Bulgari shows off Liz Taylor's gems

It isn't easy sometimes to be an ordinary person in Los Angeles, so near to and yet so far from the city's glamorous events.

You hear about the grand Oscar parties, but you will never be invited. The award ceremony may be taking place minutes from where you live, but you watch it at home, on TV, in your sweat pants — and you might as well be in Dubuque.

Rodeo Drive too can make you feel like a scrap on the cutting room floor. As you stroll the wide and immaculate sidewalks of Beverly Hills' iconic shopping street, you pass by boutiques you'd feel self-conscious walking into. In the windows are baubles and trinkets you could never in three lifetimes afford.

Which is why it is rather nice to be invited to make a private appointment at the house of Bulgari, the fine Italian jeweler that opened its doors in 1884.

Elizabeth Taylor loved Bulgari jewels. Richard Burton, whose torrid affair with her began during the filming of "Cleopatra" in Rome, accompanied her often to the flagship shop on the Via Condotti. He liked to joke that the name Bulgari was all the Italian she knew.

So it is fitting that starting Oscar week, the jeweler is celebrating the Oscar-winning star with an exhibit of eight of her most treasured Bulgari pieces.

They are heavy on diamonds and emeralds — of rare size, gleam and value.

And Bulgari knows their value well.

After Taylor's death, it reacquired some of the gems at a Christie's auction. One piece, an emerald-and-diamond brooch that also can be worn as a pendant, sold for $6,578,500 — breaking records both for sales price of an emerald and for emerald price per carat ($280,000).

That brooch, whose centerpiece is an octagonal step-cut emerald weighing 23.44 carats, was Burton's engagement present to Taylor. He followed it upon their marriage (his second, her fifth) with a matching necklace whose 16 Colombian emeralds weigh in at 60.5 carats. Bulgari bought the necklace back too, for $6,130,500.

They are in the exhibit, along with Burton's engagement ring to Taylor and a delicate brooch — given to her by husband No. 4, Eddie Fisher — whose emerald and diamond flowers were set en tremblant so that they gently fluttered as Taylor moved.

The jewels are not for sale.

On Tuesday night, actress Julianne Moore wore the Burton necklace, with pendant attached, at a gala for Bulgari's top clients. At the dinner hour, guests were escorted along a lavender-colored carpet to a nearby rooftop that had been transformed into a Roman terrace.

Those honored guests, of course, got private viewings of Taylor's jewels.

But so did Amanda Perry, a healer from West Hollywood who arrived the next morning for one of the first appointments available to the public.

Someone had emailed news of the collection to the 35-year-old Taylor fan. She walked in off the street Tuesday, when the exhibit was open only to press — and Sabina Pelli, Bulgari's glamorous executive vice president, fresh from Rome, was taking sips of San Pellegrino brought to her on a silver tray between back-to-back interviews that started at 5 a.m.

The camera crews were long gone when Perry came back Wednesday. She had the exhibit, and handsome sales associate Timothy Morzenti of Milan, entirely to herself.

In a black suit, still wearing on his left hand the black glove he dons to handle fine jewels, Morzenti whisked Perry off via a private elevator to the exhibit on the second floor. The jewels stood in vitrines mounted high off the ground. Behind them were photos and a slide show of Taylor, bejeweled.

"Which piece would you like to see first?" Morzenti asked her as a security guard stood by. "I personally love the emerald ring."

Then he proceeded at leisure to explain Bulgari-signature sugar-loaf cuts and trombino ring settings, while tossing in occasional Taylor stories.

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China Says Army Is Not Behind Attacks in Report

SHANGHAI — A day after a United States security company accused a People’s Liberation Army unit in Shanghai of engaging in cyberwarfare against American corporations, organizations and government agencies, China’s defense ministry issued a strong denial and insisted that the report was flawed.

At a news conference in Beijing Wednesday, the ministry suggested the allegations were destructive and challenged the study, which was produced by Mandiant, an American computer security company. The report identified P.L.A. Unit 61398 in Shanghai as one of the most aggressive computer hacking operations in the world.

