British Government Seeks to Limit Disclosure in Litvinenko Case

The British government sought on Tuesday to limit the information it is ready disclose at a planned inquest into the death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former officer in the K.G.B. who died of radiation poisoning in London more than six years ago, and the coroner hearing the case said it may now be postponed.

“Due to the complexity of the investigation which necessarily precedes the hearings” Sir Robert Owen, the coroner said, the planned May 1 start date for the hearings could represent “a timetable to which it may not be possible to adhere.”

The inquest would be the first — and likely the only — public forum at which witnesses would testify under oath about the killing, which strained Britain’s relationship with the Kremlin and kindled memories of the cold war.

The prospect of a postponement brought charges from Ben Emmerson, a lawyer representing Mr. Litvinenko’s widow, Marina Litvinenko, that the British government was trying to gag the inquiry in order to protect lucrative trade deals with Russia.

Referring to Prime Minister David Cameron, Mr. Emmerson said on Tuesday that “the British government, like the Russian government, is conspiring to get this inquest closed down in exchange for substantial trade interests which we know Mr. Cameron is pursuing."

He added: "One has to ask what is going on at the highest level of Her Majesty’s Government, particularly when the highest levels are building bridges with the Kremlin."

The British government, he said, had “no right to say to an independent judiciary, ’you may not investigate these issues’. That happens in Russia, for sure.”

“This has all the hallmarks of a situation which is shaping up to be a stain on British justice,” the lawyer said.

Sir Robert, the coroner, said he would rule on Wednesday on the government’s application for a so-called Public Interest Immunity Certificate, usually issued on the grounds of national security, which would prevent the inquest from hearing information on topics without explaining what those issues were.

British analysts say they believe Britain is keen to avoid disclosing any information that might link Mr. Litvinenko to the British security services.

Last December, Mr. Emmerson, the lawyer, told a preparatory hearing that that Mr. Litvinenko was a “registered and paid agent and employee of MI6,” as the British Secret Intelligence Service is known. Mr. Litvinenko also worked for the Spanish intelligence service, Mr. Emmerson said, and both the British and Spanish spy agencies made payments into a joint account with his wife. The lawyer added that the inquest should consider whether MI6 failed in its duty to protect the onetime KGB officer against a “real and immediate risk to life.”

Mr. Litvinenko, who fled Russia in 2000 and styled himself a whistle-blower and foe of the Kremlin, died in November 2006, aged 43, weeks after he secured British citizenship. He had ingested polonium 210 — a rare radioactive isotope — at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London’ central Grosvenor Square.

Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service is seeking the extradition from Russia of Andrei K. Lugovoi, another former K.G.B. officer, to face trial on murder charges. Mr. Lugovoi denies the accusation and Russia says its Constitution forbids it from sending its citizens to other countries to face trial.

The coroner has said in previous hearings that he will examine what was known about threats to Mr. Litvinenko and would also seek to determine whether the Russian state bore responsibility. In a deathbed statement, Mr. Litvinenko directly blamed President Vladimir V. Putin, who dismissed the accusation. Mr. Emmerson, the lawyer, complained on Tuesday that the preparations for the inquest were becoming “bogged down” by “the government’s attempt to keep a lid on the truth.”

“It is the government’s secret files that are delaying this inquest.”

British media outlets including the BBC and The Guardian newspaper are opposing the government’s effort to restrict evidence. The Guardian said that “the public and media are faced with a situation where a public inquest into a death may have large amounts of highly relevant evidence excluded from consideration by the inquest. Such a prospect is deeply troubling.”

But the Foreign Office said the authorities had made their application in line with their “duty to protect national security” and the coroner would rule according to “the overall public interest.”

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Oscars 2013: An 'Argo' night at Academy Awards

For the second straight year, the movie business fell for itself.

"Argo" — in which a Hollywood producer and makeup artist help engineer the rescue of six Americans from Iran — won the top prize at the 85th Academy Awards, one year after the silent film story "The Artist" took the best picture Oscar.

"I never thought I'd be back here. And I am," producer-director Ben Affleck said in accepting the best picture trophy Sunday night, 15 years after he won an original screenplay Oscar for "Good Will Hunting" and then saw his career fall into a tailspin that included "Gigli" and "Daredevil."

FULL COVERAGE: Oscars 2013 | Winners

"It doesn't matter how you get knocked down in life. That's going to happen," said Affleck, who wasn't nominated for directing "Argo," one of nine films in the best picture race. "All that matters is that you've got to get up."

