Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have broken up, reports say

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop star Justin Bieber and his girlfriend, Selena Gomez, a Disney actress and singer, have broken up, ending a relationship that made them one of Hollywood’s most high-profile young couples, media reports said.

Bieber, 18, and Gomez, 20, disclosed their relationship in February 2011 when they appeared together at an Oscar night party after months of rumors of their dating.

E! Online late on Friday was the first to report the split, with other media outlets including US Weekly and People also saying the relationship was over. The reports cited unnamed sources close to the couple.

Representatives for Bieber and Gomez did not returns calls or emails on Saturday.

Bieber has released two No. 1 albums in just over a year – the holiday-themed “Under the Mistletoe” and his latest, “Believe.” In September, he topped Billboard’s “21 Under 21″ list of top young musical acts. It was his second year in a row with the title.

Gomez rose to fame as a teenager in the Walt Disney Co television series “Wizards of Waverly Place” and has enjoyed success as a pop singer.

(Reporting By Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Greg McCune and Peter Cooney)

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Slipstream: Biometric Data-Gathering Sets Off a Privacy Debate

“PLEASE put your hand on the scanner,” a receptionist at a doctor’s office at New York University Langone Medical Center said to me recently, pointing to a small plastic device on the counter between us. “I need to take a palm scan for your file.”

I balked.

As a reporter who has been covering the growing business of data collection, I know the potential drawbacks — like customer profiling — of giving out my personal details. But the idea of submitting to an infrared scan at a medical center that would take a copy of the unique vein patterns in my palm seemed fraught.

The receptionist said it was for my own good. The medical center, she said, had recently instituted a biometric patient identification system to protect against identity theft.

I reluctantly stuck my hand on the machine. If I demurred, I thought, perhaps I’d be denied medical care.

Next, the receptionist said she needed to take my photo. After the palm scan, that seemed like data-collection overkill. Then an office manager appeared and explained that the scans and pictures were optional. Alas, my palm was already in the system.

No longer the province of security services and science-fiction films, biometric technology is on the march. Facebook uses facial-recognition software so its members can automatically put name tags on friends when they upload their photos. Apple uses voice recognition to power Siri. Some theme parks take digital fingerprints to help recognize season pass holders. Now some hospitals and school districts are using palm vein pattern recognition to identify and efficiently manage their patients or students — in effect, turning your palm into an E-ZPass.

But consumer advocates say that enterprises are increasingly employing biometric data to improve convenience — and that members of the public are paying for that convenience with their privacy.

Fingerprints, facial dimensions and vein patterns are unique, consumer advocates say, and should be treated as carefully as genetic samples. So collecting such information for expediency, they say, could increase the risks of serious identity theft. Yet companies and institutions that compile such data often fail to adequately explain the risks to consumers, they say.

“Let’s say someone makes a fake ID and goes in and has their photo and their palm print taken as you. What are you going to do when you go in?” said Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum, an advocacy group in San Diego. “Hospitals that are doing this are leaping over profound security issues that they are actually introducing into their systems.”

THE N.Y.U. medical center started researching biometric systems a few years ago in an effort to address several problems, said Kathryn McClellan, its vice president who is in charge of implementing its new electronic health records system. More than a million people in the New York area have the same or similar names, she said, creating a risk that medical personnel might pull up the wrong health record for a patient. Another issue, she said, was that some patients had multiple records from being treated at different affiliates; N.Y.U. wanted an efficient way to consolidate them.

Last year, the medical center adopted photography and palm-scan technology so that each patient would have two unique identifying features. Now, Ms. McClellan said, each arriving patient has his or her palm scanned, allowing the system to automatically pull up the correct file.

“It’s a patient safety initiative,” Ms. McClellan said. “We felt like the value to the patient was huge.”

N.Y.U.’s system, called PatientSecure and marketed by HT Systems of Tampa, has already scanned more than 250,000 patients. In the United States, over five million patients have had the scans, said Charles Yanak, a spokesman for Fujitsu Frontech North America, a division of Fujitsu, the Japanese company that developed the vein palm identification technology.

