Pope shows lifetime jobs aren't always for life

The world seems surprised that an 85-year-old globe-trotting pope who just started tweeting wants to resign, but should it be? Maybe what should be surprising is that more leaders his age do not, considering the toll aging takes on bodies and minds amid a culture of constant communication and change.

There may be more behind the story of why Pope Benedict XVI decided to leave a job normally held for life. But the pontiff made it about age. He said the job called for "both strength of mind and body" and said his was deteriorating. He spoke of "today's world, subject to so many rapid changes," implying a difficulty keeping up despite his recent debut on Twitter.

"This seemed to me a very brave, courageous decision," especially because older people often don't recognize their own decline, said Dr. Seth Landefeld, an expert on aging and chairman of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Age has driven many leaders from jobs that used to be for life — Supreme Court justices, monarchs and other heads of state. As lifetimes expand, the woes of old age are catching up with more in seats of power. Some are choosing to step down rather than suffer long declines and disabilities as the pope's last predecessor did.

Since 1955, only one U.S. Supreme Court justice — Chief Justice William Rehnquist — has died in office. Twenty-one others chose to retire, the most recent being John Paul Stevens, who stepped down in 2010 at age 90.

When Thurgood Marshall stepped down in 1991 at the age of 82, citing health reasons, the Supreme Court justice's answer was blunt: "What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and falling apart."

One in 5 U.S. senators is 70 or older, and some have retired rather than seek new terms, such as Hawaii's Daniel Akaka, who left office in January at age 88.

The Netherlands' Queen Beatrix, who just turned 75, recently said she will pass the crown to a son and put the country "in the hands of a new generation."

In Germany, where the pope was born, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 58, said the pope's decision that he was no longer fit for the job "earns my very highest respect."

"In our time of ever-lengthening life, many people will be able to understand how the pope as well has to deal with the burdens of aging," she told reporters in Berlin.

Experts on aging agreed.

"People's mental capacities in their 80s and 90s aren't what they were in their 40s and 50s. Their short-term memory is often not as good, their ability to think quickly on their feet, to execute decisions is often not as good," Landefeld said. Change is tougher to handle with age, and leaders like popes and presidents face "extraordinary demands that would tax anybody's physical and mental stamina."

Dr. Barbara Messinger-Rapport, geriatrics chief at the Cleveland Clinic, noted that half of people 85 and older in developed countries have some dementia, usually Alzheimer's. Even without such a disease, "it takes longer to make decisions, it takes longer to learn new things," she said.

But that's far from universal, said Dr. Thomas Perls, an expert on aging at Boston University and director of the New England Centenarians Study.

"Usually a man who is entirely healthy in his early 80s has demonstrated his survival prowess" and can live much longer, he said. People of privilege have better odds because they have access to good food and health care, and tend to lead clean lives.

"Even in the 1500s and 1600s there were popes in their 80s. It's remarkable. That would be today's centenarians," Perls said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain turned 71 while running for president in 2007. Had he won, he would have been the oldest person elected to a first term as president. Ronald Reagan was days away from turning 70 when he started his first term as president in 1981; he won re-election in 1984. Vice President Joe Biden just turned 70.

In the U.S. Senate, where seniority is rewarded and revered, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond didn't retire until age 100 in 2002. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia was the longest-serving senator when he died in office at 92 in 2010.

Now the oldest U.S. senator is 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. The oldest congressman is Ralph Hall of Texas who turns 90 in May.

The legendary Alan Greenspan was about to turn 80 when he retired as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006; he still works as a consultant.

Elsewhere around the world, Cuba's Fidel Castro — one of the world's longest serving heads of state — stepped down in 2006 at age 79 due to an intestinal illness that nearly killed him, handing power to his younger brother Raul. But the island is an example of aged leaders pushing on well into their dotage. Raul Castro now is 81 and his two top lieutenants are also octogenarians. Later this month, he is expected to be named to a new, five-year term as president.

Other leaders who are still working:

—England's Queen Elizabeth, 86.

—Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, 88.

—Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, emir of Kuwait, 83.

