Singer Morrissey says no to Kimmel, 'Duck Dynasty'

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The TV series "Duck Dynasty" is coming between Morrissey and Jimmy Kimmel.

The singer and animal rights activist says he canceled his appearance Tuesday on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" because "Duck Dynasty" cast members will be on the talk show.

Morrissey says he can't perform on a show with what he called people who "amount to animal serial killers."

A&E's "Duck Dynasty" reality show follows a Louisiana family with a business selling duck calls and decoys.

A&E did not immediately respond to requests for comment from it and the Robertson family.

A person familiar with the Kimmel show's plans confirmed that Morrissey was to appear. The person lacked authority to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person says Morrissey's performance will be rescheduled.

ABC says the Churchill band will perform Tuesday on Kimmel's show but declined comment on the switch.

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Reach AP Television Writer Lynn Elber at http://www.twitter.com/lynnelber .

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Horse Meat in European Beef Raises Questions on U.S. Exposure

The alarm in Europe over the discovery of horse meat in beef products escalated again Monday, when the Swedish furniture giant Ikea withdrew an estimated 1,670 pounds of meatballs from sale in 14 European countries.

Ikea acted after authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in its meatballs. The company said it had made the decision even though its tests two weeks ago did not detect horse DNA.

Horse meat mixed with beef was first found last month in Ireland, then Britain, and has now expanded steadily across the Continent. The situation in Europe has created unease among American consumers over whether horse meat might also find its way into the food supply in the United States. Here are answers to commonly asked questions on the subject.

Has horse meat been found in any meatballs sold in Ikea stores in the United States?

Ikea says there is no horse meat in the meatballs it sells in the United States. The company issued a statement on Monday saying meatballs sold in its 38 stores in the United States were bought from an American supplier and contained beef and pork from animals raised in the United States and Canada.

“We do not tolerate any other ingredients than the ones stipulated in our recipes or specifications, secured through set standards, certifications and product analysis by accredited laboratories,” Ikea said in its statement.

Mona Liss, a spokeswoman for Ikea, said by e-mail that all of the businesses that supply meat to its meatball maker  issue letters guaranteeing that they will not misbrand or adulterate their products. “Additionally, as an abundance of caution, we are in the process of DNA-testing our meatballs,” Ms. Liss wrote. “Results should be concluded in 30 days.”

Does the United States import any beef from countries where horse meat has been found?

No. According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States imports no beef from any of the European countries involved in the scandal. Brian K. Mabry, a spokesman for the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said: “Following a decision by Congress in November 2011 to lift the ban on horse slaughter, two establishments, one located in New Mexico and one in Missouri, have applied for a grant of inspection exclusively for equine slaughter. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) is currently reviewing those applications.”

Has horse meat been found in ground meat products sold in the United States?

No. Meat products sold in the United States must pass Department of Agriculture inspections, whether produced domestically or imported. No government financing has been available for inspection of horse meat for human consumption in the United States since 2005, when the Humane Society of the United States got a rider forbidding financing for inspection of horse meat inserted in the annual appropriations bill for the Agriculture Department. Without inspection, such plants may not operate legally.

The rider was attached to every subsequent agriculture appropriations bill until 2011, when it was left out of an omnibus spending bill signed by President Obama on Nov. 18. The U.S.D.A.  has not committed any money for the inspection of horse meat.

“We’re real close to getting some processing plants up and running, but there are no inspectors because the U.S.D.A. is working on protocols,” said Dave Duquette, a horse trader in Oregon and president of United Horsemen, a small group that works to retrain and rehabilitate unwanted horses and advocates the slaughter of horses for meat. “We believe very strongly that the U.S.D.A. is going to bring inspectors online directly.”

Are horses slaughtered for meat for human consumption in the United States?

Not currently, although live horses from the United States are exported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. The lack of inspection effectively ended the slaughter of horse meat for human consumption in the United States; 2007 was the last year horses were slaughtered in the United States. At the time financing of inspections was banned, a Belgian company operated three horse meat processing plants — in Fort Worth and Kaufman, Tex., and DeKalb, Ill. — but exported the meat it produced in them.

Since 2011, efforts have been made to re-establish the processing of horse meat for human consumption in the United States. A small plant in Roswell, N.M., which used to process beef cattle into meat has been retooled to slaughter 20 to 25 horses a day. But legal challenges have prevented it from opening, Mr. Duquette said. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico opposes opening the plant and has asked the U.S.D.A. to block it.

Last month, the two houses of the Oklahoma Legislature passed separate bills to override a law against the slaughter of horses for meat but kept the law’s ban on consumption of such meat by state residents. California, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas prohibit horse slaughter for human consumption.