Geng Yansheng, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, said that China had been the victim of cyberattacks that have originated in the United States, and that Mandiant mischaracterized China’s activities.

“Chinese military forces have never supported any hacking activities,” Mr. Geng said at the briefing. “The claim by the Mandiant company that the Chinese military engages in Internet espionage has no foundation in fact.”

On Tuesday, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Hong Lei, made similar remarks, arguing that cyberattacks are difficult to trace because they are “often carried out internationally and are typically done so anonymously.”

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a growing body of digital forensic evidence pointed to the involvement of the P.L.A. Shanghai unit and that American  intelligence officials had also been tracking the unit’s activities.

On its Web site, Mandiant released a lengthy report on Tuesday detailing some of its evidence, including Internet protocol addresses and even the identities of several Chinese individuals it believes were behind some of the attacks. Mandiant said it monitored the hackers as they logged onto social networking sites or through e-mail accounts.

Attempts to contact two of the individuals through telephone numbers and instant message services were unsuccessful. In one case, one of the individuals — whose online profile says he is 28 years old and a graduate of a university that specializes in computer science — declined to answer questions.

Several military analysts said they had also traced some major cyberattacks back to the People’s Liberation Army. and its Shanghai Unit 61398, which is known to be engaged in network security.

Still, many security experts concede that it is difficult if not possible to know for certain where attacks originate because hackers often take control of computers in various locations.

Chinese officials have insisted in recent years that China is one of the biggest targets of cyberattacks.

“Statistics show that Chinese military terminals connected to the Internet have been subjected to large numbers of attacks from abroad, and I.P. addresses indicate that a considerable number of these attacks are from the United States, but we have never used this as a reason to accuse the United States,” the defense ministry said Wednesday. “Every country should handle the problem of cybersecurity in a professional and responsible manner.”

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Oscar Pistorius's House Had Testosterone & Needles, Say Police

Breaking News

By Andrea Billups

02/20/2013 at 08:35 AM EST

Oscar Pistorius

Herman Verwey/City Press/Gallo Images/Getty

As a bail hearing continued Wednesday in the murder case of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, new details have emerged as prosecutors outline their charges that he is guilty of shooting his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp.

Police testified that they discovered testosterone and needles inside the "Blade Runner" Olympian's home, The New York Times reports.

But his defense lawyers said the Olympian took no banned performance-enhancing drugs, describing the substances found as herbal. The athletes, according to the International Paralympic Committee, tested drug-free as late as last September.

Pistorius, 26, has claimed the shooting was a case of mistaken identity.

Prosecution lawyers, questioning a police witness, said shots fired through the bathroom door that night countered Pistorius's claims that he was not wearing his prosthetic legs when he thought he heard an intruder inside his house and fired with a 9 mm handgun through the door.

Steenkamp, 30, was struck three times, in the head, arm and hip. She was buried on Tuesday amid an outpouring of national support and emotional family tributes.

A police detective testified Wednesday that Pistorius had accidentally fired a weapon at a restaurant in January and urged a friend to take responsibility for the shooting, The Times reports. The detective also testified that Pistorius threatened violence over a woman in another altercation.

Pistorius had claimed to investigators that his house was dark at the time he thought an intruder was inside but a witness who testified for the prosecution Wednesday said a light was switched on when the first shots were fired.

That witness said a gunshot rang out, then a woman's screams were heard, the more shots continued. Pistorius's lawyer, however, said that witness, a neighbor, lived 600 yards away.

The emotional Pistorius continued to proclaim his innocence. "I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder, let alone premeditated," Pistorius told the court in an affidavit read by his defense counsel Barry Roux. "I had no intention to kill my girlfriend."

The prosecution, however, was resolute, that this was not an accident but a premeditated act of violence. If convicted, Pistorius would receive life in prison.