Yet, unless patients at N.Y.U. seem uncomfortable with the process, Ms. McClellan said, medical registration staff members don’t inform them that they can opt out of photos and scans.

“We don’t have formal consent,” Ms. McClellan said in a phone interview last Tuesday.

That raises red flags for privacy advocates. “If they are not informing patients it is optional,” said Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham University Law School with an expertise in data privacy, “then effectively it is coerced consent.”

He noted that N.Y.U. medical center has had recent incidents in which computers or USB drives containing unencrypted patient data have been lost or stolen, suggesting that the center’s collection of biometric data might increase patients’ risk of identity theft.

Ms. McClellan responded that there was little chance of identity theft because the palm scan system turned the vein measurements into encrypted strings of binary numbers and stored them on an N.Y.U. server that is separate from the one with patients’ health records. Even if there were a breach, she added, the data would be useless to hackers because a unique key is needed to decode the number strings. As for patients’ photos, she said, they are attached to their medical records.

Still, Arthur Caplan, the director of the division of medical ethics at the N.Y.U. center, recommended that hospitals do a better job of explaining biometric ID systems to patients. He himself recently had an appointment at the N.Y.U. center, he recounted, and didn’t learn that the palm scan was optional until he hesitated and asked questions.

“It gave me pause,” Dr. Caplan said. “It would be useful to put up a sign saying ‘We are going to take biometric information which will help us track you through the system. If you don’t want to do this, please see’ ” an office manager.

Other institutions that use PatientSecure, however, have instituted opt-in programs for patients.

At the Duke University Health System, patients receive brochures explaining their options, said Eliana Owens, the health system’s director of patient revenue. The center also trains staff members at registration desks to read patients a script about the opt-in process for the palm scans, she said. (Duke does not take patients’ photos.)

“They say: ‘The enrollment is optional. If you choose not to participate, we will continue to ask you for your photo ID on subsequent visits,’ ” Ms. Owens said.

Consent or not, some leading identity experts see little value in palm scans for patients right now. If medical centers are going to use patients’ biometric data for their own institutional convenience, they argue, the centers should also enhance patient privacy — by, say, permitting lower-echelon medical personnel to look at a person’s medical record only if that patient is present and approves access by having a palm scanned.

Otherwise, “you are enabling another level of danger,” said Joseph Atick, a pioneer in biometric identity systems who consults for governments, “instead of using the technology to enable another level of privacy.”

At my request, N.Y.U. medical center has deleted my palm print.

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

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Hurricane Sandy and the Disaster-Preparedness Economy

Jeffrey Phelps for The New York Times

An assembly line at a Generac Power Systems plant. Generac makes residential generators, coveted items in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

FOLKS here don’t wish disaster on their fellow Americans. They didn’t pray for Hurricane Sandy to come grinding up the East Coast, tearing lives apart and plunging millions into darkness.

But the fact is, disasters are good business in Waukesha. And, lately, there have been a lot of disasters.

This Milwaukee suburb, once known for its curative spring waters and, more recently, for being a Republican stronghold in a state that President Obama won on Election Day, happens to be the home of one of the largest makers of residential generators in the country. So when the lights go out in New York — or on the storm-savaged Jersey Shore or in tornado-hit Missouri or wherever — the orders come pouring in like a tidal surge.

It’s all part of what you might call the Mad Max Economy, a multibillion-dollar-a-year collection of industries that thrive when things get really, really bad. Weather radios, kerosene heaters, D batteries, candles, industrial fans for drying soggy homes — all are scarce and coveted in the gloomy aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and her ilk.

It didn’t start with the last few hurricanes, either. Modern Mad Max capitalism has been around a while, decades even, growing out of something like old-fashioned self-reliance, political beliefs and post-Apocalyptic visions. The cold war may have been the start, when schoolchildren dove under desks and ordinary citizens dug bomb shelters out back. But economic fears, as well as worries about climate change and an unreliable electronic grid have all fed it.

