since the days of the Disney classics: fantasy storylines aimed at children, with just enough sophistication so parents will tolerate sitting through them with their kids.
L.A. Times reporter Rebecca Keegan writes about animation. She joins the show to talk about why animated films often go through multiple directors and scores of writers before they make it to the screen, and why Hollywood and animators put up with all the angst.
Why Japanese animation has such a huge following in the US
Japanese animation, or Anime, is a $500 million a year industry. Hundreds of anime movies and TV shows are released each year, but they don't stay in Japan. Many make their way to the U.S. market where they have a sizeable and dedicated following.
Anime expert Charles Solomon joins the show to tell us about some of his favorite anime series, and why Japanese animation is attracting U.S. viewers.
Interview Highlights:
On the who comprises the target audience for Anime in the US:
On the animated series "Steins;Gate":
On the long-running pirate-themed anime series “One Piece”:
On the series “Tenchi Universe”:
On female-centric anime:
On anime’s influence on American TV shows and movies:
“The obvious example there is the Matrix, which was inspired in large part by Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. And so that in turn had been partially inspired by Blade Runner. And you’re getting this interesting cross-pollination, where, you know, Blade Runner begets Ghost in the Shell begets the Matrix, then the Matrix begets the Animatrix, which was a group of Japanese animators kind of riffing off on characters in situations from that. If you talk to the artists at Pixar, they say, you know John Lasseter will tell you, ‘when we get stuck on something we go and we watch a Miyazaki movie, even if it has nothing to do with what we’re doing. Just the way he makes film, you know, will inspire us and get us thinking, and we’ll go back to the problem. So yes, I mean, there is some influence. It’s just something that’s kind of happening under the mainstream radar. This doesn’t get a lot of attention in the mainstream press, but it’s what those younger, hipper demographic is watching.”
Steins;Gate:
One Piece:
Tenchi Universe:
Oregon supreme court limits validity of eyewitness testimony in court
Eyewitness identifications are mainstays in police procedural dramas, but in the real world, those witness identifications are not as reliable as one would think.
Research has shown that witness memories can be easily swayed by things like suggestive questioning, the race of the suspect, even the lighting that they're shown in.
Last week, the Oregon supreme court set down new guidelines that limit the admissability of eye witness testimony in court. It's seen as a landmark decision that could provide a blueprint for the rest of the country.
Here to discuss the case is Karen Newirth, who works on this issue with the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongly convicted.
'Soul Repair' examines how military vets suffer from moral injury
William Sherman, Union Army general and veteran of the Civil War, is famously attributed with coining the phrase "war is hell" back in 1879.
Today, anyone can do a quick Internet search and see what Sherman was referring to: graphic images and reports about the atrocities and violence that are an unavoidable consequences of going to war.
But what happens when veterans return to society? How can civilized people be expected to return home from the "hell" of war, where they likely witnessed or took part in actions antithetical to everything they'd been taught?
Veterans make up just 7 percent of the U.S. population, and yet they account for 20 percent of American suicides. There are plenty of horror stories regarding post-traumatic stress disorders in veterans, but there's another condition you hear a lot less about: moral injury.
In the book "Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After the War," co-author Rita Nakashima Brock examines the powerful sense of shame, grief and remorse many soldiers feel because their experiences conflict deeply with their morals.
Interview Highlights:
How moral injury differs from PTSD:
"PTSD is an extreme sort of terror reaction to trauma, and it actually affects how your brain functions and you lose the capacity to calm down fear, so what happens is you have flashbacks and nightmares and you can be in a hyper-vigilant fear state all the time. Moral injury is you think about what happened and you start to realize you don't feel good at all about what happened, you feel like you violated some deep part of yourself. We call it a soul injury. If it's severe enough you can feel like you're not a decent human being anymore and you don't deserve to live. And you can also live in a sort of twilight depression for life because meaning breaks down for you and you don't feel like you have a moral identity anymore."
