L.A. teachers union members OK new evaluation method

A landmark agreement to use student test scores for the first time in evaluating Los Angeles Unified teachers was approved by union members Saturday.

United Teachers Los Angeles reported that 66% of 16,892 members who voted approved the agreement with the nation's second-largest school district. L.A. Unified now joins Chicago, New York and many other cities in using testing data as one measure of a teacher's effect on student academic progress. About half the union's 34,000 members voted.

In a victory for the union, however, the pact limits the use of a controversial method of analyzing a teacher's impact on student learning known as value-added. Instead, the two sides agreed to evaluate teachers with such data as raw state test scores, district assessments, high school exit exams and rates of attendance, graduation, suspensions and course completion.

The agreement will force the district to alter its new evaluation system, which was to use a teacher's individual value-added score along with a rigorous new observation process, student and parent feedback and an educator's contribution to the school community. Parts of the new performance reviews are currently being tested in the district's 1,300 schools.

UTLA President Warren Fletcher hailed the vote as an endorsement of union efforts to prevent the use of individual value-added scores in evaluations. Schoolwide value-added scores will be used, however.

"We worked hard at the bargaining table to craft a system that intelligently uses student data in the evaluation of teachers," he said.

L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy said he was gratified by what he called a larger-than-expected margin of victory.

"It's a sign that members really want us to begin moving forward with a more improved way around evaluations," he said.

Deasy said he planned to unveil details of how testing data will be incorporated into teacher evaluations in the next week. The guidelines will include recommendations for how much weight to give test scores; he has said in the past that it should count for about 30%.

The agreement was prompted by a court order last year by Los Angeles County Superior Judge James C. Chalfant, who ruled that L.A. Unified's failure to use student test scores to help measure a teacher's performance violated state law.

At least some of those who voted for the agreement did so reluctantly.

Cheryl Ortega, the union's director of bilingual education, said she remained troubled by the inclusion of an even limited use of the value-added method, which L.A. Unified calls Academic Growth Over Time. That method uses a complex statistical formula to attempt to isolate a teacher's effect on student performance by controlling for such factors as poverty and English language ability.

Ortega called the method "unreliable and unscientific," reflecting a common view among teachers unions and some educators and researchers. But she ultimately voted for the pact because she feared the courts could impose an even worse system on teachers, she said.

"Everything in my being wanted to vote no," Ortega said. "But it was the best deal that could be gotten."

Monica Ratliff, a fifth-grade teacher at San Pedro Elementary, has similar concerns about value-added and voted no. Ratliff, a Los Angeles school board candidate who was recently elected to the union's House of Representatives, said she frequently reviews raw test scores for concrete information about specific skills her students are struggling with, such as grammar or reading comprehension. But she said value-added scores were useless in telling her where to improve and that she feared the agreement would open the door to wider use of them.

Ratliff said she was also concerned about using schoolwide test scores to judge her individual performance.

"I didn't necessarily think what was negotiated was beneficial for an individual teacher," she said.

Fletcher said the union chose to delay the ratification vote until after winter break to give members more than a month to study, discuss and debate the proposed agreement.

"We felt the agreement was the best route to comply with the court order," he said. "But some members had principled disagreement, and we wanted to get that out too."

Across the country, school districts are changing the way they review teachers using test scores as one measure of their effectiveness. The Obama administration has promoted the system, setting up a competitive grant program that encouraged the move. Unions, however, have only reluctantly obliged; they mostly have opposed weighting evaluations heavily on test scores.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

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Timeline: Kim Dotcom’s year, from Megaupload to Mega

AUCKLAND (Reuters) – Here are the milestones in the past year for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Dotcom plans to launch on January 20 a new online file storage system, known as Mega.

January 20, 2012 – Seventy armed New Zealand police raid Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s mansion outside Auckland, acting on a request from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Dotcom and his colleagues Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk are served extradition and search warrants, arrested, and taken into custody. As operators of the website, they are charged with online piracy, fraud and money laundering, and their computers and files are seized. Megaupload is closed down. The raid occurs on the same day U.S. lawmakers axe anti-piracy legislation following heavy public opposition.

February 22 – Dotcom is released on bail, but his movements are restricted and he is prohibited from leaving New Zealand. His bail conditions are eventually relaxed to allow him free movement within the country, while the millionaire is given some access to his frozen funds to pay his legal team and living costs.

