An Egyptian court granted an appeal by former President Hosni Mubarak and ordered a new trial into the killings of hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising, a move certain to inflame the political unrest that has upset the country’s democratic transition.
The ruling was a victory for the ailing Mubarak and his Interior minister, Habib Adli, who also won his appeal. Both men, who had been sentenced to life in prison, face other criminal charges and are likely to remain in detention until a new trial in the deaths by security forces of more than 800 protesters.
“The previous ruling was unfair and illegal,” said Yousry Abdelrazeg, one of Mubarak’s lawyers, who accused the judge in the first trial of political bias. “The case was just a mess and there was no evidence against Mubarak.”
No date has been set for the new trial.
The court’s decision comes amid turmoil over an Islamist-backed constitution and outrage over the expanded powers of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. It means a bloody chapter in Egypt’s 2011 revolt will be revisited with the prospect that Mubarak, whose police state ruled for 30 years, may be absolved in a case that deepened the nation’s political differences and impassioned the Arab world.
Mubarak was convicted in June of not preventing the deaths of hundreds of protesters attacked by police and snipers during the uprising, which began on Jan. 25, 2011, and ended 18 days later when he stepped aside and the military seized power.
Mubarak argued that he had not ordered the crackdown and was unaware of the extent of the violence. A recently completed government-ordered investigation into the killings, however, reportedly found that Mubarak had monitored the deadly response by security forces in Tahrir Square via a live television feed.
The appeals court ruling came a day after prosecutors announced an investigation into allegations that Mubarak, 84, received about $1 million in illicit gifts from Al Ahram, the country’s leading state-owned newspaper. The former president has reportedly been in a military hospital since December after he fell in a prison bathroom and injured himself.
Last year’s trial riveted the nation with images of the aging Mubarak wheeled into the defendant’s cage on a stretcher, his arms crossed and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com
(Special correspondent Reem Abdellatif contributed to this report)
Spoiler warning: Firefly ended over 10 years ago and it’s been 7 years since its subsequent film, Serenity, came out, so the spoiler statute of limitations is officially up. Proceed at your own risk.
Like many fans of the Joss Whedon space western Firefly, Kyle Hill was shocked by the end of the Serenity movie, when fan-favorite character Wash (Alan Tudyk) was unceremoniously impaled by a Reaver harpoon. Unlike most fans, Hill — a research assistant with a degree in Environmental Engineering and a contributor at Scientific American — decided to try and rewrite (fictional) history by proving that Wash’s death was scientifically impossible, using the power of math, physics and fandom. His article originally appeared online at Scientific American, and Wired publishes this updated version with permission.
I was late to Firefly. Nearly 10 years after the show first aired and then was subsequently cancelled, I holed up in my room, coffee and external hard drive in hand, aiming to blaze through one of the most beloved sci-fi series.
A mix of science fiction and “spaghetti-western” genres, Firefly was wonderful. It certainly awakened the fanboy in me, and I quickly understood why my girlfriend envied me for being able to watch the series for the first time.
It all ended abruptly, due to early cancellation, with the last episodes of Firefly barely answering any central questions or exploring the rich universe that had been so lovingly crafted by creator Joss Whedon. It was to my delight to learn that in 2005 there was a full-length movie in response to public (and private) outcries for more of Serenity and her crew.
Watching Serenity let me spend a bit more time in the ‘verse, and the film thankfully resolved a number of outstanding loops justwaiting to be closed. But the forced end of Firefly also forced Joss Whedon’s hand. He put in scenes that would only have appeared in a last hurrah like Serenity. One scene in particular shook me, like the unexpected sight of a Reaver ship. It’s a scene that drove me to NASA forums and technical reports, glass manufacturers, my calculator, and eventually to this post.
Late in Serenity, after crash-landing at the mysterious base of “Mr. Universe,” pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne meets his end at the tip of a Reaver spear. The immediacy of the violence, and his wife Zoe’s touching reaction, kept my mouth agape well into the next few minutes of the film. One of my favorite characters just died, as Firefly died. I couldn’t stand it. I had to be sure.
What if the Reaver spear couldn’t plausibly make it through the forward windows of Serenity? The movie may have been set in the future, but we too have built spacecraft with windows, and they are made to withstand impacts. If I could prove that a modern shuttle window (assuming that a future window would be even better) could withstand the impact that killed Wash, I could have the ultimate in fanboy closure: the movie is “wrong,” and my version of the story lives on.
