TV firm All3Media to consolidate studios in Westchester

Britain's largest independent television production company, All3Media, will consolidate its Southern California studios in Westchester.

The company behind such shows as "Undercover Boss" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" has agreed to rent two floors in a Howard Hughes Center office building near the 405 Freeway and Sepulveda Boulevard, real estate broker Jacob Bobek of Cushman & Wakefield said.

The lease for 51,000 square feet of space is valued at $16 million, Bobek said. All3Media's five Los Angeles-area studios are now in separate locations in Culver City and on the Westside, and the consolidation will reduce their total rented space about 20%.

More than half of All3Media's revenue comes from international operations, and the U.S. is its fastest-growing market, according to British industry website Broadcast. This month All3Media announced plans to pool its U.S. resources in a production hub headed by Eli Holzman.

The company will move about 220 workers to its new space at 6060 Center Drive in July, said broker Greg Lovett of Cushman & Wakefield, who also worked on the All3Media lease with landlord Equity Office Properties.

The floors All3Media will rent were previously occupied by video game maker Vivendi, Lovett said, which left behind about $750,000 worth of improvements turning the offices into creative-style space with exposed heating ducts and enhanced electric power supplies.

Nasty Gal adding L.A. office space

Fast-growing e-commerce company Nasty Gal will quintuple the size of its headquarters in a historic downtown Los Angeles office complex.

Nasty Gal, which sells women's clothes and accessories online, has agreed to expand its offices to 50,300 square feet in the PacMutual Building complex near Pershing Square. It will occupy the third and fourth floors of the "Carriage House," a Beaux Arts-style building that housed a garage, ballroom and dining facility when it was finished in 1926.

The landlord, Rising Realty Partners, bought the PacMutual complex in April. The three connected buildings were built for Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. as its headquarters starting at the turn of the 20th century. Previous owners endeavored to rent offices there to traditional white-collar companies, but Rising Realty has set out to also attract creative firms by emphasizing the historic nature of the property.

Nasty Gal's space will have 18-foot ceilings, exposed brick walls, marble floors and a vintage private elevator that was closed off by previous owners. Nasty Gal, which was founded six years ago, will also occupy part of the "Clock Building." That building is where Pacific Mutual once kept a large clock and a sign reading "Time to insure."

Rising Realty is refurbishing PacMutual and will add a "green wall" vertical landscape feature that will scale the Olive Street side of the six-floor Clock Building, said Christopher Rising, president of Rising Realty.

Terms of the seven-year agreement were not disclosed, but real estate data provider CoStar Group said the landlord is asking for about $2.73 a square foot per month.

"This new space will be a prolific extension of the Nasty Gal brand," said Carle Pierose of Industry Partners, the building's leasing agent.

Health plan to move headquarters to Rancho Cucamonga

Inland Empire Health Plan, a not-for-profit public health plan serving residents of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, will move its headquarters from San Bernardino to Rancho Cucamonga.

The company has agreed to rent 207,000 square feet in the Atrium at Empire Lakes, where it will consolidate its operations from five buildings into one, real estate broker Josh Gorin of Studley Inc. said. The 15-year lease with landlord Torchlight Investors is valued at about $84 million.

The health plan is a joint powers entity serving 565,000 residents through government-sponsored programs including Medi-Cal. It is expected to serve 900,000 members by 2014 as federal healthcare reforms take effect and the company enters the newly established California Health Exchange.

IEHP will begin moving most of its 1,000 employees to the Atrium at 10801 6th St. in the second quarter of next year.

The health plan lease is a large one for the Inland Empire, which has been plagued with empty office space since the economic downturn. Vacancy in the area near L.A./Ontario International Airport is about 30%, Gorin said.

"They are leasing a tremendous amount of space in a highly depressed market," he said.

roger.vincent@latimes.com

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Richard Adams dies at 65; gay marriage pioneer

Thirty-seven years ago, Richard Adams made history when he and his partner of four years, Anthony Sullivan, became one of the first gay couples in the country to be granted a marriage license. It happened in Boulder, Colo., where a liberal county clerk issued licenses to six same-sex couples in the spring of 1975.

Adams had hoped to use his marriage to secure permanent residency in the United States for Sullivan, an Australian who had been in the country on a limited visa and was facing deportation.

But Colorado's attorney general declared the Boulder marriages invalid. Several months later, Adams and Sullivan received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service that denied Sullivan's petition for resident status in terms that left no doubt about the reason:

"You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots," the notification read.

