VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – After weeks of anticipation, Pope Benedict sent his first tweet on Wednesday.
“Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.”
The tweet was sent when the 85-year-old pope tapped on a touch screen at the end of his weekly general audience in the Vatican before thousands of people.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella, editing by Paul Casciato)
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Hugh Hefner, 86, officially confirms that he is once again engaged to Crystal Harris, 26, telling his Twitter followers, "I've given Crystal Harris a ring. I love the girl."
And to prove it, Harris posted photos of the big diamond sparkler, calling it "my beautiful ring."
Neither announced a wedding date, though sources tell PEOPLE they're planning to tie the knot at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve.
Whether that still happens remains to be seen.
This is the plan they had in 2011 – a wedding at the mansion – except that Harris called it off just days before the nuptials were scheduled to happen in front of 300 invited guests.
Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris
David Livingston / Getty
A year later, Hefner's "runaway bunny" bounded back to him.
• Reporting by JENNIFER GARCIA
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Turmoil surrounding an unprecedented $3 billion cancer-fighting effort in Texas worsened Tuesday when its executive director offered his resignation and the state's chief public corruption prosecutor announced an investigation into the beleaguered agency.
No specific criminal allegations are driving the latest probe into the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, said Gregg Cox, director of the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit. But his influential office opened a case only weeks after the embattled agency disclosed that an $11 million grant to a private company bypassed review.
That award is the latest trouble in a tumultuous year for CPRIT, which controls the nation's second-largest pot of cancer research dollars. Amid the mounting problems, the agency announced Tuesday that Executive Director Bill Gimson had submitted his letter of resignation.
"Unfortunately, I have also been placed in a situation where I feel I can no longer be effective," Gimson wrote in a letter dated Monday.
Gimson said the troubles have resulted in "wasted efforts expended in low value activities" at the agency, instead of a focused fight against cancer. Gimson offered to stay on until January, and the agency's board must still approve his request to step down.
His departure would complete a remarkable house-cleaning at CPRIT in a span of just eight months. It began in May, when Dr. Alfred Gilman resigned as chief science officer in protest over a different grant that the Nobel laureate wanted approved by a panel of scientists. He warned it would be "the bomb that destroys CPRIT."
Gilman was followed by Chief Commercialization Officer Jerry Cobbs, whose resignation in November came after an internal audit showed Cobbs included an $11 million proposal in a funding slate without a required outside review of the project's merits. The lucrative grant was given to Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics, a biomedical startup.
Gimson chalked up Peloton's award to an honest mistake and has said that, to his knowledge, no one associated with CPRIT stood to benefit financially from the company receiving the taxpayer funds. That hasn't satisfied some members of the agency's governing board, who called last week for more assurances that no one personally profited.
Cox said he has been following the agency's problems and his office received a number of concerned phone calls. His department in Austin is charged with prosecuting crimes related to government officials; his most famous cases include winning a conviction against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2010 on money laundering charges.
"We have to gather the facts and figure what, if any, crime occurred so that (the investigation) can be focused more," Cox said.
Gimson's resignation letter was dated the same day the Texas attorney general's office also announced its investigation of the agency. Cox said his department would work cooperatively with state investigators, but he made clear the probes would be separate.
Peloton's award marks the second time this year that a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant authorized by CPRIT instigated backlash and raised questions about oversight. The first involved the $20 million grant to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston that Gilman described as a thin proposal that should have first been scrutinized by an outside panel of scientific peer-reviewers, even though none was required under the agency's rules.
Dozens of the nation's top scientists agreed. They resigned en masse from the agency's peer-review panels along with Gilman. Some accused the agency of "hucksterism" and charting a politically-driven path that was putting commercial product-development above science.
The latest shake-up at CPRIT caught Gilman's successor off-guard. Dr. Margaret Kripke, who was introduced to reporters Tuesday, acknowledged that she wasn't even sure who she would be answering to now that Gimson was stepping down. She said that although she wasn't with the agency when her predecessor announced his resignation, she was aware of the concerns and allegations.