 Driven of late by freakish storms, this industry is growing fast, well beyond the fringe groups that first embraced it. And by some measures, it’s bigger than ever.

Businesses like Generac Power Systems, one of three companies in Wisconsin turning out generators, are just the start.

The market for gasoline cans, for example, was flat for years. No longer. “Demand for gas cans is phenomenal, to the point where we can’t keep up with demand,” says Phil Monckton, vice president for sales and marketing at Scepter, a manufacturer based in Scarborough, Ontario. “There was inventory built up, but it is long gone.”

Even now, nearly two weeks after the superstorm made landfall in New Jersey, batteries are a hot commodity in the New York area. Win Sakdinan, a spokesman for Duracell, says that when the company gave away D batteries in the Rockaways, a particularly hard-hit area, people “held them in their hands like they were gold.”

Sales of Eton emergency radios and flashlights rose 15 percent in the week before Hurricane Sandy — and 220 percent the week of the storm, says Kiersten Moffatt, a company spokeswoman. “It’s important to note that we not only see lifts in the specific regions affected, we see a lift nationwide,” she wrote in an e-mail. “We’ve seen that mindfulness motivates consumers all over the country to be prepared in the case of a similar event.”

Garo Arabian, director of operations at B-Air, a manufacturer based in Azusa, Calif., says he has sold thousands of industrial fans since the storm. “Our marketing and graphic designer is from Syria, and he says: ‘I don’t understand. In Syria, we open the windows.’ ”

But Mr. Arabian says contractors and many insurers know that mold spores won’t grow if carpeting or drywall can be dried out within 72 hours. “The industry has grown,” he says, “because there is more awareness about this kind of thing.”

Retailers that managed to stay open benefited, too. Steve Rinker, who oversees 11 Lowe’s home improvement stores in New York and New Jersey, says his stores were sometimes among the few open in a sea of retail businesses.

Predictably, emergency supplies like flashlights, lanterns, batteries and sump pumps sold out quickly, even when they were replenished. The one sought-after item that surprised him the most? Holiday candles. “If anyone is looking for holiday candles, they are sold out,” he says. “People bought every holiday candle we have during the storm.”

If the hurricane was a windfall for Lowe’s, its customers didn’t seem to mind. Rather, most appeared exceedingly grateful when Mr. Rinker, working at a store in Paterson, N.J., pointed them toward a space heater, or a gasoline can, that could lessen the misery of another day without power.

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Expert Witness Dinged $300,000 for Making Fake Child Porn

An Ohio lawyer who serves as an expert witness in child pornography cases is on the hook for $300,000 in civil damages for Photoshopping courtroom exhibits of children having sex, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

Attorney Dean Boland purchased innocent pictures of two juvenile girls from a Canadian stock-image website, then digitally modified them to make it appear as if the children were engaged in sexual conduct.

Boland was an expert witness for the defense in a half-dozen child porn cases and made the mock-ups to punctuate his argument that child pornography laws are unconstitutionally overbroad because they could apply to faked photos.

As a result, in 2007 he found himself the defendant in a deferred federal child-porn prosecution in Ohio, even though his exhibits helped clear at least one client of child-porn-related allegations. Now, a federal appeals court is upholding a $300,000 verdict in a lawsuit brought by the parents of two of the girls whose images Boland doctored.

“This $300,000 award undoubtedly amounts to tough medicine for Boland,” the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (.pdf) Friday. “When he created morphed images, he intended to help criminal defendants, not harm innocent children. Yet his actions did harm children, and Congress has shown that it ‘means business’ in addressing this problem by creating sizeable damages awards for victims of this conduct.”

Boland, a former state prosecutor, transformed a picture of a 5-year-old girl eating a doughnut into one of her having oral sex. Another photo was of a 6-year-old girl’s face placed on the body of an adult woman having sex with two men. He purchased the pictures from iStockPhoto, according to court records, and morphed them to help child porn defendants make a nuanced legal defense.

The parents of the children, who were not named in the case, lodged the complaint (.pdf) against him in 2007 after learning of the photo morphing from the FBI. Under the 1986 Child Abuse Victims Rights Act, each victim is entitled to a minimum $150,000 in damages.