Adams, who later filed the first federal lawsuit demanding recognition of same-sex marriages, died Monday at his home in Hollywood after a brief illness, said his attorney, Lavi Soloway. He was 65.

Soloway described Adams and Sullivan as "pioneers who stood up and fought for something nobody at that time conceived of as a right, the right of gay couples to be married.

"Attitudes at the time were not supportive, to put it mildly," Soloway said. "They went on the Donahue show and people in the audience said some pretty nasty things. But they withstood it all because they felt it was important to speak out."

Born in Manila on March 9, 1947, Adams immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 12. He grew up in Long Prairie, Minn., studied liberal arts at the University of Minnesota and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1968.

By 1971 he was working in Los Angeles, where he met Sullivan and fell in love.

Four years later, the two men heard about Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex: She had decided to issue marriage licenses to gay couples after the Boulder district attorney's office advised her that nothing in state law explicitly prohibited it.

On April 21, 1975, they obtained their license and exchanged marriage vows at the First Unitarian Church of Denver.

The Boulder marriages attracted national media attention, including an article in the New York Times that called Colorado "a mini-Nevada for homosexual couples." Rorex received obscene phone calls, as well as a visit from a cowboy who protested by demanding to marry his horse. (Rorex said she turned him down because the 8-year-old mare was underage.)

After their marriage, Adams and Sullivan filed a petition with the INS seeking permanent residency for Sullivan as the spouse of a U.S. citizen. In November 1975, they received the immigration agency's derogatory letter and lodged a formal protest. Officials reissued the denial notice without the word "faggots."

They took the agency to court in 1979, challenging the constitutionality of the denial. A federal district judge in Los Angeles upheld the INS decision, and Adams and Sullivan lost subsequent appeals.

In a second lawsuit, the couple argued that Sullivan's deportation after an eight-year relationship with Adams would constitute an "extreme hardship." In 1985 a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the hardship argument and opened the way for Sullivan to be sent back to Australia.

Because Australia had already turned down Adams' request for residency in that country, the couple decided the only way they could stay together was to leave the U.S. In 1985, they flew to Britain and drifted through Europe for the next year.

"It was the most difficult period because I had to leave my family as well as give up my job of 18 1/2 years. It was almost like death," Adams said in "Limited Partnership," a documentary scheduled for release next year.

The pair ended their self-imposed exile after a year and came home. They lived quietly in Los Angeles to avoid drawing the attention of immigration officials, but in recent years began to appear at rallies supporting same-sex marriage, Soloway said.

They were encouraged by new guidelines issued by the Obama administration this fall instructing immigration officials to stop deporting foreigners in long-standing same-sex relationships with U.S. citizens.

Although the policy change came more than three decades after Adams and Sullivan raised the issue, it gave Adams "a sense of vindication," Soloway said.

The day before he died, Sullivan told him that the most important victory was that they were able to remain a couple.

"Richard looked at me," Sullivan told Soloway, "and said, 'Yeah, you're right. We've won.'"

Adams, who was an administrator for a law firm until his retirement in 2010, is survived by Sullivan; his mother, Elenita; sisters Stella, Kathy, Julie and Tammie; and a brother, Tony.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

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2 bombers target mobile phone firms in Nigeria

KANO, Nigeria (AP) — Authorities blame a radical Islamist sect for twin suicide car bombings targeting two major mobile phone companies, an official said Saturday, blacking out a top operator’s network in most of Nigeria‘s northern commercial hub.

A suicide bomber drove an explosive-laden car into the facilities of the Nigerian subsidiary of Bharti Airtel Ltd. of India at about 8 a.m. in the city of Kano, said Capt. Iweha Ikedichi, who speaks for a special taskforce deployed in Kano to reduce the threat of the Islamic rebels known as Boko Haram. The attack left an Airtel worker injured, authorities said. It also damaged a switch station, said James Eze, an Airtel spokesman. He said the company was still assessing how bad the damage was, but declined to comment further.

Switch stations control the regional mobile phone network and if they are seriously damaged, the entire network could go down. An Airtel staff who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press said the targeted switch station covered six northern states, including Kano. But while Airtel’s network appeared to be down across Kano Sunday, calls to lines in some of the other states went through.

