Today we take a look at the latest news coming out of the Middle East, including Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's latest power grab. Then, the U.S. is facing the worst drought in 25 years, California couples are turning to social media to find open adoption opportunities, John Horn of the LA Times gives us a year-end movie preview and much more.
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi meets with judges to discuss power grab
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi meets with members of the Supreme Judiciary Council to discuss decrees he announced last week, giving him sweeping authority.
Morsi's power grab sparked violent protests throughout the country, and at least one person has died and hundreds more have been wounded.
Earlier this fall, a video created by a Southern California man also fueled protests, not only in Egypt but in several other countries from Sudan to Malaysia. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula now sits in a LA jail, not for producing "The Innocence of Muslims" video, but for a probation violation.
Most severe drought in decades threatens entire US
It's been three weeks now since the so-called Superstorm hit the east coast. Sandy was blamed for more than 130 deaths and causing approximately $50 billion worth of damage.
The country remains in the grips of another climate calamity : the great drought of 2012. Its damage estimate? $77 billion so far.
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist, and the founder of the website Wunderground. com, thinks drought has the power to do far more damage than most of us understand.
California state officials question safety of energy drinks like Monster, 5-Hour Energy
More questions are being raised about the safety of energy drinks like Monster and 5-Hour Energy.
Those brands have exploded in popularity in recent years, but health officials warn they may be linked to as many as 13 deaths. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been investigating the drinks, and now California state officials are looking into them as well.
Mina Kim reports.
Box office preview: Zero Dark Thirty, Les Miserables, and more
John Horn of the Los Angeles Times joins the show to give us a look ahead at the most anticipated films of the holiday season. Also, we tells us about how the box office did over the long Thanksgiving weekend.
Does California's 'open adoption' system help heal a baby's separation wound?
When student, Amy Otto, learned she was pregnant four years ago she knew immediately that she could not parent her baby. “So I Googled 'independent adoption,'" said Otto, learning that she could choose parents for her child and possibly even play a significant role in the child’s life.
Otto, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, found a website that featured prospective parent profiles. “I remember spending hours [one] Sunday browsing through profiles,” said Otto, making her feel like she was “shopping for parents.” She settled on a couple from Glendale, California, who were TV executives and very keen on the birth mother being part of their child’s life.
Californians adopt more babies and children than in any other state, and it is one of the most progressive in regards to how adoption is practiced. Known as “open adoption,” birth parents can select the adoptive parents and decide how much participation they want in their biological child’s life.
It’s a long way from the days when pregnant women signed their babies over to adoption agencies to select the families who would raise the baby, and all records of the biological parents were sealed until the child turned 18.
Yet as the process of adoption has gotten more open, research and studies into what adoptees experience has also advanced. According to Marcy Axness, an adopted child and family therapist with a specialization in Early Childhood Development, the relationship between a birth mother and baby is critical in the early days and weeks. Axness cites “17 different bio-regulatory channels” that exist between a birth mother and baby, “From breathing to respiration, heart-rate, to blood.” To take a baby away at birth, says Axness, cuts off all this regulation that the baby requires from its biological mother and causes a wound to the baby.
Nancy Verrier, who has two children, one adopted and one biological, agrees with Axness. Verrier is a Marriage and Family Therapist and author of a book about understanding adopted children called “Primal Wound.” Verrier goes as far as to say that babies should be kept with the birth mother until they are at least six weeks old to help ameliorate the severity of the separation wound.
“The baby is probably terrified and confused,” says Verrier, “the baby knows that mother through all its senses...knows her smell, knows her voice, knows her heartbeat, knows her rhythm.” Verrier says she understands that many babies do need to be taken from the birth mother on delivery, but would like to see a frank discussion about the possibility of extending the openness of the adoption process to keep babies with birth mothers at least for the babies first six weeks of life.
Meet Glendale couple, Jack Messitt and Kacy Andrews. They are the parents that Amy Otto chose to raise her son. Messitt and Andrews met Otto early in her pregnancy, and the three of them loved each other. The Glendale couple were at Otto’s side for ultrasounds and to hear the baby’s heartbeat, and they were in the delivery room when Sawyer was born.
