Sony confirms 10 devices will get Jelly Bean upgrade starting in February 2013

Title Post: Sony confirms 10 devices will get Jelly Bean upgrade starting in February 2013
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Cassadee Pope wins Season 3 of 'The Voice'

NEW YORK (AP) — Cassadee Pope, who was country singer Blake Shelton's protege on the third season of NBC's "The Voice," has won the show's competition.

The 23-year-old singer is stepping out into a solo career after performing with a band called Hey Monday. Her victory over Scottish native Terry McDermott and long-bearded Nicholas David was announced at the end of a two-hour show Tuesday.

"The Voice" has grown into a hit for NBC and was the key factor in the network's surprising success this fall.

The show's status was affirmed by the stream of hitmakers who performed on the finale. They included Rihanna, Bruno Mars, the Killers, Smokey Robinson and Peter Frampton.

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Church Officials Call on Filipinos to Campaign Against Birth Control Law

MANILA — After losing a battle to stop the passage of a contentious birth control law, Roman Catholic Church officials on Tuesday dug in and instructed their millions of followers to campaign against the measure in communities, schools and homes.

“Let us intensify the moral spiritual education of our youth and children so that they can stand strong against the threats to their moral fiber,” Archbishop Socrates Villegas said in a statement. “Let us use all the means within our reach to safeguard the health of expectant mothers in our communities.”

The Philippine Congress passed legislation on Monday to help the country’s poorest women gain access to birth control. Each chamber of the national legislature passed its own version of the measure, and minor differences between the two must be reconciled before the measure goes to President Benigno S. Aquino III for his signature.

The measure had been stalled for more than a decade because of determined opposition from the church in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Birth control is legal and widely available in the Philippines for people who can afford it, particularly those living in cities. But condoms, birth control pills and other forms of contraception are sometimes kept out of community health centers and clinics by local government and Catholic Church officials.

The measure passed on Monday would stock government health centers, including those in remote areas, with free or subsidized birth control options for the poor. It would also require sex education in public schools and family-planning training for community health officers.

Archbishop Villegas, the vice president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, on Tuesday encouraged Catholics to resist the measure by disseminating information about natural family planning methods and warning people about “the hazardous effects of contraceptive pills on the health of women.”

“Let us conduct our own sex education of our children insuring that sex is always understood as a gift of God,” Archbishop Villegas stated. “Sex must never be taught separate from God and isolated from marriage.”

Bishop Gabriel V. Reyes, chairman of the conference’s Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, said after the vote Monday that “we need to explain to our fellow believers that they ought to refuse contraceptives even when they are being offered these.”

The Philippines has one of the highest birthrates in Asia, but backers of the legislation, including the Aquino administration, have said repeatedly that its purpose is not to limit population growth. Rather, they say, the bill is meant to offer poor families the same reproductive health options that wealthier people in the country enjoy.

Though lacking the numbers needed to defeat the legislation, lawmakers who opposed the measure sought to delay the vote. In one instance, an opposition senator proposed 35 amendments just before a vote was to take place.

Often the debate took bizarre turns, as when a congressman claimed that the birth control measure was a plot by the Philippine Communist Party to take over the government.

In another instance, a male senator requested removal of the phrase “satisfying sex” from a passage in the bill that referred to “safe and satisfying sex.” Several female senators opposed its removal, and the amendment was debated live on television while social media networks crackled with sarcastic commentary. “I am a Filipina,” Senator Miriam Santiago said in response to the amendment. “I am also a married woman, and I insist whoever is married to me should give me safe and satisfying sex, period.”

During a vote on the measure in the House of Representatives, the boxer and congressman Manny Pacquiao linked the birth control measure to his having been knocked unconscious on Dec. 8 by Juan Manuel Marquez during their W.B.O. world welterweight fight in Las Vegas.

“Some thought I was dead,” Mr. Pacquiao said in a speech explaining his vote against the measure. “What happened in Vegas strengthened my already firm belief in the sanctity of life.” He added: “Manny Pacquiao is pro-life. Manny Pacquiao votes no.”

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Instagram draws ire over new user rules

SAN FRANCISCO — When it comes to policy changes, Instagram could have used a filter of its own.

Its usually devoted users threatened to delete their accounts en masse Tuesday if the popular photo-sharing app did not roll back new terms of service that appeared to give the company ownership of their images. Instagram users — about 100 million now — snap the photos on their smartphones, apply digital filters to enhance the photos and then instantly share them with friends.

"Dear @Instagram, why did you think we'd just be OK with your new terms? They are NOT COOL. Signed, The Entire Internet," Jason Pollock, a Los Angeles filmmaker and social media consultant, wrote on Twitter.

Instagram founder Kevin Systrom tried to calm the uproar and reassure users in a blog post Tuesday afternoon.

"Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos," he wrote. "We respect that your photos are your photos. Period."

Instagram's new terms of service announced Monday included a clause stating that Instagram had the right to turn images into advertisements without any approval from or compensation for users starting Jan. 16. — part of Facebook's drive to make money from the service it bought this year for $715 million in cash and stock.

That angered amateur and professional photographers alike — even Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's wedding photographer.

"Pro or not if a company wants to use your photos for advertising they need to TELL you and PAY you," Noah Kalina said on Twitter.

The effort to make money from Instagram users struck a nerve. According to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, nearly half of Internet users post photos and videos online that they have created themselves.

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Instagram quickly realized it had "overplayed its hand." But its mea culpa blog post still contains plenty of loopholes, he said.

"They say they don't have any plans to put your photos in an advertisement, but nevertheless that is the permission they were seeking," Opsahl said. "We will have to see what the language of the terms of service looks like after they revise it."

Jeff Lawrence, a 29-year-old DJ, graphic designer and photographer from Seattle, said he'll decide if he's dumping Instagram after he sees what the company plans to do in black and white.

"Thankfully we are all Internet savvy enough to know that people can say one thing and do another," said Lawrence, an avid Instagram user. "I am going to wait and see if Instagram takes this criticism to heart and changes the terms of service."

The backlash underscored the rising tensions between users of free social media services and the companies that are trying to profit from them. More users are asking for more control over how these companies handle their information.

Clayton Cubitt, 40, a photographer and filmmaker from Brooklyn, N.Y., quickly dubbed the new terms of service a "suicide note" from Instagram.

He urged his fellow Instagram users to revolt against the current policies at social media companies that he described as "you have a free place to post content and in exchange the company sucks the soul out of your life."

"They look at users as a herd to milk," Cubitt said.

His rants may have angered Zuckerberg, but Zuckerberg's sister Arielle Zuckerberg publicly "liked" Cubitt's Instagram snapshot of the most controversial part of Instagram's terms of service.

It's unclear if the Instagram backlash will cause lasting damage to the service.

Hacker collective Anonymous had urged its more than 780,000 Twitter followers to ditch Instagram with the hashtag #BoycottInstagram and posted screen shots from followers who had. The servers of Instaport.me, which helps users download their photos from Instagram, were overloaded Tuesday as Instagram users deleted their accounts and switched to other options such as Hipstamatic and Twitter's new photo service that has filters similar to Instagram. Yahoo said it has seen "strong interest" in its new Flickr app for iPhones.

Many Instagram users said they would give Instagram the benefit of the doubt — for now.

"I am going to rage about it, and get people to rage about it, until we change their policy," Pollock, 31, said in an interview. "There is just something so personal and beautiful about Instagram. Hopefully they don't completely ruin it."

jessica.guynn@latimes.com

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Newport Beach dock renters may withhold holiday love

Marcy Cook embraces the holiday season. The tell? Start with the teddy bears dressed as Santa. More than 1,500 stand sentry around and inside her Newport Beach waterfronthome. Garland and strings of lights threaten to strangle the place like kudzu.

"We decorate a little bit, if you haven't noticed," said Cook, 69. "It's the highlight of the year for us."

Each Christmas, Newport Harbor is ablaze in lights as homeowners go to extraordinary lengths to complement the city's annual Christmas Boat Parade — an indelible tradition that renews itself Wednesday night and continues through Sunday.

But this has been a stressful season here along the tranquil waterfront lined with multimillion-dollar homes.

An increase in city rental fees for residential docks that protrude over public tidelands created a furor when it was approved last week by the City Council.

It also prompted a call to boycott the boat parade and festival of lights by a group calling itself "Stop the Dock Tax."

"It costs us thousands of dollars to voluntarily decorate our homes and boats to bring holiday smiles to nearly 1 million people," organization Chairman Bob McCaffrey wrote to the city. "This year, we are turning off our lights and withdrawing our boats in protest of the massive new dock tax we expect the City Council to levy."

Pete Pallette, a fellow boycott proponent and harbor homeowner, told city leaders the group would call off the boycott only if the council delayed voting on the rent hike. "Otherwise," he vowed, "game on."

In a place where homes come with names and mega-yachts bob in the harbor, it might appear the wealthy are wielding a weapon most often reserved for the masses. A holiday blackout, proponents say, will underscore their displeasure.

Newport's dock fee, which has stood at $100 a year for the last two decades, will now be based on a dock's size. The city says rents will increase to about $250 for a small slip to $3,200 annually for a large dock shared by two homeowners.

"People have been paying $8 a month all these years to access what is public waters," said Newport Beach City Manager Dave Kiff. "That's a pretty good deal. The City Council didn't think the increase it approved was too extreme."