At about the same time as the Airtel attack, another bomber targeted the facilities of the Nigerian subsidiary of South Africa-based MTN Group Ltd., about two miles (three kilometers) away. That attack was botched by security officers who shot the bomber, causing an explosion at the company’s gate, Ikedichi said.

The target of the foiled attack was MTN’s switch station, said Funmilayo Omogbenigun, spokeswoman for Nigeria’s largest cell phone network provider.

Authorities suspect the Boko Haram sect is behind the attacks. The group is held responsible for more than 770 deaths this year alone, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press. Boko Haram’s campaign of bombings and shootings has targeted mosques, churches, schools, universities and government buildings. But, four months ago, the group broadened its scope by attacking mobile phone towers for the first time.

In September, a series of attacks damaged more than 31 towers operated by all the major mobile phone providers in the country. Other attacks have occurred since then, further straining the one link Nigeria relies on for communication in a country with very few landlines. While no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, the Islamist sect had threatened mobile phone companies earlier in the year, warning that they would be targeted for cooperating with the government to flush out its members.

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with more than 160 million people, mobile phones serve as a valuable lifeline in both cities and rural communities. Landlines remain almost nonexistent, as the state-run telephone company has collapsed and repeated efforts to privatize it have failed. More 87 million mobile phone lines were in use in 2009, according to estimates.

“Never would we have expected that telecommunications could be targeted,” said Damien Udeh, a spokesman for the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria. “It portends a dangerous situation for everybody, especially government.”

___

Associated Press writer Yinka Ibukun contributed to this report from Lagos, Nigeria

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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.

The actor's divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.

Kutcher's filing does not indicate that the couple has a prenuptial agreement. The filing states Kutcher signed the document Friday, hours before it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Kutcher and Moore married in September 2005 and until recently kept their relationship very public, communicating with each other and fans on the social networking site Twitter. After their breakup, Moore changed her name on the site from (at)mrskutcher to (at)justdemi.

Kutcher currently stars on CBS' "Two and a Half Men."

Messages sent to Kutcher's and Moore's publicists were not immediately returned Friday.

Moore, 50, and Kutcher, 34, created the DNA Foundation, also known as the Demi and Ashton Foundation, in 2010 to combat the organized sexual exploitation of girls around the globe. They later lent their support to the United Nations' efforts to fight human trafficking, a scourge the international organization estimates affects about 2.5 million people worldwide.

Moore was previously married to actor Bruce Willis for 13 years. They had three daughters together — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — before divorcing in 2000. Willis later married model-actress Emma Heming in an intimate 2009 ceremony at his home in Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands that attended by their children, as well as Moore and Kutcher.

Kutcher has been dating former "That '70s Show" co-star Mila Kunis.

The divorce filing was first reported Friday by People magazine.

___

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

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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

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Naomi Gleit helps keep Facebook growing

The gig: As senior director of Facebook Inc.'s growth, engagement and mobile team, Naomi Gleit helps grow the social network's 1-billion-plus user base.

Facebook employee No. 29: Few people outside Facebook have heard of Gleit, but she's the second-longest-serving Facebook employee, after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Gleit, 29, talked her way into a job at Facebook on July 18, 2005 — her birthday. She was Facebook's 29th employee, coming on board shortly after the company hit 1 million users and before anyone had an inkling of the colossus it would become.

Dogged spirit: Unlike most other early employees who eventually dispersed to seek new fortunes, Gleit says she has no intention of leaving Facebook. She gets that tenacity from her "tiger mom," a computer programmer who ferried her to ballet, piano, karate and Chinese lessons, and her Jewish father, an immigration lawyer who took her to Hebrew school, she said. "I know it sounds completely irrational, but I had no doubt in 2005 that Facebook would be something incredible in the future," she said.

Rival social networks: Her passion for Facebook began before she was hired, when she was a Stanford undergraduate studying science, technology and society, an interdisciplinary major. She wrote her senior thesis on why Facebook beat out rival college social networking site Club Nexus at Stanford. (Club Nexus was started by Stanford student and Turkish software engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, who went on to create Orkut, Google's first attempt at a social network.) Getting in on the ground floor at Facebook made her feel like she was taking part in something bigger than herself, the same feeling she got volunteering for six months in a refugee camp in Botswana, she said.