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Drug overdose deaths up for 11th consecutive year

CHICAGO (AP) — Drug overdose deaths rose for the 11th straight year, federal data show, and most of them were accidents involving addictive painkillers despite growing attention to risks from these medicines.

"The big picture is that this is a big problem that has gotten much worse quickly," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which gathered and analyzed the data.

In 2010, the CDC reported, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths nationwide. Medicines, mostly prescription drugs, were involved in nearly 60 percent of overdose deaths that year, overshadowing deaths from illicit narcotics.

The report appears in Tuesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

It details which drugs were at play in most of the fatalities. As in previous recent years, opioid drugs — which include OxyContin and Vicodin — were the biggest problem, contributing to 3 out of 4 medication overdose deaths.

Frieden said many doctors and patients don't realize how addictive these drugs can be, and that they're too often prescribed for pain that can be managed with less risky drugs.

They're useful for cancer, "but if you've got terrible back pain or terrible migraines," using these addictive drugs can be dangerous, he said.

Medication-related deaths accounted for 22,134 of the drug overdose deaths in 2010.

Anti-anxiety drugs including Valium were among common causes of medication-related deaths, involved in almost 30 percent of them. Among the medication-related deaths, 17 percent were suicides.

The report's data came from death certificates, which aren't always clear on whether a death was a suicide or a tragic attempt at getting high. But it does seem like most serious painkiller overdoses were accidental, said Dr. Rich Zane, chair of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The study's findings are no surprise, he added. "The results are consistent with what we experience" in ERs, he said, adding that the statistics no doubt have gotten worse since 2010.

Some experts believe these deaths will level off. "Right now, there's a general belief that because these are pharmaceutical drugs, they're safer than street drugs like heroin," said Don Des Jarlais, director of the chemical dependency institute at New York City's Beth Israel Medical Center.

"But at some point, people using these drugs are going to become more aware of the dangers," he said.

Frieden said the data show a need for more prescription drug monitoring programs at the state level, and more laws shutting down "pill mills" — doctor offices and pharmacies that over-prescribe addictive medicines.

Last month, a federal panel of drug safety specialists recommended that Vicodin and dozens of other medicines be subjected to the same restrictions as other narcotic drugs like oxycodone and morphine. Meanwhile, more and more hospitals have been establishing tougher restrictions on painkiller prescriptions and refills.

One example: The University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora is considering a rule that would ban emergency doctors from prescribing more medicine for patients who say they lost their pain meds, Zane said.

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Stobbe reported from Atlanta.

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Online:

JAMA: http://www.jama.ama-assn.org

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov

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AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com

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L.A. Regional Food Bank is thriving at 40

David Navarro drove south from the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club in Lincoln Heights on a recent sun-drenched day, headed to his weekly destination in a dust-gray Ford pickup.

As usual, he couldn't simply cruise into the crowded parking lot of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank on 41st Street near Alameda. He was stopped by an employee who works miracles in the lot, arranging rigs in jigsaw patterns as drivers wait their turn to make food pickups.

The Salvation Army was already there, along with the Good News Central Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Hollywood West Tenant Action Council was pulling in behind Navarro.

"I'll go in now and see what they have today," said Navarro, who told me that back at the Boys & Girls Club, people would be lining up for whatever he brought back.

Once inside the sprawling warehouse, Navarro moved as if he was in a race, trying to get his hands on as many perishables as he could before other drivers claimed them.

"They like any nice vegetables like this," he said, hoisting several crates of firm, stout zucchini onto his pushcart.

Over the course of an hour, Navarro worked up a sweat gathering boxes of bread and mounds of bananas, apples, lettuce and tomatoes. All of this tipped the scales at 556 pounds, and Navarro pushed the teetering cargo outside and loaded it onto his truck.

I thought he was done, but no.

"Now I go back," he said, "and fill the cart again."

In a region of staggering abundance, there is still desperate need. In a culture that wastes tons of food, there is still considerable hunger. And no charitable organization does more to balance the scales than the food bank, which began exactly 40 years ago, on Feb. 20, 1973.