"I don't think people would resign frivolously, so there must be some substance to those concerns," Kripke said.
Kripke also acknowledged the challenge of restocking the peer-review panels after the agency's credibility was so publicly smeared by some of the country's top scientists. She said she took the job because she felt the agency's mission and potential was too important to lose.
Only the National Institutes of Health doles out more cancer research dollars than CPRIT, which has awarded more than $700 million so far.
Gov. Rick Perry told reporters in Houston on Tuesday that he wasn't previously aware of the resignation but said Gimson's decision to step down was his own.
Joining the mounting criticism of CPRIT is the woman credited with brainstorming the idea for the agency in the first place. Cathy Bonner, who served under former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, teamed with cancer survivor Lance Armstrong in selling Texas voters in 2007 on a constitutional amendment to create an unprecedented state-run effort to finance a war on disease.
Now Bonner says politics have sullied an agency that she said was built to fund research, not subsidize private companies.
"There appears to be a cover-up going on," Bonner said.
Peloton has declined comment about its award and has referred questions to CPRIT. The agency has said the company wasn't aware that its application was never scrutinized by an outside panel, as required under agency rules.
___
Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber
NEW YORK — Brandon Woodard checked out of his midtown Manhattan hotel room Monday afternoon and emerged onto 58th Street a block from Columbus Circle.
As the 31-year-old Playa Vista man walked down the street, a man standing near a Lincoln sedan pulled a hood over his head as Woodard passed. A short time later, the two passed each other a second time. The man turned, pulled out a gun and shot Woodard at close range in the back of the head with a 9-millimeter pistol. He got back into the Lincoln, which pulled away.
The shooting has riveted New York and made for tabloid headlines. New York police have described the killing as an assassination-style attack.
But it has also reverberated in Los Angeles, where Woodard was raised and made his home.
Woodard grew up in Ladera Heights, played basketball at the exclusive Campbell Hall private high school in Studio City and graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 2003. His stepfather, Rod Wellington, said in an interview Tuesday that Woodard was pursuing a law degree at the University of West Los Angeles School of Law (school officials would not confirm if he was enrolled).
His stepfather described Woodard as a "loving son, a loving father and a loving brother." Woodard had a 4-year-old daughter and had a "great relationship" with the girl and her mother, he said.
"He was a good young man," Wellington said.
But court records revealed a more complex picture. Woodard has been arrested at least 20 times, according to New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
In 2004, Woodard was cited by Las Vegas police and summoned to court after a backstage scuffle with a security guard at an Usher concert at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. Police said Woodard had entered a restricted area and refused orders to leave.
He failed to appear in court in connection with the citation and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was arrested in 2008 on that bench warrant but police could not immediately say how the matter was resolved.
Los Angeles authorities allege that in February 2008 he stole items from a Whole Foods Market and a Gelson's. He was sentenced to nine days in county jail and 200 hours of community service.
In December 2009, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run driving charge in Torrance. He received three years and a day in county jail.
Prosecutors said that he came back to court in 2010 and 2011 for probation violation hearings related to arrests for grand theft and battery against a former spouse as well as a spousal battery arrest in January. In April, prosecutors said his probation was completed.
The Los Angeles city attorney's office said there was a hearing related to the September 2010 spousal abuse allegation and noted that a bench warrant had been issued for Woodard's arrest as recently as July 3. It was not immediately clear how the warrant was resolved.
Officials with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said Woodard was due in Beverly Hills Superior Court on Jan. 22 for a hearing in connection with a single charge of cocaine possession. He was originally charged in June.
Court records also indicated that Woodard's mother had been involved in multiple civil lawsuits related to her real estate business dealings. When Woodard was arrested in January, he listed his occupation as real estate.
Neither police nor family members said they have any idea for a motive.