—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, 79.

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Associated Press writers Paul Haven in Havana, Cuba; David Rising in Berlin; Seth Borenstein, Mark Sherman and Matt Yancey in Washington, and researcher Judy Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Ex-Bell officials defend themselves as honorable public servants

Less than three years ago, they were handcuffed and taken away in a case alleged to be so extensive that the district attorney called it "corruption on steroids."

But on Monday, two of the six former Bell council members accused of misappropriating money from the small, mostly immigrant town took to the witness stand and defended themselves as honorable public servants who earned their near-$100,000 salaries by working long hours behind the scenes.

During her three days on the stand, Teresa Jacobo said she responded to constituents who called her cell and home phone at all hours. She put in time at the city's food bank, organized breast cancer awareness marches, sometimes paid for hotel rooms for the homeless and was a staunch advocate for education.

"I was working very hard to improve the lives of the citizens of Bell," she said. "I was bringing in programs and working with them to build leadership and good families, strong families."

Jacobo, 60, said she didn't question the appropriateness of her salary, which made her one of the highest-paid part-time council members in the state.

Former Councilman George Mirabal said he too worked a long, irregular schedule when it came to city affairs.

"I keep hearing time frames over and over again, but there's no clock when you're working on the council," he said Monday. "You're working on the circumstances that are facing you. If a family calls … you don't say, '4 o'clock, work's over.' "

Mirabal, 65, said he often reached out to low-income residents who didn't make it to council meetings, attended workshops to learn how to improve civic affairs and once even made a trip to a San Diego high school to research opening a similar tech charter school in Bell.

"Do you believe you gave everything you could to the citizens of Bell?" asked his attorney, Alex Kessel.

"I'd give more," Mirabal replied.

Both Mirabal and Jacobo testified that not only did they perceive their salaries to be reasonable, but they believed them to be lawful because they were drawn up by the city manager and voted on in open session with the city attorney present.

Mirabal, who once served as Bell's city clerk, even went so far as to say that he was still a firm supporter of the city charter that passed in 2005, viewing it as Bell's "constitution." In a taped interview with authorities, one of Mirabal's council colleagues — Victor Bello — said the city manager told him the charter cleared the way for higher council salaries.

Prosecutors have depicted the defendants as salary gluttons who put their city on a path toward bankruptcy. Mirabal and Jacobo, along with Bello, Luis Artiga, George Cole and Oscar Hernandez, are accused of drawing those paychecks from boards that seldom met and did little work. All face potential prison terms if convicted.

Prosecutors have cited the city's Solid Waste and Recycling Authority as a phantom committee, created only as a device for increasing the council's pay. But defense attorneys said the authority had a very real function, even in a city that contracted with an outside trash company.

Jacobo testified that she understood the introduction of that authority to be merely a legal process and that its purpose was to discuss how Bell might start its own city-run trash service.

A former contract manager for Consolidated Disposal Service testified that Bell officials had been unhappy with the response time to bulky item pickups, terminating their contract about 2005, but that it took about six years to finalize because of an agreement that automatically renewed every year.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller questioned Mirabal about the day shortly after his 2010 arrest that he voluntarily told prosecutors that no work was done on authorities outside of meetings.

Mirabal said that if he had made such a statement, it was incorrect. He said he couldn't remember what was said back then and "might have heed and hawed."

"So it's easy to remember now?" Miller asked.

"Yes, actually."

"More than two years after charges have been filed, it's easier for you to remember now that you did work outside of the meetings for the Public Finance Authority?"

"Yes, sir."

Miller later asked Mirabal to explain a paragraph included on City Council agendas that began with the phrase, "City Council members are like you."

After some clarification of the question, Mirabal answered: "That everybody is equal and that if they look into themselves, they would see us."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

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Letter From Europe: France Takes a Step Back in Its History

PARIS — Many years ago in Ouagadougou, the dusty capital of Burkina Faso, a visiting couple from France ordered dinner in a French-owned restaurant called Le Safari whose offerings included dishes listed as “selon arrivage,” loosely translated as “depending on availability.”