June 28 – A New Zealand court rules that search warrants used by local police to raid the Dotcom mansion were illegal, and moves by the FBI to copy data from Dotcom’s computers to take offshore were also unlawful. The court’s action is seen by many as weakening the extradition case against Megaupload.

August 16 – U.S. efforts to extradite Dotcom are dealt another blow as a New Zealand court rules that prosecutors must show evidence to support charges of internet piracy and copyright breaches. The judge in the case says withholding evidence from Dotcom would give Washington a significant advantage in the extradition hearing. She also rules that the document used to order his extradition was illegal.

September 27 – New Zealand’s Prime Minister admits that the country’s spy agency illegally carried out surveillance on Dotcom, a resident of the country, despite a law which prohibits monitoring citizens and residents.

October 10 – A U.S. federal judge rules that the U.S. government’s criminal case against Megaupload will proceed, while leaving open the option of dismissing the case at a later date on grounds including the possibility that delays in proceedings have denied Megaupload to its right to due process.

January 20, 2013 – Dotcom is due to launch his new cyberlocker, Mega.co.nz, whose encryption system is designed to offer water-tight privacy protection of user files. The launch comes as Dotcom and his colleagues await their extradition hearing, which has been delayed until August.

(Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu)

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Original Batmobile from TV series sells for $4.2M

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The original Batmobile from the 1960s television series has sold at auction for $4.2 million.

A spokeswoman for the Barrett-Jackson Auction Co. in Scottsdale, Ariz., says the winning bidder has not been disclosed following Saturday's auction.

The 19-foot-long black, bubble-topped car was used in the "Batman" TV show that starred Adam West as the Caped Crusader.

The car's owner — famed auto customizer George Barris, of Los Angeles — transformed a one-of-a-kind 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car into the sleek crime-fighting machine. On the show, it boasted lasers and a "Batphone" and could lay down smoke screens and oil slicks.

Barris' publicist says his client is pleased with the auction result.

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Downtown L.A.'s edgy arts district is neighborhood in transition

When Gideon Kotzer set out to open a discount electronics store in the mid-1990s, he deliberately chose an old warehouse in the cultural middle of nowhere — the arts district of downtown Los Angeles, which charitably could be called sketchy.

Crazy Gideon's on Traction Avenue became an island of commerce in an area that saw little other retail activity beyond illegal drug sales. The store's remoteness in an otherwise unwelcoming warren of aging brick and concrete industrial buildings was central to Kotzer's business strategy.

"He bought that space with the mind-set that if people would drive to a desolate, faraway neighborhood, they wouldn't want to leave empty-handed," his son Daniel Kotzer said.

PHOTOS: A neighborhood in transition

Crazy Gideon's has closed, and its formerly shabby space in the 1917 structure is expected to open to the public again this year as an expansive brew pub serving house-made beer with meals. The upgrade is emblematic of changes going on throughout the arts district.

The neighborhood along the Los Angeles River east of downtown's Civic Center is drawing favorable comparisons to New York's meatpacking district, where trendy shops, restaurants, hotels and offices have taken over many industrial buildings that were strictly blue collar for decades.

The transformation has such momentum that some of the neighborhood's biggest supporters expect that it will be difficult to find artists in the arts district in another decade as gentrification drives up rents and pushes low-paid artists to cheaper locales.

But for now, the arts district is in a sweet spot of transition for many. Vegetable wholesalers and furniture makers share streets with top-flight restaurants and front-line technology and entertainment firms. Its walls sport elaborate murals — and foreboding razor wire.

"There are very rough patches," said architect Scott Johnson, who lives in a condominium on Industrial Street. "It's muscular. It's complicated. It's interesting."

Part of the appeal for Johnson, who lived in the meatpacking district in the late 1970s, is the roughness most suburbanites would find off-putting. He calls it "authenticity" in a time when "we're getting bombarded with fake stuff."

The spine of the arts district is Mateo Street, a truck-laden thoroughfare named after early landowner Matthew "Don Mateo" Keller. The district evolved from agricultural uses including Mateo's winery in the mid-1800s to being the city's industrial heart in the early 20th century.