Boland argued that he was immune from such a lawsuit because, among other reasons, he’d created the images for use in court, never distributed them, and that the First Amendment protected him.

But the court ruled that it was immaterial that Boland never displayed the images outside of court and never transmitted them electronically.

“The creation and initial publication of the images itself harmed Jane Doe and Jane Roe, and that is enough to remove Boland’s actions from the protections of the First Amendment,” the appeals court ruled.

The law under which the parents sued demands proof that the girls suffered “personal injury.” But Boland argued that the children didn’t know about the pictures, a point the appeals court said was immaterial.

“Even if Doe and Roe never see the images, the specter of pornographic images will cause them ‘continuing harm by haunting [them] in years to come,” the appeals court said.

Boland’s morphing was to help those caught possessing child pornography make a nuanced legal defense. Child-porn laws prohibit “knowingly” accessing child pornography. The morphed images were a bid to demonstrate that the law violated the First Amendment on “vagueness and over-breadth grounds,” because a defendant could not know whether what he was viewing was an actual or virtual image of a child having sex.

Boland did not immediately respond for comment.

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Philip Roth says he’s done writing

NEW YORK (AP) — Exit, Philip Roth? Having conceived everything from turning into a breast to a polio epidemic in his native New Jersey, Roth has apparently given his imagination a rest.

The 79-year-old novelist recently told a French publication, Les inRocks, that his 2010 release “Nemesis” would be his last. Spokeswoman Lori Glazer of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said Friday that she had spoken with Roth and that he confirmed his remarks. Roth’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, declined comment.

Roth certainly produced, completing more than 20 novels over half a century and often turning out one a year. He won virtually every prize short of the Nobel and wrote such classics as “American Pastoral” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

His name will remain on new releases, if only because the Library of America has been issuing hardcover volumes of his work. Roth also is cooperating with award-winning biographer Blake Bailey on a book about his life.

The author chose an unexpected forum to break the news, but he has been hinting at his departure for years. He has said that he no longer reads fiction and seemed to say goodbye to his fictional alterego, Nathan Zuckerman, in the 2007 novel “Exit Ghost.”

Retirement is rarely the preferred option for writers, for whom the ability to tell stories or at least set down words is often synonymous with life itself. Poor health, discouragement and even madness are the more likely ways literary careers end. Roth apparently is fit and his recent novels had been received respectfully, if not with the awe of his most celebrated work.

“I don’t believe it,” Roth’s friend and fellow writer Cynthia Ozick said upon learning the news. “A writer who stops writing while still breathing has already declared herself posthumous.”

His parting words from “Nemesis”: “He seemed to us invincible.”

Roth’s interview appeared in French and has been translated, roughly, by The Associated Press. He tells Les inRocks that “Nemesis” was “mon dernier livre” (“My last book”) and refers to “Howard’s End” author E.M. Forster, and how he quit fiction in his 40s. Roth said he doesn’t plan to write a memoir, but will instead go through his archives and help ensure that Bailey’s biography comes out in his lifetime.

Explaining why he stopped, Roth said that at age 74 he became aware his time was limited and that he started re-reading his books of the past 20-30 years, in reverse order. He decided that he agreed with what the boxer Joe Louis had said late in life, that he had done the best he could with what he had.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Malaria Vaccine Candidate Produces Disappointing Results in Clinical Trial

The latest clinical trial of the world’s leading malaria vaccine candidate produced disappointing results on Friday. The infants it was given to had only about a third fewer infections than a control group.

But researchers said they wanted to press on, assuming they keep getting financial support, because the number of children who die of malaria is so great that even an inefficient vaccine can save thousands of lives.

Three shots of the vaccine, known as RTS, S or Mosquirix and produced by GlaxoSmithKline, gave babies fewer than 12 weeks old 31 percent protection against detectable malaria and 37 percent protection against severe malaria, according to an announcement by the company at a vaccines conference in Cape Town.