Objects in Space
In terrestrial situations, a speck of paint is less than harmless. In space, it’s deadly. Travelling at a blistering 10,000 meters per second in orbit, the equations deem it lethal. It becomes a “hypervelocity” bullet.
Our spacecraft obviously must account for this deadly debris. Tens of thousands of pieces of extraterrestrial trash litter the orbit of Earth [PDF], meaning that a shuttle’s final impact could come from an errant hex nut. Shuttles today are outfitted with shielding to prevent such disasters, and feature two-and-a-half inch thick windows—the thickest pieces of glass ever produced in the optical quality for see-through viewing.
The largest impact to a shuttle window occurred when a fleck of paint struck STS-92—a flight to the International Space Station. A shuttle window has never been penetrated by a hypervelocity impact, but it doesn’t have to be. A deformation large enough could eventually cause window failure upon repeated take-offs and re-entries.
After engineers examined the crater in the window of STS-92, the shape that best explained the damage was a sort of miniaturized plate. But to begin making comparisons, I’ll consider the fleck of paint to be a similarly sized metal sphere. This will bring the numbers in line with the hypervelocity testing that NASA has already conductBased on the size and the speed of the fleck that hit STS-92, I calculated that the window weathered an impact with around 20 Joules of kinetic energy—equivalent to four milligrams of TNT or a decently thrown baseball. It created more than enough damage to warrant a window replacement. And such replacements from serious impacts are commonplace. Robert Lee Hotz notes in the Wall Street Journalthat “NASA shuttle engineers have replaced the spacecraft’s debris-pitted windows after almost every flight since since 1981, at a cost of about $40,000 per window.”
Such little flecks can be catastrophes. An orbiter unlucky enough to be hit by anything much larger than the paint chip that hit STS-92 is in for some trouble. Debris measuring five centimeters in diameter packs the punch of a bus collision. Any larger than that and we begin making comparisons to sticks of dynamite.
The shuttle windows are tough, to be sure, surviving nearly 1,400 impacts intact over 43 sampled missions, but are they strong enough to save Wash? Tiny particles are elevated to terrifying status because of their ridiculous speeds, not their mass. Conversely, the Reaver spear that killed Wash was larger, but moving much more slowly. A few assumptions and some physics equations would determine if I could save him.
I Am A Leaf on the Wind…
To get the general dimensions of the spear that killed Wash, I had to (unfortunately) go back to the scene in question, excruciatingly slowing down an emotional moment to be replayed over and over.
Diving back into Serenity, I used an earlier Reaver chase scene to guesstimate the spear size and speed. If Reavers shoot spears slow enough to be dodged (which they do), the spear that kills Wash can’t be moving much faster than a Major League fast-ball, putting the upper limit on speed around 100 miles per hour (45 m/s). This is orders of magnitude slower than the hypervelocity impacts that a shuttle deals with, but the spear is thousands of times more massive than a fleck of paint. Assuming it’s fashioned out of an “average” metal, and given its size, I’d guess it’s around 100-200 pounds (45-90 kg).
Kinetic energy is easy enough to calculate. The kinetic energy of a moving object is one-half of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity.
This equation gives the Reaver spear a frightening 45,500 Joules at the low end. This is over 3,700 times the energy of the largest recorded impact to a space shuttle window — equivalent to a detonation of a pencil made of TNT or a medium sized anvil dropped on it.
What are the risks? via Aerospace.org
Based on hypervelocity testing undertaken by NASA, the Reaver spear would be like an aluminum sphere with a one-centimeter diameter hitting the window at 10 kilometers per second (assuming that the tip of the spear is comparable to a 1cm diameter point). Seeing that the damage threshold for a shuttle window based on this testing is 0.004 centimeters, my hopes quickly vanished. With this kind of energy, the Reaver spear could pierce a shuttle’s wing, its thermal protection tiles, or even its crew cabin.
The math doesn’t lie—Wash didn’t stand a chance.
Watch How I Soar…
I thought I had found the perfect fanboy out. The windows in Serenity looked flimsy and thin, surely not something a space-faring craft would be outfitted with. If the windows were anything like what we use to traverse the ‘verse today, perhaps all that would have happened is a jolt of fright from a deflected Reaver spear, or so I hoped.