"Argo," which became the first movie to win best picture without its director being nominated since 1989's "Driving Miss Daisy," collected two other Academy Awards, for editing and adapted screenplay. But it was not the evening's most recognized film: That honor went to Ang Lee's "Life of Pi," which won four Oscars — for directing, visual effects, cinematography and score.

"Thank you, movie god," said Lee, whose movie came into the evening with 11 nominations, one behind Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln." The film about the 16th president helped Daniel Day-Lewis make movie history, as he became the only man to ever win three lead actor statuettes. "Lincoln" won one other prize, for production design.

The song-and-dance heavy ceremony, hosted by Seth MacFarlane, hewed closely to a traditional awards show script, but there were several surprises. First Lady Michelle Obama, who joined the ABC telecast from the White House, announced "Argo" as the best picture. And the ceremony featured only the sixth tie in Oscar history and the first since 1994, with the sound editing award split between "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Skyfall." For the first time in Oscar history, six best picture nominees were $100-million blockbusters.

The ceremony was billed as a tribute to music in film, and boasted a number of extravagant musical numbers — including a medley of songs from movie musicals and an appearance by Barbra Streisand, who sang "The Way We Were." The telecast also paid homage to the long running James Bond series, with Adele singing the theme from "Skyfall" and Dame Shirley Bassey performing the theme from 1964's "Goldfinger."

Oscars 2013: Nominee list | Red carpet | Highlights

Jennifer Lawrence, 22, nabbed the lead actress prize for her role as an emotionally unstable widow in "Silver Linings Playbook" — and promptly tripped over her long dress walking up the stairs to accept her statuette. The crowd quickly gave her a standing ovation. "You guys are just standing up because you feel bad that I fell and that's embarrassing," Lawrence said to the applauding crowd at the Dolby Theatre.

The evening's very first award — for supporting actor — was a shocker, with long shot Christoph Waltz winning for his role as bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz in Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" over favored contenders Robert De Niro ("Silver Linings Playbook") and Tommy Lee Jones ("Lincoln"). Waltz, who won the same award three years ago for Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," dedicated his prize to his writer-director, who also won the Oscar for original screenplay. "We participated in a hero's journey — the hero being Quentin," Waltz said.

Tarantino pulled off a mild surprise with the screenplay triumph for his slave-revenge tale. He dedicated his award to his eclectic cast of actors. "I actually think if people know my movies 30-50 years from now it's because of the characters I create," Tarantino said.

Anne Hathaway's supporting actress win for her emotionally raw portrayal of a doomed seamstress in "Les Misérables" was hardly as startling. The 30-year-old had been the odds-on favorite to win since the film first screened for members of the Motion Picture Academy in late November. "It came true," she stage-whispered as she picked up her trophy for her performance, the centerpiece of which is the lament "I Dreamed a Dream."

Oscars 2013: Backstage | Quotes | Best & Worst moments

Some of the evening's wins were bittersweet.

The animated feature Oscar was shared by "Brave" directors Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, an unusual pairing given that Chapman was fired from the Pixar Animation Studios film and replaced by Andrews in the middle of production. "Making these are a struggle — it's a battle, it's a war," Andrews said backstage. "I was very happy it was him who took my place," Chapman said.

Rhythm & Hues Studios, the company behind "Life of Pi's" visual effects win, recently filed for bankruptcy and laid off hundreds of its employees. As Oscar winner Bill Westenhofer addressed the situation in his acceptance speech, he ran over time and the theme from "Jaws" began to play him off the stage. His microphone was cut off just as he said the words "I urge you all…"

William Goldenberg was a double nominee in the film editing category — he worked on both "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty" — and won the prize for Affleck's CIA drama.

"Working at my father's deli, I had to do a million things at one time," Goldenberg said backstage about the best training for his job. "It really does prepare you for the multitasking it takes to be in an editing room."

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Amazon May Seem Unstoppable, But Google Is Powering the Counterattack

Back in 1990, other stores still had a chance against Walmart. As recalled in Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect, a great history of the rise of the retail giant, it was that year when Walmart surpassed Kmart in sales. It wasn’t until 1992 that Walmart sold more than Sears. But by 2011, Walmart had higher sales worldwide than the combined total sales of the next six biggest retailers: Kroger, Target, Walgreens, Costco, Home Depot and CVS.

That year, Amazon ranked 15th on the list of overall largest retailers. Its sales for the past year, however, are likely to bump it to at least number seven in the rankings, ahead of CVS, and just a few billion behind Target. Amazon is bigger than Lowe’s, Best Buy, Safeway, Macy’s and Rite Aid, not to mention Kmart and Sears (now both part of the same company). Some Wall Street analysts believe Amazon’s sales could yet triple by 2016, which would make Walmart and Amazon the only two true rivals in retail.