Last year, in a trial in children up to 17 months old, the same vaccine gave 55 percent protection against detectable malaria and 47 percent against severe malaria.

The new trial “is less than we’d hoped for,” Moncef Slaoui, chairman of research and development at Glaxo, said in a telephone interview. “But if a million babies were vaccinated, we would prevent 260,000 cases of malaria a year. This is a disease that kills 655,000 babies a year — 31 percent of that is a very large number.”

The company, which has already spent more than $300 million on the vaccine, wants to keep forging ahead, Mr. Slaoui said, “but it is not just our decision.”

It also depends on the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which has put more than $200 million of its Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation financing into the vaccine, and on the World Health Organization, which has helped talk seven African countries into allowing the vaccine to be tested on their children.

The Gates Foundation declined to say how much money it was ultimately prepared to spend on an imperfect vaccine; this set of trials is set to go into 2014.

“The efficacy came back lower than we had hoped, but developing a vaccine against a parasite is a very hard thing to do,” Bill Gates said in a prepared statement. “The trial is continuing, and we look forward to getting more data to help determine whether and how to deploy this vaccine.”

All the families in the trial were given insecticide-treated mosquito nets and encouraged to use them; 86 percent did, so the vaccine’s results were achieved on top of other anti-malaria measures.

RTS, S contains a protein found on the parasite’s surface that provokes an immune reaction. It was first identified decades ago by two New York University scientists, Ruth and Victor Nussenzweig. The vaccine was developed by Glaxo in Belgium and initially tested on American volunteers by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

When the Gates Foundation began focusing on global health in the early part of this century, it was one of the first projects the foundation adopted. Different ways to make the vaccine more effective, including adding different boosters and giving more shots, are being experimented with. Other vaccines using different ways to provoke an immune reaction exist, but none are as far along in clinical trials.

Like an H.I.V. vaccine, one against malaria has proved an elusive goal. The parasite morphs several times, exhibiting different surface proteins as it goes from mosquito saliva into blood and then into and out of the liver. Also, even the best natural “vaccine” — catching the disease itself — is not very effective. While one bout of measles immunizes a child for life, it usually takes several bouts of malaria to confer even partial immunity. Pregnancy can cause women to stop being immune, and immunity can fade out if someone moves away from a malarial area — presumably because they no longer get “boosters” from repeated mosquito bites.

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Black Friday Deals Will Start Earlier This Year

There was an outcry last year when some retailers opened at midnight on Thanksgiving, with workers and shoppers saying the holiday should be reserved for family, not spent lining up for the start of the Christmas shopping season.

This year, retailers are responding to the criticism by opening even earlier on Thanksgiving evening — and a handful are even planning to be open all day.

The lesson of 2011 was clear: earlier shopping hours were good for the top line. Retailers said their midnight openings drew a younger crowd who wanted to party — and shop — late rather than get up early. At Macy’s Herald Square store in Manhattan, for instance, about 9,000 people were in line as it opened, compared with 7,000 for an early Friday opening the previous year.

“We got customer feedback that says, ‘I like to shop earlier so I can go to bed earlier,’ so as we looked at the balance of being competitive in the marketplace and being customer-centric,” said Duncan Mac Naughton, chief merchandising and marketing officer for Wal-Mart, which will put its first doorbuster items on sale at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving.

Just a few years ago, most major stores opened about 5 a.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving, usually the busiest shopping day of the year. This year, not only are the openings scattered across two days, but several retailers are offering staggered deals — some items at a certain time, other items a few hours later, still others over the weekend.

“We had Black Friday pretty cleanly teed up, with, here are the ads, here are the stores opening Friday morning, pick a retailer and go,” said Brad Wilson, who lists Black Friday ads at BradsDeals. “Now you have this multiday affair, and you can go at different times.”

Kmart has perhaps the most confusing hours. Like last year, it will open at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving. It will then stay open until 4 p.m., close from 4 to 8 p.m., reopen at 8, stay open until 3 a.m. on Friday, close from 3 to 5 a.m., reopen at 5, and then stay open until 11 p.m. on Friday.