It all began with a Pasadena cook named Tony Collier, who hated seeing perfectly good food getting thrown out at the recovery center where he worked. He began redistributing it to those in need, and the operation just kept growing. Today, it distributes some 200,000 pounds of food daily. A staff of 106 is backed up by 32,000 volunteers who pitch in at least one day a year, sorting food that includes non-perishables such as canned corn, as well as foods such as navel oranges and frozen chicken that have to be turned around quickly, before they go bad.

Each morning, a convoy of food bank trucks retrieves surplus food from farms, supermarket chains and other donors and brings it back to the warehouse, where it is picked up by about 650 agencies. Another 600 groups are on a waiting list to be included in the daily giveaway.

"Four hundred thousand of the 1 million people we serve each year are kids," said Michael Flood, president and chief executive of the food bank.

The challenge of the food bank has been to hook up with farmers whose harvest is sometimes bigger than the demand, or with supermarkets that have stocked more perishable food than they can sell. Ralphs and Vons are among the biggest donors to the food bank.

Still, billions of dollars worth of food ends up in dumpsters every year in the U.S., Flood said. He encourages citizens to be more conscious of waste and get involved in food donations or volunteering at a local pantry or the food bank (for more information, http://www.lafoodbank.org).

If you do happen to wander into the food bank, watch your step or you could get run over by a forklift. They zip around like bumper cars, honking horns as they wheel hulking loads toward the exits. And one of the employees who supervises the flow from delivery trucks to conveyor belts to palates is Valerie Rodriguez.

Rodriguez, like the food she processes, didn't get where she was supposed to go on the first try. The food bank is her second chance. As a teen growing up in South El Monte, she got it all wrong, becoming a drug addict, getting married way too young, losing kids she couldn't care for, and ending up in rehab at several skid row agencies, including the L.A. Mission and Union Rescue Mission.

But then she began straightening herself out, and as part of a welfare-to-work program, Rodriguez was assigned to volunteer at the food bank, not knowing anything about it. That's when she saw the trucks roll in from the missions and made the connection:

The food she'd eaten at the missions came from the food bank. She'd gone from recipient to supplier. And the food bank liked her so much that she was offered a temp job.

"It was after about a year of volunteering here," Rodriguez said.

Later, she was promoted to full time, and she's since remarried and regained custody of her children.

"It's still a struggle," she said. "But my hope and dream and desire is to save and buy a home. I want to have a home for my kids to grow up in."

While Rodriguez supervised volunteers, David Navarro finished loading his pickup and drove north from the food bank with more than 1,000 pounds of food. That evening, volunteers bagged the goods as men and women inched closer to the door of the Boys & Girls Club, eagerly awaiting their care packages.

Jo Ellen Kitchen, a volunteer at the club since the 1980s, told me she'd heard that the country has started to see an economic recovery.

"But it never really seems to get here."

It was Valentine's Day, and 20 people were in line. As dusk drew in around them, Alvina Rodriguez and Teresa Olmeda talked about the challenges of temporary work, low pay and hungry children. On this night, they and the others would go home with dinner because a simple act of compassion 40 years ago keeps rippling across the city.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

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India Ink: A Conversation With: Journalist and Author Rahul Pandita

Rahul Pandita, an associate editor with the Open magazine in Delhi, is a journalist and author who belongs to the Kashmiri Pandit community, Hindus who had to flee the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s during a separatist insurgency by the Muslim majority.

In his memoir, “Our Moon has Blood Clots,” which was released last month, Mr. Pandita chronicles the loss and suffering of his own family to narrate the plight of the estimated 350,000 Kashmiri Hindus who were uprooted from their homes during the conflict.

Mr. Pandita spoke to India Ink recently about why his book was important in the Kashmir discourse and about some of the difficulties he faced in the writing process.

Why did you decide to write this book?