The single best precedent for Amazon’s rise is Walmart’s own, and whether one day Amazon could top Walmart will be interesting to see. In the meantime, if its own experience offers any lesson, Amazon cannot rest. Though the company continues to cement its dominance as the internet’s default destination for buying stuff, a small army of little guys are seeking to peel off chunks of Amazon’s business, much as Amazon started out by taking aim at bookselling. And if Amazon was able to unseat so many iconic stores in just 15 years, then Jeff Bezos knows that the same could happen to him.

Bezos also knows that, unlike him, the startups biting Amazon’s ankles have an ally that sports a huge pair of shoulders on which to stand. Oh, and unlike Amazon, this giant – Google – makes huge profits.

Google’s increasingly aggressive effort to steal online retail from Amazon is turning into one of the most intriguing business battles of the year, and not just because of the sight of two behemoths pounding on each other. Google’s unique position in the internet’s infrastructure means that it can count on more than its own resources to take on Amazon. The search giant also serves as the platform from which everyone else trying to beat Amazon can use to fire their salvos. It’s a pretty high perch from which to take aim.

San Francisco-based Inkling is specifically shooting for Amazon’s book business. Founder and CEO Matt MacInnis observes that the Kindle isn’t especially well suited to the oversized, graphics-intensive layouts of many textbooks. Inkling seeks to overcome this limitation of traditional e-book formats through a layout engine specifically designed to re-envision textbooks for tablets, smartphones and the web.

But elegant design doesn’t take you far if most online shoppers are going straight to Amazon to buy books. That’s why Inkling has developed an information architecture based on the concept of “cards.” Each of the books is divided into chapters, and each chapter is divided into cards. A card contains what amounts to one quantum of useful information. Cards themselves are viewable for free on a limited basis; readers can buy Inkling’s books by the chapter. Each card also has its own URL, which means Inkling’s cards are what Google indexes.

Inkling is banking on the quality of the information in its cards to rise to the top of Google search results (and generate attention on social media) to get Inkling’s books noticed. People aren’t going to discover content through Inkling, MacInnis says. They’re going to discover Inkling through content.

With Google’s search results as a storefront, MacInnis believes his company can unlock the value of knowledge contained in books without arbitrarily tying buyers of digital content to an object in the physical world. “People are looking for knowledge,” he says. “They’re not looking for books. They never were.”

Challengers to Amazon in the broader retail realm are staking their value to an analogous belief. People want their stuff. They want it fast, for the lowest price possible and from someone they trust. And that someone doesn’t have to be Amazon.

Bigcommerce CEO Eddie Machaalani says more than 30,000 small and medium-sized business owners are running their online stores via his company’s shopping platform, which has processed more than $1.2 billion in transactions since launching in 2009. Machaalani describes Amazon as a “frenemy” to third-party sellers, who have become an increasingly important part of its strategy.

“Amazon can show they’re a friend to small and medium-sized businesses by offering them a platform that allows them to sell,” he says. “What they don’t do is allow you to control your own brand.”

Machaalani argues that businesses that rely on Amazon as the platform through which they sell their stuff lose their individual identity. No matter who actually provided the inventory, most customers will just think of what they bought as coming from Amazon. His company’s success hinges on businesses building their own strong, unique brand identity to attract shoppers to their own stores. And one of the key places that strong brand becomes visible, he says, is Google.

Big retailers seeking to play that same Google game don’t need online stores, which they already have. They need better online stores that get noticed. Silicon Valley startup Bloomreach does search-engine optimization on what CEO Raj De Datta describes as a big data scale. His company’s analytics engine crawls billions of webpages and parses a similar number of search queries and clicks to learn what webpages draw shoppers seeking particular products — and how Bloomreach’s clients can become those pages. By that measure, success means shoppers clicking through from Google to Bloomreach-powered sites like Williams-Sonoma and Nieman Marcus instead of Amazon, of course assuming they didn’t start out on Amazon in the first place.

“In order to aid that Google experience,” Datta says, “it’s really important that the websites behind Google provide a compelling experience.”

Getting shoppers to those individual retailer sites appears to have helped another Amazon rival. For $79 per year, ShopRunner offers unlimited two-day shipping from dozens of retailers you’d typically find at the mall. It’s a kind of Amazon Prime-in-a-box for stores like Toys”R”Us, PetSmart and Radio Shack. ShopRunner recently said that orders across its network more than doubled last year from the year before.