But even delving through a hundred page NASA technical report [PDF] on impact shielding couldn’t ease my psyche.
Now, this is at its core a fanboy rant. No matter what I found, Wash dies in the movie. It’s part of the larger story and serves as a plot point, not a meaningless killing-off. But I selfishly wanted closure; I needed to resolve the dissonance between a character’s death and the fact that we know he wouldn’t have died if the networks saw better numbers from Firefly.
Maybe this is a testament to the enduring qualities of the show. To create characters important enough, and in only fifteen short stories, to warrant hours of research and calculation that ultimately proves useless in the larger story is an outcome of a great narrative. It’s typical of a fan base that will still pack a Comic-Con panel ten years after the airing of the show.
In the end, I like the story better this way. It takes a great narrative to make someone care so much about a character that he takes real world steps to resolve his own dissonance. If I could have ‘proved’ that Wash wouldn’t have been killed, a whole can of worms would open. What about the fact that Serenity was an old ship with sub-optimal gear? What about space-age technologies like super-strong window polymers? The scene obviously resonated with people (especially me), and the fact that I failed is a better story than a discussion of faulty film physics.
DALLAS (Reuters) – Grammy-winning country music singer Randy Travis had a blood alcohol level nearly twice the state’s legal limit when he was arrested last summer after a Texas state trooper found him lying naked on a road after crashing his car, authorities said.
Travis, 53, was charged on Wednesday with driving while intoxicated for the August 7 incident near his hometown of Tioga, about 60 miles north of Dallas, in which he also threatened to shoot and kill state troopers while he was being transported to jail, Grayson County prosecutors said.
Travis had a blood alcohol level of more than 0.15 percent, or nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 in Texas, authorities said in the statement issued on Thursday.
The misdemeanor charge carries up to two years in jail and a $ 4,000 fine if he is convicted.
Travis has not been charged for the threats to troopers, which remain under investigation and could be considered retaliation, a third-degree felony, the statement said.
Prosecutors and lawyers representing Travis have been actively negotiating a resolution, Grayson County District Attorney Joe Brown said in the statement, apparently hinting at a possible plea deal.
“The filing of this charge allows us to get the case into court, in order to finalize the case as soon as we can,” Brown said, noting that it took some time to complete blood alcohol tests needed by the state and defense attorneys.
In addition to winning multiple Grammy awards, Travis also has appeared in movies and television shows.
The August crash and drunken driving charge is the latest in a series of law enforcement incidents involving Travis, who is known for “Forever and Ever, Amen” and other songs.
Travis pleaded not guilty in December to assaulting a man in a church parking lot in the Dallas suburb of Plano last August. Police said Travis intervened in a dispute between a woman he was with and her estranged husband. The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum $ 500 fine. Trial is set for March 11.
He was also arrested last February on suspicion of drunken driving while sitting in his car in the parking lot of another North Texas church.
(Editing by David Bailey and Will Dunham)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.
There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.
“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.
Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.
While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.
There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.
In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.
“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”
There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.
In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.
As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.
According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.
Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.
Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.
The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.
A version of this article appeared in print on 01/13/2013, on page A21 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New York Declares Health Emergency.
WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Saturday that it will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to head off an imminent battle with Congress over raising the government’s borrowing limit.
“Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” Anthony Coley, a Treasury spokesman, said in a written statement.
The Obama administration has indicated that the only way for the country to avoid a cash-management crisis as soon as next month is for Congress to raise the “debt ceiling,” which is the statutory limit on government borrowing. The cap is $16.4 trillion.
“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”
In recent weeks, some Republicans have indicated that they would not agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agreed to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.
The White House has said it would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for Congressional authority to borrow more, and it has insisted that Congress raise the ceiling as a matter of course, to cover expenses already authorized by Congress. In broader fiscal negotiations, it has said it would not agree to spending cuts without commensurate tax increases.
The idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin drew wide if puzzling attention recently after some bloggers and economic commentators had suggested it as an alternative to involving Congress.
By virtue of an obscure law meant to apply to commemorative coins, the Treasury secretary could order the production of a high-denomination platinum coin and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, where it would count as a government asset and give the country more breathing room under its debt ceiling. Once Congress raised the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could then order the coin destroyed.