On how soldiers are afflicted by moral injury:
"Civilians are not taught to kill, in fact, we're taught to regard killing as a crime, it's criminal behavior. So we have to take an ordinary person, people, members of our families, they go into the military and they're taught to kill without thinking, because if you think about it its harder to do it. That process is a rigorous and fairly sophisticated process of creating a good army. Then we throw them into the maws of war…War in many circumstances causes people to start to question why they're there and to feel upset and traumatized morally by the things they have to do. Unfortunately, we do this sophisticated training to put them there, put them through the process of war and then we bring them home with almost no process of bringing them back to civilian life. So basically they're dumped into civilian life amongst people who don't really understand what they went through and just kind of expect them to just forget about it and get on with their lives, and that's an impossible thing to do."
On what kind of help someone with moral injury needs:
"It's a social condition, in many ways, of the society not taking responsibility for having sent people to war. So it's more like being a friend to a veteran, taking on the struggle of a veteran to recover their moral identity, which can take a very long time. We believe that's a social responsibility and it requires caring people not a clinical treatment because you learn your moral values in a large social system, from your family, your neighbors, your religious communities, whoever you're around who teaches you moral values. So to rebuild a moral identity requires that kind of support system, you don't build that moral identity alone, and if you build it in treatment, but you go back to a community that doesn't affirm it, it's really hard to hold onto it."
On how moral injury is affecting a wide variety of veterans:
"There are 18 million American veterans of combat, the larger majority is not from these wars. Moral injury is something that afflicts anyone that has to go to war, we certainly have WWII vets who have spoken to us, my father served in Vietnam and I think he had moral injury when he came home, we didn't know what was wrong with him we just knew he wasn't the person who left. I think people might be surprised how their lives are touched by the aftermath of war if they just look around."
On how an atrocity her father experienced in WWII changed him forever:
"This project has changed my whole sense of who my father was, actually. He was a WWII veteran and he'd survived that war as a POW and he had electroshock, so I don't think he had much memory of that war. … He did a second tour and something terrible happened to him in that second tour and I didn't know that, but when he came home he was emotionally withdrawn and very controlling and angry in ways that were really different than the father I grew up with. In order to get away from him I moved out my first year of college and never lived at home again, I just didn't want to be around him. He died eight years after the war and we were not reconciled at all, I just tried to stay out of his way and out of his life as much as possible.
"I didn't know what had happened to him until I was talking to an older cousin of mine who was very close to my father. I was telling her about moral injury and she said, 'Oh, I think that's what your daddy had.' I said what do you mean? She said, 'You know there was a thing that happened with that spy or informant or girl that he worked with.' My father had sent me tapes when he was in Vietnam and I knew that he had a 16-year-old Vietnamese woman who was his guide when he would give medical help to villagers in the hills around where his field station was, and she was bilingual and knew the territories, and guided him and translated for him when he went to help villagers. He thought very highly of her, I remember he just talked a lot about how great a young woman she was and I think he was very proud to know her.
"I asked my cousin what happened to her and he said, 'You know, your daddy found her body, and she'd been raped and tortured by the troops. I think he never got over that.' I was stunned. I had no idea that she'd been killed much less in a horrible way. I started thinking about what that must have done to my father, how he might have felt guilty for putting her in harms way, I knew he felt angry at the military, he came home and got out, he retired as soon as he possibly could. When my mother argued with him and asked him to stay in a full 30 years, which would have been two more years, he said, 'This man's army is not my man's army, I didn't sign up for this.' And he got out. Now I understand that and I understand his behavior and I regret that I didn't know about moral injury so that I could be more patient with what was happening to him and try to understand."
NASA announces latest findings from Mars Curiosity Rover
This morning NASA held a press conference to present the latest findings from its Curiosity rover on Mars. The announcement was much hyped after an NPR report quoted one of the lead scientists as saying the this could be, "one for the history books."
But the space agency dialed back expectations, calling the findings merely "interesting."
So what did the rover find? Here to tell us is Bruce Betts, Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.