One of the most ambitious private developments of that era was Union Terminal Annex, which was connected by rail to the city's seaport and was the second-largest wholesale terminal in the world. Two of the four large remaining buildings are occupied by clothing manufacturer American Apparel Inc., and the owners are improving and divvying up long-vacant remaining space for other business tenants including the makers of Splendid and Ella Moss apparel.

The advanced age of the neighborhood's buildings worked against the district in recent decades as businesses moved to more modern, efficient industrial properties elsewhere in the region. Those that remained often barricaded themselves behind tall gates and barbed wire as the area gained a reputation for crime and homelessness.

"There were drug addicts and prostitutes on the corner when we started," said restaurateur Yassmin Sarmadi, who began working on French bistro Church & State seven years ago. "Now limousines pull up on a regular basis."

Sarmadi opened her bistro in the former West Coast headquarters of National Biscuit Co., a seven-story factory built in 1925 that was renovated and converted to condos in 2006. She was attracted to the historic nature of the building, she said, and the fact that it was remote from the elite restaurant enclaves of the Westside.

"It was far more exciting for me to be in a place that wasn't already 'there,' so to speak," Sarmadi said.

She lives in the arts district and enjoys the company of artists who are neighbors, but knows that the march of prosperity will make it hard for some of them to stay. It may take 10 more years to become as affluent as once-lowly Venice, Sarmadi said, but gentrification will come.

"I think it's inevitable," she said. "It brings a tear to my eye, but it's also progress."

Guiding change is Tyler Stonebraker, who helps young businesses such as film and television production company Skunk set up shop in old warehouses and factories.

Stonebraker's real estate firm Creative Space caters to creative companies that consider nontraditional offices essential to their identities and part of their appeal to desirable workers in the millennial generation.

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A backyard nuclear shelter? Yes, paranoia does sell

One sterling quality of American businesses is that they'll try to make money from anything.

Paranoia, for instance. So say hello to Ron Hubbard, the owner of Montebello-based Atlas Survival Shelters, which converts huge corrugated metal tubes up to 50 feet long into fully equipped, all-the-comforts-of-home underground shelters at a price of up to about $78,000 each, not including shipping and interment.

You may have spotted the Atlas shop from the 5 Freeway as you're heading into downtown. There's a corrugated tube out front, painted bright yellow and looking like a tipped-over corn silo. High on the exterior wall facing the road is a banner declaring that the shelters offer protection from nuclear blasts, nuclear fallout, EMP (that's electromagnetic pulses, which can foul electrical systems), solar flares, mobs, looters, earthquakes and chemical warfare. If there's anything left off that list, it's probably not worth worrying about.

"People who buy my shelters are not radical crazy people," Hubbard told me recently as he guided me around the Montebello shop. "I get maybe three crazy calls a year. They're practical people."

Hubbard, 50, is a big Texan with a toothy grin and the friendly enthusiasm of someone trying to sell you something. He'll expound cheerily on the basic practicality, not to mention the sheer joy, of having a 40-foot corrugated steel drum buried 20 feet deep in your yard and tricking it out with a big-screen TV and Internet connection for those long days and nights hunkered down against nuclear blasts, the Chinese army or domestic looters. His shelters also offer such necessities as microwave ovens, space for a year's worth of provisions and high-grade air filtration.

"We don't know where our country will go," he said. "If we're going to be attacked, my shelters will protect you from Sarin gas or super flu. If we go bankrupt and we don't pay China, that could be the start of World War III. We could attack Iran or back Israel, and that could start a war. This is insurance. Why do we carry insurance on our homes? Just. In. Case."

Hubbard doesn't describe these dystopias as though he actually believes in them, but rather with the air of a salesman trying out any buzzword that might trigger a deal. During the couple of hours we were together, he described his products serially as underground condos, second homes, combination second homes and bomb shelters, man caves, man caves that happen to be bombproof, weekend cabins and hunting cabins.

Atlas Survival Shelters hasn't turned a significant profit yet. Hubbard said it made no money in the start-up year of 2011, was modestly in the black last year and may show a profit for 2013. But the business is unusual enough that it has won featured spots on several reality shows. An episode on A&E Network's "Shipping Wars" shows a team of moving experts trying to figure out how to transport a 32-foot shelter on their flatbed truck. During the episode Hubbard regales them with the virtues of the unit's escape-hatch feature, a second portal that opens only from the inside, in case of an attack.