Writing this book has been part of the reason that I became a journalist and pursued literature in college. Otherwise, like most people in the Kashmiri community, I too would have studied engineering, which was important for us [Kashmiri Pandits] then, to regain some of what we had lost in the Kashmir Valley in 1992 after the mass exodus. I really wanted to tell this story.

There is a palpable sense of pain, loss and anger in your writing. How difficult was it for you to write this memoir?

This story has been an extremely difficult story to write. I think I started writing it very seriously from 2000 onwards, when I was a reporter with a television channel.

So I would write chapters and then give up completely because I just couldn’t write it. Then I began again in mid-2000s and again gave up because I wasn’t sure what form it would take. What I also found very unfortunate was how our story was relegated to the margins. And I was not sure if it should come out as a memoir. Many close friends suggested that I should write this as a fictional account—the truth but laced in fiction, because that would be more acceptable to the overall discourse of this country.

At one point, I was very seriously contemplating writing it in the form of a novel. But I think over the last few years I have become very conscious of my identity as a Kashmiri Pandit, and what has happened to us in Kashmir. The anger of the early 1990s and the hardships that we faced in exile have come back all of a sudden in the last few years.

What happened in the last few years that led to this seething anger that you are talking about?

I have just become conscious of the fact that nobody is interested in our story. It is so easy to align it with the right-wing narrative. This liberal discourse I feel is run by these 50, 100 people who contain anything coming from Kashmiri Pandit point of view. They say it’s a B.J.P.-R.S.S. [Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] narrative.

The bigger betrayal for us was denying us our truth, that the night of January 1990 “did not happen.” When some of the excerpts of the book were published in The Hindu and my own magazine, people started writing open letters to me, saying it never happened. For God’s sake, don’t insult the memory of 350,000 Kashmiri Pandits who have suffered it in every nook and corner of the Kashmir Valley! It is being made as if talking about Kashmiri Pandit pain will diminish the Kashmiri Muslim pain, which is not the case. I believe that both these pains have the right to coexist, but as a Kashmiri writer I am not ready to compromise on my truth, no matter how inconvenient it is.

Which portions would you say were the most difficult to chronicle?

The most difficult passages to write were of course the brutal murder of my own brother, my mother’s illness, which we are still struggling with, and it’s only because of the hardships of the exile in the initial years.

I think I also hate when I go to Jammu. I love it at one point because all of my relatives are there, and it’s like a mini Kashmir now in many ways. But when I go there, those images of the suffering of  1990, ’91, ’92, ’93 come back to me, when we had to face the ignominy of doorless toilets that I mention in my book and the way we were treated in Jammu in those one-room dwellings. All that was very difficult to write.

When I return to my book, I realize that I cannot read it any longer. Those emotions come back to me — every single incident, every single passage I write comes back to me.

What was your gut reaction when you visited your house in Kashmir for the first time since the exodus?

Till 2007 I never returned to my home in the Srinagar suburb of Chanapora. I went because I wanted to capture those memories. My mother is so unwell, and my parents have never returned to Kashmir after 1990. I have gone to Kashmir since ’98 as a journalist. I wanted to click some pictures and show it to them.

Throughout the book, I have used the word “home” for my home in Kashmir. I haven’t done it consciously; it just happened to me. I now stay in a Delhi suburb and own an apartment, but that feeling never comes back. It’s a house for me. I take care of it as anyone would do, but that feeling of uprootedness is there.

When I go to Kashmir, there is an acute sense of loss — traveling through the same roads, meeting people and a strong sense of realization that you don’t belong here any longer. Your roots are here, but you don’t own anything here. Your house is no longer your house — that’s very painful.

I think it’s going to be a very difficult journey for me when I return to Kashmir now. Because now I will look at Kashmir through the prism of my book, the memories I evoke in the book.

It is very important for the Kashmiri Pandit community not to lose sight of what happened to us in January 1990. It’s like a festering wound, and I will personally make sure that I keep festering this wound. Otherwise, you are completely lost. Then you become a refugee who has compromised, who has surrendered to destiny. My book begins and ends on a defiant note.