On Tuesday, Kelly said detectives had made progress in their investigation from ballistics evidence and video surveillance footage that captured the shooting and the suspected getaway vehicle.
He added that investigators were pursuing all leads, including Woodard's criminal history and his family's real estate dealings.
Kelly said Woodard, who carried three cellphones, was believed to be a promoter of some kind, but did not elaborate.
It was not clear what brought Woodard to New York after he purchased a one-way ticket from California, Kelly said, or where he was going when he left the hotel. Woodard checked into the hotel Sunday and checked out about 1:15 p.m. the next day.
Kelly said it was clear the gunman lay in wait for Woodard and didn't act alone.
The suspect had a driver who, after the hit, pulled a silver or gray Lincoln onto 58th Street, Kelly said. Once the gunman was in the car, the vehicle headed south on 7th Avenue and disappeared. A short time later, a car "similar in description" was seen heading through the midtown tunnel eastbound into Queens, where the driver paid the toll with cash.
Investigators had the license plate of the vehicle, but Kelly declined to release the information, citing the ongoing investigation.
Kelly also said ballistics analysis linked the weapon to a 2009 shooting in Queens. The gun was fired at a residence, he said — no one was hurt and no arrests were made.
Kelly said Monday's crime was particularly surprising, given such a public setting.
"You can characterize it as either being brazen or foolhardy," he said.
Times staff writers Adolfo Flores, Jeff Gottlieb and Frank Shyong contributed to this report. Susman reported from New York, Mather and Blankstein from Los Angeles.
ULAN BATOR, Mongolia — The concept of a “blue sky country” has become almost a cliché in presentations about Mongolia, the world’s fastest-growing economy last year. The phrase, which evokes the Montana-like landscape of the steppe, paints a picture of sunny investment horizons in this frontier democracy rich in coal, copper and gold.
But visitors to this city, the capital of Mongolia, seldom find a blue sky today. It is smoggy, and soot rains down from the hills, as the poorest residents burn cheap brown coal to stay alive through the winter.
The investment prospects of Mongolia, a darling of the emerging markets, are similarly shifting.
In May, the Parliament passed a law that restricted foreign investment in the country’s most attractive asset, its mineral deposits. The government is also taking aim at a crucial deal with the multinational mining giant Rio Tinto, a pact that many see as the foundation of the country’s recent economic growth.
Now, the underlying fundamentals of the country look increasingly shaky. Mongolia faces a financing crunch, as investment dollars flowing from abroad have fallen. And revenue from coal, the country’s main export, has dropped along with Chinese demand.
“There are a series of elements that have built up less-than-welcoming attitudes to Mongolia at a time when the macroeconomic situation is deteriorating,” said John P. Finigan, the chief executive of Golomt Bank, the country’s second-biggest bank.
Mongolia’s star rose — and is now falling — with the fortunes of one company: Rio Tinto, the country’s largest investor.
In October 2009, Rio Tinto and Ivanhoe Mines, a Canadian exploration company, negotiated a deal with the Mongolian government about developing Oyu Tolgoi, the crown jewel of the country’s mining sector and the world’s biggest new source of copper. The copper and gold mine would cost more than $10 billion to build, and the potential investors wanted assurances. Under the so-called Oyu Tolgoi Investment Agreement, taxes and royalty payments to the government would be fixed for 30 years. At the time, it was considered “the initiation of a new stage in Mongolia’s history,” said Oliver Belfitt-Nash, an analyst at Monet Capital, a Mongolian investment bank.
The agreement set off a boom.
Rio Tinto spent billions of dollars to buy out Ivanhoe’s stake in the project and build the Oyu Tolgoi mine. Investors followed, encouraged by the cooperation between a multinational corporation and a coalition government. Some investors financed smaller mines. Others imported mining equipment or Hummers to sell to newly minted millionaires. Skyscrapers rose in central Ulan Bator.