Is there a market for horse meat in the United States?

Mr. Duquette said horse meat was popular among several growing demographic groups in the United States, including Tongans, Mongolians and various Hispanic populations. He said he knew of at least 10 restaurants that wanted to buy horse meat. “People are very polarized on this issue,” he said. Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, disagreed, saying demand in the United States was limited. Italy is the largest consumer of horse meat, he said, followed by France and Belgium.

Is horse meat safe to eat?

That is a matter of much debate between proponents and opponents of horse meat consumption. Mr. Duquette said that horse meat, some derived from American animals processed abroad, was eaten widely around the world without health problems. “It’s high in protein, low in fat and has a whole lot of omega 3s,” he said.

The Humane Society says that because horse meat is not consumed in the United States, the animals’ flesh is likely to contain residues of many drugs that are unsafe for humans to eat. The organization’s list of drugs given to horses runs to 29 pages.

“We’ve been warning the Europeans about this for years,” Mr. Pacelle said. “You have all these food safety standards in Europe — they do not import chicken carcasses from the U.S. because they are bathed in chlorine, and won’t take pork because of the use of ractopamine in our industry — but you’ve thrown out the book when it comes to importing horse meat from North America.”

The society has filed petitions with the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, arguing that they should test horse meat before allowing it to be marketed in the United States for humans to eat.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated how many pounds of meatballs Ikea was withdrawing from sale in 14 European countries. It is 1,670 pounds, not 1.67 billion pounds.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the last year that horses were slaughtered in the United States. It is 2007, not 2006.

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DealBook: Confirmation Hearing for Mary Jo White Said to Be Scheduled for March

Mary Jo White appears poised to face a Senate confirmation hearing next month, a crucial step for the former federal prosecutor on her path to becoming the top Wall Street regulator.

Ms. White, whose nomination to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission has lingered for over a month, plans to testify in March before the Senate Banking Committee, three Congressional officials briefed on the matter said on Monday. The committee has not set a firm date for the confirmation hearing, the officials said, though lawmakers have tentatively scheduled her to appear the week of March 11.

At the hearing, one official said, Ms. White will most likely join Richard Cordray, who is in line to become director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In January, when the White House nominated Ms. White to the S.E.C. spot, it reappointed Mr. Cordray to a position he has held for the last year under a temporary recess appointment.

The Senate last year declined to confirm him in the face of Republican and Wall Street opposition to the newly created consumer bureau. Republicans are likely to voice similar skepticism at the hearing next month.

While some officials have quietly expressed concerns about Ms. White’s role as a Wall Street defense lawyer, her nomination is not expected to face major complications. An S.E.C. spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The timetable laid out on Monday offers Ms. White additional weeks to prepare. Over the last couple of weeks, she has received multiple briefings from agency staff members about new securities rules and the structure of the stock market, an official said. The briefings will in part prepare her for the confirmation hearing, which is expected to cover a broad scope of topics.

While Ms. White is a skilled litigator, she lacks experience in financial rule-writing and regulatory minutiae, a potential stumbling block for her nomination. Lawmakers also expect to raise questions about her movements through the revolving door that bridges government service and private practice. Some Democrats, a person briefed on the matter said, will question whether she is cozy with Wall Street.

In private practice, Ms. White defended some of Wall Street’s biggest names, including Kenneth D. Lewis, a former chief of Bank of America. As the head of litigation at Debevoise & Plimpton, she also represented JPMorgan Chase and the board of Morgan Stanley. Her husband, John W. White, is co-chairman of the corporate governance practice at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he represents many of the companies that the S.E.C. regulates.

(Ms. White has agreed to recuse herself from many matters that involve former clients, while her husband has agreed to convert his partnership at Cravath from equity to nonequity status.)

Despite some reservations, she is expected to receive broad support on Capitol Hill. When President Obama nominated her last month, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York was one of several Democrats to praise her prosecutorial prowess, calling her “tough as nails” during stints as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn and as the first female United States attorney in Manhattan.

While she handled some white-collar and securities cases, her specialty was terrorism and organized crime. As a federal prosecutor in New York City for more than a decade, she helped oversee the prosecution of the crime figure John Gotti and directed the case against those responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She also supervised the original investigation into Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

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Fashion Review: Sleeves and Straps Are Barely There at Oscars

Sleeves were in short supply and straps were so unrepresented on dresses at the Oscars on Sunday night that they might as well have been outlawed. But hold the envelope a moment: The verdict on this year’s red carpet is not all that bad. At least it wasn’t the usual monotonous parade of princess dresses.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Anne Hathaway on the red carpet.