"Somebody sees you going down; while they're trying to smoke you out, you're going to the back tunnel, you're gonna come up through an escape hatch that's hidden underground, you can shoot 'em in the back. Pretty cool, huh?" (Remarked one of the show's plainly creeped-out female cast members, "Remind me to never pay him a visit.")

More recently, Atlas was featured on an episode of the National Geographic Channel series "Doomsday Preppers," which chronicles the lifestyles of the scared and nervous. Hubbard's customer is described in network publicity as Brian Smith, a father of 12 "preparing for a total collapse of the U.S. monetary system."

Hubbard got into the underground shelter business a little more than a year ago after years of selling wrought-iron doors from the same location, operating as Hubbard Iron Doors. That business was brought low by the poor economy and cheap Chinese knockoffs, Hubbard says. It filed for bankruptcy in 2011; Hubbard says it's now owned and run by his brother, though the two companies share space with each other.

While he was casting about for a new business, Hubbard said, he happened across a brochure for Radius Engineering International, a Texas company that manufacturers fiberglass shelters mostly for business, government and military buyers. But the Radius products were expensive — they run from $150,000 up to millions, depending on the design and capacity. Hubbard thought he could do better on price while turning out a more appealing hideaway.

He's still trying to get a feel for the market, however. With his six or seven full-time workers, he can turn out one shelter a week. Orders, he said, come in at somewhere between one a month and one a week, more in periods of publicity-driven paranoia — during the run-up to the supposed Mayan apocalypse at the end of December, he said, calls jumped up to one a day.

The joke was on the callers, however, because Hubbard's six-week lead time meant that no one who called because they had just seen a Mayan feature on TV could get a shelter built, much less on site and in the ground, in time to beat the end of the world. Luckily, the apocalypse was a bust.

And for all that he plays up Armageddon in all its possible varieties in his sales pitch, doomsday may not be that great a marketing tool. "If I just sold bomb shelters, there would be about this big of a market." Hubbard holds his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. "But if I say, 'man cave,' 'wine cellar,' 'getaway,' then I get the recreational shelter owner too."

He says most of his calls come from retired military men, doctors, lawyers and business owners — possibly because the latter are among the few categories of buyers with the wherewithal to plunk down $60,000 or $70,000 for a man cave/bomb shelter, plus installation.

The size of the overall shelter market is unclear, in part because its promoters make a point of secrecy about whom they sell to and where. Privately held Radius has claimed to sell more than $30 million worth of shelters a year, but you have to take their word for it.

Then there are firms like Vivos Group, a Del Mar, Calif., company that claims to have started survivalist communities in three states — but they appear to be sort of co-op arrangements in which you have to apply to be considered for "co-ownership" of your refuge community. Once you're chosen, they'll let you know where to go when the end times come.

"This is just the threshold of something that's going to become common," Hubbard said, putting a hopeful spin on his words as though aware that paranoia may be peaking today, but gone tomorrow. "So I say, don't buy a bomb shelter. Buy an underground cabin, and enjoy it."

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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Twitter co-founders move Obvious Corp into spacious new digs

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter, have leased three sprawling floors in a historic downtown San Francisco tower for their low-profile start-up incubator, The Obvious Corporation.

Obvious said Friday it leased 75,000 square feet at the busy 760 Market Street location – known as the Phelan Building – in one of the city’s larger commercial real estate deals in recent months.

The downtown space will be able to hold roughly 500 employees and signals ambitions at Obvious, which was re-constituted when Williams and Stone both left Twitter in 2011.

The incubator, with no more than two dozen employees, has mostly stayed out of the press except when it unveiled two new blogging platforms called Medium and Branch last September.

Although still thinly staffed, Obvious’s new space is larger than start-up Pinterest’s recently inked lease in the city.

“We need the right space from which to grow the Medium team and position Obvious to focus on bringing our new ideas to life,” Obvious CEO Williams said in a statement Friday about the new lease.

The company will occupy the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the triangular building, which wraps around a central courtyard, said Jenny Haeg, a real estate agent who has brokered leases for Square Inc, Dropbox, Airbnb and other large tech startups.

(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

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J.J. Abrams to produce Lance Armstrong biopic

LOS ANGELES (AP) — He's already gotten the Oprah treatment. Now Lance Armstrong is headed for the silver screen.