The impact of this spending was significant in this country of only three million people. Last year — when capital expenditures on the Oyu Tolgoi mine peaked — Mongolia’s gross domestic product increased by 17.5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. It was the fastest-growing economy in the world.
But optimism has fizzled since May. That month, Mongolia passed the Strategic Foreign Investment Law, which states that Parliament must approve foreign takeovers of assets in strategic sectors like mining and banking.
In Ulan Bator, the law was widely seen as a torpedo aimed at one deal, Chalco’s takeover of SouthGobi Resources, a coal mining company. Chalco, China’s largest state-owned mining company, agreed in April to buy a controlling stake in SouthGobi Resources, a Rio Tinto subsidiary, for $926 million. In September, Chalco walked away, citing regulatory uncertainty.
Both foreign investors and local businessmen have complained about the law’s lack of clarity. The rules set up the potential for severe regulatory delays, as politicians from all parties intervene in the deal-making. The government has not yet specified how the law would work in practice, but it has already affected transactions beyond the SouthGobi acquisition.
“We haven’t made any new investments,” said an executive at an financial company with extensive holdings in Mongolia, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. It “is a horrible law. It is very menacing and unclear. At a time when investors are scared of allocating capital anyway, it’s definitely had a negative impact.”
In the months after the law’s passage, foreign direct investment plunged. In September, investment flows from abroad dropped 44 percent compared with the same month in 2011, according to data from the central bank.
The commodity markets are partly to blame for the financing crunch. Prices for coal and copper, the country’s main exports, are lower this year.
But government policies have only worsened the problem. Ovoot Tolgoi, a large coal mine owned by SouthGobi Resources, has suspended its operations for the last six months after the failed deal with Chalco.
Tavan Tolgoi, the state-owned coal mining company, did not export coal for three months this summer. In the run-up to elections in June, the government raided the company’s treasury to pay for cash handouts to the populace.
The ruling party eventually lost the elections. And the policy left Tavan Tolgoi so starved for money that it could not afford to transport its coal to Chinese markets, according to a company official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political nature of the matter.
The combination — the weakness in the mining industry coupled with the government actions — has hurt the country’s finances. The International Monetary Fund expects that Mongolia will face a fiscal deficit of 900 billion tugrik, or $643 million, in 2012, and several policy makers in Ulan Bator expect it to widen next year.
The situation has left the government scrambling to make up the gap, putting the Rio Tinto deal directly in the cross hairs.
Last month, the Parliament approved a budget for 2013 that tries to renegotiate the Oyu Tolgoi Investment Agreement with Rio Tinto. The budget calls for 446 billion tugrik, or $319 million, of extra income from the Oyu Tolgoi mining project next year. This revenue would come from new royalty payments that are up to four times as high as in the original deal. The budget legislation refers to “when the amendment is made,” as if it were already a done deal.
“We believe the recent surge in government support to renegotiate” the deal with Rio Tinto “is to meet the proposed budget deficit,” Dale Choi, an analyst at Origo Partners, a private equity investor in Mongolia, said in a note last month. But revising the deal “would undoubtedly adversely impact both near- and longer-term economic growth and Mongolia’s sovereign risk profile in the global financial markets.”
The changes in the budget could threaten Rio Tinto’s returns. Significantly higher payments to the government could make the project uneconomical, prompting the company to freeze new investment and start international arbitration.
So far, Rio Tinto and its partners have spent more than $6 billion building Oyu Tolgoi, a vast complex that gleams with state-of-the-art equipment in the Gobi Desert. But the investors have not seen a dollar in profit because the mine will not start producing copper until next year. A spokesman for Rio Tinto declined to comment.
The two sides are in a standoff. The mining minister said at a news conference in October, “We have a strong need to renegotiate the investment agreement. If Oyu Tolgoi keep refusing, we will work until they understand and accept the changes.” But the company is unwilling to accept the tax and royalty amendments proposed in the budget, said a person with knowledge of the situation. Low-level discussions between the company and the government are under way, according to people on both sides, who declined to be identified.
