Venezuela contemplates next move with Hugo Chavez absent

CARACAS, Venezuela — The nerves of Venezuelans are sure to be tested in the coming week as the country seeks answers not only to the mystery of President Hugo Chavez's medical condition and prognosis but also to the debate over constitutional requirements should he be unable to take the oath of office Thursday to start a fourth term.

On Saturday, Chavez confidant and former army comrade Diosdado Cabello was reelected as National Assembly president, a key position that would make him the leader in any process to call a new election to replace Chavez if the fiery socialist dies or is deemed "permanently incapacitated."

Chavez has not been seen or heard from since he left Venezuela in early December for Cuba, where he underwent his fourth surgery to treat pelvic cancer. In sporadic and thinly detailed medical updates, officials have said he has encountered postoperative problems, including "respiratory insufficiency," that have dimmed his chances of being present for his inauguration.

After being reelected to his assembly post by his fellow lawmakers, Cabello said Chavez did not need to be sworn in Thursday to retain his presidential powers because he has permission from the National Assembly to be absent from the country.

"If Chavez isn't here by Jan. 10, the constitution establishes that he can be sworn in before the Supreme Court, although it doesn't specify how or when," Cabello said. "The president received unanimous permission from the assembly to be absent, and that is still in effect."

Constitutional law expert Carlos Ayala agreed that Chavez can be granted two oath-taking postponements for a total of 180 days in the event he is "temporarily incapacitated." But he said Venezuelans are entitled to proof that Chavez is alive, is tending to his duties and has a positive prognosis.

"The citizenry has a legitimate right to know the facts surrounding the mental and physical condition of the head of state," said Ayala, a professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas. "If he cannot exercise his duties and obligations under the constitution, then that leads to constitutional consequences."

If Chavez is so ill that he cannot competently carry out his duties, then he could be declared "permanently incapacitated." That would trigger a constitutional requirement for the National Assembly president to call a new presidential election within 30 days, Ayala said.

On Friday, Vice President Nicolas Maduro — whom Chavez has designated as his political heir and preferred successor — said the 58-year-old president was "resting and recuperating" and emerging from what he previously said was a "delicate postoperative phase."

But other pronouncements have been less positive. Communications and Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said last week that Chavez was experiencing "respiratory insufficiency," raising the possibility that Chavez is on a respirator or even comatose.

Luis Salamanca, a constitutional law expert at Central University of Venezuela, said "reading between the lines" of official announcements "verifies that things are getting worse."

Political consultant and commentator Ricardo Sucre said the Chavez government seems to be trying to frame the oath-taking as a "mere formality." If that interpretation is accepted, it would enable the government to defer the constitutional requirement to clarify the president's condition and, in a worst-case scenario, to avoid starting the wheels turning for a new presidential election.

Some opposition figures are openly questioning why the Chavez government has not decided to seek a postponement of the swearing-in under a "temporary incapacitation" provision if, in fact, Chavez's prognosis is one of recovery and not imminent death.

If Chavez is deathly ill, his successors will try to "draw out the process as long as possible to consolidate their power and take advantage of Chavez's image to better appropriate it for themselves," Sucre said.

Although Chavez won reelection in October in convincing fashion against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, the chances of success in another election against Capriles are much less certain for any Chavez successor, including Maduro or Cabello.

Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor at Pomona College, said opposition politicians should be careful not to create the impression that they are trying to gain power "on the possible disability or death of the leader they were unable to defeat in life."

"There is no harm in letting the process unfold and waiting to see if Chavez regains his health or not," Tinker Salas said. "The people of Venezuela freely elected Chavez in October 2012, and their decision on this matter should be respected."

Special correspondents Kraul reported from Bogota, Colombia, and Mogollon from Caracas.

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We Salute the First Baby Senator

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

RELATED: Claire McCaskill and How to Attack the Opponent You’re Rooting For

Here’s our suggestion to improve the (already pretty hilarious) swearing-in process for U.S. Senators: Each new member of Congress must bring a cute baby.

RELATED: Rand Paul Doesn’t Want You to Go to Jail for Smoking Pot

RELATED: Larry David’s Two-Minute Guide to Etiquette

Apparently the BBC has decided to market a line of lunch boxes specifically made for hungry polar bears. They are still working out the kinks: 

RELATED: Homer Simpson, Fox News Pundit; Books After Dark

RELATED: Bo Obama Stays On Message; Sarah Palin Can See HBO in Her House

The Golden Globes will be bittersweet this year. Don’t get us wrong — we’re really excited to watch Amy Poehler and Tina Fey entertain us. But we’ll also be also really sad when this thing is over because it means the end of these promos:

And finally, it’s Friday. And it’s time to dance. Enjoy your weekend. 

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Poet-performer Jayne Cortez dies in NY at age 78

NEW YORK (AP) — Jayne Cortez, a forceful poet, activist and performance artist who blended oral and written traditions into numerous books and musical recordings, has died. She was 78.

The Organization of Women Writers of Africa says Cortez died of heart failure in New York on Dec. 28. She had helped found the group and, while dividing her time between homes in New York and Senegal, was planning a symposium of women writers to be held in Ghana in May.

Cortez was a prominent figure in the black arts movement of the 1960s and '70s that advocated art as a vehicle for political protest. She cited her experiences trying to register black voters in Mississippi in the early '60s as a key influence.

A native of Fort Huachuca, Ariz., she was raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles. She loved jazz since childhood and would listen to her parents' record collection. Musicians including trumpeter Don Cherry would visit her home and through them she met her first husband, Ornette Coleman, one of the world's greatest jazz artists. They were married from 1954 to 1964.

Her books included "Scarifications" and "Mouth On Paper," and she recorded often with her band the Firespitters, chanting indictments of racism, sexism and capitalism. Its members included her son, drummer Denardo Coleman, and several other members of Ornette Coleman's electronic Prime Time band, guitarist Bern Nix and bassist Al McDowell.

Cortez, who described herself as a "jazz poet," performed all over the world and her work was translated into 28 languages. At the time of her death, she was living with her second husband, the sculptor Melvin Edwards.

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The New Old Age: Murray Span, 1922-2012

One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.

So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”

And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.

But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.

Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.

His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.

So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.

On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.

When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.

But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.

All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.

Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.

His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.

“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”

Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.

These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.

I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.

He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.

He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.

As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.

In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.

The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.

We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.

We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.

---

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Vast cache of Kaiser patient details was kept in private home

Federal and state officials are investigating whether healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente violated patient privacy in its work with an Indio couple who stored nearly 300,000 confidential hospital records for the company.

The California Department of Public Health has already determined that Kaiser "failed to safeguard all patients' medical records" at one Southern California hospital by giving files to Stephan and Liza Dean for about seven months without a contract. The couple's document storage firm kept those patient records at a warehouse in Indio that they shared with another man's party rental business and his Ford Mustang until 2010.

Until this week, the Deans also had emails from Kaiser and other files listing thousands of patients' names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and treatment information stored on their home computers.

The state agency said it was awaiting more information from Kaiser on its "plan of correction" before considering any penalties.

Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began looking into Kaiser's conduct last year after receiving a complaint from the Deans about the healthcare provider's handling of patient data, letters from the agency show. Kaiser said it hadn't been contacted by federal regulators, and a Health and Human Services spokesman declined to comment.

Kaiser said it remained confident that this patient information was never disclosed or accessed inappropriately. It said that some employees were disciplined because company policies were not followed and that it had informed regulators of the steps it had taken to ensure this type of incident didn't happen again.

"Kaiser Permanente is committed to protecting the medical and personal privacy of its patients," spokesman John Nelson said. "In retrospect, we certainly wish we'd never done business with Mr. Dean."

Even with tougher government oversight of medical privacy in recent years, this case underscores how confidential patient information remains vulnerable in the hands of big healthcare institutions and legions of outside contractors.

"Kaiser has shown extraordinary recklessness in this situation," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "Healthcare companies have to make sure their contractors adhere to ironclad security practices."

Federal and state laws impose strict standards on anyone dealing with patient information. The privacy rule of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, bans the unauthorized disclosure of individuals' medical records and requires healthcare providers and vendors, such as billing and storage companies, to protect the information.

Despite those rules, personal medical information of 21 million people nationwide has been improperly exposed since 2009, according to federal data. Last year, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee agreed to pay $1.5 million to resolve allegations it violated federal law after 57 computer hard drives with patient information were stolen from an outside facility.

In October, Kaiser sued the Deans in Riverside County Superior Court, accusing them of violating their contract by not returning all of its patient information two years ago when Kaiser picked up the paper records.

In court filings, Kaiser said the Deans put patient data at risk by leaving two computer hard drives in their garage with the door open. In response, Stephan Dean moved them to a spare room. On a recent day they sat next to a red recliner where Ziggy, the family's black-and-white cat, curled up for a nap. Dean said those hard drives contained spreadsheets on thousands of Kaiser patients, prepared at the company's request.

At one point, Dean told Kaiser he was planning to contact patients about the whereabouts of their medical information because he felt Kaiser hadn't taken proper precautions. The company sought a temporary restraining order against Dean, barring him from disclosing any confidential information. A Superior Court judge granted Kaiser's request until Thursday, when another hearing is scheduled.

Dean, 47, got his foot in the door at Kaiser from his previous work labeling paper folders for courthouses, hospitals and doctors.

But the demand for folders was slipping as hospitals and doctors used computers more. Kaiser was at the forefront of this as it invested billions of dollars in its HealthConnect system, which it bills as the largest private-sector electronic health record in the world. Kaiser, with more than 9 million customers, is the nation's largest nonprofit insurer and hospital system.

Dean said his small business, Sure File Filing Systems, got a big break when Kaiser acquired the Moreno Valley Community Hospital in 2008. The company needed to organize and clear out thousands of old patient files and it gave the job to the Deans, Kaiser records show.

In August 2008, the Deans started packing up thousands of files from Moreno Valley and moving them to the warehouse in Indio.

Hospital clerks routinely messaged Dean asking him to pull records on specific patients, emails sent by Kaiser to Sure File show. Dean said some Kaiser employees would put the patient's full name in the subject line of the email, and other messages listed the patient's Social Security number, date of birth, doctors' names and treatment dates. One message started, "Good Morning Sure File," and requested adoption records for a child.

Dean said Kaiser showed little concern for patient privacy in handling those requests. Only one out of more than 600 emails from Kaiser was password-protected with encryption, he said. Many medical providers use such technology so information isn't visible to others.

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At the Consumer Electronics Show, more glitz than gee whiz

The International Consumer Electronics Show next week may be facing questions about its relevance in an Internet world that makes new things seem old in minutes, but it is still the foremost gathering for all things gadgety and geeky.

The annual trade show in Las Vegas has a rich past showcasing such groundbreaking devices as the VCR, the CD player, the camcorder, high-definition television and the Blu-ray disc.

"It was the singular most important technology event of the year," said Zack Zalon, a longtime show attendee and managing partner at the digital product design firm Wilshire Axon in Westwood.

The nature of the glitzy show has shifted in recent years from a focus on new products to one on deal-making and industry schmoozing. Still, the show draws enormous crowds and global publicity — even though the convention isn't open to the public.

When it kicks off Tuesday, more than 3,200 exhibitors are expected to occupy 1.9 million square feet of

exhibition space at the convention center for four days of news conferences, product demonstrations, parties and celebrity appearances. Roughly 150,000 people, about the same as last year, are expected to attend, temporarily swelling the city's population by about 25%.

These days, attendees and exhibitors say they see the show as a time to survey the overall personal electronics landscape and to connect in person with developers, retailers and the media.

Executives at the Beats by Dr. Dre line of high-end headphones, for instance, will be in Las Vegas but plan to hold their meetings and product demonstrations in exclusive suites on the Strip instead of vying for attention in the cavernous exhibit halls of the convention center.

"The brand experience that we want our customers and partners to have with Beats is very personal and it takes a real dialogue," Beats President Luke Wood said. "I want to do that in an atmosphere that is personal and not rushed."

New products will still be launched, preserving a bit of the show's famous wow factor. Show producers say they expect 20,000 new products to be unveiled, including Samsung Electronics Co.'s 85-inch ultra-high-definition TV and LG Electronics' newest organic-LED sets.

But groundbreaking products are rarely launched at the show anymore because of the 24-hour news cycle of the Internet, which makes it easy for companies to promote whatever they want, whenever they want.

Tech behemoths now accustomed to holding their own media events throughout the year don't want to share the limelight with their rivals. Case in point: Microsoft Corp., which unveiled its Xbox video game console at the trade show in 2001, will not host a booth at the show this year nor give its usual keynote address.

Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. don't officially participate in the show, though they typically send executives and other employees to scope out the competition and meet quietly with developers and the media.

Part of the problem with the show is it's "so huge that's it's tough for any announcement to gain any kind of traction," said Zalon of Wilshire Axon.

"I don't think anyone is going to CES under the illusion that they're going to be dramatically educated on the innovations of the near future," he said. "I think most people now go for face time and to hope to pick up on some trends that indicate where things are heading."

Exhibitors are expected to focus on improvements to already-established technologies, emphasizing the fast-growing markets for tablets and smartphones and related products.

Many of the devices and technologies featured at the show will begin appearing on store shelves in the weeks following the event.

With the television industry in a slump and projected to have a flat sales year in 2013, TV manufacturers will be out in force at the show. Many will be touting larger screen sizes as consumers increasingly adopt a bigger-is-better approach when buying TVs.

Samsung will have one of the largest booth spaces at the show, where it will display the 85-inch ultra-HDTV, one of the largest commercially available "4K" sets to hit the market this year. The so-called 4K TVs cram four times as much picture information onto the screen as current high-definition models do.

Samsung also will demonstrate a smart TV camera with features such as gesture control and face recognition, as well as an improved Smart Hub platform for Internet-connected televisions.

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How BuzzFeed Is Betting on Hollywood, Long-Form Writing to Grow

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Last January, BuzzFeed, then an aggregator of memes and cat videos, secured a $ 15.5 million round of venture capital to beef up a craft that most traditional media was downsizing: journalism.

It hired dozens of reporters and editors, opened bureaus in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and became a must-read for political junkies during the 2012 presidential election.

On Thursday, the company took another step.

It added adding a fourth round of capital investment – this time worth $ 19.3 million. And it plans to expand in two major ways: literary, long-form journalism like the kind practiced by New York magazine and the New Yorker, and – with two former Los Angeles Times staffers newly on board – its Hollywood coverage.

BuzzFeed’s been on a roll. According to the privately held company‘s internal traffic numbers, the 8 million unique monthly visitors it drew in 2008 has swelled to 40 million, and revenue for 2012 may triple that of 2011, a spokeswoman for BuzzFeed told TheWrap.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Tom Gara reported that some analysts place the company’s valuation at $ 200 million and say that revenues may reach $ 40 million this year.

Most of BuzzFeed’s traffic currently comes from its odd mix of news and eccentricity on the homepage. Friday morning, spotlighted stories ranged from J.J. Abrams screening his new “Star Trek” for a dying fan and Sen. Tammy Baldwin talking about breaking the glass ceiling to: “How to Murder Your Friend’s Facebook Page” and “Here Are Some Elephants Eating Christmas Trees.”

But there’s no question things are changing.

The first thing CEO Jonah Peretti did with his 2012 investment cash was hire Ben Smith, a Politico veteran, as the site’s first editor-in-chief. Smith then kicked off a hiring spree of reporters and got to work. Already BuzzFeed is beginning to break stories and get quoted by aggregators.

McKay Coppins, the site’s political editor, embedded with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign. John Stanton, a veteran reporter in Washington, was named BuzzFeed’s first D.C. bureau chief. Michael Hastings, the dogged journalist whose Rolling Stone exposé of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s private disagreements with President Obama over Afghanistan led to his resignation, joined the team.

Then, less than a year into its political foray, the site hired former Spin magazine chief Steve Kandell to make the push for longform journalism.

It began with an experiment – a 7,118-word post from last October titled “Can You Die From a Nightmare?” that garnered more than 115,000 hits. Another in October titled “Making Mitt: The Myth of George Romney” drew nearly 130,000 views. This convinced Smith and his team that literary journalism had a niche in the viral news market.

Despite the internet school of thought that briefer is better, Kandell said he has no plans to restrict stories’ word counts.

“If someone has a story that has to be 10,000 words, I don’t know why that couldn’t be,” Kandell said.

“I don’t think people necessarily have a certain fatigue level when it gets to a certain length and people start trailing out.”

Kandell says he plans in the coming months to start publishing at least one long-form story a week and may even start packaging and selling the stories as Amazon Kindle singles or as audiobooks.

Kandell assembled a “Best of 2012″ post for his nascent section of the site. The stories ranged from the tale of BuzzFeed’s own political editor Coppins, a Mormon, watching attitudes toward his and Romney’s religion change throughout the campaign to an inside look at the “Dark World of Online Sugar Daddies.”

Plans are to cover more foreign policy and national security issues from a Washington-centered perspective – and to add Hollywood into the mix. The only hands-off topic, apparently, will be international news.

“We’ve played around with ways to make world news more sharable, just like every editor at every publication,” he said, noting that readers liked a roundup of Instagram photos of the civil war in Syria. “It’s really hard, it’s not something we want to jump into without really knowing what we’re doing.”

As for Hollywood, BuzzFeed hired Richard Rushfield, former entertainment editor of LATimes.com, and ex-Times television editor Kate Aurthur, also a former Daily Beast staffer, to jump-start its bureau.

Smith said he plans to forge a presence in Los Angeles second only to its flagship New York bureau. A Hollywood vertical is expected to launch on January 7.

To that end, the site is entering a crowded space – one dominated by publications like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Vulture and the Times – but Rushfield said he plans to cover entertainment through BuzzFeed’s social-web lens: If it’s irresistibly share-worthy, it’s publishable.

“We have a unique position, despite how crowded the beat is,” Rushfield told TheWrap, adding that they won’t be competing with trades over stories concerning studio executives and casting deals. “One of our advantages is that we are not going to be going after every single story that the trades are – we have more room to take the things that we think can be interesting. What BuzzFeed is about is writing news that will be of interest to the social web.”

Now the trick is to make all these editorial investments worthwhile financially.

Revenue growth from its advertising model has been climbing, chief operating officer Jon Steinberg told TheWrap.

Forgoing the usual banners and display ads, BuzzFeed offers its clients “branded content.” For example, Scope mouthwash sponsored a “listicle” on the most “courageous” mustaches.

To that end, the advertising team, which is made up of 20 people that report to Steinberg, works with brands from General Electric to Virgin Mobile to devise sharable pieces of content.

The ratio of advertorial to editorial content on the homepage is usually about one to every six or so stories,” he said.

Those branded-content headlines garner 10-20 times the click-through rates of blinking banner and display ads, Steinberg told TheWrap.

“You compare those ads in the 1950s to modern advertising, you realize how broken modern advertising is,” Steinberg said. “Most publishers and media companies say you can’t make money on modern advertising.”

But – though he declined to reveal exact numbers, as BuzzFeed is a private company – the model helped to increase revenue last year and has allowed the publication to focus solely on its advertising stream.

He said the company has no immediate plans to enter the conference business popular with online publications including the Business Insider, AllThingsD and TheWrap.

“This is our Google ad words,” Steinberg said of the innovative advertising tool that Google pioneered in the mid-2000s. “If we were Apple, this would be our manufacturing of great hardware products.”

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Pacino says he didn't want to meet Spector

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Al Pacino said Friday that he decided not to meet famed record producer and convicted killer Phil Spector before portraying him in an HBO movie — only to find he already had.

A friend showed Pacino a 20-year-old photo in which the actor was standing next to Spector. Pacino said he has no memory of the moment.

The movie, "Phil Spector," debuts in March. It focuses on the client-attorney relationship between Spector and Linda Kenney Baden, who represented him in his first trial after he was charged with the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. That ended in a mistrial, but Spector was convicted in a second trial and is now serving 19 years to life in prison.

Pacino wore a dizzying array of wigs in his portrayal of the eccentric Spector, whose "Wall of Sound" style was an integral part of pop music in the early 1960s. The actor said he decided not to meet Spector in prison because he'd be a different man than the one Pacino is portraying, who had not yet been convicted of a crime.

He watched video clips of Spector to help him with his portrayal.

"I didn't know anything about him, except that he was responsible for a lot of great music and this strange case," Pacino said.

Actress Helen Mirren, who portrayed Baden, said she heard stories about Spector from her filmmaker husband, Taylor Hackford, who had hired Spector to provide music for his 1980 film, "The Idolmaker."

The Academy Award-winning Mirren was a last-minute substitute in her role. Bette Midler had begun filming as Baden, but had to withdraw because of a bad back. The film's executive producers are Barry Levinson and David Mamet.

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F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

A new rule imposed by the F.D.A. would establish different standards for ensuring the purity of water that touches fruits and vegetables.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

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FDA proposes sweeping new food safety rules

The Food and Drug Administration has proposed sweeping rules to curtail food-borne illnesses that kill thousands of Americans annually — and, in the process, to transform itself into an agency that prevents contamination, not one that merely investigates outbreaks.

The rules, drafted with an eye toward strict standards in California and some other states, enable the implementation of the landmark Food Safety Modernization Act that President Obama signed two years ago in response to a string of deadly outbreaks of illness from contaminated spinach, eggs, peanut butter and imported produce.

The first proposed rule would require domestic and overseas producers of food sold in the U.S. to craft a plan to prevent and deal with contamination of their products. The plans would be open to federal audits. The second rule would address contamination of fruit and vegetables during harvesting.

One in six Americans suffers from a food-borne illness annually, a "substantial burden" on the country, according to the FDA. Of those who get sick, about 130,000 end up hospitalized and 3,000 die.

A salmonella outbreak in peanut butter last fall prompted the FDA to shut down a New Mexico production facility of Sunland Inc. and initiate a mass recall from retailers such as Trader Joe's. A listeria outbreak in several states last year also killed dozens of people.

"The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act is a common-sense law that shifts the food safety focus from reactive to preventive," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Friday in releasing the proposals.

The outbreaks of the last several years pushed consumer advocates and much of the food industry to back more stringent standards.

Many welcomed the proposed rules, although consumer advocates pointed out that the standards were delayed in the White House a year past their congressionally mandated due date, giving rise to concerns that the Obama administration sought to avoid any political fallout in an election year.

The 2011 food safety act, the most comprehensive overhaul of the food industry in 70 years, was to be built on three sets of regulations, not just the two issued Friday, said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington consumer advocacy group.

The third rule, which has yet to be issued, would establish how food importers would verify that the products they bring in meet U.S. standards.

Last year more than 800 cases of illness were caused in the U.S. by contaminated imported tuna flakes, cantaloupes, mangoes and ricotta cheese, DeWaal said, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It's supposed to be a three-legged stool in terms of consumer protection," DeWaal said, "and one leg is still missing."

The FDA said developing the complex new rules took time as it consulted "consumers, government, industry, researchers and many others," and "studied, among many other sources, the California leafy greens marketing agreement." Additional rules will "follow soon," the agency said.

The California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement, formed in 2007 after an E.coli outbreak tied to spinach crops, mandates that farmers fund government audits of their food safety processes. Melon growers in California have a similar agreement and last year made it mandatory, said Stephen Patricio, president of Westside Produce in Firebaugh, Calif., which grows, packs and ships melons.

"California has the most stringent requirements," Patricio said. "It's the culture of food safety that is important, and California farmers have been working on the culture of food safety for a decade."

As a result, the proposed federal regulations aren't expected to force substantial changes in the way many crops in California are handled. Melons in the state also have a mandatory code on every box that is shipped that would allow authorities to track where the fruit came from and when it was harvested, a policy that was proposed in the new regulations.

Eric Hanagan already has implemented some of the policies suggested in the proposed guidelines.

Hanagan's 1,500-acre farm, which grows melons and vegetables in the Rocky Ford area of Colorado, was hit hard when a nearby farm was blamed for a 2011 listeria outbreak that killed 25 people. In response, Hanagan and other farmers adopted rules that they hoped would restore the region's reputation.

His vegetables are now shipped with codes that allow them to be tracked, and every winter he and other regional farmers go to classes about food safety. Hanagan's farm is inspected twice a year by the state, one of the inspections unannounced. Inspectors talk to each worker individually and regulate what kind of shoes, clothes and jewelry they can wear.

Hanagan estimates that the regulations cost medium-sized farms about $5,000 to $7,500 a year, which includes the cost of time for training workers and attending classes. But, he said, it's worth every penny.

"We need to have safe food, because if you get a consumer sick, you're done," he said. Jensen Farms, the Colorado farm blamed for the listeria outbreak, filed for bankruptcy in May.

The FDA will gather public comment for 120 days before finalizing the rules. Large farms would have 26 months to comply with most of the new requirements after the final rules are published; smaller farms would have longer.

neela.banerjee@latimes.com

alana.semuels@latimes.com

Times staff writer Tiffany Hsu contributed to this report.

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