Growing with Facebook: Gleit helped Facebook push beyond colleges to high schools and eventually to everyone. In late 2007, when the torrid growth pace temporarily cooled, Zuckerberg tapped a team of five to reignite it and asked Gleit to lead product management. It fell to the growth team to identify the obstacles to the company's momentum. In a company ruled by engineers, Gleit, who never studied programming, earned respect with her analytical approach and intuitive understanding of people. "I always believed that growth was the most important thing, the most important way to impact the company," she said. There are now more than 150 people on the team. "It's been an incredible learning experience," she said. "Each year is different."

That magic moment: Those who work closely with Gleit say part of her success early on was her ability to seize on the "magic moment" that makes users fall in love with Facebook. She made it simpler to sign up, and she helped people find friends as soon as they joined. She also helped Facebook spread quickly to new countries by enlisting users to translate the service into more than 80 languages. Gleit helps her team parachute into new markets and traverse less-familiar languages and cultures. It's something that comes from her own passion to see the world and have new experiences. She has taught on a Navajo reservation and lived in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand.

One billion users: Around noon Sept. 14, Zuckerberg gathered with Gleit and dozens of employees in front of a big screen as the number of Facebook users crossed 1 billion. "The scale was insane," she said. "But that is not the goal. When Mark talks about his vision for Facebook, he talks about being able to connect everyone in the world to the people that they care about and provide some value for them every single day."

A problem solver: Zuckerberg calls on Gleit for high-profile projects. In May 2010, when Facebook was under siege because of how it was handling users' personal information, he put Gleit in charge of simplifying privacy settings. Last year she worked on a popular feature that lets users subscribe to a News Feed without having to become Facebook friends.

Betting on mobile: Now Gleit is focused on the future: mobile devices and how they can unlock emerging markets. Gleit knew back in 2011 that people would begin to log on to Facebook from mobile devices in greater numbers than from desktops, particularly in the developing world. So she traveled to Tel Aviv to buy Snaptu, which makes software that helps people on low-tech phones access Facebook, and she brought the whole team back to Silicon Valley with her. Now Facebook is surging in popularity on mobile devices in Tokyo and Nairobi, Kenya. "I have always been interested in technology and how it can be used to improve lives," Gleit said.

jessica.guynn@latimes.com

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Obama offers scaled-back plan to limit tax increases

WASHINGTON — With the sudden collapse of House Speaker John A. Boehner's Plan B to avert most year-end tax increases, President Obama and congressional leaders face a daunting choice: compromise in the few days remaining before tax hikes and spending cuts kick in, or call it quits and soar off the "fiscal cliff."

Obama appeared in the White House briefing room late Friday to urge congressional leaders to at least prevent income tax increases on household income of less than $250,000, continue long-term unemployment benefits and delay the mandatory spending cuts set to begin in January.

"Call me a hopeless optimist, but I actually still think we can get it done," Obama said before leaving with his family to spend Christmas in Hawaii.

The president's plea was a retreat from the much broader deal he had sought during private talks with Boehner, which fell apart this week as the Ohio Republican pursued a separate course. By suggesting last-ditch action on priorities that are most important to Democrats, Obama is not likely to attract an enthusiastic GOP response.

Obama talked with Boehner by telephone before he spoke in the briefing room, and he met at the White House with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — a trusted partner who could help craft a deal in the Senate. All sides expect to return to Washington next week.

"Everybody can cool off; everybody can drink some eggnog, have some Christmas cookies, sing some Christmas carols, enjoy the company of loved ones," the president said. "Think about the obligations we have to the people who sent us here."

Even this more modest request will probably run into opposition from Republicans as they weigh whether to seek a better agreement or stomach the tax hikes that will happen Jan. 1 if nothing is done.

The options carry political and practical calculations for all sides — and could determine not only whether every American sees a bigger tax bill, but also whether Obama's second term will be consumed by more chaotic budget debates.

Although Boehner's stature appears diminished by his failure to persuade GOP colleagues to support his tax plan — which would have raised taxes on incomes over $1 million — Republican support, or at least acquiescence, will be required for congressional action.

That includes Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader. Obama will face continued pressure to sweeten his budget plan so McConnell does not put up a filibuster fight.

McConnell is a close-to-the-vest operator eyeing his own run for reelection in two years. If a budget deal cleared the Senate, that would put pressure on Boehner to bring it to a vote — even if most of his Republican colleagues opposed it — and allow it to pass with Democratic support. That would threaten his authority as speaker, which stems, in part, from controlling what legislation comes to the House floor.