Now, Mongolia faces a tough choice.
The country needs the money to plug the hole in the budget. The Rio Tinto deal has also become politically toxic, and the government needs to please many members of its coalition who campaigned and won seats by opposing the agreement.
But foreign investment — the lifeblood of the economy — could dry up if Rio Tinto pulls back.
Even as pessimism about the economy and investment policy deepens in Mongolia, outside investors continue to buy into the country’s “blue sky” future. Last week, Mongolia sold $1.5 billion of sovereign bonds amid strong demand.
In New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, a Mongolia delegation showed a PowerPoint presentation that featured photographs of the wide-open steppe. The first slide reads: “Mongolia: The Country with Unmatched Growth Potential.”
But within Mongolia, some are wondering whether such claims match the reality.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 11, 2012
A previous version of the article said that Chalco walked away from buying a controlling stake in SouthGobi Resources in May. The company walked away in September.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A recently announced hacking of the U.N. nuclear agency’s computer servers was not the first time an attempt had been made to break into the organization’s computer system, the head of the agency said on Thursday.
Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that a few months ago a group broke into the agency’s computer system and stole personal information of scientists working on peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
In response to questions at a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington, Amano repeated what he said last week after the hacking was revealed: no sensitive information about the IAEA‘s nuclear inspections had been stolen.
The IAEA has shut down the server that had been hacked and is continuing an investigation, Amano said. But he also said it wasn’t the first attempt to break into the system.
“If you ask if this is the only case? I would say there have been some other tries but we are doing our best to protect our system,” Amano said.
The hackers – a group using an Iranian-sounding name – have posted scores of email addresses of experts who have been working with the U.N. agency on a website, and have urged the IAEA to investigate Israel’s nuclear activity.
Israel, which has an undeclared nuclear arsenal, and the United States accuse Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran denies such ambitions.
Amano would not say if he believed Iran was behind the attacks on the IAEA, whose missions include preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and which is investigating Iran’s disputed nuclear activities.
“The group … they have what looks like an Iranian name. But that does not mean that the origin is Iran,” he said.
There has been an increase in suspected Iranian cyber attacks this year, coinciding with a deepening standoff with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program.
(Reporting by Deborah Charles. Editing by Warren Strobel and Doina Chiacu)
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Hayden Panettiere and Scotty McKnight
Splash News Online
Nashville star Hayden Panettiere has broken up with her boyfriend of more than a year, New York Jets wide receiver Scotty McKnight, a source confirms to PEOPLE.
But the split doesn't appear to be the stuff of a sad country song. The actress, 23, is still friends with McKnight, 24, and one source tells TMZ that their pals wouldn't be surprised if they got back together.
This is Panettiere's second go at a relationship with an athlete. Before dating McKnight she was with Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko for about two years.
– Julie Jordan
WASHINGTON (AP) — It's about to get faster and easier to diagnose food poisoning, but that progress for individual patients comes with a downside: It could hurt the nation's ability to spot and solve dangerous outbreaks.
Next-generation tests that promise to shave a few days off the time needed to tell whether E. coli, salmonella or other foodborne bacteria caused a patient's illness could reach medical laboratories as early as next year. That could allow doctors to treat sometimes deadly diseases much more quickly — an exciting development.
The problem: These new tests can't detect crucial differences between different subtypes of bacteria, as current tests can. And that fingerprint is what states and the federal government use to match sick people to a contaminated food. The older tests might be replaced by the new, more efficient ones.
"It's like a forensics lab. If somebody says a shot was fired, without the bullet you don't know where it came from," explained E. coli expert Dr. Phillip Tarr of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that losing the ability to literally take a germ's fingerprint could hamper efforts to keep food safe, and the agency is searching for solutions. According to CDC estimates, 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from foodborne illnesses each year, and 3,000 die.