Paramount Pictures and J.J. Abrams' production company, Bad Robot, are planning a biopic about the disgraced cyclist, a studio spokeswoman said Friday.

They've secured the rights to New York Times reporter Juliet Macur's upcoming book "Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong," due out in June. Macur covered the seven-time Tour de France winner for over a decade.

No director, writer, star or start date have been set.

Armstrong is in the midst of a two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey in which he admits to using performance-enhancing drugs to reach his historic victories, something he'd defiantly denied for years. The International Olympic Committee stripped him of his 2000 bronze medal this week.

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Business Briefing | Medicine: F.D.A. Clears Botox to Help Bladder Control

Botox, the wrinkle treatment made by Allergan, has been approved to treat adults with overactive bladders who cannot tolerate or were not helped by other drugs, the Food and Drug Administration said on Friday. Botox injected into the bladder muscle causes the bladder to relax, increasing its storage capacity. “Clinical studies have demonstrated Botox’s ability to significantly reduce the frequency of urinary incontinence,” Dr. Hylton V. Joffe, director of the F.D.A.’s reproductive and urologic products division, said in a statement. “Today’s approval provides an important additional treatment option for patients with overactive bladder, a condition that affects an estimated 33 million men and women in the United States.”

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A backyard nuclear shelter? Yes, paranoia does sell

One sterling quality of American businesses is that they'll try to make money from anything.

Paranoia, for instance. So say hello to Ron Hubbard, the owner of Montebello-based Atlas Survival Shelters, which converts huge corrugated metal tubes up to 50 feet long into fully equipped, all-the-comforts-of-home underground shelters at a price of up to about $78,000 each, not including shipping and interment.

You may have spotted the Atlas shop from the 5 Freeway as you're heading into downtown. There's a corrugated tube out front, painted bright yellow and looking like a tipped-over corn silo. High on the exterior wall facing the road is a banner declaring that the shelters offer protection from nuclear blasts, nuclear fallout, EMP (that's electromagnetic pulses, which can foul electrical systems), solar flares, mobs, looters, earthquakes and chemical warfare. If there's anything left off that list, it's probably not worth worrying about.

"People who buy my shelters are not radical crazy people," Hubbard told me recently as he guided me around the Montebello shop. "I get maybe three crazy calls a year. They're practical people."

Hubbard, 50, is a big Texan with a toothy grin and the friendly enthusiasm of someone trying to sell you something. He'll expound cheerily on the basic practicality, not to mention the sheer joy, of having a 40-foot corrugated steel drum buried 20 feet deep in your yard and tricking it out with a big-screen TV and Internet connection for those long days and nights hunkered down against nuclear blasts, the Chinese army or domestic looters. His shelters also offer such necessities as microwave ovens, space for a year's worth of provisions and high-grade air filtration.

"We don't know where our country will go," he said. "If we're going to be attacked, my shelters will protect you from Sarin gas or super flu. If we go bankrupt and we don't pay China, that could be the start of World War III. We could attack Iran or back Israel, and that could start a war. This is insurance. Why do we carry insurance on our homes? Just. In. Case."

Hubbard doesn't describe these dystopias as though he actually believes in them, but rather with the air of a salesman trying out any buzzword that might trigger a deal. During the couple of hours we were together, he described his products serially as underground condos, second homes, combination second homes and bomb shelters, man caves, man caves that happen to be bombproof, weekend cabins and hunting cabins.

Atlas Survival Shelters hasn't turned a significant profit yet. Hubbard said it made no money in the start-up year of 2011, was modestly in the black last year and may show a profit for 2013. But the business is unusual enough that it has won featured spots on several reality shows. An episode on A&E Network's "Shipping Wars" shows a team of moving experts trying to figure out how to transport a 32-foot shelter on their flatbed truck. During the episode Hubbard regales them with the virtues of the unit's escape-hatch feature, a second portal that opens only from the inside, in case of an attack.

"Somebody sees you going down; while they're trying to smoke you out, you're going to the back tunnel, you're gonna come up through an escape hatch that's hidden underground, you can shoot 'em in the back. Pretty cool, huh?" (Remarked one of the show's plainly creeped-out female cast members, "Remind me to never pay him a visit.")