How is this book about Kashmir different from the ones written before?

It’s the first honest account.

Honest in what sense?

The previous books have done this balancing act. I am talking about books written in English–there are a couple of good books written in Hindi, especially “Dardpur,” by Kshama Kaul, which is very powerful.

The tendency of balancing out things — “let’s not make anyone unhappy, not talk about their pain” — is a very valid thing. But then you are compromising on your own story.

Right from the beginning there was this bitterness between the two communities [Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims], which would flare up once in a while in the form of 1986 Anantnag riots or they [Muslims] would break the window pane of our house if India won a cricket match against Pakistan. Those portions are ignored, and those are really the signals. And one needs to talk about it.

This balancing act that some of us have gotten into is because we go back to Kashmir and we have friends from the other end. I have so many Kashmiri Muslim friends. I don’t see why my truth should make them unhappy.

How has it been received in the Kashmir Valley?

It was expected to ruffle a few feathers. Only a minuscule population in Kashmir is willing to own up to what happened to Kashmiri Pandits in 1989-90.

One reason I wrote this book and the way I wrote it was to tell the world that, it is not only the Islamist Muslim with a gun in his hand who is responsible for the brutalization of Kashmiri Pandits. Not all ordinary Kashmiri Muslims took part in this ethnic cleansing, but a substantial number of them did. Otherwise, how would have so many people come out of the mosques on one night in January 1990 and raised frightening slogans against Kashmiri Pandits? And it wasn’t just that one day. All of us know how so many of us were killed.

The dominant reaction was expected. But I am also hopeful. I am in touch with a few Kashmiri youngsters who are validating my story because they know what has happened. Some of them are very vocal on social media networks.

If you had not been a journalist, would you have written this book differently?

The advantage of being a journalist is that you know your story well. You know how to present it well. Writing is about the structure, something you learn while you are at it.

I have written this book with a strict journalistic rigor. Memory is very slippery at times, so I have validated and re-validated everything that came from my memory. I have tallied and re-tallied everything from newspaper archives and official documents from that time.

If I was not a journalist or a writer, I don’t think the book would have been so raw.

(The interview has been condensed and lightly edited.)

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Kate Looks Great at First Official Outing Since Babymoon

By Simon Perry

UPDATED
02/19/2013 at 08:45 AM EST

• Originally published 02/19/2013 at 08:25 AM EST

Making her first official public appearance since her Caribbean babymoon, a tanned and healthy-looking Duchess of Cambridge showed off her blooming baby bump Tuesday morning during a visit to a residential treatment center run by one of her patronages, Action on Addiction.

Just back from a winter break in Mustique, Kate, 31, chose a gray MaxMara Studio dress paired with pearl drop earrings.

"She looked really relaxed and rested after her break. She could have worn a coat, but she looked happy to show off her bump," says Judy Wade, the royals writer for the Observer.

"It's nice to be back," Kate said as she greeted Action on Addiction's chief executive, Nick Barton. "It's a lovely day for it."

Kate also acknowledged how she felt about having a baby as she chatted with those at the center.

Said Lisa, 34, a mother of three: "I asked her if she was nervous about having a child, and she said it would unnatural if she wasn't. It's just human, isn't it?"

Another woman, Natalie, 28, is carrying a baby due in late July, and said after speaking to Kate, "She was saying she had been feeling unwell but was feeling better now."

Next month, the Palace is set to make an announcement on another group of charities and interests that Kate will support.

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Hip implants a bit more likely to fail in women

CHICAGO (AP) — Hip replacements are slightly more likely to fail in women than in men, according to one of the largest studies of its kind in U.S. patients. The risk of the implants failing is low, but women were 29 percent more likely than men to need a repeat surgery within the first three years.

The message for women considering hip replacement surgery remains unclear. It's not known which models of hip implants perform best in women, even though women make up the majority of the more than 400,000 Americans who have full or partial hip replacements each year to ease the pain and loss of mobility caused by arthritis or injuries.