Since then, the three adults who are Sawyer’s parents have become very close, in fact they call each other “family."
Kacy Andrews is herself an adopted child, and when she couldn’t get pregnant, it was a natural move to try to adopt. Andrews did not know her own birth mother until she was an adult, and this, she says, caused her a lot of frustration and confusion. In fact, it made her an angry child.
She sees the same behavior in her adopted son, Sawyer. “I have to travel for business and I was gone for 3 days, and not only did he act out bad at home but also at school.” Andrews recognizes this as a fear of being abandoned, which she too felt. “He feels like 'Oh, mama just left, will she come back? I don’t know.' Even though I can tell him I’m coming back, and I always do, it puts him on edge and makes him really difficult to live with.”
Experts like Verrier say what Sawyer goes through when his mother travels is common in adopted children. While Sawyer has no explicit memory of his biological mother leaving him, says Verrier, he has an “implicit memory” of the event.
“And so this disappearing of the mother becomes a real fear for them, and they are afraid that the next mother, the one they are with now might also disappear," said Verrier. "And so they have this fear of abandonment that kind of goes on and on and on throughout their life.”
To watch Messitt and Andrews with their adopted son, Sawyer, it is clear that he is showered with love, affection and all the attention he needs. The family lives in a comfortable home and it would be hard to find anything that Sawyer might be wanting for.
Amy Otto feels like her biological child is in the perfect home. As are many adopted children, says Marcy Axness. Yet, she adds, adoption is centered around loss, which scars everyone involved. “The adoptive parents have lost the dream of their biological child, or maybe they have lost actual children through miscarriage or still birth," said Axness. "The birth parents have lost the child they will not parent for whatever reason. And of course the adoptee has lost their biological ties with their parents and possibly their genealogical history, their cultural heritage.”
Experts say that even very young babies experience this loss, and it is something adoptive parents need to understand. Nancy Verrier says adoptive parents “need to validate” this loss for their baby. She cites an example, “I know an adoptive mom who was really astute about this. And when her baby would cry and not want her to hold him, she would say, 'You must be missing your other mommy,' and calm him right down.
Marcy Axness offers advice for adoptive parents when babies or toddlers exhibit signs that their child doesn’t want them, or is inconsolable. “A really wise mother will not take it personally and will say, 'Hey I realize, you’re missing your connection. I’m not the heartbeat you expected, I’m not the smell you expected. But I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere, and I’m going to hold you and you can just feel all your feelings.'”
Amy Otto will be traveling to Glendale for the Holidays. And while she is looking forward to seeing Sawyer and his parents, who she now refers to as “family," she is also wary of the day Sawyer will want to know why she gave him away.
She asks, “Is Sawyer going to judge me later in his life or be angry at me for giving him up and casting him aside?” It’s an answer she hopes will be mitigated by her active presence in his life, as do Sawyer’s parents, Jack Messitt and Kacy Andrews.
Couples use social media to find 'open adoption' opportunities
How do parents find birthmothers for an open adoption? Here's one unusual way: head over to Facebook.
Staci and Jay Baird are prospective adoptive parents in San Francisco who are using Pinterest, Facebook and
to showcase themselves to birth mothers as a way to find a child and speed up the open adoption process.
Jay said that after facing infertility hardships, he and his wife felt like adoption was, “Just kind of a natural thing to do.” He added, “And I was adopted back in the early ‘80s, when pretty much the whole process was closed, and so I actually don’t know the identities of either of my birth parents.”
The Baird’s website is host to seemingly professionally-staged photographs of the couple and their dog, their personal histories, and even a letter to the prospective birth mother. Staci explained that it was an easy transition to create and maintain all the social media outlets currently in use by the couple.
“I think because it’s part of what I do in my professional life, it was an easy leap to make for me,” she said. “I just felt like it was another marketing campaign and I needed to get on all the social channels. And I knew that would be a great way to spread the word.”