Boehner dealt himself a blow — and strengthened the Democrats' hand — with his Plan B, which conservatives rejected as a tax increase. The proposal would have kept most tax rates the same but allowed the scheduled increase on incomes above $1 million to take effect. The rate would have risen to 39.6% from 35%.

Despite the setback, Boehner reasserted himself Friday, accompanied by his sometime-rival, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, in a public display of solidarity.

As for a deal, the speaker said, "How we get there, God only knows."

Obama must decide whether he is willing to make concessions to Republicans to achieve a broader budget deal. Many Republicans have signaled publicly, and privately, that they are willing to raise taxes as part of a deal to cut spending.

In negotiations with Boehner, Obama proposed raising taxes only on household income above $400,000 and cutting the inflation adjustment for Social Security and other government benefits.

The president had campaigned for reelection on keeping tax rates the same for the first $250,000 of income for families and $200,000 for individuals, but raising rates on income above that level. He returned to that stance Friday, when he made a pitch to Republicans to help enact a few stopgap measures. His party's left flank is unlikely to cheer another overture to the GOP.

"The slate is clean," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. Obama has "no obligation to radical Republicans," he said.

All parties were weighing whether a deal remained within reach or whether the fiscal cliff would provide strengthened leverage to fight what Boehner has called "trench warfare" into next year.

In a matter of months, a vote will be needed to raise the debt limit so the nation can pay its bills. That has the potential to create a replay of the 2011 battle that led to the current standoff. A new bill to keep the federal government functioning will also be due in the spring.

"Both sides need to recognize what the other can do," said David Winston, a longtime GOP strategist who is close to the House leadership. "Republicans and Democrats, the last thing they want to do is go off the fiscal cliff."

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com

christi.parsons@latimes.com

Michael A. Memoli in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

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Instagram diverts attention from botched policy change with another new filter

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The Daughter of a Sick Woman Falls Prey to a Craigslist Scam

Sitting side by side on their living room sofa, Patricia Morales and her daughter, Katherine, could be any mother-daughter duo. Both have dark hair, dark eyes and welcoming, infectious smiles.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Patricia Morales, 62, at home in the Bronx. Her treatment for ailments like rheumatoid arthritis and hepatitis C led to depression.

2012-13 Campaign

Previously recorded:

$3,375,394

Recorded Wednesday:

182,251

*Total:

$3,557,645

Last year to date:

$3,320,812

*Includes $709,856 contributed to the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

For the past 100 years, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. To celebrate the 101st campaign, an article will appear daily through Jan. 25. Each profile will illustrate the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year donors contributed $7,003,854, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities.

The Youngest Donors

If your child or family is using creative techniques to raise money for this year’s campaign, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line on Facebook or talk to us on Twitter.

But the ties that bind them go beyond their genes, beyond the bodies they were born with.

“It’s called a neck ring. It’s a silver curved barbell, one inch,” Katherine, 20, said as she swept aside her shoulder-length black hair to show the piercing in the back of her neck, a show of solidarity with her mother. She had it done when she was 16. “I wanted to know what it felt like for my mom.”

Her mother then turned around and outlined with her finger two lengthy scars that run down her back.

“I’ve had a lot of physical problems,” Ms. Morales, 62, said. Shaking her head at her daughter’s piercing, she added, “I’ve had rods put in my upper and lower spine, but I could never do that.”

The rods were surgically planted to treat herniated discs, the result of having a cruel combination of osteoporosis, hepatitis C, fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis. Ms. Morales contracted hepatitis C from a blood transfusion she received in 1972 after the birth of her only son, she said.

“I didn’t even know about it until 10 years ago,” she said. “My liver blood count was a little high.”

Since the diagnosis, Ms. Morales, a former schoolteacher, has ridden the arduous highs and lows common to patients with hepatitis C. Her treatments for the disease, which debilitates the liver over time, have included pills and injections that can cause depression. Ms. Morales, a single parent, found an unforgiving salve in alcohol.

“I was depressed; I was totally drunk,” she said. “I didn’t want to live anymore.”

Then, about a year ago, she reached a turning point when visiting her hepatitis C specialist.

“I was 210 pounds,” she said. “The doctor said: ‘You have to stop drinking. You have to lose weight.’ ”

To help combat the depression, her doctor referred her to Jewish Association Serving the Aging, a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. She began weekly counseling sessions with a social worker and started taking an antidepressant medication. The federation drew about $600 from the fund in May so that Ms. Morales could buy a mattress.