"These improved tests for diagnosing patients could have the unintended consequence of reducing our ability to detect and investigate outbreaks, ultimately causing more people to become sick," said Dr. John Besser of the CDC.
That means outbreaks like the salmonella illnesses linked this fall to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter might not be identified that quickly — or at all.
It all comes down to what's called a bacterial culture — whether labs grow a sample of a patient's bacteria in an old-fashioned petri dish, or skip that step because the new tests don't require it.
Here's the way it works now: Someone with serious diarrhea visits the doctor, who gets a stool sample and sends it to a private testing laboratory. The lab cultures the sample, growing larger batches of any lurking bacteria to identify what's there. If disease-causing germs such as E. coli O157 or salmonella are found, they may be sent on to a public health laboratory for more sophisticated analysis to uncover their unique DNA patterns — their fingerprints.
Those fingerprints are posted to a national database, called PulseNet, that the CDC and state health officials use to look for food poisoning trends.
There are lots of garden-variety cases of salmonella every year, from runny eggs to a picnic lunch that sat out too long. But if a few people in, say, Baltimore have salmonella with the same molecular signature as some sick people in Cleveland, it's time to investigate, because scientists might be able narrow the outbreak to a particular food or company.
But culture-based testing takes time — as long as two to four days after the sample reaches the lab, which makes for a long wait if you're a sick patient.
What's in the pipeline? Tests that could detect many kinds of germs simultaneously instead of hunting one at a time — and within hours of reaching the lab — without first having to grow a culture. Those tests are expected to be approved as early as next year.
This isn't just a science debate, said Shari Shea, food safety director at the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
If you were the patient, "you'd want to know how you got sick," she said.
PulseNet has greatly improved the ability of regulators and the food industry to solve those mysteries since it was launched in the mid-1990s, helping to spot major outbreaks in ground beef, spinach, eggs and cantaloupe in recent years. Just this fall, PulseNet matched 42 different salmonella illnesses in 20 different states that were eventually traced to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter.
Food and Drug Administration officials who visited the plant where the peanut butter was made found salmonella contamination all over the facility, with several of the plant samples matching the fingerprint of the salmonella that made people sick. A New Mexico-based company, Sunland Inc., recalled hundreds of products that were shipped to large retailers all over the country, including Target, Safeway and other large grocery chains.
The source of those illnesses probably would have remained a mystery without the national database, since there weren't very many illnesses in any individual state.
To ensure that kind of crucial detective work isn't lost, the CDC is asking the medical community to send samples to labs to be cultured even when they perform a new, non-culture test.
But it's not clear who would pay for that extra step. Private labs only can perform the tests that a doctor orders, noted Dr. Jay M. Lieberman of Quest Diagnostics, one of the country's largest testing labs.
A few first-generation non-culture tests are already available. When private labs in Wisconsin use them, they frequently ship leftover samples to the state lab, which grows the bacteria itself. But as more private labs switch over after the next-generation rapid tests arrive, the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene will be hard-pressed to keep up with that extra work before it can do its main job — fingerprinting the bugs, said deputy director Dr. Dave Warshauer.
Stay tuned: Research is beginning to look for solutions that one day might allow rapid and in-depth looks at food poisoning causes in the same test.
"As molecular techniques evolve, you may be able to get the information you want from non-culture techniques," Lieberman said.
___
Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick
University of California officials said they were trying to project a "forward-looking spirit" when they replaced the university system's ornate, tradition-clad logo with a sleek, modern one.
What they got was an online revolt complete with mocking memes, Twitter insults and a petition to restore the old logo. Students and alumni have taken to Facebook and Photoshop to express their displeasure, showing the new symbol ready to be flushed down a toilet and as a permanently stalled computer operating system. One critic suggested the controversial image be tattooed on its creators' foreheads as punishment.
UC campuses in the past have been the site of war protests, sit-ins against tuition hikes and Occupy camping demonstrations. This week, the schools are dealing with a unlikely debate about graphic design and whether the new logo demeans the university.