"This is the first step in what has to be a much longer-term research strategy to figure out why women have worse experiences," said Diana Zuckerman, president of the nonprofit National Research Center for Women & Families. "Research in this area could save billions of dollars" and prevent patients from experiencing the pain and inconvenience of surgeries to fix hip implants that go wrong.

Researchers looked at more than 35,000 surgeries at 46 hospitals in the Kaiser Permanente health system. The research, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, was funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

After an average of three years, 2.3 percent of the women and 1.9 percent of the men had undergone revision surgery to fix a problem with the original hip replacement. Problems included instability, infection, broken bones and loosening.

"There is an increased risk of failure in women compared to men," said lead author Maria Inacio, an epidemiologist at Southern California Permanente Medical Group in San Diego. "This is still a very small number of failures."

Women tend to have smaller joints and bones than men, and so they tend to need smaller artificial hips. Devices with smaller femoral heads — the ball-shaped part of the ball-and-socket joint in an artificial hip — are more likely to dislocate and require a surgical repair.

That explained some, but not all, of the difference between women and men in the study. It's not clear what else may have contributed to the gap. Co-author Dr. Monti Khatod, an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles, speculated that one factor may be a greater loss of bone density in women.

The failure of metal-on-metal hips was almost twice as high for women than in men. The once-popular models were promoted by manufacturers as being more durable than standard plastic or ceramic joints, but several high-profile recalls have led to a decrease in their use in recent years.

"Don't be fooled by hype about a new hip product," said Zuckerman, who wrote an accompanying commentary in the medical journal. "I would not choose the latest, greatest hip implant if I were a woman patient. ... At least if it's been for sale for a few years, there's more evidence for how well it's working."

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Online:

Journal: http://www.jamainternalmed.com

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Garcetti and Greuel trade shots in mayoral candidates debate

Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti disparaged rival Wendy Greuel's record as city controller and mocked her campaign platform Monday night in a feisty debate that highlighted the intensifying clash between the top two contenders in the race for mayor.

Greuel defended her record and agenda, but declined to take direct shots at Garcetti. Instead, she accused the entire City Council of failing to act on her findings of waste, fraud and abuse at City Hall.

"They can attack me," she said. "They can attack my numbers. They can attack my auditors. But the one thing they haven't done is attack the problem."

Garcetti's aggressive posture in the Cal State L.A. debate reflects the increasing pressure he faces as Greuel reaps the benefits of more than $1 million in advertising by independent committees funded by public employee unions and other supporters.

It also overshadowed efforts by three other candidates — Councilwoman Jan Perry, entertainment lawyer Kevin James and former tech executive Emanuel Pleitez — to decisively break from the pack during the 90-minute debate, televised live on KABC-TV Channel 7. Voters go to the polls in two weeks.

Garcetti began his assault by challenging as "simply not true" Greuel's frequent statements that she identified $160 million in squandered city money.

"It rests on an accounting maneuver and on unrealistic projections," he said, citing a Times review of audits by Greuel's office.

"What is real," he added, "is real pension reform like we've done the last few years, real cuts and consolidations — the tough choices — not just identifying potential savings, but actually enacting them."

Greuel told viewers that two former controllers, Laura Chick and Rick Tuttle, were supporting her.

"They told me that City Hall would try and kill the messenger, and that's what they're trying to do," she said. "And apparently my opponents don't feel there is any waste. I know there is and I'm going to do something about it."

Garcetti's offensive left James, a former federal prosecutor, in the unfamiliar role of watching another candidate play attack dog.

Nonetheless, he said large raises for city employees — approved by Garcetti, Perry and Greuel when she was on the City Council — show that three longtime officials were "too cozy with the union leaders that have run City Hall."

"We'll talk about cozy later, Mr. James," Perry responded. She too portrayed herself as independent.

"I'm not the favorite of the political power-brokers or insiders because I've never been willing to cut backroom deals or make promises to special interests," said Perry, whose campaign mailers have accused Greuel of selling out to the union representing DWP workers in return for support.