It was shocking in a way to see fashion like the dress worn by Anne Hathaway. Her last-moment choice was a pale pink dress that appeared to have been styled after a household apron, as potent a symbol of feminine repression as ever there was. Only the dress, made by Miuccia Prada with a loosely tied back, featured a bodice that was intentionally subversive. The seams along the bust were so sexually suggestive that many viewers at home believed they were seeing part of Ms. Hathaway’s anatomy.

“I didn’t know what I was wearing until about three hours ago,” Ms. Hathaway said on the red carpet, and that would have been around the time that Valentino sent out a news release announcing that she would be dressed in one of its couture gowns. Ms. Hathaway evidently changed her mind, and one would like to imagine it as a sign of independence from the pull of Big Fashion. She also wore a Tiffany & Company necklace worth a half-million dollars, but she wore it backward.

Anyone who pays the slightest attention to fashion knows the rap on actresses who wear clothes from the designers with whom they have big advertising contracts. And though you could still detect the pull of special interests on the red carpet, there was less of a sense that actors were complicit billboards.

It was no surprise when Jennifer Lawrence, the new face of Miss Dior handbags, appeared in a Dior Haute Couture dress, the palest of pinks with a modernized ball gown shape. It was her third major awards appearance in that label. But this was the best example yet of how the house’s new look, by the designer Raf Simons, could be worn in reality, which is to say beautifully, but not without difficulty. The skirt of the gown was so big that Ms. Lawrence couldn’t reach the mani-cam on E! network.

While strapless designs still ruled the night, it wasn’t all the same old, same old. There was that weird moment, for example, when Helen Hunt said she was wearing a strapless dress by the Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M, not that the trend hasn’t had a while to settle down into the mainstream. It seems unlikely, anyway, that Ms. Hunt just dashed in and picked a great-looking, on-trend dress off the rack. But let’s not forget that Sharon Stone wore a Gap top out of her closet back in 1996.

There were plenty of microtrends for retailers to chew over, like the gunmetal colors and metallic beads. (Nicole Kidman in a swell L’Wren Scott, Naomi Watts in that extraterrestrial silver Armani and Catherine Zeta-Jones in campy gold Zuhair Murad.) Also, even though seen only in two examples — Ms. Hathaway’s Tiffany rocks and a long, delicate Chopard chain worn by Ms. Lawrence — backward-hanging necklaces are likely to become a thing.

There is no valid argument to be made against the old Hollywood strapless gowns worn by Jessica Chastain (a custom Giorgio Armani in coppery textured satin) or Reese Witherspoon (navy Louis Vuitton with a smart bow). But were not the dresses with sleeves more interesting, more, how shall we say, new Hollywood?

Jane Fonda, in a brilliant yellow Versace number that covered almost everything but a peekaboo cutout on the back, will most certainly wind up on the best-dressed lists, along with Sally Field in a red pleated chiffon Valentino couture dress with a long train.

And the pointed shoulders of Halle Berry’s heavily beaded Art Deco gown might have been a little severe, but it was nice to hear that Ms. Berry had told its designer, Donatella Versace, that she wanted to go to the Oscars dressed as a Bond Girl, and long sleeves were part of the result.

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Affleck's 'Argo' wins best-picture Oscar

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ben Affleck's "Argo," a film about a fake movie, has earned a very real prize: best picture at the Academy Awards.

In share-the-wealth mode, Oscar voters spread Sunday's honors among a range of films, with "Argo" winning three trophies but "Life of Pi" leading with four.

Daniel Day-Lewis became the first person to win three best-actor Oscars, the latest coming for "Lincoln," while "Hunger Games" star Jennifer Lawrence triumphed in Hollywood's big games as best actress for "Silver Linings Playbook."

Ang Lee pulled off a major upset, winning best director for the shipwreck story "Life of Pi," taking the prize over Steven Spielberg, who had been favored for "Lincoln." It was the second directing Oscar for Lee, who also won for "Brokeback Mountain."

The supporting-acting prizes went to Anne Hathaway for "Les Miserables" and Christoph Waltz for "Django Unchained." It was Waltz's second supporting-actor Oscar in a Quentin Tarantino film after previously winning for "Inglourious Basterds." Tarantino also earned his second Oscar, for the "Django" screenplay, a category he previously won for "Pulp Fiction."

From the White House, first lady Michelle Obama joined Jack Nicholson to help present the final prize to "Argo."