"To a generation all too familiar with circular, fading loading symbols, this is an attempt to be revolutionary. But it comes off as insensitive," Reaz Rahman, a 21-year-old UC Irvine senior who started the online petition, said of the UC's new logo. "To me, it didn't symbolize an institution of higher learning. It seemed like a marketing scheme to pull in money rather than represent the university."
UC officials were caught on the defensive. They emphasize that the traditional seal, with its "Let There Be Light" motto, a drawing of an open book and the 1868 date of UC's founding, is not being abandoned and still will be used on such things as diplomas and official letterhead. But they say that the 1910 seal is so ornate that it does not reproduce well for many Internet uses and that it is often confused with variations created by the 10 individual UC campuses. UC websites are now adorned with the new logo.
It was introduced with little fanfare about six months ago and is now being extended to more UC websites and publications. Officials said it is adaptable and will provide a unified image for fundraising, recruiting and public affairs campaigns.
"We want to convey that this is an iconic place that makes a difference to California and that there is a UC system," said Jason Simon, the UC system's director of marketing communication.
In various colors, it shows a large U that echoes the shape of the old seal's book and contains an interior C at the bottom. The words "University of California" are on its right, and Simon complained that critics usually don't include that text in their depictions of the logo.
Simon said UC has received much favorable feedback about the logo, which was developed by an in-house team of designers. There are no plans to immediately change it in response to the protests, but he suggested that the symbol might evolve over time.
Marketing and design experts said emotional responses are common when institutions change their marketing images. For example, over the past few years, changes in the logos for Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice and the Gap clothing chain triggered consumer protests and the companies then restored the original.
Drastic changes in long-time logos disrupt "a sense of connection," explained Kali Nikitas, chairwoman of the graduate program in graphic design at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. "It's as if you show up at the same coffee shop for years and they start serving you a different coffee. Your routine is broken," she said. And at colleges and universities, reactions can be particularly powerful, she added, "since people really love tradition and legacy at their alma mater. They are really passionate about where they go to school and view it as the cornerstone of their lives."
The older UC logo, she said, conveys a sense of stability while the new one looks "incredibly progressive." She said that people probably will come to accept the new one and "in five years, no one will care."
Such debates have reached college campuses because schools are looking for ways to better compete for donations and applicants, said Petrula Vrontikis, a graphic design professor and branding expert at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. "It is much more about brand differentiation," she said, noting that many of the old college seals looked too much alike. UC has shifted dramatically, she said, "from an institutional look to a marketing look that is young-skewed and vibrant."
But some young people rejected it with online mockery and slashing comments, similar to the ways they reacted to last year's pepper-spraying of student demonstrators by UC Davis police.
"New UC logo is an abomination," wrote one Twitter-user "Back to the drawing board." Another tweeted that "Whoever signed off on this UC logo should be forced to have it tattooed on their forehead for life."
David Bocarsly, UCLA student body president, attributed some of the unusual attention to exam period procrastination.
"During finals week, you have more people on their computers than ever looking for something to do other than study," said Bocarsly, a senior.
Tomo Hirai, a 24-year-old UC Davis graduate, thought the new UC logo looked like "a loading logo" for a computer operating system such as Windows or Mac.
"It cheapened the entire UC System," Hirai said. "That's not what you do to 144 years of history."
So about 30 minutes on Adobe Photoshop was all it took for Hirai to create a logo with the C endlessly circling.
This past weekend, after Hirai shared his modified logo with the world, he said he received a letter from the UC Davis alumni association seeking a donation.
"I'm not paying them a single penny," he said, adding that the logo debacle was the "bitter icing on the cake."
larry.gordon@latimes.com
matt.stevens@latimes.com
Times staff writer Samantha Schaefer contributed to this report.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
In November, Xi Jinping made his official debut as party chief at the 18th party congress, which military officers attended.
