Washed It!

Seven more Western troops were killed in attacks across Afghanistan on Thursday, military officials said, bringing the two-day fatality toll for the NATO force to 13 and illustrating the war’s widening reach.

Combat deaths are running at their highest levels of the 9-year-old war. This year has already been the most lethal for Western troops’ since the U.S. invasion that toppled the Taliban movement.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force released few details about the latest fatalities. It did not even disclose the nationalities of those killed, and provided only general details about where the deaths occurred.

The largest single fatal incident Thursday was reported in the west of the country, where three troops were killed by a single roadside bomb. National contingents serving in the west, near the Iranian border, include Americans and Italians.

Three more of Thursday’s deaths occurred in the country’s south, two in an insurgent attack and another in a roadside bombing. Yet another fatality took place in Afghanistan’s east, where insurgents often infiltrate from Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. The majority of the troops in the east are American, but several other NATO nations have forces there as well.

A day earlier, four service members were killed by a single IED, or improvised explosive device, in Afghanistan’s south, considered the insurgency’s heartland. IEDs — low-tech, but sometimes effective even against well-armored vehicles — are the No. 1 killer of Western troops in Afghanistan.

U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan now stands at about 100,000, bolstered by a surge ordered by President Obama last December. The bulk of the American forces are in the south, where NATO is attempting to stifle the Taliban in volatile Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

Even as the fighting pushes ahead, so do efforts by the government of Hamid Karzai to broker some kind of political settlement with the Taliban. While no formal negotiations have begun, contacts have been taking place for months.

NATO officials say the Western military is helping to facilitate the informal talks by granting a measure of freedom of movement to Taliban leaders involved.

Meanwhile, the head of a newly formed government council tasked with overseeing any negotiations with the Taliban and other insurgent groups said he believed the reconciliation effort would move forward.

“We are taking our first steps,” former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani told a news conference in Kabul.

laura.king@latimes.com
Seven Western troops killed in Afghanistan

A trio of economics scholars, including an MIT professor whose nomination to the Federal Reserve board has been held up in the Senate, won the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for their studies of markets and how mismatches between buyers and sellers can contribute to such problems as high unemployment.

Peter A. Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and fellow American Dale T. Mortensen, a professor at Northwestern University, will share the $1.5 million award with Christopher A. Pissarides, a British and Cypriot citizen who teaches at the London School of Economics.

The three men pioneered and developed models that help explain, among other things, why there are so many jobless people even as there are a large number of job openings — a problem that is particularly relevant today as the United States and other developed countries grapple with stubbornly high unemployment.

The U.S. jobless figure for September was reported Friday at 9.6%.

“The laureates’ models help us understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in announcing the prize.

“This may refer to benefit levels in unemployment insurance or rules in regard to hiring and firing,” the statement said. “One conclusion is that more generous unemployment benefits give rise to higher unemployment and longer search times.”

The idea that more-generous jobless benefits can provide a disincentive for workers to seek or take jobs has been hotly debated in the U.S. as policymakers have continued to face pressure to extend unemployment checks for millions of people.

Mortensen, in a conference call from Denmark, where he is currently a visiting professor at Aarhus University, said his models do show a negative effect of higher jobless benefits.

But he dismissed that as a major factor in the high unemployment, saying instead that the current job troubles are a function of the impaired financial markets.

“I really don’t think this is the time to worry about that,” Mortensen, 71, said of unemployment benefits.

The works of Diamond, who first developed a theoretical framework on “search markets” in the early 1970s, and Mortensen and Pissarides also offer insights into another ongoing debate among economists — whether the high unemployment today reflects structural deficiencies such as mismatches in skills or problems that are more cyclical in nature because of weak demand.

Some economists have argued the troubles are structural, suggesting that unemployment won’t be going back to the normal range of 5%, while others have emphasized that the terrible labor situation demands more substantial government stimulus to bolster demand for goods and services.

Diamond acknowledged that the process of improving the job market “is going to be slow and painful” for the whole economy and people looking for work. But he didn’t view it as a structural problem, suggesting more optimism for the future.

“I think the economy is very adaptive,” he said. “Workers and employers will adapt.”

Diamond, 70, who received his Ph.D. from MIT and has been a professor there since 1966, is considered by peers as a brilliant theorist whose works on social security systems are highly regarded.