But the company is wary of giving Google too much credit. Since converting its product search results to all-paid listings last fall, Google appears to be driving a lot more traffic to its advertisers’ sites.

But Google’s bid to become the anti-Amazon destination for online shoppers cuts both ways, says Fiona Dias, ShopRunner’s chief strategy officer.

“Google will likely evolve from a friend of retailers to a foe,” she says. “Google Shopping just needs a ‘buy now’ button to become a retailer rival.”

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Warner Bros. takes home Oscar gold, sales boost for “Argo”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Time Warner Inc‘s Warner Bros. basked in the golden glow of coveted Best Picture Oscar for its Iran hostage drama “Argo” on Sunday, giving the Ben Affleck film a likely boost for its ticket and home entertainment sales.

Hollywood‘s big night often proves a boon to studios that take home Oscars, and this year the haul was spread among several major film companies.

Among the Best Picture competitors, shipwreck drama “Life of Pi” from News Corp’s 20th Century Fox studio earned the most awards – four – including Best Director for Ang Lee.

“Les Miserables,” made by Comcast Corp’s Universal Pictures, secured a Best Supporting Actress win for Anne Hathaway and two others.

Besides grabbing the big prize, “Argo” took home two other trophies for Best Adapted Screenplay and Film Editing.

Winning a golden statuette can boost receipts by one-third or more.

Last year, ticket sales for “The Artist” gained 41 percent after it won the top film prize, according to the box office division of Hollywood.com.

Before this year’s awards show, the nominees already racked up a combined $ 2 billion in global sales, with six of the nine contenders topping $ 100 million at the domestic box office.

Ticket sales for “Argo,” directed by and starring Ben Affleck, surpassed the expectations of Warner Bros. executives, topping $ 127 million at theaters in the United States and Canada, plus $ 77 million in international markets. The film was released on DVD last week and should see a spike in sales.

When Lionsgate Entertainment surprisingly took home the gold for “Crash” in 2006, it had already been released in both the theatrical and DVD markets. Its DVD sales spiked after the Academy Awards, with Lionsgate selling 17,500 copies of “Crash” in one day after the Oscars, more than half the previous week’s entire total of 33,000.

“Argo,” a $ 45 million production, recounts a real-life CIA mission to rescue six American diplomats from Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, under the cover of making a fake Hollywood film called “Argo.”

Fox’s “Life of Pi” had scored $ 583 million in global ticket sales ahead of Sunday night’s awards, overcoming skepticism that the book adaptation about a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger would work on the big screen.

“Everyone at Fox, thank you for taking the leap with me!” Lee said onstage as he accepted his Best Director award.

The victory for “Argo” in the Best Picture category ended the winning streak for independent studio The Weinstein Company, which took home the Best Picture trophy last year for “The Artist” and the prior year for “The King’s Speech.”

The studio run by brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein went into the night with 16 nominations, including Best Picture nominations for “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Django Unchained.”

The Weinstein Company finished the evening with three awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz in “Django” and Best Actress for Jennifer Lawrence in “Silver Linings.”

Fox, which led rivals going into the ceremony with 31 nominations, ended the night with a total of six, four for “Pi” and two for the international distribution of “Lincoln.”

Sony topped all studios with seven wins, including best foreign language film “Amour” and Best Documentary for “Searching for Sugar Man.” It shared in the two wins for “Django” as the film’s international distributor.

Sony’s thriller, “Zero Dark Thirty,” the controversial account of the CIA’s search for Osama bin Laden, landed just one technical award, for sound editing, in a category that was a tie.

Walt Disney Co earned the Best Animated Feature award for Pixar movie “Brave” about a spunky red-headed princess, plus three other awards.

Disney-distributed film “Lincoln,” produced by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, went home with just two statuettes, Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and Production Design, after going into the night with an industry-leading 12 nominations.

The film about the 16th U.S. president is leading Best Picture nominees in the box office race, however, selling $ 179 million worth of tickets at U.S. and Canadian theaters in addition to $ 59 million in international markets

(Edited by Ronald Grover and Mary Milliken)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds

About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study found.

The findings, published on the New England Journal of Medicine’s Web site on Monday, were based on the first major clinical trial to measure the diet’s effect on heart risks. The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.

The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight and most of them were already taking statins, or blood pressure or diabetes drugs to lower their heart disease risk.

“Really impressive,” said Rachel Johnson, a professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. “And the really important thing — the coolest thing — is that they used very meaningful end points. They did not look at risk factors like cholesterol of hypertension or weight. They looked at heart attacks and strokes and death. At the end of the day, that is what really matters.”