Mr. Carney, the press secretary, fielded questions about the theoretical tactic at a news conference last week. But the idea is now formally off the table.
The White House has also rejected the idea that it could mount a challenge to the debt ceiling itself, on the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that the “validity of the public debt” of the United States “shall not be questioned.”
The Washington Post earlier published a report that the Obama administration had rejected the platinum-coin idea.
A month after a gunman invaded Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 children and six adults, a group of local residents are calling for efforts to make communities safer from gun violence.
A news conference is scheduled for Monday, the one-month anniversary of the shootings at the Connecticut school, a tragedy that has reignited the national debate on gun control.
A task force led by Vice President Joe Biden has been meeting this week with advocates on all sides of the thorny gun control issue and he has said he is hoping to have recommendations by next week.
Biden has offered to talk with any victims' families who would like to speak with him personally, a support group said Saturday, the Associated Press reported.
“If you choose to wait a few weeks, or months, the offer is still there,” the group called Sandy Hook Promise wrote.
White House officials have said they are communicating with local groups and the families in Newtown, Conn.
“We remain in touch with families from Newtown and will present an opportunity for all of them to share their views before the president makes any decisions,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich told the Associated Press.
Sandy Hook Promise is planning to “ask individuals across the country to make a promise to encourage and support common sense solutions that make their communities and our country safer from acts of violence like that which occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14,” according to the Hartford Courant. The group was formerly known as “Newtown United,” the newspaper said.
TIMELINE: U.S. mass shootings
The group was originally started to aid families of the children killed in the attack on the school by Adam Lanza, who first killed his mother at the home they shared. Adam Lanza killed himself after attacking the school.
Since the shooting, the group has broadened its focus, seeking a role in the national debate on gun violence. Founders of the group will be joined by victims' family members, survivors of the shooting, first responders and other community members, the newspaper reported.
Meanwhile, Newtown's schools superintendent is urging an indefinite police presence at the district's schools to allay fears among parents and children about gun violence, according to the Newtown News Times. Two officers are on duty at each of the district's six schools.
“I've told the police we need them,” Supt. Janet Robinson told that newspaper this week.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School remains closed. Students and staff are using a school in neighboring Monroe.
School officials say they've received nearly 300 emails, many voicing concern about long-term security and a police presence.
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We often say, upon the passing of a friend or loved one, that the world is a poorer place for the loss. But with the untimely death of programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, this isn’t just a sentiment; it’s literally true. Worthy, important causes will surface without a champion equal to their measure. Technological problems will go unsolved, or be solved a little less brilliantly than they might have been. And that’s just what we know. The world is robbed of a half-century of all the things we can’t even imagine Aaron would have accomplished with the remainder of his life.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide Friday in New York. He was 26 years old.
When he was a 14 years old, Aaron helped develop the RSS standard; he went on to found Infogami, which became part of Reddit. But more than anything Aaron was a coder with a conscience: a tireless and talented hacker who poured his energy into issues like network neutrality, copyright reform and information freedom. Among countless causes, he worked with Larry Lessig at the launch of the Creative Commons, architected the Internet Archive’s free public catalog of books, OpenLibrary.org, and in 2010 founded Demand Progress, a non-profit group that helped drive successful grassroots opposition to SOPA last year.
“Aaron was steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world,” writes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. “He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation. I am crushed by his loss, but will continue to be enlightened by his work and dedication.”
In 2006 Aaron was part of a small team that sold Reddit to Condé Nast , Wired’s parent company. For a few months he worked in our office here in San Francisco. I knew Aaron then and since, and I liked him a lot — honestly, I loved him. He was funny, smart, sweet and selfless. In the vanishingly small community of socially and politically active coders, Aaron stood out not just for his talent and passion, but for floating above infighting and reputational cannibalism. His death is a tragedy.
I don’t know why he killed himself, but Aaron has written openly about suffering from depression. It couldn’t have helped that he faced a looming federal criminal trial in Boston on hacking and fraud charges, over a headstrong stunt in which he arranged to download millions of academic articles from the JSTOR subscription database for free from September 2010 to January 2011, with plans to release them to the public.