Many did.

They packed council meetings when the hike was discussed, accusing the city of an excessive money grab.

They brushed aside the city's rationale: Statelawmandates cities charge fair market rents for the private use of public lands, and Newport Beach was only now catching up.

And they were unmoved by arguments that the extra revenue will go exclusively to badly needed repairs to a harbor that, despite outward appearances, needs a lot of work.

The city's five-year plan for the harbor calls for $29 million in long-overdue maintenance. Its silt-filled channels haven't been fully dredged since the Great Depression. Ancient, leaky sea walls protecting neighborhoods need to be repaired or replaced.

"We have the makings of a perfect storm like they did on the East Coast" during Superstorm Sandy, said Chris Miller, the city's harbor resources manager. "The sea walls are nearing the end of their useful life."

Even with the rent increases, Newport's dock owners will contribute a tiny fraction of that cost — the rest coming from the federal government and the city's general operating fund.

As dock owners fumed over having to pay more, others recoiled at the proposed boycott of the boat parade, which dates to 1908 when a single gondola led eight canoes illuminated by Japanese lanterns around the harbor. It has now swelled to a decent-sized armada of dozens of boats — some carrying paying customers — that circle past the decorated harbor-front homes.

"The boycott is ridiculous," said Shirley Pepys, whose frontyard on Balboa Island has been taken over by a family of penguins dressed for a Hawaiian luau.

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Facebook to launch new Snapchat alternative with self-destructing messages

Title Post: Facebook to launch new Snapchat alternative with self-destructing messages
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Zooey Deschanel, rocker husband finalize divorce

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge has finalized Zooey Deschanel's divorce from her rocker husband of roughly three years.

Court records show a judge finalized the actress' divorce from Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard on Wednesday in Los Angeles.

Gibbard and Deschanel, who stars in Fox's "New Girl," were married in September 2009. They had no children together.

The actress filed for divorce in December 2011 after separating two months earlier.

The judgment does not provide financial details of the breakup, although it states that the former couple's marriage cannot be repaired by counseling or mediation.

Deschanel was nominated last week for a Golden Globe for her work on "New Girl."

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Mind: A Misguided Focus on Mental Illness in Gun Control Debate

The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, has been described as a loner who was intelligent and socially awkward. And while no official diagnosis has been made public, armchair diagnosticians have been quick to assert that keeping guns from getting into the hands of people with mental illness would help solve the problem of gun homicides.

Arguing against stricter gun-control measures, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and a former F.B.I. agent, said, “What the more realistic discussion is, ‘How do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?’ ”

Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, told The New York Times: “To reduce the risk of multivictim violence, we would be better advised to focus on early detection and treatment of mental illness.”

But there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.

This does not mean that mental illness is not a risk factor for violence. It is, but the risk is actually small. Only certain serious psychiatric illnesses are linked to an increased risk of violence.

One of the largest studies, the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, which followed nearly 18,000 subjects, found that the lifetime prevalence of violence among people with serious mental illness — like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — was 16 percent, compared with 7 percent among people without any mental disorder. Anxiety disorders, in contrast, do not seem to increase the risk at all.

Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself. In the National Institute of Mental Health’s E.C.A. study, for example, people with no mental disorder who abused alcohol or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to commit violent acts.

It’s possible that preventing people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses from getting guns might decrease the risk of mass killings. Even the Supreme Court, which in 2008 strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms, at the same time endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill.”

But mass killings are very rare events, and because people with mentally illness contribute so little to overall violence, these measures would have little impact on everyday firearm-related killings. Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness.

Perhaps more significant, we are not very good at predicting who is likely to be dangerous in the future. According to Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an expert on mass murderers, “Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.”

Even though we know from large-scale epidemiologic studies like the E.C.A. study that a young psychotic male who is intoxicated with alcohol and has a history of involuntary commitment is at a high risk of violence, most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.

Jeffery Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University and a leading expert in the epidemiology of violence, said in an e-mail, “Can we reliably predict violence?  ‘No’ is the short answer. Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.”

It would be even harder to predict a mass shooting, Dr. Swanson said, “You can profile the perpetrators after the fact and you’ll get a description of troubled young men, which also matches the description of thousands of other troubled young men who would never do something like this.”

Even if clinicians could predict violence perfectly, keeping guns from people with mental illness is easier said than done. Nearly five years after Congress enacted the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, only about half of the states have submitted more than a tiny proportion of their mental health records.

How effective are laws that prohibit people with mental illness from obtaining guns? According to Dr. Swanson’s recent research, these measures may prevent some violent crime. But, he added, “there are a lot of people who are undeterred by these laws.”