Last spring he was nominated by President Obama to fill one of three vacancies on the Fed’s board. But while two other nominees to the Fed board were cleared recently, Diamond’s confirmation was effectively blocked by Senate Republicans.

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, questioned whether the MIT professor had enough practical experience to serve as a Fed governor.

Asked about the Fed nomination during a news conference at MIT, Diamond said he would not withdraw his candidacy but declined to comment further.

don.lee@latimes.com
Three share Nobel Prize in economics

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been good for Frank Amador Jr.’s business, a small Buena Park machine shop where workers make aluminum parts for the B-1 and B-2 bombers.

Sales have tripled since the war began, to $8 million a year. The payroll has doubled to 28 workers.

But now, after one of the biggest military buildups in decades, Amador is among the thousands of aerospace suppliers across Southern California bracing for a downturn, a slide that could have gut-wrenching consequences for an economy struggling to recover.

“It won’t be long before we’re all scrambling for business,” said Amador, who has been through a few boom-and-bust cycles over the last three decades. “I’ve seen this before. There’s a long road ahead. I just hope we can hold on.”

Aerospace has been one of the few bright spots in the region’s dismal economy, offering high-wage engineering, manufacturing and administrative jobs at a time when construction, real estate and banking work has grown scarce.

Nearly 5,500 aerospace suppliers — many with a handful of workers — collectively employ more than 130,000 people in California. Most of these small shops depend on subcontracts from giant defense contractors, which have announced a wave of job cuts in recent weeks, citing expectations of a protracted contraction of Pentagon spending.

Northrop Grumman Corp., the nation’s third-largest defense contractor and one of the largest private employers in the region, said last week that it would eliminate 500 jobs in its aerospace division, with most of the cuts expected to hit its sprawling facilities in El Segundo and Redondo Beach. Also last week, Raytheon Co. issued pink slips to about 130 employees in its Space and Airborne Systems division in El Segundo.

Boeing Co., the second-largest defense contractor, plans to trim its military aircraft business and cut workers, starting with 10% of the group’s executives. Boeing has more than 20,000 workers in Southern California at sprawling facilities in places like Seal Beach, El Segundo and Huntington Beach.

Top-ranked Lockheed Martin Corp., which operates its famed Skunk Works research facility in Palmdale, said last month that about 25% of its executives had opted for a voluntary retirement program designed to cut costs. More than 600 vice presidents and directors applied for the program.

“Eventually, these cuts will work their way down the supply chain,” said James McAleese, a lawyer in McLean, Va., who specializes in military contracts. “Prime contractors will squeeze their suppliers to bring down their costs.”

Paul H. Nisbet, a defense analyst who has been following the aerospace industry since the 1970s, expects that many small suppliers will be forced to go out of business, merge with rivals or cut employees to survive.

That’s what happened after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, in a downturn that fundamentally altered the defense industry.

The last time defense spending plunged, from 1989 to 1994, the amount that the Pentagon budgeted for research and buying weapons plummeted 20%. During that period, the U.S. aerospace industry job base shrank 25% nationwide.

California saw its aerospace industry employment drop 40%, the bulk of that in the Southland, as a quarter of the local defense industry suppliers went out of business, said Jack Kyser, an economist with the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Those that survived cut back on workers, slashed employees’ hours or got into a different line of business altogether, Kyser said. Smaller firms were hardest hit because they tend to manufacture only a handful of products and for a small number of customers.

“We’re at an inflection point in the aerospace industry,” he said. “We have our fingers crossed that we don’t see cutbacks as we did before. But there are already indications that jobs are going to be cut.”

Pentagon officials confirmed that spending would slow, although they said this downturn would not be as severe as the last one.

“This is not the 1990s,” Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said during a media conference last month. “But neither is it the 2000s, when we had double-digit year-on-year growth and we could always reach for more money.”

Citing the end of combat operations in Iraq and the rising federal deficit, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he is looking to trim $100 billion from the Pentagon budget over the next five years.

“The golden era of aerospace has passed,” said Tom Captain, principal of Deloitte’s aerospace and defense consulting practice. “There is now a siren call for businesses to transfer from a hardware-based machine shop to a software-based technologically advanced firm.”

Aerospace suppliers brace for defense spending cuts

A small city that used Los Angeles County tax dollars to buy a verdant stretch of the Whittier Hills to keep it out of the hands of oil companies now wants to profit from a plan to pump at least 1,000 barrels of crude a day on the same property.