“I had a horrible bed,” she said. “I felt like I was sleeping on rocks, and with rods in my back, I was waking up every hour.”

After several months of therapy and starting a diet, Ms. Morales was on her way to losing 60 pounds. Today, she weighs 148.

Light was starting to show itself again when the family took an unexpected financial hit this summer. While taking time off from attending Hostos Community College, Katherine Morales looked for work on Craigslist.

“I saw my mom, and I realized I needed to get a job,” Katherine said shyly. “This guy asked me to be his personal assistant, and he asked me to wire money.”

Offering $400 a week, the man requested help transferring almost $2,000 from what he said was his wife’s account. He transferred the money to Katherine’s account, asking her to wire it to a bank account in Malaysia.

Shortly after she wired the money, the bank froze the account, which Katherine and her mother shared. It was then that Katherine realized she had been the victim of a scam. The money transferred into her account turned out to have been stolen, and she was responsible for repaying it.

Katherine went to detectives immediately with more than 20 pages of evidentiary e-mails, but found that she was unable to file a complaint.

“They told me it wasn’t enough,” she said. “These things happen all the time.”

They lost almost $2,000.

Ms. Morales lives on a fixed income. She receives just over $700 a month from Social Security and $200 month in food stamps. The rent for the apartment she shares with her daughter in the Throgs Neck neighborhood of the Bronx is $230, and Ms. Morales has a monthly combined phone and cable bill of $140. Ms. Morales has a son, but he is unable to help the family.

Falling behind on her bills, Ms. Morales turned once again to JASA for help paying a combined phone and cable bill of nearly $200, a grant the agency drew from the Neediest Cases Fund.

“It was terrible, because my intention was to help my mom,” said Katherine, who has since found a part-time job at a vitamin shop.

Ms. Morales has been feeling much better, but she is nervous about an appointment with her hepatitis C specialist in January.

“I’m taking things one day at a time, but I’m looking forward to someone taking care of me,” she said. “I want to live a little bit longer, but not that long.”

“Why are you putting a time limit on it?” Katherine said, jokingly. “Seventy’s the new 20!” she added, nudging her mother in the side. “Remember, the doctor said you wouldn’t live past your late 50s, but you did.”

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E-book restrictions leave 'buyers' with few rights

There's a crass old joke about how you can never buy beer, just rent it. Who would think that the same joke applies to book buying in the digital age?

But that's the case. Many people who'll be unwrapping iPads, Amazon Kindles or Barnes & Noble Nooks on Tuesday morning and loading them with bestsellers or classics won't have any idea how limited their rights are as their books' "owners."

In fact, they won't be owners at all. They'll be licensees. Unlike the owners of a physical tome, they won't have the unlimited right to lend an e-book, give it away, resell it or leave it to their heirs. If it's bought for their iPad, they won't be able to read it on their Kindle. And if Amazon or the other sellers don't like what they've done with it, they can take it back, without warning.

All these restrictions "raise obvious questions about what 'ownership' is," observes Dan Gillmor, an expert on digital media at Arizona State University. "The companies that license stuff digitally have made it clear that you own nothing."

Typically, e-book buyers have no idea about these complexities. How could they? The rules and limitations are embodied in "terms of service" documents that Amazon, Apple, B&N and other sellers shroud in legalese and bury deep in their websites. That tells you how little they want you to know.

The rules are based, in turn, on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with which Congress hoped to balance the rights of copyright holders and content users. "In the digital environment, that's always been the trickiest balance to strike," Annemarie Bridy, a specialist in intellectual property law at the University of Idaho, told me. In those terms, the DMCA looks like a failure.

Both camps have important rights to protect. Let's start with copyright owners.

In the non-digital world, copyright ends with the first sale of each copyrighted object. Under the "first sale" doctrine, once you buy a book, that physical book is yours to lend, give away, or resell. Copyright is safeguarded by the limitations of physical transfer — once the book is given or loaned, the original buyer no longer has access to it. If a library owns five copies of a book, only five borrowers can read it at the same time. Theoretically a book can be photocopied, but only at great effort and with a perceptible loss of quality.