The overhead thunder of a French airliner on final approach to landing offered a more telling definition.

“Not long now,” the owner told the impatient couple. And, as promised, a rickety moped driven by a man in robes arrived from the airport within minutes, bearing chilled oysters to landlocked northwest Africa, fresh from distant Paris.

The episode seemed to say something about the umbilical cord binding France and its former colonies, like Burkina Faso, in a hard-nosed relationship designed to anchor French ways and to secure French benefits in commerce, diplomacy and influence going far beyond a plate of fines de claire.

But the relationship always had its darker, more muscular side. A year before the dinner at Le Safari, in another West African nation, 1,000 French soldiers had deployed to resist a southward advance by Libyan troops in Chad, intent on blocking what was depicted as a vision of Islamic expansionism sponsored by the former Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Almost 30 years later, the echoes of that moment — and many others like it — resonate through the fighting in Mali, whose desert north has become a crucible of Islamic fervor where French troops now risk being drawn into a protracted campaign to cement at least a semblance of government control.

And, much as President François Hollande of France denies that his country is still the gendarme of francophone Africa, the columns of French soldiers and planeloads of paratroops embroiled in the newest fighting recall much earlier campaigns.

“There was a time when General Faidherbe pursued armed bands attacking the forts of the Sahel, and even then they professed radical Islam,” Bertrand Badie, a political science scholar in Paris, wrote in Le Monde, referring to Gen. Louis Faidherbe, who played a central role in solidifying French interests in the broad swath of desert known as the Sahel in the 19th century. “What have we done since then?”

For many years, French military intervention in Africa functioned as the guardian of French economic interests and of the large expatriate French communities who benefited from them in cities like Libreville in Gabon and Abidjan in Ivory Coast. French troops defined the longevity of protégé African leaders. The French presence was a postcolonial bulwark, too, against British influence in southern and eastern Africa.

When Graham Greene crossed the border between Liberia and what was then the French colony of Guinea in the 1930s, as he recounted in his “Journey Without Maps,” the Liberians did not call their neighbor “Guinea” but “France,” so pervasive was French colonial influence.

But French Socialists, including Mr. Hollande, have long professed unease with the role of post-imperial puppet-masters.

As recently as December, when rebel forces advanced on Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, France dispatched 600 soldiers there. “If we’re present, it is not in order to protect a regime,” Mr. Hollande declared. “It’s to protect our citizens and our interests and in no way to intervene in the internal affairs of a country.”

The era of interference, he said, “is over with.”

A few days later, his words might have seemed somewhat premature when French warplanes halted a lightning southward advance by Islamist extremists in northern Mali. Paris deployed 4,000 soldiers for a ground campaign to recapture the insurgents’ northern redoubts.

After the quagmire of Afghanistan, welcome to the shifting sands of Sahelistan.

Mr. Hollande, indeed, had already cast the jihadi presence in northern Mali not in terms of a challenge to Francafrique, as the pervasive French presence in its former African colonies is known, but in the global terms of an international struggle against terrorism. “We face a threat that concerns the entire world,” Mr. Hollande told the United Nations in September.

That assessment, said Patrick Smith, the editor of a London-based newsletter, Africa Confidential, has spread a “geopolitical patina” over the “very, very local” mistakes and miscalculations in Mali and elsewhere.

Indeed, as France seeks an exit strategy based on handing over the fight to Malian and West African troops, “the next part of the war is going to be much more complicated,” Mr. Smith said in an interview.

Many years ago, when the French Foreign Legion had been drawn into an easy contest against rebels in what was called Zaire, a French diplomat in the capital, Kinshasa, concluded that “in Africa, there are never big battles.”

The official may have been making comparisons with cataclysms woven into French history, like the Somme during World War I, or Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. But, if Mr. Hollande is borne out in his analysis of the jihadi menace, Sahelistan might just put the diplomat’s adage to a critical test.

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Anne Hathaway on Winning An Oscar: Whatever Happens, Happens

By Phil Boucher

02/11/2013 at 07:00 AM EST

She's won big at the Golden Globes and now the BAFTAs, but will Anne Hathaway take home an Oscar?