Sears, which was closed on Thanksgiving last year, will open at 8 p.m. on Thursday night.

Sears Holdings, which owns both Sears and Kmart, said in a news release that customers wanted “more flexible Black Friday in-store shopping times.”

Lord & Taylor was closed last year on Thanksgiving, but this year it will be open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Walmart, which is generally open 24 hours anyway, is offering the first deals on Thanksgiving two hours earlier than last year. Mr. Mac Naughton said customer feedback and competitiveness with other retailers were factors.

Target, which last year got angry feedback from employees when it opened at midnight on Thanksgiving, this year moved it up three hours to 9 p.m., according to a holiday circular posted online on Friday.

Some workers object to Thanksgiving Day holiday openings, saying it cuts into family time. It shows “disregard for all of our families,” said Mary Pat Tifft, a Walmart employee in Kenosha, Wis., who is part of the union-backed OUR Walmart group, in a statement. But in many cases, it can also mean a higher hourly pay rate for holiday duty.

Now, the handful of retailers who are holding off until midnight on Thanksgiving suddenly look like the respectful ones.

“We believe that Thanksgiving Day is a time to spend and celebrate with family, and we want our associates to do so,” said Jim Sluzewski, a spokesman for Macy’s, which will open at midnight. Kohl’s will also open at midnight Thanksgiving, as will Best Buy, according to a circular posted online Friday.

Companies are also sprinkling sales throughout the weekend in an effort to keep traffic coming.

After its initial 8 p.m. sale, Walmart will put another set of items on sale at 10, and a third group at 5 a.m. Friday. “Whether they like to start early, stay up late, or go to bed early and get up early, we’re going to have three different events that will meet their needs,” Mr. Mac Naughton said. Then, Walmart will “kick off a weekend full of savings with more specialty offers” on items like jewelry, sewing machines and tools.

Target, after its 9 p.m. doorbuster special, will offer a free gift card for purchases made between 4 a.m. and noon on Friday, according to the circular posted on Mr. Wilson’s site and elsewhere. (Target declined to confirm the authenticity of the circular, saying it had not yet publicly announced holiday details.)

Sears will do a second wave of promotions at 4 a.m. on Friday, eight hours after it opens. Sports Authority will do some doorbusters at its midnight opening, then put numerous others on sale over the weekend. And Ace Hardware is offering different percentages or dollars off, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Mr. Wilson of BradsDeals says the retailers may be intentionally trying to confuse shoppers. “They’re trying to introduce more variables,” he said, to make it harder to figure out exactly which is the best deal.

All of the twists and turns, though, may just end up frustrating consumers.

Only 6 percent of shoppers plan to hit stores on Thanksgiving night, and just under one-fifth will go to stores on Black Friday, according to a new survey from Ipsos and Offers.com, accurate within three percentage points.

At least one major retailer is going against the grain. Sam’s Club, which last year opened at 5 a.m. on Black Friday, this year is opening two hours later, at 7 a.m., and offering coffee and pastries to shoppers.

“If they want to chill out on Thanksgiving day and not go out and get into the rat race of everything, they can do that,” said Todd Harbaugh, executive vice president for operations at Sam’s Club. “Our members said they want hassle-free shopping.”

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Prop. 30 win gives Jerry Brown major boost

SACRAMENTO — Just a few weeks ago, as support for Gov. Jerry Brown's tax initiative appeared to falter, some of his fellow Democrats were saying privately that he might be serving his last term.

None of them are saying that now.

Brown has emerged from his successful tax fight with replenished political capital, his experience and instinct trumping conventional wisdom.

"His standing in the Capitol is probably higher than it has ever been," said Tony Quinn, co-editor of the California Target Book, which monitors political races. "Now we have a strong governor.... He is going to be able to get his way a lot more."

A loss at the ballot box would have been catastrophic for Brown politically. It also would have devastated education budgets throughout the state. The passage of Proposition 30 addressed both scenarios.