"I never thought I'd be back here, and I am because of so many of you in this academy," said Affleck, who shared a screenplay Oscar with pal Matt Damon 15 years earlier for their breakout film "Good Will Hunting."

Among the wisdom he's acquired since then: "You can't hold grudges — it's hard but you can't hold grudges."

Kind words for an academy that overlooked him for a directing nomination, making "Argo" just the fourth film in 85 years to win best picture when its director was not in the running.

Lawrence took a fall on her way to the stage, tripping on the steps.

"You guys are just standing up because you feel bad that I fell," Lawrence joked as the crowd gave her a standing ovation.

At 22, Lawrence is the second-youngest woman to win best actress, behind Marlee Matlin, who was 21 when she won for "Children of a Lesser God."

With a monumental performance as Abraham Lincoln, Day-Lewis added to the honors he earned for "My Left Foot" and "There Will Be Blood." He's just the sixth actor to earn three or more Oscars, tied with Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman and Walter Brennan with three each, and just behind Katharine Hepburn, who won four.

"It's funny, because three years ago, we agreed to do this swap. I had actually been committed to play Margaret Thatcher," a role that earned Streep her third Oscar last year for "The Iron Lady," Day-Lewis said. "And Meryl was Steven's first choice for Lincoln. I'd like to see that version."

On a not-so typically predictable Oscar night, given Lee's win and Obama's appearance, the emcee duties came off stylishly as crude-humor master Seth MacFarlane was on his best behavior — mostly — as host.

And "Argo" completed a quest that took it from populist underdog to Hollywood titleholder in an awards-season journey as quixotic as the film's story line.

In Greek mythology, Argo was the name of the ship that took hero Jason and his Argonauts on their unlikely quest for the Golden Fleece that would elevate him to his rightful kingship. The real-life thriller "Argo" borrows the name as title for a phony sci-fi movie concocted by the CIA as cover to spring six U.S. diplomats from Iran during the hostage crisis that erupted in 1979.

Like the voyage of Jason and the rescue of the Americans, the Oscar journey of "Argo" was filled with obstacles.

It was a slick, optimistic film in a best-picture race that often favors sober, gloomier stories. Best-picture doom seemed to chime for "Argo" after Affleck missed out on a directing nomination.

Leading the Oscars with 12 nominations, "Lincoln" initially looked like the default favorite. Then "Argo" started collecting every prize in sight, winning top honors at the Golden Globes and guilds representing Hollywood directors, actors, producers and writers. Everyone loved "Argo," which managed to dominate awards season while coming across as the deserving underdog because of the directing snub for Affleck, who played nice and spent the time proclaiming his respect for the academy and endearing himself with self-effacing humor and humility.

Affleck said he was disappointed at his omission from the directing category. But he had a nice consolation prize with the first lady announcing the film's win.

"I was sort of hallucinating when that was happening," Affleck said backstage alongside fellow "Argo" producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov. "Honestly, I was just asking these two guys outside, was that Michelle Obama? ... Anyway, it was very cool."

Hathaway is the third performer in a musical to win supporting actress during the genre's resurgence in the last decade.

"It came true," said Hathaway, who joins 2002 supporting-actress winner Catherine Zeta-Jones for "Chicago" and 2006 recipient Jennifer Hudson for "Dreamgirls." Hathaway had warm thanks for "Les Miz" co-star Hugh Jackman, with whom she once sang a duet at the Oscars when he was the show's host.

"Life of Pi" also won for Mychael Danna's multicultural musical score that blends Indian and Western instruments and influences, plus cinematography and visual effects.

"I really want to thank you for believing this story and sharing this incredible journey with me," Lee said to all who worked on the film, a surprise blockbuster about a youth trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.

"Argo" also claimed the Oscar for adapted screenplay for Chris Terrio, who worked with Affleck to create a liberally embellished story based on an article about the rescue and part of CIA operative Tony Mendez's memoir.

Terrio dedicated the award to Mendez, saying "33 years ago, Tony, using nothing but his creativity and his intelligence, Tony got six people out of a bad situation."

The foreign-language prize went to Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's old-age love story "Amour," which tells the agonizing story of an elderly man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) tending his wife (Emmanuelle Riva) as she declines from age and illness.

The Scottish adventure "Brave," from Disney's Pixar Animation unit, was named best animated feature. Pixar films have won seven of the 12 Oscars since the category was added.

The upbeat musical portrait "Searching for Sugar Man" took the documentary feature prize. The film follows the quest of two South African fans to discover the fate of acclaimed but obscure singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez, who dropped out of sight after two albums in the 1970s and was rumored to have died a bitter death.