Until now, evidence that the Mediterranean diet reduced the risk of heart disease was weak, based mostly on studies showing that people from Mediterranean countries seemed to have lower rates of heart disease — a pattern that could have been attributed to factors other than diet.

And some experts had been skeptical that the effect of diet could be detected, if it existed at all, because so many people are already taking powerful drugs to reduce heart disease risk, while other experts hesitated to recommend the diet to people who already had weight problems, since oils and nuts have a lot of calories.

Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet is powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.

Low-fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain — a reality born out in the new study, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

“Now along comes this group and does a gigantic study in Spain that says you can eat a nicely balanced diet with fruits and vegetables and olive oil and lower heart disease by 30 percent,” he said. “And you can actually enjoy life.”

The study, by Dr. Ramon Estruch, a professor of medicine at the University of Barcelona, and his colleagues, was long in the planning. The investigators traveled the world, seeking advice on how best to answer the question of whether a diet alone could make a big difference in heart disease risk. They visited the Harvard School of Public Health several times to consult Dr. Frank M. Sacks, a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention there.

In the end, they decided to randomly assign subjects at high risk of heart disease to three groups. One would be given a low-fat diet and counseled on how to follow it. The other two groups would be counseled to follow a Mediterranean diet. At first the Mediterranean dieters got more intense support. They met regularly with dietitians while the low-fat group just got an initial visit to train them in how to adhere to the diet followed by a leaflet each year on the diet. Then the researchers decided to add more intensive counseling for them, too, but they still had difficulty staying with the diet.

One group assigned to a Mediterranean diet was given extra virgin olive oil each week and was instructed to use at least 4 tablespoons a day. The other group got a combination of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts and was instructed to eat about an ounce of them each day. An ounce of walnuts, for example, is about a quarter cup — a generous handful. The mainstays of the diet consisted of at least 3 servings a day of fruits and at least two servings of vegetables. Participants were to eat fish at least three times a week and legumes, which include beans, peas and lentils, at least three times a week. They were to eat white meat instead of red, and, for those accustomed to drinking, to have at least 7 glasses of wine a week with meals.

They were encouraged to avoid commercially made cookies, cakes and pastries and to limit their consumption of dairy products and processed meats.

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Many Cruise Ship Lack Backup Power Systems, Vexing Regulators

Denis Poroy/Associated Press

The Carnival Splendor cruise ship was towed into San Diego Bay in 2010, after a fire destroyed its electrical systems.

It is becoming a familiar tale: When the cruise ship was towed into port, the endless hours for passengers of sleeping on deck and going without electricity or toilets were finally over.

“It was really hell,” said Bernice Spreckman, who is 77 and lives in Yonkers, N.Y. “I used my life jacket, which was flashing with a little light on it, to find a bathroom it was so dark.”

Ms. Spreckman was not among the 4,200 people aboard the Carnival Triumph who this month endured five days of sewage-soaked carpets and ketchup sandwiches. Her trial at sea came in 2010, on another ship run by Carnival Cruises, called the Splendor, which carried 4,500 passengers.

On both ships, fires broke out below decks, destroying the electrical systems and leaving them helpless. A preliminary Coast Guard inquiry into the Splendor found glaring deficiencies in its firefighting operations, including manuals that called for crew members to “pull” valves that were designed to turn.

But more than two years after the episode, the final report about what happened on the Splendor has yet to appear, a reflection of what critics say is a pattern of international regulatory roulette that governs cruise ship safety.

While the Splendor was based in the United States, the ship was legally registered in Panama, meaning the Panamanian Maritime Authority had the right to lead the investigation. But after the 2010 fire, Panamanian regulators chose to have the Coast Guard take over the inquiry. Then, officials in both countries apparently spent months trading drafts of their reports.

One official in Panama said the authority had completed its review of the Splendor report in October 2012. But a Coast Guard spokeswoman, Lisa Novak, said it still had not “finalized” the report. In the case of the Carnival Triumph, the regulatory scene will shift to the Bahamas, where that ship was registered.

In a recent letter to Coast Guard officials, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, said that cruise ships seemed to have two separate lives. Only during days near port are they closely monitored.

“Once they are beyond three nautical miles from shore, the world is theirs,” said the letter from Senator Rockefeller, who has headed recent inquiries into cruise ship safety.

Cruise industry officials point out that seaborne vacations are extremely safe and that some 20 million people go on cruises annually, with few problems. The most glaring exception to that record occurred last year when a vessel operated by a subsidiary of Carnival, the Costa Concordia, ran aground off the coast of Italy, resulting in 32 deaths.