Even though the Bairds are exhausting many social outlets, the heartbreak of having a possible adoption fall through remains equally upsetting each time. Staci said that while they were contacted by two separate women who were interested in a possible adoption, ultimately neither incident led to bringing a child into the Baird’s life, which was extremely disappointing.
However, Staci and Jay are not giving up. They are currently still using an adoption agency, and the addition of using Facebook and Twitter allows Staci to feel like she is doing something proactively. “In some ways,” she said, “this is a little bit therapeutic for me.” The process of sharing and documenting the process, has opened the doors of a community the Bairds might have not been able to connect with otherwise.
Jay added, “It’s kind of like dating in a sense,” referencing the entire search for a birth mother. “We’re just waiting for that right person. That’s why, I think, you know, we like building the Facebook page, because it just allows us to really tell our story and just kind of feel like we have some little knob to twist or something to try and just show people, you know, that we would really be great parents.”
The risks and complications of looking online for an open adoption
Although many would-be parents are using social media as a tool in adoption, as with any online transactions, there are many risks involved.
We speak with Adam Pertman, the executive director of the Evan Donaldson Adoption Institute who has studied the use of social media in adoptions.
Suspected murderer Jose 'Joe' Luis Saenz heads to Pomona court
One of the FBI's 10 most wanted fugitives was taken into custody on Thursday in a joint operation between Mexican law enforcement and the U.S.
Jose "Joe" Luis Saenz, who was wanted in multiple slayings in Los Angeles, was captured in Guadalajara, Mexico late Thursday and flown to L.A. on Friday to face charges of murder, kidnapping and rape.
Saenz, 37, was born in East Los Angeles and was a member of the Cuatro Flats gang of the Hollenbeck area. He is suspected of committing the murders of two rival gang members in July 1998 and the suspected kidnapping, rape and murder of his girlfriend that same year. He is also suspected of murdering another person in 2008.
FBI agent Scott Garriola says this was one of his toughest cases to crack. "I think the primary reason why it was so difficult, he was moving around quite a bit, throughout Central America and North America," said Garriola. "He had been to Canada. He had been back and forth throughout the United States, throughout Mexico and Central America."
Saenz, who also went by several aliases, including Giovanni Torres, Smiley and Peanut, among others, had access to large amounts of money because of his connection to Mexican drug cartels.
"This man had a lot of resources, a lot of money," said KPCC's Erika Aguilar, who has been following the case. "In 2008, a drug bust went down in Missouri and that included about $600,000 and the case agent said this was just an example of some kind of cash that was easily available to him."
It's unclear what he was doing in Mexico, but FBI authorities think he may have been working as an enforcer for the cartels while trying to hide out from authorities. According to officials, Saenz was surprised by his arrest and is quoted as saying he "got sloppy." There was also a reward of $100,000 for information leading to his arrest.
Saenz is in court in Pomona today, but the case will move the the L.A. district attorney's office where he will be charged with four counts of murder, one count of kidnapping and one count of rape.
The complex relationship between US and Mexico law enforcement
While U.S. and Mexican authorities have been reluctant to work together in the past, but the arrest of Jose Saenz points to an improved relationship between the two.
Here to talk about the complicated relationship is David Shirk, Director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.
After 86 years, Los Angeles tennis tournament heads to Bogota
After 86 years, the longest running tennis tournament in the city is coming to an end. That's right, long before the Dodgers or the Lakers came to town, tennis ranked among the top spectator sports in Los Angeles.
But now the L.A. Open will be moving to Bogota, Colombia. Ben Bergman reports.
The Farmers Classic – by any of the seven names it’s had over 86 years – once drew the biggest names in tennis: Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Andre Agassi, and Palos Verdes star Pete Sampras.
In 2001, Sampras and Agassi played each other in the final.
Agassi won in straight sets, but before he got his trophy, tournament director Bob Kramer addressed the fans.
“As we always say here, this might have been great, but come back next year because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Kramer told the crowd.
That was the tournament’s apex, as Kramer remembered on a recent morning at the LA Tennis Center, on the same court where Sampras and Agassi had played.