Now, the Democrats who won record-high numbers in the Legislature on Tuesday will owe him for the billions of dollars they'll have to balance the budget. The business interests who fear what a supermajority of Democrats might do with new, unilateral power will be eager to work with the moderate governor. They may see the pragmatic Brown as a check on a hostile Legislature.

Brown himself is already talking about the next steps in the state's bullet-train program and about moving on a multibillion-dollar system to send more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Southern California — projects that could reshape his image into one of a builder like his father, who was governor when the state built new freeways and universities.

He wants to focus on enduring changes to the state's spending policies that he hopes will enhance California's standing with Wall Street and put it on more stable financial footing.

He is vowing to steer the Capitol toward moderation in the coming years, working with business leaders to streamline state regulations that they complain hamper economic growth. He wants to lift some of the policies Sacramento has inflicted on local schools — often at the behest of the Democrats' labor allies — so they have more flexibility in deciding how to operate.

"The work is never done," Brown said at a Capitol news conference after the election, stressing that he would not lose sight of the nuts and bolts of government just because the financial books would be in order for now.

He joked at the Capitol on Wednesday that he never understood why there were so many doubters of his ability to pull off a Proposition 30 victory.

"Some people began to read tea leaves incorrectly," Brown told reporters. "And then you all go off like a herd of buffalo down the road. Hopefully you're all now back on the plane of common sense."

Brown's internal polls had shown steady support for his measure despite public surveys suggesting steep drops. He was watching a surge in Democrats signing up to vote, spurred by the new online voter registration system he signed into law. Unions were mobilizing to get voters to the polls.

The governor also knew he could ride the coattails of President Obama, who appealed to the same demographic group as Proposition 30 and has been consistently popular in California.

Still, the path to victory had looked rocky as election day loomed. As in his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, he had resisted pressure from old Capitol hands to mobilize all his forces quickly. He ignored advice to hit the stump early and hard, to hammer away at this theme or that, to blitz the airwaves from the beginning.

Unfavorable reviews of Brown's encore as governor began to mount. Brown had vastly more campaign money than his opponents, but No-on-30 ads blanketed the airwaves, helped by $11 million that secret donors gave a group devoted partly to defeating Brown's measure.

He tweaked his strategy after questioning employees at a San Diego coffee shop. When one young woman told him she hadn't seen his commercials because she doesn't watch TV, he called his chief advisor, his wife, Anne Gust Brown, to say they needed to reach the "non-TV voter."

Only days away from the election, he had not settled on whether he should be featured prominently in campaign advertisements. On a plane, in the air between Bakersfield and Fresno, he drilled a Central Valley state senator about how voters viewed him there and whether his face should appear on their television sets.

"If this had gone the other way, he would be perceived as a lame duck," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor in the USC Price School of Public Policy. "You would have seen a lot more visible activity on the part of … possible opponents in the 2014 governor's race."

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fellow Democrat, appeared to be positioning himself that way when he openly contradicted some of what Brown said on the campaign trail. As it became clear in the wee hours Wednesday that Proposition 30 would pass, Brown's press secretary had a message for Newsom in the form of a tweet.

It was a link to Elvis Presley performing "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"

evan.halper@latimes.com

anthony.york@latimes.com

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VP Joe Biden guest stars as celebrity crush on “Parks and Rec”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Someone has a big crush on U.S. Vice President Joe Biden – and now she is getting to meet him.

Biden will make his TV acting debut with a cameo on NBC‘s comedy “Parks and Recreation” as the celebrity crush of actress Amy Poehler‘s ditzy local councilwoman Leslie Knope, NBC said on Thursday.

Biden, 69, will play himself in the episode “Leslie vs. April,” airing November 15, where Knope, a city councilwoman for the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana, has a surprise meeting with the vice president in Washington D.C.

Knope has long described her ideal man as having the “brains of George Clooney and the body of Joe Biden.”

“Meeting Vice President Biden was a thrill for me and for Leslie,” Poehler said in a statement.

“He was a good sport and a great improviser. The vice president maintained his composure while I harassed him and invaded his personal space. The nation of ‘Parks and Rec’ will be forever grateful,” she added.