In the Triumph’s case, the Coast Guard has said that the ship’s safety equipment failed to contain the blaze. And both the Triumph and the Splendor returned from their aborted voyages without serious injuries to passengers or crew.

But those successes also underscore what most travelers do not realize when they book cruises: nearly all ships lack backup systems to help them return to port should power fail because to install them would have cost operators more money.

The results are repeated episodes involving dead ships, with all the discomforts and potential dangers such situations can bring. In another case, in late 2012, the Costa Allegra cruise ship, a sister ship of the Concordia, lost power after a fire in the generator room and it had to be towed under guard from its location in the Indian Ocean.

In many ways, passengers aboard boats like the Triumph and Splendor were lucky because their ships were disabled in calm weather, when instead they could have been knocked out during storms, or when they were far out at sea or in pirate-infested waters, experts said.

“Anything that knocks a ship dead in the water is serious,” said Mark Gaouette, a safety expert and former Navy officer.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

A caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the number of passengers on the Carnival Splendor when it was disabled at sea. There were 4,500 aboard, not 14,500.

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Oscars stage manager braces for his final cues to the stars

He delivered a forgotten harmonica to Stevie Wonder onstage at the Grammy Awards, supplied a shoulder to lean on for a post-hip-surgery Gregory Peck at the Oscars and served as a human Xanax for hundreds of other stars in the most terrifying and exhilarating moments of their careers.

Stage manager Dency Nelson, 61, works behind the scenes at the Oscars, plus at times the Grammys, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Teen Choice Awards, MTV Movie Awards and other shows. This year will mark his 25th — and last, he said — Academy Awards, as he plans to retire from one of show business' least known but most stressful gigs.

An anonymous but critical piece of the Hollywood awards season machinery, stage managers like Nelson control the chaos of the live TV broadcast — they deliver the correct winning envelopes, ensure that the pop-up microphone actually pops up and, most delicately, orchestrate the flow of talent through the stage wings.

Oscars 2013: Nominee list | Ballot | Trivia | Timeline

An avuncular former hippie with twinkling green eyes, a silver earring and a scruffy, salt-and-pepper beard, Nelson is stationed in the stage-right wings, a hot spot where most of the Oscar telecast's jittery presenters enter and elated winners exit.

"It's like air traffic control," he said one recent afternoon at the Dolby Theatre at the Hollywood & Highland Center, where he was preparing for Sunday's show. "Ninety percent of the people in the room don't know my name, but when they round the corner and come into the wings there's a smile, 'Oh, that guy.'"

Even seasoned performers rely on stage managers for assurance in the unforgiving medium of live TV, and backstage figures like Nelson develop a rapport with stars they see at multiple shows.

Last year, before Meryl Streep stepped onto the Oscar stage to present an award, she reviewed her script, smoothed her gown and cast a tentative glance at Nelson. "You'll push me out when it's time?" she asked. He gently led the actress by the arm to the edge of the curtain, sending her off to face an audience of 40 million.

An hour later, after winning lead actress for "The Iron Lady," the first person an emotional Streep saw was Nelson, with a chair and a welcome water bottle.

"Dency's businesslike, but he makes people comfortable," said American Film Institute founder George Stevens Jr., who met him when the recent college grad was lugging heavy film reels for the L.A.-based nonprofit. Charmed by the young man's work ethic, nearly four decades later Stevens still hires him to stage-manage the "Kennedy Center Honors" and "Christmas in Washington" shows every year.

Many of the approximately 500-person backstage crew at the Oscars have been performers themselves, including head stage manager Gary Natoli (Nelson's boss) and a stage manager who specializes in talent, Valdez Flagg, both former actors and dancers.

TIMELINE: Academy Award winners

According to guild minimums, the stage managers must make at least $746 for a 12-hour day, and many work other steady jobs. Thanks to the proliferation of performance-based reality shows such as "American Idol" and "The Voice," there's a lot of work available for the specialized group who know how to do it.

Nelson has stage-managed the game show "Let's Make a Deal" and the syndicated variety program "The Wayne Brady Show."

"Anyone can do this job as long as nothing goes wrong," said Flagg. "If you can't go with the flow, you won't last. You'll freak out."

The year Wonder forgot his harmonica, for instance, the Grammys crew had to think quickly — how do you subtly signal a blind man? Ultimately, Nelson asked the director to frame a tight shot on the singer's face while he sneaked up from below and tugged on Wonder's pant-leg. At the Emmys, when an impostor tried to walk off with "Hill Street Blues" star Betty Thomas' trophy, Nelson skidded on stage with another.