And it has a formidable competitor eyeing a share of the royalties, which could range from $7 million to nearly $70 million a year.

The dispute between Whittier and Los Angeles County hinges on whether the city has a right to allow development on the 1,280 acres of hill country it purchased in 1994 with $17 million of Proposition A funds, which were intended for conservation purposes. Until now, the 21,000 acres of open space and parklands created countywide with Proposition A funds had never hosted a business larger than a taco stand or boat concession.

The average L.A. County homeowner pays about $18.50 a year to a property “benefit assessment” district designed to raise money to expand, renovate and maintain parks and open space from Long Beach to Lancaster. It also funds inner-city recreation programs meant to keep young people away from gangs.

Facing the release Thursday of a final environmental impact report on the drilling project, Whittier is eager to settle the controversy.

“We are not here to simply benefit the county; that is not going to happen,” said Whittier City Councilman Bob Henderson, who led the fight to preserve the land in the early 1990s. “If the county is unwilling to work with us toward a win-win compromise, then, as far as I’m concerned, there will be no drilling at all.”

So far, no such compromise is imminent. “Whittier wants to look as though it has presumptive rights to this royalty money, but the confidence expressed by Whittier in this matter is the city’s alone,” said Ilona Volkmann, administrator of the Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, which administers Proposition A funds. “Whittier can go ahead with this oil deal, but proceeds from disposal of the property must be returned to the county.”

When Whittier acquired the land from Chevron and Unocal oil companies, it also obtained the mineral rights. “We just wanted to make sure the oil companies couldn’t someday decide to renew oil drilling there,” Henderson said of the transaction.

That was back when oil was selling for about $12 a barrel. In 2008, a year when oil prices soared past $100 a barrel, the City Council had a change of heart. It voted unanimously to lease the property for 30 years to Matrix Oil Co. of Santa Barbara.

“Times change, and the oil industry uses different, less destructive technologies than it did 15 years ago,” Henderson said. “Beyond that, the oil is worth from $600 million to $1 billion. It would be foolish to just let it sit there.”

Under terms of the lease, Matrix would use slant-drilling technologies to tap an estimated 20 million barrels of recoverable oil. Whittier, a city of about 90,000, would receive royalties amounting to 30% of the annual gross revenue from the wells.

The prospect of a revenue stream that is not tax-based has attracted the attention of Los Angeles County, which claims it has legal rights to any royalties generated by the venture. Meanwhile, conservationists contend that neither the city nor the county is authorized to industrialize open space purchased with Proposition A funds.

“The city opened a Pandora’s box when it broke the compact it made with the people whose taxes were used to buy and preserve that land,” said Daniel Duran, president of Whittier Hills Oil Watch, a group opposed to the project.

Whittier is paying $15,000 a month for a weighty ally to represent its interests: Proposition A author Esther Feldman. She now believes drilling in a nature preserve does not undermine her proposition. “I believe that this proposal to extract oil and gas from 1% of the preserve can be done in a modern fashion that maintains the integrity of the proposition,” she said.

So Whittier is moving ahead, “based on the interpretations of the author of Prop. A and several attorneys,” Henderson said.

“If Matrix can drill without causing ecological damage and at the same time make money for the city of Whittier — that’s very attractive,” he said. “Matrix is looking at producing 1,000 barrels a day…. That’s huge money. With it we can do a lot of productive things to restore habitat…. But the project only makes sense if the city of Whittier benefits from it.”

After all, Henderson added: “We own the mineral rights.”

Whittier resident Eddie Diaz, a spokesman for Open Space Legal Defense Fund, a local group opposed to the project, predicted that the dispute would land in court.

“This is not a municipal affair and the city cannot use this land at its whim,” said Diaz, a deputy city attorney for Riverside. Whittier may hold title to the park, he said, “but it holds that title in trust for the residents of the county and to fulfill the mission of the state’s open space policy.”

The Matrix project would include as many as 52 wells, pipelines and truck-loading facilities on land that had been set aside for sensitive species. Most drilling and pumping equipment would be placed in soundproof underground vaults, some of them less than 1,000 feet from homes and an elementary school for children with special needs.

“Our goal,” said Matrix Vice President Mike McCaskey, “is to return the field to its level of production in 1991 — about 1,000 barrels a day — which could be achieved with a handful of wells. But if we are wildly successful, and the price of oil stays higher, we could see numbers as high as $70 million per year for the city.”

Duran, who lives just a few yards away from the project site, dismissed that kind of talk as “an attempt to cloud the real issues with grandiose economic projections.”

“They are shooting hypothetical wads of money into peoples’ minds,” he said, “to overwhelm common sense and bury our concerns about impacts on quality of life, the environment and our recovering wilderness.”

louis.sahagun@latimes.com
Whittier hopes to profit from oil from land preserved with taxpayer funds

An American and two Japanese scientists won the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing chemical methods widely used to make potential cancer drugs and other medicines, as well as slimmed-down computer screens.

Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki were honored for their development four decades ago of one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today, called palladium-catalyzed cross couplings.

It lets chemists join carbon atoms together, a key step in the process of building complex molecules. Their methods are now used worldwide in commercial production of pharmaceuticals and molecules used to make electronics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Heck, 79, is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, now living in the Philippines. Negishi, 75, is a chemistry professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and 80-year-old Suzuki is a retired professor from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.

Negishi told reporters in Stockholm by telephone from Indiana that he was excited to be awakened by a call early Wednesday from the Nobel committee, saying he started dreaming about winning the prize “half a century ago.”

“The Nobel Prize became a realistic dream of mine when I was in my 20’s,” he said, adding he would use his third of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award to continue doing research.

“I may have accomplished maybe half of my goals and I definitely would like to work for at least a couple of more years,” Negishi said.

Heck said from his home in the Philippines that the importance of his work wasn’t clear initially.

“It sort of grew as we worked on it,” he told The Associated Press. “As I worked on it longer it appeared it was pretty important and it has developed well since then.”

In a televised news conference from Hokkaido University, Suzuki said he was honored by the prize and hoped that it would inspire Japanese youngsters to explore chemistry.

“To my disappointment, not many young people seem to be interested in science, especially chemistry,” said Suzuki. “A resource-poor country like Japan can only rely on people’s endeavor and knowledge. I would like to continue my effort to provide help to younger people.”

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he spoke to Suzuki on the phone and congratulated him.

“He told me that Japan’s science and technology is at the world’s top level and encouraged me to make good use of the resources,” Kan said.

The methods developed by the three scientists have been used to artificially produce cancer-killing substances first found in marine sponges, the academy said in its citation. It’s not yet clear whether they will turn out to be useful drugs.

They are also being used to create new antibiotics that work on resistant bacteria and a number of commercially available drugs, including the anti-inflammatory Naproxen, prize committee member Claes Gustafsson said.

“There have been calculations that no less than 25 percent of all chemical reactions in the pharmaceutical industry are actually based on these methods,” Gustafsson said.

Palladium-catalyzed cross coupling has also been used by the electronics industry to make light-emitting diodes used in the production of extremely thin monitors, the academy said.

The approach developed by the winners is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, in research labs and in commercial production of substances like plastics, said Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society and a colleague of Negishi’s in Purdue’s chemistry department.

“It’s truly quite fundamental work,” he said.

By using the metal palladium as a catalyst to make carbon atoms bond to each other, the approach makes those bonds happen “very easily, very cleanly,” he said. It requires fewer steps than previous methods and avoids having to clean up unwanted byproducts, he said.

Heck started experimenting with using palladium as a catalyst while working for an American chemical company in Delaware in the 1960’s. In 1977 Negishi developed a variant of the method and two years later Suzuki developed a third.

The academy said the chemistry award had a link to the research honored Tuesday by the Nobel Prize in physics, awarded to Russian-born Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for experiments with graphene, the thinnest and strongest material known to mankind.

“In spring 2010, scientists announced that they had attached palladium atoms to graphene, and the resulting solid material was used to carry out the Suzuki reaction in water,” the citation said.

The 2010 Nobel Prize announcements began Monday with the medicine award going to 85-year-old British professor Robert Edwards for fertility research that led to the first test tube baby.

The literature prize will be announced on Thursday, followed by the peace prize on Friday and economics on Monday, Oct. 11.

The awards were established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel — the inventor of dynamite — and are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of his death in 1896.
American, 2 Japanese share 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry

Gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown tangled in a blistering dispute Saturday over Whitman’s employment of an illegal immigrant housekeeper as they met for the campaign’s first and only Spanish-language debate.

The most intense exchange of the debate, held at Cal State Fresno, came when the moderator asked Whitman about the revelations earlier this week that she had employed Nicandra Diaz Santillan for nine years before firing her in 2009. Whitman has denied knowing that Diaz Santillan was undocumented until just before the dismissal.

Whitman turned to face Brown and accused Brown of being behind Santillan’s emergence.

“Jerry, you should be ashamed,” she said, turning to Brown and shaking her finger. “You and your surrogates put her deportation at risk. You put her out there. You should be ashamed for sacrificing Nicky Diaz on the altar of your political ambitions.”

Brown fired back, denying any involvement and accusing Whitman of failing to take responsibility.

“Let’s be sympathetic and let’s really empathize with the millions of people who are in the shadows and you want to keep them in the shadows and now you’re trying to evade responsibility,” he said. “Don’t run for governor if you can’t stand up on your own two feet and say, ‘Hey I made a mistake, I’m sorry, let’s go on from here.’ You have blamed her, blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions but you don’t take accountability.”

Whitman said she fulfilled her obligations as an employer and fired the housekeeper when the woman disclosed her undocumented status last year.

The 60-minute debate was much more confrontational, and their accusations much more personal than their first meeting, which took place Tuesday night in Davis. Saturday’s debate was sponsored by Univision, the Fresno Bee, the Fresno Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Cal State Fresno and the city of Fresno.

It was filmed at midday Saturday, with questions posed in Spanish and simultaneously translated for the candidates. It was to be aired later, after Spanish voiceovers were added to the candidates’ responses.

The meeting was plagued by technical difficulties. Immediately after the exchange about the housekeeper, the translation system stopped working, and both candidates were taken off stage for several minutes and placed in separate holding areas.

Unemployment, home foreclosures, education and the water shortage in the Central Valley also played prominent roles in the clash, but illegal immigration provided the sharpest contrast between the candidates, with Brown supporting a path to citizenship for undocumented workers and Whitman opposing one. Brown repeatedly accused Whitman of “talking out of both sides of her mouth” as she appeals to Latinos. Whitman stood by her proposals, including a guest-worker program, and emphasized instead her plans to create jobs and improve education, two areas of considerable interest to Latinos since the economy has disproportionately affected them.

Latinos are an emerging political force in California, representing 21% of the electorate, compared with 10% two decades ago. In 2008, they made up 18% of general-election voters. Republicans have long seen an opportunity to regain ground because many Latinos share some of the core values of the party, such as social conservatism, and are small-business owners. But until now GOP candidates have lacked the resources to make an all-out push for their votes.

Whitman, who has put $119 million of her own money into her campaign, has launched an aggressive outreach effort, flooding Spanish-language radio and TV and opening neighborhood offices in cities with large Latino populations. Brown, on the other hand, ran a bare-bones campaign through the summer, relying on labor unions to carry his message until last month when he began airing his own ads.

michael.mishak@latimes.com
Brown, Whitman tangle over illegal immigration in debate

For months, the budget crisis in Los Angeles has hamstrung and frustrated the city’s homicide detectives. With no money to pay for the long hours of overtime they typically work, LAPD officials saw no choice but to force detectives to take time off from the job. Cases started taking longer to solve or going cold.

The LAPD’s struggles weren’t lost on Robert Clark, an FBI assistant special agent in charge of the bureau’s anti-gang efforts in Los Angeles. Clark’s concern grew as he watched the number of gang-related killings in the city’s violent southern swatch spike in early summer. With agents, cash and equipment to spare, Clark approached LAPD officials with an unusual offer to help.

The results were striking: More than two dozen homicide cases were solved during a first-of-its-kind collaboration of the two agencies.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said veteran LAPD homicide Det. Sal LaBarbera. “We were able to clear cases at a pace that we never would have been able to hit. Twenty-seven homicides in three months? That’s unheard of.”

Though the FBI and LAPD have collaborated before, officials from both agencies said the speed with which the improvised idea came together, the scope of the assistance and its immediate effect were unprecedented.

Named Operation Save Our Streets, the effort began July 1 and teamed six FBI agents with a few dozen LAPD homicide detectives who work in some of the city’s bloodiest, most gang-saturated neighborhoods. With the agents came half a dozen vehicles, badly needed computers and hard drives, and access to the FBI’s forensic laboratory and surveillance equipment. Most importantly, Clark ponied up money to cover the LAPD detectives’ overtime costs, allowing them to forgo the department-wide policy that sends officers home on forced leave when they accrue too many hours of additional work.

The money “kept us working — allowed us to stay at it unrestricted, in the way we need to. Without it, we would have been stuck keeping regular office hours,” LaBarbera said.

The effect of the LAPD’s overtime policy on homicide cases was first reported in The Times in April.

At the start, detectives and agents focused on 13 recent killings in which the detectives believed they had strong leads and a good chance of quick arrests. Within weeks, however, the scope of the project expanded as the agents began joining detectives when they rolled out to fresh crime scenes, as well as helping with cases going back several years. In all, the teams worked on 78 homicides, LaBarbera said.

Often forced to wait for the LAPD’s overworked crime lab to process DNA evidence and conduct other forensic tests, LaBarbera said, detectives got quicker results from the FBI’s lab. Advanced cellphone tracking technology was available, as were surveillance vans outfitted with equipment not owned by the LAPD.

The case of Shavonna Jones, a 30-year-old woman allegedly shot to death by her estranged husband on May 22, underscored the reach of the FBI. LAPD detectives had spent several weeks chasing dead ends throughout the region, but lost the husband’s trail.

On information they gathered from prison inmates who knew the man, FBI agents were able to trace him to an area outside Minneapolis. Calls to the bureau’s Minneapolis field office resulted in his arrest Aug. 12.

“Would we have solved the case? Probably, but it would have taken three or four times as long,” LaBarbera said.

Arrests were also made in Nevada and Arizona. The oldest case solved went back two decades. In all, agents and detectives interviewed more than 250 witnesses and suspects, served more than two dozen search warrants and made 20 arrests, according to LAPD officials. In a few cases, the suspects whom police concluded were responsible for the killings were found to have died.

If there was a downside to the collaboration, LaBarbera said, it was that it was a stark reminder of what LAPD detectives might be able to do with more resources.

“There shouldn’t be a cap or a limit when it comes to somebody’s life,” he said. “If it were my kid, I’d want 1,000 people out there working around the clock.”

joel.rubin@latimes.com
FBI and LAPD join forces to solve more than two dozen homicide cases

The U.S. Labor Department issued a critical report on enforcement of workplace safety in California on Tuesday and ordered the state to fix myriad problems, including poor training of safety inspectors and delays in responding to complaints.

Federal officials took aim at the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health, saying, among other things, that inspectors do not always review a company’s history statewide before deciding whether to cite it for repeat violations. They also found that the division’s appeals process “falls short.”

The problems found with California’s program were “relatively serious, especially with the appeals board,” said Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health.

The Labor Department’s review mirrors many of the findings of a Times investigation last fall that found the division’s appeals board repeatedly reduced or dismissed penalties levied by health and safety inspectors, even in situations in which workers died or were seriously injured.

The Times highlighted the case of Bimbo Bakeries USA, where nine employees have lost parts of fingers or a limb in several California plants since 2003. After most of those accidents, investigators found that baking machines did not have proper guards to prevent employees from reaching in to dislodge dough that got stuck. It is not clear that inspectors recognized the problem as a pattern across the plants.

Many of the penalties levied by the Cal/OSHA were dismissed or reduced on technicalities by judges working for the appeals board, so the company wasn’t required to immediately fix hazards.

The Times focused on several serious examples, including the case of a worker on the Golden Gate Bridge, Kevin Scott Noah, who plummeted 50 feet to his death.

A Cal/OSHA investigator concluded that the contractor had not provided employees with scaffolds; it issued three “serious” citations and a $26,000 fine, records show.

The contractor appealed on the grounds that Cal/OSHA had issued the citations to Shimmick Obayashi, the name listed on the company’s business cards. The company’s full name was the Shimmick Construction Co. Inc./Obayashi Corp.

An administrative law judge tossed the case out, writing that Cal/OSHA had failed to determine the company’s legal name.

Candice Traeger, chairwoman of Cal/OSHA’s appeals board, could not be reached Tuesday for comment

Workplace safety advocates hailed the federal government’s action, saying it underscored that safety in California has been suffering for years.

“I don’t think people realize how broken our system is,” said Gail Bateson, executive director of Worksafe, a nonprofit that advocates for workers.

But Len Welsh, the chief of the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, took issue with some of the more than 40 findings about his division.

“They got a lot of stuff frankly wrong, and embarrassingly so,” he said. For example, he said, one finding accuses the division of not opening investigations into seven fatal accidents quickly enough. But another finding says there were two such accidents. When his office questioned the findings, federal officials couldn’t explain the discrepancy, he said.

Cal/OSHA and the appeals board have 30 days to respond to the report and develop corrective plans.

The general review of California’s program was part of a larger examination of all 25 U.S. states that run their own workplace safety programs under the jurisdiction of the federal program. Serious problems were also found with Hawaii’s program, which could be taken over by the federal government.

jessica.garrison@latimes.com
Cal/OSHA ordered to improve workplace safety

Iran said its Bushehr nuclear power plant is safe after confirming some of its industrial computers have been targeted by a computer worm and that it is working to counter the cyber-attack.

“The main systems of the Bushehr nuclear power plant have not been damaged,” Mahmoud Jahfari, the plants project manager, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency today. “Investigations show that some private software of the power plants employees have been contaminated.”

The cyber assault has had no impact on the operations of the plant, Jahfari said.

The IP addresses of 30,000 computer systems infected by the Stuxnet worm have been detected, state-run Mehr news agency reported earlier, citing Mahmoud Liaii, director of the Information Technology Council of the Ministry of Industries and Mines.

A worm is a self-replicating piece of malicious software, or malware.
Iran says nuclear plant unaffected by virus as industrial computers struck

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts who lived six months on the International Space Station touched down safely, but one day late, Saturday morning in the cloudy, central steppes of Kazakhstan.

The homecoming of American astronaut Tracy Caldwell-Dyson and Russia’s Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko had been delayed after technical glitches hindered the undocking of the spacecraft.

NASA spokesman Rob Navias said in a Web streamed report on the landing that the Soyuz craft landed vertically at its precise planned landing spot at 11:23 a.m. local time (0523 GMT).

“That was almost a bull’s-eye landing,” Navias said.

A hover of 12 Russian recovery helicopters took flight ahead of the landing above an area southeast of the remote central Kazakh town Arkalyk to intercept the capsule.

Recovery workers arrived quickly at the landing spot and erected a plaftorm around the slightly titled capsule.

Skvortsov beamed with joy and held his fist aloft as the recovery team carefully lifted him out of the Soyuz.

After being hoisted out of the craft, the astronauts were immediately placed into reclining chairs to help them recover from the change in gravitational pull after spending 176 days in space.

Russian space officials and health workers then crowded around a smiling Skvortsov and handed him an apple, as is tradition.

Caldwell-Dyson, who looked weary but joyous, spoke with colleagues by satellite phone after being lowered into her chair and wrapped in a blanket.

By contrast with the previous day’s attempt to depart the space station, undocking from the International Space Station was executed flawlessly and exactly on schedule.

The three astronauts remaining aboard the space station — Americans Doug Wheelock and Shannon Walker, and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin — pumped their fists with joy as they watched a report on the landing via a direct feed.

Russian cosmonauts Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka, along with NASA astronaut Scott J. Kelly, will join them after blasting off from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan on Oct. 8.

Undocking on Friday had been thwarted by signaling errors in the onboard computer system and a malfunction with the opening hooks and latches on the space station side of the capsule.

After the failed undocking attempt, one of the Russian cosmonauts on board, flight engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin, inspected the space station docking mechanism holding the Soyuz in place and discovered a loose piece of gear mechanism with two teeth broken off.

The crew installed a series of electrical jumper cables to bypass what’s believed to be a failed part. Once that was completed, the cosmonauts performed a test, and the hooks and latches opened properly, NASA said.

Minor but recurring glitches with the Soyuz will create unease as reliance on the Russian craft increases over the next few years with two launches left for U.S. space shuttles before the fleet is retired.

Space shuttle Discovery is set to lift off Nov. 1 for the International Space Station. Endeavour will follow in February to wrap up 30 years of shuttle flight.

That will leave NASA without its own means to send astronauts into space for the first time in half a century.
Soyuz capsule lands in Kazakhstan