Hathaway – who is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Les Misérables – isn't spending too much time worrying about it.

"Whatever happens in two weeks, happens. It won't be the worst thing that happens to me if I don't win, and with my husband by my side it won't be the best thing either. So I am feeling very good about whatever," the actress, 30, told reporters backstage after nabbing a best supporting actress statue at Sunday's British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards in London.

"I really have to say that getting to do the work, getting to play the character with this cast and to have this opportunity, it is the most sublime experience. I don't know how I got so lucky. ... So I don't think ahead – I am just happy to be in the conversation in two weeks' time," she said.

But should she win, Hathaway has been imagining where to keep her statue.

"I kind of have this fantasy – because this year that I have been lucky enough to receive a few pieces of hardware – that I'm going to get a tool shed and keep it in my garage so that it opens to some music. But for now I am just going to keep it in my kitchen," she said.

While she's earned awards and received critical acclaim for her portrayal of Fantine, she says the best thing to come of filming the musical epic was meeting costar Russell Crowe.

"The biggest surprise of the whole experience was what a sweetie pie Russell Crowe was. The whole cast would kind of gather around his place and we would just sing for hours. We all bonded that way. He has become a dear, dear friend," she said, "and I feel very blessed to have him in our life."

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What heals traumatized kids? Answers are lacking

CHICAGO (AP) — Shootings and other traumatic events involving children are not rare events, but there's a startling lack of scientific evidence on the best ways to help young survivors and witnesses heal, a government-funded analysis found.

School-based counseling treatments showed the most promise, but there's no hard proof that anxiety drugs or other medication work and far more research is needed to provide solid answers, say the authors who reviewed 25 studies. Their report was sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

According to research cited in the report, about two-thirds of U.S. children and teens younger than 18 will experience at least one traumatic event, including shootings and other violence, car crashes and weather disasters. That includes survivors and witnesses of trauma. Most will not suffer any long-term psychological problems, but about 13 percent will develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress, including anxiety, behavior difficulties and other problems related to the event.

The report's conclusions don't mean that no treatment works. It's just that no one knows which treatments are best, or if certain ones work better for some children but not others.

"Our findings serve as a call to action," the researchers wrote in their analysis, published online Monday by the journal Pediatrics.

"This is a very important topic, just in light of recent events," said lead author Valerie Forman-Hoffman, a researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

She has two young children and said the results suggest that it's likely one of them will experience some kind of trauma before reaching adulthood. "As a parent I want to know what works best," the researcher said.

Besides the December massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, other recent tragedies involving young survivors or witnesses include the fatal shooting last month of a 15-year-old Chicago girl gunned down in front of a group of friends; Superstorm Sandy in October; and the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado, whose survivors include students whose high school was destroyed.

Some may do fine with no treatment; others will need some sort of counseling to help them cope.

Studying which treatments are most effective is difficult because so many things affect how a child or teen will fare emotionally after a traumatic event, said Dr. Denise Dowd, an emergency physician and research director at Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, Mo., who wrote a Pediatrics editorial.

One of the most important factors is how the child's parents handle the aftermath, Dowd said.

"If the parent is freaking out" and has difficulty controlling emotions, kids will have a tougher time dealing with trauma. Traumatized kids need to feel like they're in a safe and stable environment, and if their parents have trouble coping, "it's going to be very difficult for the kid," she said.

The researchers analyzed 25 studies of treatments that included anti-anxiety and depression drugs, school-based counseling, and various types of psychotherapy. The strongest evidence favored school-based treatments involving cognitive behavior therapy, which helps patients find ways to cope with disturbing thoughts and emotions, sometimes including talking repeatedly about their trauma.

This treatment worked better than nothing, but more research is needed comparing it with alternatives, the report says.

"We really don't have a gold standard treatment right now," said William Copeland, a psychologist and researcher at Duke University Medical Center who was not involved in the report. A lot of doctors and therapists may be "patching together a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and that might not add up to the most effective treatment for any given child," he said.