Adam Lanza was prohibited from purchasing a gun, because he was too young. Yet he managed to get his hands on guns — his mother’s — anyway. If we really want to stop young men like him from becoming mass murderers, and prevent the small amount of violence attributable to mental illness, we should invest our resources in better screening for, and treatment of, psychiatric illness in young people.

All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.

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U.S. agency sues JPMorgan Chase unit over bad mortgage bonds

The government agency overseeing credit unions is suing J.P. Morgan Securities, the investment arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co., over the sale of $3.6 billion in mortgage bonds that collapsed in value after the 2008 financial crisis.

The suit is the largest ever filed by the National Credit Union Administration.

It stems from actions by Bear Stearns & Co., the failed bank bought by JPMorgan in early 2008. The NCUA alleges that Bear Stearns misrepresented or hid information about mortgage-backed bonds sold to four corporate credit unions, in violation of federal and state securities laws.

The complaint says that many of the mortgages backing the bonds were bound to fail because underwriting standards were "abandoned." When the bonds later dropped in price, the credit unions suffered steep losses and eventually collapsed.

"Firms like Bear Stearns acted unfairly by ignoring the rules for underwriting," NCUA board Chairman Debbie Matz said in a statement. "They packaged these securities and then told buyers the paper was sound. When the securities plunged in value, we learned the truth."

The four federal credit unions were U.S. Central, Western Corporate, Southwest Corporate and Members United Corporate. NCUA oversees their liquidation. The lawsuit was filed in a federal district court in Kansas.

A representative for JPMorgan Chase did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The NCUA has eight similar lawsuits pending against other banks, including subsidiaries of Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS.

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Advocacy groups coming hat in hand to a less-strapped Sacramento

SACRAMENTO — Now that California faces a dramatically smaller deficit, advocacy groups and other interests are queuing up with wish lists totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in case the spending spigot opens even slightly.

Children's advocates want day-care centers inspected more often. Dentists want their poor patients' coverage restored. Universities want funds to prevent further tuition increases, replace old computers and perform maintenance. Cities say the state should let them keep more of the money left over from defunct redevelopment agencies.

But California still has financial problems, even after years of steep service cuts, and Gov. Jerry Brown has vowed to keep a tight rein on the budget. State finances could take a turn for the worse if the federal budget standoff sends the country into a new recession or tax revenue doesn't keep pace with spending.

Labor unions that took compensation cuts this year and then put their political muscle behind Brown's successful tax-hike campaign may also look for more money. Almost every contract involving state workers — covering about 172,000 employees from 10 unions — is set to expire this summer.

Brown has not said publicly how he would cover next year's budget gap, which the nonpartisan legislative analyst projected at $1.9 billion. The governor is expected to unveil his spending blueprint in January.

Still, many groups "feel they should be at the head of the line and get their money back next year," said Mike Herald, a lobbyist at the Western Center on Law and Poverty. "Being shy just means you'll be at the back of the line."

Herald has his own wish list, including raising monthly welfare grants and increasing aid for the disabled.

Kim Kruckel, executive director at the Child Care Law Center in San Francisco, said she's been huddling with fellow advocates to decide what to request from Brown and lawmakers. She noted that spending on subsidized child care has been cut $1 billion in four years.

"Could we start to work our way back up? Ten or 20% per year?" Kruckel said. "That sounds reasonable."

Environmental advocates hope for more resources to control hazardous waste and other dangers through the Department of Toxic Substance Control.

"It hasn't been the most effective agency," said Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club California. "If we want to make it work, they're going to have to substantially increase their funding."

Advocates for dental care for the poor already have a powerful supporter in their corner, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento). He frequently recalls his August visit to a temporary dental clinic in Sacramento, where hundreds camped overnight to get free care and volunteer dentists yanked 2,700 rotted teeth.

In a September conversation with The Times' editorial board, Steinberg said he regretted the cuts the government had made in dental coverage for the poor.

"I thought to myself, 'God, how could I have ever done that,'" he said.

More than 3 million adults lost their coverage in 2009. That saved the state $55 million annually and sacrificed an equal amount of federal money.

Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access, said Sacramento should restore the money, ensuring that all adults are covered when Medi-Cal expands in 2014 to an estimated 2 million more people under President Obama's healthcare law.

Reviving dental care "could bring hundreds of millions of dollars into our healthcare system, into our economy, and help people have better health," Wright said.

The California Medical Assn. also wants more funding as the state prepares to enlarge healthcare coverage. David Ford, the group's associate director of medical and regulatory policy, said administrators will need more staff to process an influx of newly covered Californians.

"We have to be ramping up," he said.

Advocates worry that the new healthcare law will be undermined in California because the state's Medi-Cal cuts could make it harder for the poor to get care. A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the state can reduce payments to doctors and others who care for Medi-Cal patients; provider groups say they will appeal.

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