More recently, Atlas was featured on an episode of the National Geographic Channel series "Doomsday Preppers," which chronicles the lifestyles of the scared and nervous. Hubbard's customer is described in network publicity as Brian Smith, a father of 12 "preparing for a total collapse of the U.S. monetary system."

Hubbard got into the underground shelter business a little more than a year ago after years of selling wrought-iron doors from the same location, operating as Hubbard Iron Doors. That business was brought low by the poor economy and cheap Chinese knockoffs, Hubbard says. It filed for bankruptcy in 2011; Hubbard says it's now owned and run by his brother, though the two companies share space with each other.

While he was casting about for a new business, Hubbard said, he happened across a brochure for Radius Engineering International, a Texas company that manufacturers fiberglass shelters mostly for business, government and military buyers. But the Radius products were expensive — they run from $150,000 up to millions, depending on the design and capacity. Hubbard thought he could do better on price while turning out a more appealing hideaway.

He's still trying to get a feel for the market, however. With his six or seven full-time workers, he can turn out one shelter a week. Orders, he said, come in at somewhere between one a month and one a week, more in periods of publicity-driven paranoia — during the run-up to the supposed Mayan apocalypse at the end of December, he said, calls jumped up to one a day.

The joke was on the callers, however, because Hubbard's six-week lead time meant that no one who called because they had just seen a Mayan feature on TV could get a shelter built, much less on site and in the ground, in time to beat the end of the world. Luckily, the apocalypse was a bust.

And for all that he plays up Armageddon in all its possible varieties in his sales pitch, doomsday may not be that great a marketing tool. "If I just sold bomb shelters, there would be about this big of a market." Hubbard holds his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. "But if I say, 'man cave,' 'wine cellar,' 'getaway,' then I get the recreational shelter owner too."

He says most of his calls come from retired military men, doctors, lawyers and business owners — possibly because the latter are among the few categories of buyers with the wherewithal to plunk down $60,000 or $70,000 for a man cave/bomb shelter, plus installation.

The size of the overall shelter market is unclear, in part because its promoters make a point of secrecy about whom they sell to and where. Privately held Radius has claimed to sell more than $30 million worth of shelters a year, but you have to take their word for it.

Then there are firms like Vivos Group, a Del Mar, Calif., company that claims to have started survivalist communities in three states — but they appear to be sort of co-op arrangements in which you have to apply to be considered for "co-ownership" of your refuge community. Once you're chosen, they'll let you know where to go when the end times come.

"This is just the threshold of something that's going to become common," Hubbard said, putting a hopeful spin on his words as though aware that paranoia may be peaking today, but gone tomorrow. "So I say, don't buy a bomb shelter. Buy an underground cabin, and enjoy it."

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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Algeria raid puts a lawless region in the spotlight

CAIRO — The offensive by Algerian soldiers to free hostages at a natural gas complex has refocused world attention on the dangers of a lawless desert region bristling with gunrunners, smugglers and a virulent strain of Islamic ideology.

Coming days after French airstrikes on Islamist militants in neighboring Mali, the raid Thursday killed or wounded many militants and an unspecified number of Western and Algerian hostages, the Algerian government said. Officials in Algiers, the capital, said late in the evening that they had wrapped up the assault on the compound near the Algerian-Libyan border deep in the Sahara desert.

"The operation resulted in the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and the freeing of a considerable number of hostages," Communications Minister Mohamed Said Belaid told state-run media. "Unfortunately we deplore also the death of some.... We do not have final numbers."

The Algerian news agency said 45 hostages, including Americans, escaped the site. But later Algerian media reports indicated that only four to six foreign hostages were freed and that there were a number of "victims."

A Mauritanian news organization quoting a militant spokesman suggested that gunfire from Algerian military helicopters struck two vehicles attempting to flee the compound, killing 35 foreigners and 15 kidnappers, including the militant group's commander. The differing accounts were impossible to confirm or reconcile and epitomized a chaotic day that appeared to raise questions from Western leaders over the operation's planning.

In addition to as many as seven Americans, captives included Algerians, Britons, Japanese, Norwegians and other foreigners.

The army raid marked a surprising twist in a drama that had raised fears of a long siege and highlighted the revived Islamist extremism in the region.

To the west of Algeria lies Mali, where Islamist rebels have intensified their fight in recent days to overthrow the government, prompting French military action backed by American logistical support. To the east lie Tunisia and Libya, where revolutions beginning in 2010 overthrew President Zine el Abidine ben Ali in Tunis and Moammar Kadafi in Tripoli.