Telenovela series aims at battling HIV among Latinos
In the world of Spanish language TV, the telenovela reigns supreme. These Spanish language serials are rife with scandalous familial dramas that keep viewers hungry for more. And the plot line of a new telenovela web project by one of the nation’s largest community health clinics is no exception.
AltaMed health clinics that serve patients in Los Angeles and Orange Counties is debuting an original series of four YouTube telenovelas as a way to educate Latinos about the spread of HIV.
“As a culture, Latinos tend not to speak about things,” says Paco Farias, director of the AltaMed series. “Growing up in my family, whenever there was something borderline scandalous or taboo we just didn’t talk about it. I think that’s pretty pervasive in our community.”
Called “Sin Verguenza,” or “without shame,” the series' aim is three fold: to educate the clinics’ mostly Latino population about how HIV is spread; to encourage universal HIV testing for everyone 15 and older and to assure viewers that HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was, thanks to the availability of new treatments for the virus.
Getting that information to Latinos is especially important as they experience a disproportionate number of infections. In 2009, the HIV infection rate among Latinos was almost three times as high as that of whites, says the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Among Latinas, the disparity is even worse - nearly four times as high as that of white women, the agency reports.
"We began looking at what was the best approach for reaching clients," says Natalie Sanchez, AltaMed's HIV prevention manager. "The telenovelas really capture what’s central to Latinos - which is the family. And so in (AltaMed's) telenovelas - you’ll see an unraveling of the different issues that impact Latinos."
The CDC provided AltaMed with a $385,000 grant to hire a professional writer, director and bilingual actors for the four seven-minute episodes. The producers shot each one twice – once in Spanish and once in English.
Their HIV plot line is told through the lens of the fictitious family Salazar of East Los Angeles.
“It’s highly connected to the stories that we hear on an everyday basis here at the clinic from patients who are HIV infected,” says Hilda Sandoval, a program manager for AltaMed’s HIV unit, and co-writer of the series. “The telenovela focuses on one family unit but it really ties into some of the issues that no one really wants to talk about.”
Issues such as homosexuality, infidelity and risky sexual behaviors, one of which – by the series close - will lead to the HIV infection of a member of the Salazar family.
In the first minutes of Episode One viewers wonder whether it might be the Salazar son, Enrique, a law student who lovingly embraces his gay lover – a young medical intern – in the kitchen of the family restaurant, within full view of dad’s disapproving eyes.
Less than a minute later, though, viewers learn that the family mother - Adrianna Salazar - is also potentially at risk. Her husband Cesar Salazar, it seems, may be fooling around. The distraught Adrianna shares her concerns with her mother, the widowed Grandmother Salazar, who tries to comfort her daughter as best as she can.
But just seconds later, we learn that not even Grandma Salazar is safe from the risk of HIV exposure. After she tells her adult grandchildren she’s off to bingo at the senior center and that she's "feeling lucky" they begin teasing her about getting "lucky" with the handsome Senor Rodriguez - another senior center patron and future love interest.
“So the grandmother is dealing with going back into the dating scene not knowing what to do after being a widow for 10 years,” Sandoval says. “A lot of times we forget that out elder population really do have a life beyond their 60s and 70s and the do go back and start dating because HIV does not discriminate in age. So we wanted to depict what we see happening in our community."
Episode One of Sin Verguenza, now on YouTube, will be followed by the release of episode two in mid-December and the final two episodes in January.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the director of the telenovela as Pablo Farias. His name is Paco Farias.
LA-based artists that collectors should look out for
Maybe the "economic" drama of the past several years took a toll on your 401k and now you're looking for an investment that will recoup all that you lost. How about putting some money down on a Basquiat, or a Jeff Koons?
The value of works by those artists has skyrocketed in the past several years into the tens-of-millions of dollars. This week at Art Basel, the big art fair in Miami Beach, collectors will be on the hunt for the next big contemporary artist who will pay off in the long term.
If you're thinking, hey, art sounds like a pretty good investment, you might do well to look at some L.A.-based artists. Joining us is reporter Kelly Crow, who covers the art market for the Wall Street Journal.