The scenes with Biden were shot in July in the chambers of the vice president’s ceremonial office, during the TV show’s recent trip to the nation’s capital to film scenes for this season’s storylines.

The biggest challenge of landing Biden’s cameo was keeping it a secret before Tuesday’s U.S. elections. Airing the episode prior to November 6 could have been equivalent to a campaign contribution to advertise a candidate, executive producer Michael Schur told Entertainment Weekly.

“Parks and Recreation” follows the Pawnee Parks department and its tireless deputy Knope, who puts all her efforts into improving her little hometown.

This is a big season for Poehler’s character, who is finally elected into city government, gets engaged to campaign advisor Ben Wyatt and meets her political heroes including Senators Barbara Boxer, Olympia Snow and John McCain, who were featured in September’s season premiere.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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States Rush to Meet Tight Health Care Deadlines

After nearly three years of legal and political threats that kept President Obama’s health care law in a constant state of uncertainty, his re-election on Tuesday all but guarantees that the historic legislation will survive.

Now comes another big hurdle: making it work.

The election came just 10 days before a critical deadline for states in carrying out the law, and many that were waiting for the outcome must now hustle to comply. Such efforts will coincide with epic negotiations between Mr. Obama and Congress over federal spending and taxes, where the administration will inevitably face pressure to scale back some of the costliest provisions of the law.

Mr. Obama faces crucial choices about strategy that could determine the success of the health care overhaul: Will the administration, for example, try to address the concerns of insurers, employers and some consumer groups who worry that the law’s requirements could increase premiums? Or will it insist on the stringent standards favored by liberal policy advocates inside and outside the government?

But for now — with Democrats retaining control of the Senate and Mitt Romney’s vow to “repeal and replace” the law no longer a threat — supporters are exulting.

“For our district and for our country, the debate on Obamacare is over,” declared Bill Foster, a Democrat elected Tuesday to the House from a suburban Chicago district.

Many supporters feel one of Mr. Obama’s most important tasks will be to step up efforts to promote and explain the law to a public that remains sharply divided and confused about it. In exit polls on Tuesday, nearly half of voters said the law should be either partly or fully repealed.

“There is still a tremendous amount of disinformation out there,” said Jeff Goldsmith, a health industry analyst based in Virginia. “If you actually are going to implement this law, people need to know what’s in it — not just the puppies-and-ice-cream parts, but ‘Here are the broader social changes intended and how they can help you.’ ”

Already, advocacy groups eager for the law to succeed have shifted into a higher gear. One such group, Families USA, held a conference call on Thursday with about 300 advocates around the country to strategize about next steps, said Ronald F. Pollack, the group’s executive director. Enroll America, a sister organization, will hold focus groups next week in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas to collect ideas for a public education campaign.

Much depends on the states as they decide in the coming weeks and months whether to build online marketplaces known as insurance exchanges, where individuals and small businesses can shop for health plans, and whether to expand their Medicaid programs to reach many more low-income people.

The clock is ticking on the exchange question in particular: states have until next Friday to decide whether they will build their own exchange or let the federal government run one for them. Some states have asked the administration for more time.

So far, only about 15 states and the District of Columbia have created the framework for exchanges through legislation or executive orders; three others have committed to running exchanges in partnership with the federal government. A number of Republican governors, including those in Arizona, Idaho, New Jersey, Virginia and Tennessee, had said they would decide after the election, giving themselves only a 10-day window before the deadline.

“I would expect that starting today there are a significant number of fascinating conversations going on behind closed doors in state capitols all over America,” said John McDonough, a professor of public health at Harvard who helped draft the law.

With deficit-reduction talks beginning in Washington next week, some observers believe that the law’s most expensive provisions — like federal subsidies to help families with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty level pay their insurance premiums — could be scaled back in the name of deficit reduction.

“We know folks on the Hill are talking about this already,” said David Smith, an analyst at Leavitt Partners, a consulting firm that advises states on the law. “There are a lot of competing factors, but they have to find the savings and we believe health care will be one of the places where they will go.”

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