JSTOR provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals online. MIT had a subscription to the database, so Aaron brought a laptop onto MIT’s campus, plugged it into the student network and ran a script called keepgrabbing.py that aggressively — and at times disruptively — downloaded one article after another. When MIT tried to block the downloads, a cat-and-mouse game ensued, culminating in Swartz entering a networking closet on the campus, secretly wiring up an Acer laptop to the network, and leaving it there hidden under a box. A member of MIT’s tech staff discovered it, and Aaron was arrested by campus police when he returned to pick up the machine.
The JSTOR hack was not Aaron’s first experiment in liberating costly public documents. In 2008, the federal court system briefly allowed free access to its court records system, Pacer, which normally charged the public eight cents per page. The free access was only available from computers at 17 libraries across the country, so Aaron went to one of them and installed a small PERL script he had written that cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from Pacer every three seconds, and uploading it to the cloud. Aaron pulled nearly 20 million pages of public court documents, which are now available for free on the Internet Archive.
The FBI investigated that hack, but in the end no charges were filed. Aaron wasn’t so lucky with the JSTOR matter. The case was picked up by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann in Boston, the cybercrime prosecutor who won a record 20-year prison stretch for TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez. Heymann indicted Aaron on 13 counts of wire fraud, computer intrusion and reckless damage. The case has been wending through pre-trial motions for 18 months, and was set for jury trial on April 1.
Larry Lessig, who worked closely with Aaron for years, disapproves of Aaron’s JSTOR hack. But in the painful aftermath of Aaron’s suicide, Lessig faults the government for pursuing Aaron with such vigor. “[Aaron] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying,” Lessig writes. “I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.”
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – ABC’s “The Middle” doesn’t get the recognition, ratings or Emmy Awards that “Modern Family” does, but the cast and creators are fine with cruising under the radar if they can continue producing more episodes.
“I say slow and steady wins the race,” series star Neil Flynn rationalized at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour.
Despite averaging a middling 2.8 rating in the 18-49 demographic this season – a feeble number compared to the 5.4 for “Modern Family” and the 6.4 for CBS’s top-rated “Big Bang Theory” – “The Middle” has lasted 83 episodes over the course of four seasons. (The rating counts live viewing plus seven days of DVR viewing.)
“Before you know it, we’ll have done 120 episodes,” Flyn continued. “I’d much rather be underrated than overrated.”
And although the show has only been nominated for one Emmy – in the Outstanding Makeup for a Single-Camera Series (Non-Prosthetic) category – executive producers Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline joke that they consider it an award every time critics label the show “underrated.”
In fact, they revel in “kindly being called under-appreciated” so much that star Patricia Heaton jokes that they have developed a drinking game for every time the show receives the compliment.
“We’re on fourth season with a show that people love and we’re incredibly, incredibly grateful for that,” Heaton concluded, in all seriousness. “Would it be nice to have more? Yeah, but it’s fantastic and I certainly can’t complain.”
TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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HUNTINGTON PARK, Calif. — The “bodega clinicas” that line the bustling commercial streets of immigrant neighborhoods around Los Angeles are wedged between money order kiosks and pawnshops. These storefront offices, staffed with Spanish-speaking medical providers, treat ailments for cash: a doctor’s visit is $20 to $40; a cardiology exam is $120; and at one bustling clinic, a colonoscopy is advertised on an erasable board for $700.
County health officials describe the clinics as a parallel health care system, serving a vast number of uninsured Latino residents. Yet they say they have little understanding of who owns and operates them, how they are regulated and what quality of medical care they provide. Few of these low-rent corner clinics accept private insurance or participate in Medicaid managed care plans.
“Someone has to figure out if there’s a basic level of competence,” said Dr. Patrick Dowling, the chairman of the family medicine department at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Not that researchers have not tried. Dr. Dowling, for one, has canvassed the clinics for years to document physician shortages as part of his research for the state. What he and others found was that the owners were reluctant to answer questions. Indeed, multiple attempts in recent weeks to interview owners and employees at a half-dozen of the clinics in Southern California proved fruitless.
What is certain, however, is that despite their name, many of these clinics are actually private doctor’s offices, not licensed clinics, which are required to report regularly to federal and state oversight bodies.
It is a distinction that deeply concerns Kimberly Wyard, the chief executive of the Northeast Valley Health Corporation, a nonprofit group that runs 13 accredited health clinics for low-income Southern Californians. “They are off the radar screen,” said Ms. Wyard of the bodega clinicas, “and it’s unclear what they’re doing.”
But with deadlines set by the federal Affordable Care Act quickly approaching, health officials in Los Angeles are vexed over whether to embrace the clinics and bring them — selectively and gingerly — into the network of tightly regulated public and nonprofit health centers that are driven more by mission than by profit to serve the uninsured.
Health officials see in the clinics an opportunity to fill persistent and profound gaps in the county’s strained safety net, including a chronic shortage of primary care physicians. By January 2014, up to two million uninsured Angelenos will need to enroll in Medicaid or buy insurance and find primary care.
And the clinics, public health officials point out, are already well established in the county’s poorest neighborhoods, where they are meeting the needs of Spanish-speaking residents. The clinics also could continue to serve a market that the Affordable Care Act does not touch: illegal immigrants who are prohibited from getting health insurance under the law.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, the deputy director of community health for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said bodega clinicas — a term he seems to have coined — that agree to some scrutiny could be a good way of addressing the physician shortage in those neighborhoods.
“Where are we going to find those providers?” he said. “One logical place to consider looking is these clinics.”
Los Angeles is not the only city with a sizable Latino population where the clinics have become a part of the streetscape. Health care providers in Phoenix and Miami say there are clinics in many Latino neighborhoods.
But their presence in parts of the Los Angeles area can be striking, with dozens in certain areas. Visits to more than two dozen clinics in South Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley found Latino women in brightly colored scrubs handing out cards and coupons that promised a range of services like pregnancy tests and endoscopies. Others advertised evening and weekend hours, and some were open around the clock.
Such all-hours access and upfront pricing are critical, Latino health experts say, to a population that often works around the clock for low wages.
Also important, officials say, is that new immigrants from Mexico and Central America are more accustomed to corner clinics, which are common in their home countries, than to the sprawling medical complexes or large community health centers found in the United States. And they can get the kind of medical treatments — including injections of hypertension drugs, intravenous vitamins and liberally dispensed antibiotics — that are frowned upon in traditional American medicine.
The waiting rooms at the clinics reflected the everyday maladies of peoples’ lives: a glassy-eyed child resting listlessly on his mother’s lap, a fit-looking young woman waiting with a bag of ice on her wrist, a pensive middle-aged man in work boots staring straight ahead.
For many ordinary complaints, the medical care at these clinics may be suitable, county health officials and medical experts say. But they say problems arise when an illness exceeds the boundaries of a physician’s skills or the patient’s ability to pay cash.
Dr. Raul Joaquin Bendana, who has been practicing general medicine in South Los Angeles for more than 20 years, said the clinics would refer patients to him when, for example, they had uncontrolled diabetes. “They refer to me because they don’t know how to handle the situation,” he said.
The clinic physicians by and large appear to have current medical licenses, a sample showed, but experts say they are unlikely to be board certified or have admitting privileges at area hospitals. That can mean that some clinics try to treat patients who face serious illness.
Olivia Cardenas, 40, a restaurant worker who lives in Woodland Hills, Calif., got a free Pap smear at a clinic that advertises “especialistas,” including in gynecology. The test came back abnormal, and the doctor told Ms. Cardenas that she had cervical cancer. “Come back in a week with $5,000 in cash, and I’ll operate on you,” Ms. Cardenas said the doctor told her. “Otherwise you could die.”
She declined to pay the $5,000. Instead, a family friend helped her apply for Medicaid, and she went to a hospital. The diagnosis, it turned out, was correct.
Health care experts say the clinics’ medical practices would come under greater scrutiny if they were brought closer into the fold.
But being connected would mean the clinics’ cash-only business model would need to change. Dr. Dowling said the lure of newly insured patients in 2014 might draw them in. “To the extent there are payments available,” he said, “the legitimate ones might step up to the plate.”
This article was produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.
He was 26.
An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz had apparently hanged himself, and that Mr. Swartz’s girlfriend had discovered the body.
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.
Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”
Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”
The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.
Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.
But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.
The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.
The government abruptly shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account of the events, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.
When an article about his Pacer exploit was published in The New York Times, Mr. Swartz responded in a blog post in a typically puckish manner, announcing the story in the form of a personal ad: “Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.
The federal government investigated but decided not to prosecute.
In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.