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Online:

Pediatrics: http://www.pediatrics.org

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Dorner's LAPD firing case hinged on credibility

For a Los Angeles Police Department disciplinary panel, the evidence was persuasive: Rookie officer Christopher Jordan Dorner lied when he accused his training officer of kicking a mentally ill man during an arrest.

But when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge examined the case a year later in 2010 as part of an appeal filed by Dorner, he seemed less convinced.

Judge David P. Yaffe said he was "uncertain whether the training officer kicked the suspect or not" but nevertheless upheld the department's decision to fire Dorner, according to court records reviewed by The Times.

As the manhunt for the ex-cop wanted in the slayings of three people enters its sixth day, Dorner's firing has been the subject of debate both within and outside the LAPD. An online manifesto that police attributed to Dorner claims he was railroaded by the LAPD and unjustly fired. His allegations have resonated among the public and some LAPD employees who have criticized the department's disciplinary system, calling it capricious and retaliatory toward those who try to expose misconduct.

Seeking to address those concerns, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announced this weekend that he was reopening the investigation into Dorner's disciplinary case. "It is important to me that we have a department that is seen as valuing fairness," Beck said.

LAPD records show that Dorner's disciplinary panel heard from several witnesses who testified that they did not see the training officer kick the man. The panel found that the man did not have injuries consistent with having been kicked, nor was there evidence of having been kicked on his clothes. A key witness in Dorner's defense was the man's father, who testified that his son told him he had been kicked by police. The panel concluded that the father's testimony "lacked credibility," finding that his son was too mentally ill to give a reliable account.

The online manifesto rails against the LAPD officials who took part in the review hearing and vows revenge. Police allege Dorner killed his own attorney's daughter and her fiance last weekend in Irvine.

"Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will [lead] to deadly consequences for you and your family," the manifesto says.

Dorner's case revolved around a July 28, 2007, call about a man causing a disturbance at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Pedro. When Dorner and his training officer showed up, they found Christopher Gettler. He was uncooperative and threw a punch at one of the officers, prompting Dorner's training officer, Teresa Evans, to use an electric Taser weapon on him.

Nearly two weeks later, Dorner walked into Sgt. Donald Deming's office at the Harbor Division police station. There were tears in Dorner's eyes, the sergeant later testified.

Deming gave the following account of what happened next:

"I have something bad to talk to you about, something really bad," Dorner told him.

Evans, Dorner explained, had kicked Gettler once in the face and twice in the left shoulder or nearby chest area. Afterward, Dorner said, Evans told him not to include the kicks on the arrest report.

"Promise me you won't do anything," Dorner asked Deming.

"No, Chris. I have to do something," Deming responded.

An internal affairs investigation into the allegation concluded the kicks never occurred. Investigators subsequently decided that Dorner had fabricated his account. He was charged with making false accusations.

At the December 2008 Board of Rights hearing, Dorner's attorney, Randal Quan, conceded that his client should have reported the kicks sooner but told the board that Dorner ultimately did the right thing. He called the case against Dorner "very, very ugly."

"This officer wasn't given a fair shake," Quan said, according to transcripts of the board hearing. "In fact, what's happening here is this officer is being made a scapegoat."

At the hearing, Dorner stuck to his story. Evans, he said, kicked Gettler once in the left side of his collarbone lightly with her right boot as they struggled to handcuff him. She kicked him once more forcefully in the same area, Dorner testified, and then much harder in the face, snapping Gettler's head back. Dorner said he noticed fresh blood on Gettler's face.

Dorner did not immediately report the kicks to a sergeant, he said, because he was asked only what force he had used, not what his partner had done. And as a rookie who had already filed complaints against fellow officers, he feared retaliation from within the department, Dorner testified.

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After early start, worst of flu season may be over

NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.

The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.

The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.

For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.

Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.

"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.

In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.

Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications

But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.

So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.

Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.

The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.

According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.

Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

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Online:

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

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Cardinal Mahony used cemetery money to pay sex abuse settlement

Pressed to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to settle clergy sex abuse lawsuits, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony turned to one group of Catholics whose faith could not be shaken: the dead.