In digital-dom, however, technology allows infinite copies to be made, with no loss of quality. Absent the usual restrictions, one could give away an e-book and still have it to read. Unrestricted transferability becomes a genuine threat to the livelihood of authors, artists, filmmakers, musicians.

So some limitation is sensible. That's usually done through digital rights management, or DRM, which encodes copy or usage limitations into the digital file. The DMCA protected DRM by outlawing efforts to circumvent it (with a few exceptions).

The question is whether the balance has tipped too far in favor of the booksellers, at the consumers' expense. The answer is yes.

For one thing, DRM has put far too much power in the hands of digital booksellers. Amazon, in particular, has shown it can't be trusted with that power. In 2009, having learned that it inadvertently had sold unauthorized e-book versions of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" through its website, the company simply deleted those e-books from buyers' Kindles stealthily, without warning.

An uproar followed, not least because Amazon's Orwellian behavior involved those Orwellian masterpieces. Amazon settled a subsequent lawsuit by promising never to steal a book back from a Kindle without the device owner's permission.

But earlier this year, the company was revealed to have unilaterally shut down the access of Linn Jordet Nygaard, a Norwegian Kindle owner, to her library of 43 e-books, for reasons it refused to divulge. Another uproar, and Amazon backed down again, restoring Nygaard's account — again without explanation. Amazon refused my request for comment.

Another downside of e-book DRM is that most e-books are tied to the seller's reading device or apps. Buy a book from Amazon, and you can read it only on a Kindle or Amazon app. Buy it from Apple, and it can be read only on an Apple device.

This lock-in gives the booksellers power over not only consumers but publishers. In fact, it led several publishers to make a price-fixing deal with Apple that aimed to undermine Amazon's market power, but ended with their getting whacked with a big federal antitrust fine instead.

Moreover, notwithstanding the public impression that digital is forever, nothing is permanent in the digital world. In fact, digital content can be less permanent than physical books. In libraries you can find volumes that date back hundreds of years and can still be read (if carefully); but there are digital files that date back only a decade yet are completely unintelligible today.

Nowhere does Amazon, Apple or any other distributor pledge to support its digital formats in perpetuity. Quite the contrary: They typically warn that they can cancel their service at any time, without warning, in a way that could end your access to a lifetime of e-book purchases in the flash of an electron. They could also go out of business, leaving millions of dependent customers in the lurch.

Amazon keeps your purchased content for free on its own servers — the term is "in the cloud" — for downloading to your Kindles as needed. You pay once for an e-book and can use it on all the Kindles you own. I can't find any written promise by Amazon that this storage will always be free. If it announces a few years from now that henceforth there will be a monthly fee to store books purchased, say, more than 10 years ago, what rights will you have to resist? None.

There are ways to protect your e-books from grasping e-booksellers or the future. Programs available on the Web can strip the DRM code from your purchased items — for books, one possible method involves an e-library management program called Calibre. The program easily can be augmented with a DRM-stripping application so you can convert e-books sold in any proprietary format into a different format or even as plain text.

But is it legal? No one is quite sure, and that's a problem. The DMCA makes it unlawful to circumvent certain DRM protection, but doing so on an item you've bought and want to keep in a different format for your own use — not to make multiple copies for sale — may not break the law. On the other hand, distributing software that enables that is illegal under the DMCA even if the goal is legitimate, which is absurd.

Even if reformatting a file you own is legal, what if you don't own it? The hard-to-find terms of service of e-book sellers specify that you're only licensing a book, not buying it (although the Amazon order page does say you're "buying" it). "In the digital context, it's not clear that the 'first sale' has ever occurred," says Bridy.

It should be a top priority for Congress to clear out the murk. Buyers of e-books must have the explicit right to reformat their purchases and save backup copies for their own use, permanently. The sale of an e-book must be irrevocable. On the other side, it must remain strictly illegal to make multiple unauthorized copies of any copyrighted work for distribution. Lending by libraries, one digital copy at a time, should be facilitated — it tends to widen the audience for books.

The guiding principle must be that an e-book owner's rights and responsibilities parallel those of a book owner, and the same must go for authors, publishers and booksellers. "Someone once observed to me that if libraries were being invented today, publishers would try to make them illegal," Gillmor says.

Clarify these rules of e-book commerce, and the book market will reap the benefit. The power of electronic booksellers over publishers might be reduced, and consumers would know what they were buying — and would own what they bought. Leave the rules as vague as they are, and the victims will be authors, consumers and publishers.

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

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