And then there's that other occupational hazard: jerks. "People are just nervous in some cases and take it out on you," Nelson said with a shrug.

This year's Oscar telecast is a particularly taxing one for the stage crew, with many singing and dancing casts to maneuver. The consequences of a missed cue can be dire — at several points in the show, 34.5-foot lifts built into the stage floor will open to move scenery pieces.

Nelson, who grew up in Menlo Park the son of an Army auditor, originally wanted to be an actor. As a child he hosted the Andy Williams Christmas show by himself in front of the Christmas tree, with a toilet paper roll as a microphone.

After graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in theater, he took a job as a driver and mail clerk for AFI and worked behind the scenes as "the guy who guarded the doughnuts" for the 1970s soap opera parody "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" and a cue card man for "Saturday Night Live" and David Letterman.

Play-at-home ballot: Have you made your picks yet?

Along the way he continued to act in commercials, basement theaters and tiny walk-on roles (in Woody Allen's "Manhattan," you can see Nelson stride across Park Avenue carrying an attaché case). "I wasn't really getting anywhere," he said. "I just saw my actor colleagues, their talent, and saw I'm not that."

The frustrated performance experience, however, gives Nelson a nuanced understanding of what the people he's pushing into the lights on Oscar night are feeling. "There have been plenty of times where I have held a trembling hand and smiled," he said. "I so admire anyone who can do that."

The stage crew prepares with the thoroughness of a military campaign. During rehearsals, Nelson marks his show rundown with different colors of highlighters and pens, noting when he'll send a performer upstage or where a piece of scenery will move. Unlike some younger stage managers, he still uses paper, not an electronic device, for storing his "road map."

In a change this year, six college film students will deliver the trophies onstage, instead of the usual cadre of models who float from show to show. On Wednesday, Nelson was coaching them on the subtle art of statuette distribution.

"Let the kiss and hug happen," he said, his hands stained with red ink from jotting notes on his script, six roles of tape swinging from his belt. "Just linger upstage, let that traffic happen."

At Nelson's first Oscars, before the students were born, Jack Lemmon was the host. Over the years, Nelson said he's noticed an evolution in the awards show scene, as older performers who approached show business with a certain gentility have given way to a more casual and sometimes cruder generation.

"I'm no prude, but there was a certain formality and respect to things," he said. "I'm sorry to see it go, although I understand the financial necessity 'cause it's about the ratings."

A married father of one grown daughter, Nelson lives in Hermosa Beach and is active in Democratic party politics and environmental causes; he helped found a nonprofit devoted to alternative vehicles called Plug in America (he owns two electric cars). Especially engaged in the union to which stage managers belong, the Directors Guild of America, this year he received the guild's Franklin J. Schaffner Award for service.

He said he's retiring to devote more time to his political passions, but he also appears ready to shed the pressures of awards season.

"I don't want to make any mistakes," Nelson said. "The worst is just before the show starts. That's awful. That last hour in the wings.... It's not calm inside. As I am nearing my retirement, I just keep thinking of Jack Nicholson's line in 'Terms of Endearment' ... 'Inches from a clean getaway.'"

Play-at-home ballot: Have you made your picks yet?

rebecca.keegan@latimes.com

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Wired Space Photo of the Day: Glowing Gas in Omega Nebula

This image is a colour composite of the Omega Nebula (M 17) made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximatelly 4.7 x 3.7 degrees.

Image: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin. [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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Britain’s first Oscar-winning animator Bob Godfrey dies at 91

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s first Oscar-winning animator Bob Godfrey, whose work ranged from the children’s TV cartoon “Roobarb” to mock-erotic movies like “Kama Sutra Rides Again”, has died aged 91, his family told the BBC on Friday.

Godfrey, often referred to as “The Godfather of British Animation“, was born in Australia but educated in England and started his career as a graphic artist in London in the 1930s before gaining work in the film industry.

He was the first British animator to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for his 1975 musical comedy “Great”, about civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Godfrey was nominated three other times for Oscars, including for his 1971 short film “Kama Sutra Rides Again”, one of his mock-erotic exploitation films that focused on the hypocrisy of British attitudes towards sex.

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick so admired the film that he screened it alongside UK showings of “A Clockwork Orange”.

“Much of Godfrey’s work has been predicated on satirizing the foibles and minutiae of what it means to be ‘British’,” said his biography on the British Film Institute website.

For nearly 50 years Godfrey worked with some of animation’s biggest names including Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, poking fun at orthodoxy and establishment thinking. He retired in 1999.

His work ran along two tracks – adult material and quirky children’s cartoons which he wanted to appeal to adults too.