Under his leadership in 2007, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles quietly appropriated $115 million from a cemetery maintenance fund and used it to help pay a landmark settlement with molestation victims.

The church did not inform relatives of the deceased that it had taken the money, which amounted to 88% of the fund. Families of those buried in church-owned cemeteries and interred in its mausoleums have contributed to a dedicated account for the perpetual care of graves, crypts and grounds since the 1890s.

Mahony and other church officials also did not mention the cemetery fund in numerous public statements about how the archdiocese planned to cover the $660-million abuse settlement. In detailed presentations to parish groups, the cardinal and his aides said they had cashed in substantial investments to pay the settlement, but they did not disclose that the main asset liquidated was cemetery money.

In response to questions from The Times, the archdiocese acknowledged using the maintenance account to help settle abuse claims. It said in a statement that the appropriation had "no effect" on cemetery upkeep and enabled the archdiocese "to protect the assets of our parishes, schools and essential ministries."

Under cemetery contracts, 15% of burial bills are paid into an account the archdiocese is required to maintain for what church financial records describe as "the general care and maintenance of cemetery properties in perpetuity."

Day-to-day upkeep at the archdiocese's 11 cemeteries and its cathedral mausoleum is financed by cemetery sales revenue separate from the 15% deposited into the fund, spokeswoman Carolina Guevara said. Based on actuarial predictions, it would be at least 187 years before cemeteries are fully occupied and the church started to draw on the maintenance account, she said.

"We estimate that Perpetual Care funds will not be needed until after the year 2200," Guevara wrote in an email.

The church's use of fund money appears to be legal. State law prohibits private cemeteries from touching the principal of their perpetual care funds and bars them from using the interest on those funds for anything other than maintenance. Those laws, however, do not apply to cemeteries run by religious organizations.

Mary Dispenza, who received a 2006 settlement from the archdiocese over claims of molestation by her parish priest in the 1940s, said her great-uncle and great-aunt are buried in Calvary Cemetery in East L.A.

"I think it's very deceptive," she said of the way the appropriation was handled. "And I think in a way they took it from people who had no voice: the dead. They can't react, they can't respond."

The fund dates to the tenure of Bishop Francis Mora, who opened Calvary in 1896. An official archdiocese history published in 2006 recounts how the faithful of Mora's era were assured their money was "in the custody of an organization of unquestionable integrity and endurance" — the Catholic Church.

Over the next century, the archdiocese built more cemeteries, and each person laid to rest meant a new deposit into the maintenance account. By the time of the sex abuse settlement, there were cemeteries from Pomona to Santa Barbara and $130 million in the fund. Church officials removed $114.9 million in October 2007.

"Management plans to repay these appropriated funds from future cemetery sales ... after all liabilities associated with the lawsuits ... are paid off," a December 2012 church financial report stated.

It's unclear when that will happen. The archdiocese is still repaying a $175-million loan it took to help cover the settlement. Archbishop Jose Gomez, who took over from Mahony two years ago, is mulling over a $200-million fundraising campaign. Cemeteries have been a reliable source of income for the church, and the use of the upkeep-fund money is one of several ways the archdiocese is depending on them to erase its abuse debts.

When Mahony agreed to the settlement six years ago, he did so knowing his archdiocese couldn't afford it. But he had little choice. If cases brought by more than 500 victims went to trial, the archdiocese feared it could be facing jury awards and legal bills in excess of $1 billion.

The deal reached after lengthy negotiations paid an average of $1.3 million per victim. Even with contributions from its insurance companies, religious orders and others, the archdiocese was on the hook for more than $300 million, vastly more cash than it had on hand.

Bishops in other cities had closed parishes and schools or filed for bankruptcy, moves that angered the faithful and that Mahony wanted to avoid. He went to Rome at least twice to consult with Vatican officials, who must approve the transfer of archdiocese property worth more than $10 million. He later told the National Catholic Reporter he got permission to "alienate" — the Vatican's term for sale or transfer — $200 million in church assets. Asked whether the Vatican had signed off on the use of cemetery funds, archdiocese Chief Financial Officer Randolph E. Steiner said in a statement, "All approvals under the Church's Code of Canon Law were obtained."