Since then, militant and radical Islamist groups, including Algeria's Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, have become more emboldened amid the political upheaval of new governments. Western countries have grown increasingly concerned that North Africa could become a seedbed for international terrorism.

The hostage drama unfolded in a gas field known as In Amenas, close to the border with Libya, a country of particular concern to Algeria. Extremists and weapons looted from Kadafi's military and police have flowed across the border for months.

Farther east, Egyptian authorities are concerned that militants from Algeria and Libya have joined terrorist cells in the Sinai Peninsula along the Israeli border.

It was the strife in Mali, however, that apparently led to the militant takeover of the Western-run gas compound Wednesday. The Algerian militants, who belonged to an Al Qaeda-linked group called the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, said they were acting in retaliation for French airstrikes against advancing Malian rebels. They reportedly threatened to blow up the plant if Algerian commandos attempted to free the hostages.

After the compound was seized by the militants, hundreds of Algerian soldiers firing warning shots ringed the remote compound as helicopters skimmed overhead. The militants asked for safe passage to Libya, with the hostages accompanying them. Algerian officials, who over the years have cracked down harshly on Islamic radicals, said they would not consider such requests.

"The authorities do not negotiate, no negotiations," Interior Minister Daho Ould Kabila said on state television. "We have received their demands, but we didn't respond to them."

The Algerian government was under pressure from the U.S., Britain and other countries whose nationals were taken hostage. But the raid caught some by surprise and appeared to irritate some Western leaders. British Prime Minister David Cameron's office said he would have preferred to have been told in advance of the operation.

"I think we should be prepared for the possibility of further bad news, very difficult news in this extremely difficult situation," Cameron said.

The State Department declined to provide details of the Algerian offensive, saying it could endanger hostages, some of whom were reportedly forced to wear explosives-laden belts.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, "We are certainly concerned about reports of loss of life and we are seeking clarity from the government of Algeria."

The Algerians are "used to fighting terrorism, in their own, quite hard way," said Mathieu Guidere, a professor of "Islamology" at the University of Toulouse in France and author of "The New Terrorists." "It's likely the deaths at the petrol base were as a result of the assault by the Algerian security forces."

Reports have suggested that as many as 41 foreigners were being held along with scores of Algerians. An Irishman who was among them contacted his family to say he had been freed.

The natural gas field complex at In Amenas, which supplies Europe and Turkey, is a joint venture operated by BP; Statoil, a Norwegian firm; and Sonatrach, the Algerian national oil company.

The assault on the compound dramatically changed the dynamics of Algeria's decades-long campaign against radicals. Militants had rarely, if ever, targeted oil and gas operations, even during the 1990s civil war, when few rules applied amid beheadings and massacres. Their seizure of the compound was a direct strike at the government and the nation's economic and political stability.

The civil war in Algeria, a country rich in oil and gas and with a spectacular coast and vast deserts, killed more than 100,000 people. The conflict began when the military, fearing Islamists would come to power, shut down parliamentary elections and the country collapsed into turmoil.

The government offered an amnesty program more than a decade ago. Thousands of militants accepted, but hard-core members of what had become Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb resisted. The group publicly joined Al Qaeda in 2006, sending recruits to fight U.S. forces in Iraq while expanding its suicide bombings and kidnappings of businessmen and Westerners for ransom in Algeria.

AQIM and other Algerian radicals are heavily armed and fluid, shifting much of their attention last year to neighboring Mali, where they joined rebels and Islamists in a war to overthrow the government. Mali has attracted extremists from across Africa and the Middle East who are attempting to exploit the country's instability to create an Islamist state.

Two top radicals are believed to be connected to the gas field seizure: Abdelmalek Droukdel, AQIM's leader, who has called for militants to target France over its intervention in Mali, and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a mercurial, one-eyed smuggler and kidnapper who runs the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, an AQIM splinter group that claims to have carried out Wednesday's predawn attack.

The hostages at the complex "who managed to reach loved ones abroad said the terrorists that captured them have Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan accents," said an Algerian risk-assessment analyst who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of his job.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Special correspondents Kim Willsher in Paris and Reem Abdellatif in Cairo and Times staff writers Henry Chu in London and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.

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