He was known for his children’s cartoons “Roobarb”, about a warring cat and dog, and “Henry’s Cat”.

His death comes after the death on Sunday of veteran actor Richard Briers, aged 79, who narrated “Roobarb” and also the character of Brunel in Godfrey’s film “Great”.

Aardman Animations studio founder Peter Lord tweeted: “Dear old Bob Godfrey is no more. A great influence and inspiration to me and my generation of animators. Also a lovely bloke.”

In an interview with the Guardian in 2001, Godfrey said he had one professional regret.

“I’d love to have done a full-length feature but I can’t seem to stretch myself to that length,” he told the newspaper.

“When you look at my films, they appear to be a series of 30-second commercials cut together. I’m a short distance man whether I like it or not.”

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith; editing by Andrew Roche)

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The Texas Tribune: Advocates Seek Mental Health Changes, Including Power to Detain

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

The Sherman grave of Andre Thomas’s victims.

SHERMAN — A worried call from his daughter’s boyfriend sent Paul Boren rushing to her apartment on the morning of March 27, 2004. He drove the eight blocks to her apartment, peering into his neighbors’ yards, searching for Andre Thomas, Laura Boren’s estranged husband.

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

For more articles on mental health and criminal justice in Texas, as well as a timeline of the Andre Thomas case: texastribune.org

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

Laura Boren

He drove past the brightly colored slides, swings and bouncy plastic animals in Fairview Park across the street from the apartment where Ms. Boren, 20, and her two children lived. He pulled into a parking spot below and immediately saw that her door was broken. As his heart raced, Mr. Boren, a white-haired giant of a man, bounded up the stairwell, calling out for his daughter.

He found her on the white carpet, smeared with blood, a gaping hole in her chest. Beside her left leg, a one-dollar bill was folded lengthwise, the radiating eye of the pyramid facing up. Mr. Boren knew she was gone.

In a panic, he rushed past the stuffed animals, dolls and plastic toys strewn along the hallway to the bedroom shared by his two grandchildren. The body of 13-month-old Leyha Hughes lay on the floor next to a blood-spattered doll nearly as big as she was.

Andre Boren, 4, lay on his back in his white children’s bed just above Leyha. He looked as if he could have been sleeping — a moment away from revealing the toothy grin that typically spread from one of his round cheeks to the other — except for the massive chest wound that matched the ones his father, Andre Thomas (the boy was also known as Andre Jr.), had inflicted on his mother and his half-sister as he tried to remove their hearts.

“You just can’t believe that it’s real,” said Sherry Boren, Laura Boren’s mother. “You’re hoping that it’s not, that it’s a dream or something, that you’re going to wake up at any minute.”

Mr. Thomas, who confessed to the murders of his wife, their son and her daughter by another man, was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death at age 21. While awaiting trial in 2004, he gouged out one of his eyes, and in 2008 on death row, he removed the other and ate it.

At least twice in the three weeks before the crime, Mr. Thomas had sought mental health treatment, babbling illogically and threatening to commit suicide. On two occasions, staff members at the medical facilities were so worried that his psychosis made him a threat to himself or others that they sought emergency detention warrants for him.

Despite talk of suicide and bizarre biblical delusions, he was not detained for treatment. Mr. Thomas later told the police that he was convinced that Ms. Boren was the wicked Jezebel from the Bible, that his own son was the Antichrist and that Leyha was involved in an evil conspiracy with them.

He was on a mission from God, he said, to free their hearts of demons.

Hospitals do not have legal authority to detain people who voluntarily enter their facilities in search of mental health care but then decide to leave. It is one of many holes in the state’s nearly 30-year-old mental health code that advocates, police officers and judges say lawmakers need to fix. In a report last year, Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit advocacy organization, called on lawmakers to replace the existing code with one that reflects contemporary mental health needs.

“It was last fully revised in 1985, and clearly the mental health system has changed drastically since then,” said Susan Stone, a lawyer and psychiatrist who led the two-year Texas Appleseed project to study and recommend reforms to the code. Lawmakers have said that although the code may need to be revamped, it will not happen in this year’s legislative session. Such an undertaking requires legislative studies that have not been conducted. But advocates are urging legislators to make a few critical changes that they say could prevent tragedies, including giving hospitals the right to detain someone who is having a mental health crisis.

From the time Mr. Thomas was 10, he had told friends he heard demons in his head instructing him to do bad things. The cacophony drove him to attempt suicide repeatedly as an adolescent, according to court records. He drank and abused drugs to try to quiet the noise.

bgrissom@texastribune.org

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