After the settlement, Mahony and others from the archdiocese said publicly that the money would come from administrative cuts, liquidation of investments, a bank loan and sales of real estate not directly related to their religious mission. Such real estate included the archdiocese's Wilshire Boulevard headquarters, which eventually sold for $31 million.

Three months later, with no announcement, the archdiocese reached into the cemetery account. Steiner said that during an internal review of church assets, the money "was determined to be excess funding and was made available to the 2007 settlement."

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Berlusconi Remains the Wild Card in Italy Race

ROME — One candidate promised to drop an unpopular new property tax and refund all prior payments in cash. Another called that proposal a “poisoned meatball,” disconnected from reality. A third suggested that Al Qaeda blow up the Italian Parliament — then backtracked — and the man generally considered the front-runner is campaigning on vague promises of stability, so has often been ignored.

With only two weeks to go before national elections, the Italian campaign has become a surreal spectacle in which a candidate many had given up for dead, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has surged. Although he is not expected ever to govern again, with his media savvy and pie-in-the-sky offers of tax refunds, Mr. Berlusconi now trails the front-runner, Pierluigi Bersani, the leader of the Democratic Party, by about five or six points, according to a range of opinion polls published on Friday.

The polls found that the former comedian Beppe Grillo, who made the Qaeda quip as part of his antipolitical campaign, is close behind in third place, while the caretaker prime minister, Mario Monti, who made the “poisoned meatball” remark as he stepped up attacks on Mr. Berlusconi in an awkward transition from technocrat to candidate, is taking up the rear with around 10 percent to 15 percent of the vote.

Most analysts predict that the center-left will win, but with not enough votes to govern without forming an alliance with Mr. Monti’s centrists. Yet in a complex political landscape — and with significant policy differences between Mr. Monti and Mr. Bersani, who have been criticizing each other in their campaigns — nothing is a given, and the political uncertainty weighs on financial markets.

Some compare the election to a power struggle on a corporate board. “Mr. Berlusconi knows he can’t govern, but wants a strong seat at the table,” said Marco Damilano, a political reporter for L’Espresso, a weekly. The Democratic Party will have the majority of seats but will not be able to govern without making accords, he said, adding that “Monti wants the golden share,” in which his few seats count for a lot.

Many outsiders marvel at the survival skills of Mr. Berlusconi, who dragged down Italy’s finances and international standing to the point that Mr. Monti was brought on in November 2011 to lead an emergency technocratic government that lasted a year. But at least a good part of Mr. Berlusconi’s success has to do with his competition.

Mr. Monti lacks a strong party and has hit Italians with unpopular taxes, and centrists who might lean left are concerned that Mr. Bersani would be weak on the flagging economy. On top of that, Mr. Berlusconi, whose center-right People of Liberty is more a charismatic movement than a party, has true loyalists who do not know where else to turn.

“Berlusconi is politically dead, but his electorate is still there and it is looking for a new leader, and there isn’t one,” said Massimo Franco, a political columnist for the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. “So it’s a sort of a nostalgic operation.”

In an auditorium near the Vatican, Mr. Berlusconi was greeted Thursday by rows of adoring fans, most of them retirees. “Ah,” he said. “It reminds me of the good old days.” Joking about his age, the 76-year-old former premier added: “I looked at myself in the mirror and saw someone who didn’t look like me. They don’t make mirrors the way they used to.”

In a two-hour off-the-cuff speech, he returned to familiar themes: depicting the left as unreconstructed, cold-war Communists; magistrates as politically motivated; the euro and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany as harming Italy; and Mr. Monti as a leader beholden to foreign interests who did nothing but raise taxes.

His supporters were mostly buying it. “Even if he doesn’t refund us the property tax, at least he’ll take it away,” said Francesca Cipriani, 70, a retiree, as she cheered Mr. Berlusconi.