Now, despite a website that still promises a tennis tournament in Los Angeles in 2013, the event is leaving forBogota, Colombia next year.
Kramer stood next to an on-court plaque that recognized the Times Mirror Company for helping to build the tennis stadium on UCLA’s campus.
Another contributor was Johnny Carson.
“His donation was a major gift and we built the Johnny Carson draw board,” said Kramer. “On the west end was the Unocal scoreboard.”
Carson passed away seven years ago. Unocal and Times Mirror are gone. And soon, The Farmers Classic will be gone, too.
“There’s a big hole in my heart. This is something we didn’t see coming,” said Kramer.
Kramer managed the tournament's ball boys as a teenager. He took over managing the whole show about three decades ago.
Until a few weeks ago, he thought he could keep The Farmers Classic in LA.
“We were in many, many conversations and meetings with large sports marketing organizations and talking to potential investors, billionaires – people like the Ellisons, the Kerkorians, the Anschutzes – but at the end of the day, none of those people were able to come to the table and make a deal with us,” said Kramer. “The only definitive offers came from Colombia.”
Kramer says the tournament has been losing millions of dollars.
He blames the recession and the tournament’s location in the middle of the crowded summer tennis calendar.
But the biggest problem has been attracting the world’s top players.
“The markets globally have been stronger than the ones domestically and the events have flowed to those stronger markets,” said Kramer. “For example, in December, we understand that Roger Federer is playing five or six events and he’s going to be paid $10 million dollars in South America.”
The Farmers Classic is only the latest American tennis event to depart.
Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim remembers it wasn’t long ago that there were dozens of tournaments coast to coast.
“The tour would thread its way from Hilton Head to Amelia Island to Atlanta,” said Wertheim. “We don’t have that anymore. And it’s very hard to become a tennis fan now. You may be the biggest Roger Federer fan in the world but he only comes to the U.S. three, maybe four times a year whereas a generation ago a player like Bjorn Borg would play 15-20 tournaments in the U.S.”
In those days, the top players were American. Not anymore. Wertheim says tennis tournaments tend to follow the workforce.
“The decline of American players at the top of the rankings is directly correlated, I think, to the decline of American events,” said Wertheim.
One of the few American events thriving today is only a two-hour drive from L.A.
The BNP Paribas Open was on its way from Indian Wells to Doha a few years ago, until Oracle founder Larry Ellison swooped in to save it.
Still, Wertheim says it’s strange that LA – where Pancho Gonzales and Bobby Riggs learned the game, where Arthur Ashe went to college – will no longer have a major tournament.
“It is jarring,” said Wertheim. “Name your global city. We have tournaments in Basel, Switzerland and Barcelona and Bangkok, but not in Los Angeles. I think that it really says as much about the current state of global tennis as anything.”
A state in which American tennis declines as the sport grows more popular in the rest of the world.
PHOTOS: At 87, legendary LA disc jockey Art Laboe shows no signs of slowing down
If you've tuned into an oldies station in L.A. over the past half a century, chances are you've heard Art Laboe. The legendary disc jockey has been spinning the hits and taking requests on L.A. air waves since 1949.
Earlier this month he was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, and after decades on the air, Laboe continues to give shout-outs on behalf of his listeners. KPCC's Vanessa Romo sat down with Laboe to talk about his legacy.
On the corner of Sunset and Alvarado – above the Burrito King – is a billboard dedicated to the king of dedications.
Art Laboe's face may not be instantly recognizable, but his warm voice is. For more than half a century, Laboe’s been a conduit for lovers dedicating love songs to each other.
He’s a purveyor of rhythm & blues since the time when L.A.’s airwaves were segregated. An Armenian DJ without a drop of Latino blood, who’s now the adopted godfather to L.A.’s Chicano youth. He also coined the phrase “oldies but goodies."
They were oldies and definitely goodies in 1955 when Laboe started broadcasting live from Scrivener’s Drive-In burger joint in Hollywood.