BEIJING — In a strong signal of support for greater market-oriented economic policies, Xi Jinping, the new head of the Communist Party, made a visit over the weekend to the special economic zone of Shenzhen in south China, which has stood as a symbol of the nation’s embrace of a state-led form of capitalism since its growth over the last three decades from a fishing enclave to an industrial metropolis.
The trip was Mr. Xi’s first outside Beijing since becoming party chief on Nov. 15. Mr. Xi visited a private Internet company on Friday and went to Lotus Hill Park on Saturday to lay a wreath at a bronze statue of Deng Xiaoping, the leader who opened the era of economic reforms in 1979, when Shenzhen was designated a special economic zone. Mr. Deng famously later visited the city in 1992 to encourage reviving those economic policies after they had stalled following the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.
“Reform and opening up is a guiding policy that the Communist Party must stick to,” Mr. Xi said, according to Phoenix Television, one of several Hong Kong news organizations that covered the trip. “We must keep to this correct path. We must stay unwavering on the road to a prosperous country and people, and there must be new pioneering.”
In the months before the transition, there were widespread calls, including from people close to Mr. Xi, to adopt more liberal economic policies and even to experiment with greater political openness as a way for the party to maintain its rule. Without much success so far, reformers have long been encouraging the leadership to move toward a more sustainable growth model for China, one that relies more on domestic consumption rather than infrastructure investment and exports, and where state enterprises play less of a role.
Mr. Xi, known as a skillful consensus builder, has kept his ideas carefully veiled throughout his career, but his trip to Shenzhen is the strongest sign yet that he may favor more open policies. In a speech in Beijing on Nov. 29, Mr. Xi spoke of the “Chinese dream” of realizing the nation’s “revival,” which, besides being a call for renewal, also signaled strong nationalist leanings.
Mr. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revered senior official handpicked by Mr. Deng to help shape the new economic policies and oversee the creation of the Shenzhen zone. Mr. Xi’s mother lives in Shenzhen, and he visited her on his trip, according to Hong Kong news reports.
“If he indeed went to Shenzhen, that means he intends to make reform a subject of priority,” said Li Weidong, a liberal political analyst. “That would really be a phenomenon.”
Mr. Li cautioned, though, that the so-called reform policies that followed Mr. Deng’s 1992 southern tour, in his view, “ended up being fake” because China’s boom resulted in widespread corruption and the expansion of state enterprises at the expense of private entrepreneurship.
When Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, became party chief in 2002, he was seen by many as a potential reformer, but his tenure was marked by conservative policies. For his first trip outside Beijing as party chief, Mr. Hu went in December 2002 to Xibaipo, a hallowed site for the revolution, where he reiterated a speech given by Mao Zedong.
Over the weekend, video footage from Phoenix Television showed a line of minibuses and police cars winding its way through Shenzhen. Mr. Xi and other officials walked outdoors in dark suits. The party’s official news organizations did not immediately report on the trip, but some prominent mainland Chinese news Web sites cited the Hong Kong reports.
Mr. Xi’s early moves as party leader seem aimed at emphasizing national “revival,” a theme he highlighted when he appeared on Nov. 29 with the party’s new seven-man Politburo Standing Committee in a history museum at Tiananmen Square. According to People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, Mr. Xi stood in front of an exhibition called “The Road to Rejuvenation” and said, “After the 170 or more years of constant struggle since the Opium Wars, the great revival of the Chinese nation enjoys glorious prospects.”
He added: “Now everyone is discussing the Chinese dream, and I believe that realizing the great revival of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream of the Chinese nation in modern times.”
The emphasis on a “Chinese dream” is particular to Mr. Xi, and could prove to be a recurring motif throughout his tenure. The notion of a grand revival — “fu xing” in Mandarin — has been popular with Chinese leaders for at least a century, but Mr. Xi appears to be tapping more deeply into that nationalist vein than his recent predecessors, perhaps recognizing that traditional Communist ideology no longer has popular appeal.
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