“My house is worth 20 percent less,” Nicola Manichelli, 75, a retired taxi driver, chimed in.

Marcello Sorgi, a columnist for the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa, said: “Berlusconi voters fear that Monti will raise taxes, and that under Berlusconi that won’t happen. It’s not at all true, but Berlusconi’s propaganda works with his electorate.”

“His electorate still has a messianic, religious rapport with him,” Mr. Sorgi added.“Berlusconi is considered a kind of guru.”

Not so with Mr. Monti, who is beloved in Brussels, Berlin and Washington, but has been less popular with Italian voters. As he learns to campaign, Mr. Monti, an economist with no previous political experience, has sought the services of the political consulting firm AKPD Message and Media, whose co-founder, David Axelrod, President Obama’s key political strategist, visited Mr. Monti in Rome last month.

Mr. Monti, who is trying to capture the civic-minded centrists from both right and left who once voted for the centrist Christian Democrats before the party disbanded in a corruption scandal in the early 1990s, also opened a Facebook page. He uses it to post folksy musings that some critics say are undermining the authority of the slyly ironic but hardly showmanlike candidate instead of humanizing him.

Last week, an interviewer presented Mr. Monti with a puppy on live television, days after Mr. Berlusconi had appeared with one. “This is a mean blackmail,” Mr. Monti said with a smile, before stroking the fluffy pet and saying, “Feel how soft it is.”

Mr. Bersani, a longtime party veteran and former economic growth minister, speaks more to the old guard of the Italian left. He defeated Matteo Renzi, the charismatic 38-year-old mayor of Florence, in a rare party primary and has been running on the slogan “A Just Italy,” a message aimed at reassuring voters but which may not inspire them.

In a half-hour speech on Thursday to party loyalists, including municipal workers and frustrated university adjunct teachers, Mr. Bersani called attention to youth unemployment and the disconnect between the real economy and financial markets, and called for economic stimulation to help more people have steady jobs. “Europe isn’t just the fiscal compact,” he said.

Both Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Bersani appear to speak more to their own constituencies than to the nation as a whole, long a characteristic of Italian politics. Faced with a political class that seems stuck in the past, Mr. Grillo and his antipolitical Five Star Movement have been gaining ground in the polls, campaigning in piazzas across Italy.

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Minka Kelly: 'I'm Not Worthy' of Acting with Oprah

By Jennifer Cress

02/08/2013 at 07:40 PM EST

Minka Kelly as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Pacific Coast News

It's intimidating enough to play Jackie O, but Minka Kelly felt even more pressure to perform when she found out who was joining the cast of her latest film, The Butler.

"I'm not worthy. I feel so lucky and grateful. I was like, 'What am I doing here?!' " Kelly tells PEOPLE of starring alongside Robin Williams, Forest Whitaker, John Cusack, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda and more in the upcoming film, which tells the story of a butler who served eight presidents.

The movie also features another major star: the one and only Oprah Winfrey. "I didn't get to meet Oprah because our shooting schedules were different, but she's a pretty loved lady," Kelly says. "I have yet to hear a bad thing about her!"

Kelly found that the most difficult part of playing Jackie Kennedy was nailing the former first lady's distinct accent. "I think she spoke in a way she thought she should speak, so getting that down was hard. There's a musicality and rhythm to the way she speaks," Kelly explains. "I went to sleep listening to her."

Another tough task? Slipping into the retro costumes. "My body is so different from her because I have curves, so fitting into those vintage clothes was actually really hard," she shares. "Also it was hot – and there was a lot of wool!"

Jennifer Graylock / Getty

But Kelly had no issue slipping into the stunning Oscar de la Renta gown (left) she strutted down the runway in at the Red Dress Collection fashion show in N.Y.C. on Wednesday night. The actress walked for the second year in a row in honor of The Heart Truth campaign, which encourages women to monitor their heart health.

For the month of February, Diet Coke will donate $1 for every person who uploads a heart-inspired photo to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #showyourheart. Visit to dietcoke.com/showyourheart for more information.

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