"It just blew up. I mean, kids, only music they were hearing were these schmaltzy love songs and all of a sudden, here’s this afternoon program and the microphone is live, you hear girls giggling, horns honking, 'Hey Joe!' You hear all this background going on," said Laboe. "It sounds like a party. They’d never heard anything like that on the air. Neither had I."
It was fresh and spontaneous and teenagers couldn’t get enough. He even let them pick the records.
"Then comes rock and roll. I was at the right place at the right time, and rock and roll came like a tidal wave," said Laboe. "I was like a surfer that caught this giant wave and it just pulled me along with it."
Political scientist and civil rights activist Jaime Regalado grew up in Boyle Heights. Mention Art Laboe, and he perks up.
"He was the Dick Clark for Chicanos and for many young whites who liked the original R&B sound as it became rock and roll, and African-Americans as well," said Regalado. "You know thousands of kids over the years just worshiped him because he basically integrated rock and roll and rhythm and blues music for a very diverse and a very hungry audience. Especially of Chicanos."
While anyone in radio today would pay good money to cultivate Laboe’s loyal Latino audience, it happened quite by accident.
At the time, L.A. teens could dance only at school or church. So Laboe booked bands like Handsome Jim Balcom, The Jaguars and The Penguins and headed to the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium and El Monte Legion Stadium.
"Well a lot of my friends had the cool-looking cars and the cool-looking girlfriends. Of course we used to go in groups," said Regalado. "One of my friends, Denny, had a tuck-and-rolled lowered Mercury and I used to love it. We used to identify with it and that was part of the emblem, the symbolism."
Laboe still dazzles concert fans with his gold lame suits, and getting on the air with him is still a right of passage for east-side kids.
Marie Torres was a lovestruck 14-year-old in El Monte in the early 90s. She remembers calling Laboe and dedicating songs to her former love.
"My boyfriend was a year older than me and I called to dedicate 'Always and Forever' to my old man," said Torres. "No joke. My old man which was 15. And I said in East Los [Angeles]. I don’t know what I was thinking. I grew up in the suburbs and I said in 'East Los.'"
The dedications are memorable for Laboe, too. Sitting in his dimly lit studio about an hour before his show, he recalled a moving request from a woman whose husband was an avid listener in prison.
"She says, 'You think I could have my daughter say something to her daddy?' Carrissa, I think was her name," said Laboe. "And she says, 'I love you daddy.' And he had never heard his daughter’s voice. Here he is in jail and he just broke up, you know?"
He knows this because when the guy got out, he called to thank him.
The 87-year-old Art Laboe — make that Radio Hall of Famer Art Laboe — is on the air every night on Hot 92.3. He is still working and has no plans to retire.
Fake Facebook privacy disclaimer clogs digital newsfeeds
This weekend on Facebook you may have noticed a few of your friends posting something like:
"In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, graphics, comics, paintings, photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!
Anyone reading this can copy this text and paste it on their Facebook Wall. This will place them under protection of copyright laws. By the present communiqué, I notify Facebook that it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, disseminate, or take any other action against me on the basis of this profile ...
The post goes on for about three long paragraphs, but the basic idea is simple: post the message and Facebook isn't allowed to make commercial use of the stuff you've put on the site.
Problem is, this disclaimed post isn't true.
Slate's Will Oremus joins the show to talk about what's behind this new fake Facebook privacy chainletter.
Tanja Hollander's photo project examines real vs. Facebook friendships
Maine-based photographer Tanja Hollander has more than 600 "friends" on Facebook. Having 600 so-called friends got her thinking: "How many of these people are really my buddies?"
To answer that question she decided to travel around the world to meet and photograph each and every one of them. Some of them she knew very well, others she had never met before.
All the pictures are now part of a collection called "Are You Really My Friend?"
Interview Highlights:
On how her quest to photograph her 626 Facebook friends began:
On the difference between common Facebook photos and Hollander’s photos:
On her approach to contact and then photograph her Facebook friends:
On the reaction Hollander has encountered from the people she has met throughout the journey thus far:
On her stipulation of why some her real friends refused to partake in the project:
On life lessons that can be gleaned from social media sites, such as Facebook: