Oscar Pistorius remains in jail facing murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who made history last year as the first double amputee runner to compete in the Olympics using prosthetic blades, will spend the night in jail Thursday after he was charged with murder in the death of his girlfriend at his house, prosecutors said.

The National Prosecuting Authority said Pistorius would remain in custody until his hearing Friday, when police intend to oppose bail.

Reeva Steenkamp, a 30-year-old model, died after being shot several times in the head and arm in Pistorius’ house in an upscale suburb in Pretoria.

PHOTOS: Pistorius in the London Olympics

Pistorius was ushered from the home by police Thursday morning with a gray hoodie covering his head and obscuring most of his face.

South Africans were in shock about the accusation against Pistorius, who became a hero during his long battle for the right to compete in the Olympics. After a controversy on whether the blades he uses to walk and run gave him an advantage in races, Pistorius was granted the right to compete in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of murder and violent crime, and many South Africans keep guns at home to guard against intruders.

The Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld suggested that Pistorius mistook his girlfriend for a burglar and killed her accidentally.

However, a police spokeswoman, Brig. Denise Beukes, said police were “surprised” at reports the killing was accidental, adding that that version hadn’t come from police, according to the South African Press Assn.

"I confirm there had been previous incidents of a domestic nature at his place,” said Beukes, adding that police couldn’t comment on the decision to oppose bail.

Beukes said police had interviewed neighbors who heard sounds at Pistorius’ home earlier in the evening, and also at the time the incident reportedly took place.

Pistorius’ father, Henke Pistorius, said his son was sad. But the older Pistorius said he didn’t know the facts.

“I don’t know nothing. It will be extremely obnoxious and rude to speculate,” he said in a radio interview. “If anyone makes a statement, it will have to be Oscar.”

An advertisement for Nike, one of Pistorius’ major sponsors, was removed from his official website Thursday. It had shown the athlete in a green lycra athletic suit and the slogan, “I am the bullet in the chamber."

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Ryan O'Neal wins appeals ruling in defamation case

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ryan O'Neal may have enough evidence to show that he was defamed by a man who claimed the actor stole a valuable portrait of the late Farrah Fawcett, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

A divided panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that O'Neal's case against Craig Nevius, a former Fawcett associate, should be allowed to proceed and that the actor may be able to win some damages. One justice disagreed and wrote that the case should be dismissed.

O'Neal sued in July 2011, claiming he was defamed by Nevius' comments that the actor had stolen a Fawcett portrait created by Andy Warhol. The painting is the subject of a separate lawsuit between O'Neal and the University of Texas, which claims Fawcett left the artwork to the school after her 2009 death.

Nevius's attorney, Lincoln Bandlow, said he would appeal the ruling to the California Supreme Court. He had appealed a lower court's ruling allowing the case to go forward.

O'Neal's suit seeks more than $1 million in damages. He claimed in the case that Warhol gave him the portrait and he intends to bequeath it to his only son from his longtime relationship with Fawcett, Redmond O'Neal.

Nevius' comments that O'Neal stole the artwork were made in interviews with Star magazine and "Good Morning America," and he cooperated with UT investigators searching for the portrait.

Although Nevius initially denied he accused O'Neal of stealing the painting, he acknowledged in a later court filing that he made the claim to university investigators.

"The inferences reasonably drawn from the evidence here would support a jury's finding that Nevius harbored strong ill-feelings toward O'Neal," the justices siding with O'Neal wrote. The dissent argues that Nevius' comments were constitutionally-protected speech and the case should have been dismissed.

O'Neal's fight with UT over the portrait returns to court on Feb. 27.

The actor and Nevius have battled in court for years.

Nevius collaborated on a documentary of Fawcett's fight with cancer but sued the actor claiming he interfered in the project and removed him from it shortly before Fawcett's death. The case was dismissed before trial.

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Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP

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Doctor and Patient: Afraid to Speak Up to Medical Power

The slender, weather-beaten, elderly Polish immigrant had been diagnosed with lung cancer nearly a year earlier and was receiving chemotherapy as part of a clinical trial. I was a surgical consultant, called in to help control the fluid that kept accumulating in his lungs.

During one visit, he motioned for me to come closer. His voice was hoarse from a tumor that spread, and the constant hissing from his humidified oxygen mask meant I had to press my face nearly against his to understand his words.

“This is getting harder, doctor,” he rasped. “I’m not sure I’m up to anymore chemo.”

I was not the only doctor that he confided to. But what I quickly learned was that none of us was eager to broach the topic of stopping treatment with his primary cancer doctor.

That doctor was a rising superstar in the world of oncology, a brilliant physician-researcher who had helped discover treatments for other cancers and who had been recruited to lead our hospital’s then lackluster cancer center. Within a few months of the doctor’s arrival, the once sleepy department began offering a dazzling array of experimental drugs. Calls came in from outside doctors eager to send their patients in for treatment, and every patient who was seen was promptly enrolled in one of more than a dozen well-documented treatment protocols.

But now, no doctors felt comfortable suggesting anything but the most cutting-edge, aggressive treatments.

Even the No. 2 doctor in the cancer center, Robin to the chief’s cancer-battling Batman, was momentarily taken aback when I suggested we reconsider the patient’s chemotherapy plan. “I don’t want to tell him,” he said, eyes widening. He reeled off his chief’s vast accomplishments. “I mean, who am I to tell him what to do?”

We stood for a moment in silence before he pointed his index finger at me. “You tell him,” he said with a smile. “You tell him to consider stopping treatment.”

Memories of this conversation came flooding back last week when I read an essay on the problems posed by hierarchies within the medical profession.

For several decades, medical educators and sociologists have documented the existence of hierarchies and an intense awareness of rank among doctors. The bulk of studies have focused on medical education, a process often likened to military and religious training, with elder patriarchs imposing the hair shirt of shame on acolytes unable to incorporate a profession’s accepted values and behaviors. Aspiring doctors quickly learn whose opinions, experiences and voices count, and it is rarely their own. Ask a group of interns who’ve been on the wards for but a week, and they will quickly raise their hands up to the level of their heads to indicate their teachers’ status and importance, then lower them toward their feet to demonstrate their own.

It turns out that this keen awareness of ranking is not limited to students and interns. Other research has shown that fully trained physicians are acutely aware of a tacit professional hierarchy based on specialties, like primary care versus neurosurgery, or even on diseases different specialists might treat, like hemorrhoids and constipation versus heart attacks and certain cancers.

But while such professional preoccupation with privilege can make for interesting sociological fodder, the real issue, warns the author of a courageous essay published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, is that such an overly developed sense of hierarchy comes at an unacceptable price: good patient care.

Dr. Ranjana Srivastava, a medical oncologist at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, recalls a patient she helped to care for who died after an operation. Before the surgery, Dr. Srivastava had been hesitant to voice her concerns, assuming that the patient’s surgeon must be “unequivocally right, unassailable, or simply not worth antagonizing.” When she confesses her earlier uncertainty to the surgeon after the patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava learns that the surgeon had been just as loath to question her expertise and had assumed that her silence before the surgery meant she agreed with his plan to operate.

“Each of us was trying our best to help a patient, but we were also respecting the boundaries and hierarchy imposed by our professional culture,” Dr. Srivastava said. “The tragedy was that the patient died, when speaking up would have made all the difference.”

Compounding the problem is an increasing sense of self-doubt among many doctors. With rapid advances in treatment, there is often no single correct “answer” for a patient’s problem, and doctors, struggling to stay up-to-date in their own particular specialty niches, are more tentative about making suggestions that cross over to other doctors’ “turf.” Even as some clinicians attempt to compensate by organizing multidisciplinary meetings, inviting doctors from all specialties to discuss a patient’s therapeutic options, “there will inevitably be a hierarchy at those meetings of who is speaking,” Dr. Srivastava noted. “And it won’t always be the ones who know the most about the patient who will be taking the lead.”

It is the potentially disastrous repercussions for patients that make this overly developed awareness of rank and boundaries a critical issue in medicine. Recent efforts to raise safety standards and improve patient care have shown that teams are a critical ingredient for success. But simply organizing multidisciplinary lineups of clinicians isn’t enough. What is required are teams that recognize the importance of all voices and encourage active and open debate.

Since their patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava and the surgeon have worked together to discuss patient cases, articulate questions and describe their own uncertainties to each other and in patients’ notes. “We have tried to remain cognizant of the fact that we are susceptible to thinking about hierarchy,” Dr. Srivastava said. “We have tried to remember that sometimes, despite our best intentions, we do not speak up for our patients because we are fearful of the consequences.”

That was certainly true for my lung cancer patient. Like all the other doctors involved in his care, I hesitated to talk to the chief medical oncologist. I questioned my own credentials, my lack of expertise in this particular area of oncology and even my own clinical judgment. When the patient appeared to fare better, requiring less oxygen and joking and laughing more than I had ever seen in the past, I took his improvement to be yet another sign that my attempt to talk about holding back chemotherapy was surely some surgical folly.

But a couple of days later, the humidified oxygen mask came back on. And not long after that, the patient again asked for me to come close.

This time he said: “I’m tired. I want to stop the chemo.”

Just before he died, a little over a week later, he was off all treatment except for what might make him comfortable. He thanked me and the other doctors for our care, but really, we should have thanked him and apologized. Because he had pushed us out of our comfortable, well-delineated professional zones. He had prodded us to talk to one another. And he showed us how to work as a team in order to do, at last, what we should have done weeks earlier.

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Anthem Blue Cross rolls back rate increase

In response to pressure from California regulators, Anthem Blue Cross agreed to a slightly lower rate increase for about 630,000 individual policyholders that will save consumers an estimated $54 million.

Anthem, a unit of Indianapolis insurance giant WellPoint Inc., had sought to raise rates an average of 18% beginning Feb. 1. California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said Thursday that the company had agreed to reduce the average increase to 14% after regulators reviewed Anthem's rate filing.

Some Anthem customers will still see their premiums rise as much as 25% under this agreement with the state.

"Health insurance premiums continue to increase substantially, and health insurance has become unaffordable for far too many Californians," Jones said. "I appreciate that Anthem Blue Cross has agreed to lower these rates so policyholders will pay $54 million less than they otherwise would have."

The state cited a number of factors that led it to deem Anthem's proposed rate hike excessive, including unsubstantiated estimates of expected medical costs. Insurance officials review these rate filings, but they don't have authority to reject them for being unreasonable as they do for property and auto policies.

Voters will get a chance to change that in November 2014 with a ballot measure that would give the California insurance commissioner the power to approve or reject health insurance rate increases.

Anthem said it plans to issue refunds or premium credits to customers who paid the higher rates this month. It also said policyholders who either dropped or changed coverage because of the planned rate increase would be able to reinstate their prior benefits without having to reapply.

Even with these higher rates, Anthem said, it expects to lose money on its individual health insurance business in California this year, primarily because of rising medical costs.

"This agreement with the Department of Insurance and rate filings by our competitors reinforce the fact that escalating healthcare costs are an economic reality faced by the entire industry," said Anthem spokesman Darrel Ng.

A separate rate hike of 15%, on average, for an additional 100,000 Anthem policyholders remains under review by another regulator, the California Department of Managed Health Care. These increases don't affect most Californians, who are insured through employer group plans.

Anthem is the dominant player in California's individual insurance market with a 43% share of the market in 2011, according to Citigroup research. Nonprofit Kaiser Permanente was second with a 25% market share.

The federal healthcare law aims to dramatically change how people buy their own health coverage starting in January. Californians will be able to shop for standardized coverage in a state-run exchange called Covered California and check whether they are eligible for federal premium subsidies or coverage under an expansion of Medi-Cal.

chad.terhune@latimes.com

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Dorner manhunt: Investigators work to ID charred human remains

After what LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called "a bittersweet night," investigators Wednesday were in the process of identifying the human remains found in the charred cabin where fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner was believed to have been holed up after trading gunfire with officers, authorities said.

If the body is identified as Dorner’s, the standoff would end a weeklong manhunt for the ex-LAPD officer and Navy Reserve lieutenant suspected in a string of shootings following his firing by the Los Angeles Police Department several years ago. Four people have died in the case, allegedly at Dorner’s hands.

Beck said he would not consider the manhunt over until the body was identified as Dorner. Police remained on tactical alert and were conducting themselves as if nothing had changed in the case, officials said.

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

The latest burst of gunfire came Tuesday after the suspect, attempting to flee law enforcement officials, fatally shot a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy and seriously injured another, officials said. He then barricaded himself in a wooden cabin outside Big Bear, not far from ski resorts in the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, according to police.

"This could have ended much better, it could have ended worse," said Beck as he drove to the hospital where the injured deputy was located. "I feel for the family of the deputy who lost his life."

The injured deputy is expected to survive but it is anticipated he will need several surgeries. The names of the two deputies have not been released.

TIMELINE: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

Just before 5 p.m., authorities smashed the cabin's windows, pumped in tear gas and called for the suspect to surrender, officials said. They got no response. Then, using a demolition vehicle, they tore down the cabin's walls one by one. When they reached the last wall, they heard a gunshot. Then the cabin burst into flames, officials said.

Last week, authorities said they had tracked Dorner to a wooded area near Big Bear Lake. They found his torched gray Nissan Titan with several weapons inside, the said, and the only trace of Dorner was a short trail of footprints in newly fallen snow.

According to a manifesto that officials say Dorner posted on Facebook, he felt the LAPD unjustly fired him several years ago, when a disciplinary panel determined that he lied in accusing his training officer of kicking a mentally ill man during an arrest. Beck has promised to review the case.

DOCUMENT: Read the manifesto

The manifesto vows "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against law enforcement officers and their families. "Self-preservation is no longer important to me. I do not fear death as I died long ago," it said.

On Tuesday morning, two maids entered a cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive and ran into a man who they said resembled the fugitive, a law enforcement official said. The cabin was not far from where Dorner's singed truck had been found and where police had been holding news conferences about the manhunt.

The man tied up the maids, and he took off in a purple Nissan parked near the cabin, the official said. About 12:20 p.m., one of the maids broke free and called police.

FULL COVERAGE: Sweeping manhunt for ex-cop

Nearly half an hour later, officers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted the stolen vehicle and called for backup, authorities said. The suspect turned down a side road in an attempt to elude the officers but crashed the vehicle, police said.

A short time later, authorities said, the suspect carjacked a light-colored pickup truck. Allan Laframboise said the truck belonged to his friend Rick Heltebrake, who works at a nearby Boy Scout camp.

Heltebrake was driving on Glass Road with his Dalmatian, Suni, when a hulking African American man stepped into the road, Laframboise said. Heltebrake stopped. The man told him to get out of the truck.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Searching for suspected shooter

"Can I take my dog?" Heltebrake asked, according to his friend.

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Lady Gaga cancels rest of tour due to injured hip

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Lady Gaga has canceled the rest of her tour dates due to a hip injury.

A Wednesday news release from Live Nation Global Touring says Lady Gaga has a tear in her right hip that will require surgery to repair, followed by a recovery period.

The pop star had 21 dates through March 20 remaining on her "Born This Way Ball" tour schedule. She postponed four dates on Tuesday after telling fans in a tweet she'd hurt herself some time ago, but hid the injury from her staff. Over the last month, the injury became worse and she said she was unable to walk following a performance Monday in Montreal.

Fans who have already bought tickets will receive a refund.

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Online:

http://ladygaga.com

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Phys Ed: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Fitness Tracker

Marathon, half-marathon, 10k and 5K training plans to get you race ready.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

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California housing recovery may gain momentum, experts say

New foreclosures in California fell sharply in January as state rules for banks took effect, signaling that repossessions may finally settle in at levels not seen since before the housing bust.

The resulting decline in bank-owned properties listed for sale on the market — as well as record numbers of investors prowling for bargains — should give the state's housing recovery momentum this year, experts said.

In the Southland, the new year kicked off with a sharp annual gain in sales, the highest volume for a January in six years. The region's median home price notched a sharp 23.5% gain over the same month last year. And new foreclosure actions plummeted statewide.

“The recovery is for real, that is what I think is happening,” said Esmael Adibi, director of Chapman University's A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research. “It is being driven by real demand, and fundamentals are favorable.”

The price gains reflect a shift in the market away from foreclosures and toward regular sales, indicating a recovery on solid ground, said Christopher Thornberg, founding principal at Beacon Economics.

“The question is, is it the real deal?” Thornberg said. “Sure it is. It is driven of course by a very tight market … about as tight as it gets, and ultimately inventory drives prices.”

Although prices may be gaining, the healthiest contributors to housing strength — employment gains and consumer confidence — appear to be playing less of a factor than investor activity and low mortgage interest rates. That's cause for some concern, but the housing market still has a long way to go to recover from its peak summer 2007 levels, DataQuick President John Walsh said.

“This fledgling housing recovery has momentum,” Walsh said in a statement. “Already, price hikes have caused some to question whether it's sustainable, whether it's a ‘bubble.' Let's not forget, though, that we're still climbing out of a deep hole from the housing downturn.”

The home price and sales gains came as foreclosure starts in California took a massive tumble last month as new state laws aimed at prohibiting certain aggressive bank repossession practices went into effect. The real estate website ForeclosureRadar.com reported a 60.5% decline in California default notices in January from December.

The number of default notices — the first formal step in the state's foreclosure process — fell 77.7% from January 2012. A total of 4,500 such filings were logged last month — the lowest number of default no-
tices since at least September 2006, when the website's records begin.

The website noted that the foreclosure drop came in January, when a package of tough new laws protecting California homeowners went into effect. Most notably, the Homeowner Bill of Rights bans the practice of “dual tracking,” in which a lender seizes a home while the owner is negotiating to lower mortgage payments.

The laws also outlawed so-called robo-signing — the improper or faulty processing of foreclosure documents — and would allow state agencies and private citizens to sue financial institutions, under limited conditions, for economic compensation and for additional civil damages of up to $50,000. Passed last year, the legislative package was sponsored by California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris and written by 10 Democratic lawmakers.

While dramatic, the drop is part of a general decline in foreclosure actions over the last year as banks look toward short sales and loan modifications as alternatives to seizing homes.

“You will see a continued decline in defaults from regulator activity, new laws and from the economy,” said Dustin Hobbs, a spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Assn. “As long as the economy, and especially the housing market, continues to slowly heal itself, you will see fewer and fewer defaults.”

Katherine Porter, a UC Irvine law professor who is monitoring the state's accord with the nation's five largest mortgage servicers over foreclosure abuses, said that it was not clear to her whether the dramatic drop in foreclosures resulted directly from new laws. The decrease could be temporary, she said, as mortgage servicers adjust their foreclosure processing systems.

Madeline Schnapp, director of economic research for ForeclosureRadar, believes the low levels of foreclosures will continue.

“The plethora of anti-foreclosure laws have been very effective in reducing foreclosure activity to what you are seeing today,” she said.

Foreclosed homes made up just 15% of the Southern California resale market last month, down dramatically from the worst of the crash, when they hit a high of 56.7% in February 2009, according to DataQuick. Short sales made up an estimated 25.9% of January's resale market.

Fewer foreclosures will probably lead to more gains in home prices, because foreclosures have been the main supply of cheap housing. But rising prices also will lift more underwater homeowners out of a negative equity position, helping them sell their homes, which could also loosen up supply.

Buyers paid a median $321,000 last month in Southern California, a reflection of rising prices and a shift in the buying mix from lower-end starter homes to pricier digs.

Sales of homes in the region's move-up market have continued to gain. Sales of homes priced from $300,000 to $800,000 soared 49.6% year-over-year in January, while sales of homes costing more than $500,000 jumped 74% from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, sales of homes costing less than $200,000 fell 23.5% from the previous January, an indication of tight inventory levels in those markets as investors look to snap up houses and rent them out.

alejandro.lazo@latimes.com

Times staff writer Andrew Khouri contributed to this report.

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Hagel's Defense nomination OKd by Senate Armed Services Committee

WASHINGTON — After a contentious debate, the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday narrowly approved former Sen. Chuck Hagel to be secretary of Defense, moving the fight over President Obama's controversial Cabinet choice to the full Senate.

Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, won the 26-member panel's endorsement with only Democratic votes. All 11 Republicans present voted against his nomination; one GOP senator was absent.

The full Senate will begin considering Hagel's nomination Wednesday, with a final vote possible by week's end. Several GOP senators have threatened to delay the vote, but the White House appears confident it has enough votes to prevail. Hagel, who would replace Leon E. Panetta, already has scheduled his first foreign trip as secretary for Feb. 20.

The two-hour hearing grew heated after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) complained that Hagel did not report the source of $200,000 in income, saying it may have come "directly from North Korea." Cruz acknowledged that he had "no evidence" to support that charge.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman, countered that Hagel had complied with all the committee's financial disclosure requirements, including for foreign sources of income. He chided Cruz, the panel's most junior Republican, for offering "innuendo" without evidence.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) reacted more strongly, calling Cruz's remarks "out of line."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former close friend of Hagel who has been sharply critical of the nominee's views on Iraq, defended him. Like McCain, Hagel served in combat in the Vietnam War, and he was wounded twice in battle.

"Sen. Hagel is an honorable man. He served his country and no one on this committee should impugn his integrity," McCain said.

The tense exchange brought to the surface concerns of several members that the Armed Services Committee, which traditionally has operated in a more bipartisan fashion than other congressional panels, was losing that spirit.

Other Republican criticism focused on issues that emerged before and during Hagel's Jan. 31 confirmation hearing, including his past statements on Iran and Israel, and concerns that he will oversee a significant reduction in Pentagon spending.

Members also cited Hagel's widely panned performance at his confirmation hearing, at which he appeared tentative and unsure at times. McCain called it the worst of any Defense nominee he'd seen.

Even a supporter, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), said she wished he had appeared "feistier."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Hagel's chief critics, said: "The next secretary of Defense is going to have to deal with a world on fire. I just believe that the testimony of Sen. Hagel was not reassuring."

Several Republicans have vowed to delay or derail a final Senate vote on Hagel.

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) has said he would insist that Hagel overcome a filibuster, which would require the support of 60 senators to end debate and move to a final up-or-down vote.

Graham has threatened to hold Hagel's nomination until the White House answers specific questions about Obama's actions on Sept. 11, 2012, when armed militants stormed a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and killed four Americans.

Other Republican senators who say they will vote against Hagel also say that they oppose a filibuster.

The White House believes all 53 Democratic senators and the two independents who caucus with the party will support Hagel's confirmation. Two Republicans — Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Mike Johanns of Nebraska — also have said they would vote yes.

michael.memoli@latimes.com

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Alec Baldwin, wife expecting a baby this summer

NEW YORK (AP) — Alec Baldwin and his wife are expecting their first child together.

Publicist Matthew Hiltzik confirmed Tuesday that Hilaria Baldwin is due late this summer.

Alec Baldwin already is the father of a 17-year-old daughter, Ireland, from his previous marriage to actress Kim Basinger (BAY'-sing-ur). Hilaria Baldwin is a special correspondent for the TV show "Extra." The couple wed last June after a three-month engagement.

Alec Baldwin recently won a SAG Award for best actor in a TV series for the NBC comedy "30 Rock," which concluded its seven-year run two weeks ago.

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