Pleitez struck similar notes, saying he was "tired of the same politicians saying what they're doing, yet the results — there's nothing to show for them."

"Let's take our city in a new direction," said Pleitez.

But it was Garcetti's attacks that stood out.

Alluding to $700,000 spent by the city utility employees' union to benefit Greuel, Garcetti asked, "Do you want a DWP union to buy this election by spending a million dollars on Ms. Greuel's campaign? Or do you want a mayor who is independent enough to make the right decisions and to preserve our democracy?"

Taking aim at her plan to hire more than 2,000 new police officers and 700 new firefighters and paramedics by 2020, Garcetti cited Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's criticism of the plan as unrealistic, given the city's budget troubles.

Greuel defended her plan and attacked the council for cutting the Fire Department's budget after the recession hit. She also noted her endorsements by public safety unions.

"The police officers and the firefighters had a choice," she said. "They chose me."

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

david.zahniser@latimes.com

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IHT Rendezvous: Holding Obama's Feet to the Climate-Change Fire

At first glance, it was hard to tell whether they had come to bury Obama or to praise him.

Thousands of activists from hundreds of environmental, social justice and community groups marched on Washington yesterday in the biggest climate rally ever held in the U.S. capital. Activists both called on President Obama to make good on his climate change policy promises and protested the Keystone XL pipeline project.

“For 25 years our government has basically ignored the climate crisis: now people in large numbers are finally demanding they get to work,” Bill McKibben, head of 350.org, one of the environmental groups organizing the event, told the crowd.

The “Forward on Climate” rally comes less than a week after President Obama urged American leaders to “act before it is too late,” on climate change during his State of the Union address.

The demonstration’s timing — early in the administration’s second term — was important. While many say Mr. Obama achieved important green goals in his first term (Rendezvous wrote about tougher fuel efficiency standards for cars), critics say he did not achieve enough in the fight to address climate change. Many blame an uncooperative Congress and the always-looming re-election campaign. (The words “climate change” were not uttered during any of the three presidential debates between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney.

The secretaries of the interior and energy — portfolios where green leadership is seen as important — are being replaced. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, announced her resignation late last year.

Despite the President’s recent emphatic address to the nation, critics point out that his speech was short on details. And for many of the organizers of yesterday’s rally, the fact that the President did not mention the controversial Keystone XL pipeline — a pipeline that is to bring crude oil from Canada to Texas refineries — was a warning sign.

At the rally on the National Mall, activists from the ‘Backbone Campaign’ carried a 70-foot model of a spine, with an anti-Keystone XL pipeline message painted on the side, imploring the President to stand strong against the project.

As my colleagues John M. Broder, Clifford Krauss and Ian Austen reported, the Keystone XL pipeline issue is particularly thorny for Mr. Obama because the project is so detested by environmentalists, but supported by so many other players, including the government of Canada, one of the United States’ most important trading partners.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed an energy bill that would allow Congress, rather than the White House, to issue a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The President had put plans for the pipeline on hold temporarily.

On the same day in the Senate, several senators co-sponsored legislation for a carbon tax program that would finance clean-energy projects, in a move largely seen as symbolic because of the legislation’s scant chance of passing either house of Congress.

Partially due to recent extreme weather events, the issue of climate change is once more at the forefront of American politics. A survey carried out by the League of Conservation voters found that 65 percent of American voters were in favor of “the President taking significant steps to address climate change now.”

“Twenty years from now on President’s Day, people will want to know what the President did in the face of rising sea levels, record droughts and furious storms brought on by climate disruption,” said Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, an environmental organization that helped organized Sunday’s rally.

A man dressed as the grim reaper held a sign that read: “the only steady job on a dying planet will be mine.”

While no official attendance numbers were recorded, participating organizations estimated that more than 35,000 people attended. On its Facebook page, 350.org claimed that 50,000 protesters took part in the event.

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