There was a rare tie in one category, with the Osama bin Laden thriller "Zero Dark Thirty" and the James Bond tale "Skyfall" each winning for sound editing.

William Shatner made a guest appearance as his "Star Trek" character Capt. James Kirk, appearing on a giant screen above the stage during MacFarlane's monologue, saying he came back in time to stop the host from ruining the Oscars.

"Your jokes are tasteless and inappropriate, and everyone ends up hating you," said Shatner, who revealed a headline supposedly from the next day's newspaper that read, "Seth MacFarlane worst Oscar host ever."

The performance-heavy Oscars also included an opening number featuring Charlize Theron and Channing Tatum, who did a classy dance while MacFarlane crooned "The Way You Look Tonight." Daniel Radcliffe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt then joined MacFarlane for an elegant musical rendition of "High Hopes."

Halle Berry introduced a tribute to the Bond franchise, in which she has co-starred, as the British super-spy celebrated his 50th anniversary on the big-screen last year with the latest adventure "Skyfall." Shirley Bassey sang her theme song to the 1960s Bond tale "Goldfinger." Later, pop star Adele performed her theme tune from "Skyfall," which won the best-song Oscar.

A salute to the resurgence of movie musicals in the last decade included Oscar winners Zeta-Jones singing "All That Jazz" from "Chicago" and Hudson doing "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" from "Dreamgirls." Hathaway and Jackman joined cast mates of best-picture contender "Les Miserables" to sing songs from their musical.

Academy officials said all performances were sung live.

Fans had pondered how far MacFarlane, the impudent creator of "Family Guy," might push the normally prim and proper Oscars. MacFarlane was generally polite and respectful, though he pressed his luck a bit on an Abraham Lincoln joke.

"I would argue that the actor who really got inside Lincoln's head was John Wilkes Booth," MacFarlane wisecracked, earning some groans from the crowd. "A hundred and 50 years later, and it's still too soon?"

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Online: http://www.oscars.org

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AP writers Christy Lemire, Lynn Elber, Hannah Dreier, Ryan Nakashima, Sandy Cohen, Beth Harris and Anthony McCartney contributed to this report.

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‘Bloodless’ Lung Transplants for Jehovah’s Witnesses

Eric Kayne for The New York Times

SHARING HOME AND FAITH A Houston couple hosted Gene and Rebecca Tomczak, center, in October so she could get care nearby.

HOUSTON — Last April, after being told that only a transplant could save her from a fatal lung condition, Rebecca S. Tomczak began calling some of the top-ranked hospitals in the country.

She started with Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, just hours from her home near Augusta, Ga. Then she tried Duke and the University of Arkansas and Johns Hopkins. Each advised Ms. Tomczak, then 69, to look somewhere else.

The reason: Ms. Tomczak, who was baptized at age 12 as a Jehovah’s Witness, insisted for religious reasons that her transplant be performed without a blood transfusion. The Witnesses believe that Scripture prohibits the transfusion of blood, even one’s own, at the risk of forfeiting eternal life.

Given the complexities of lung transplantation, in which transfusions are routine, some doctors felt the procedure posed unacceptable dangers. Others could not get past the ethics of it all. With more than 1,600 desperately ill people waiting for a donated lung, was it appropriate to give one to a woman who might needlessly sacrifice her life and the organ along with it?

By the time Ms. Tomczak found Dr. Scott A. Scheinin at The Methodist Hospital in Houston last spring, he had long since made peace with such quandaries. Like a number of physicians, he had become persuaded by a growing body of research that transfusions often pose unnecessary risks and should be avoided when possible, even in complicated cases.

By cherry-picking patients with low odds of complications, Dr. Scheinin felt he could operate almost as safely without blood as with it. The way he saw it, patients declined lifesaving therapies all the time, for all manner of reasons, and it was not his place to deny care just because those reasons were sometimes religious or unconventional.

“At the end of the day,” he had resolved, “if you agree to take care of these patients, you agree to do it on their terms.”

Ms. Tomczak’s case — the 11th so-called bloodless lung transplant attempted at Methodist over three years — would become the latest test of an innovative approach that was developed to accommodate the unique beliefs of the world’s eight million Jehovah’s Witnesses but may soon become standard practice for all surgical patients.

Unlike other patients, Ms. Tomczak would have no backstop. Explicit in her understanding with Dr. Scheinin was that if something went terribly wrong, he would allow her to bleed to death. He had watched Witness patients die before, with a lifesaving elixir at hand.

Ms. Tomczak had dismissed the prospect of a transplant for most of the two years she had struggled with sarcoidosis, a progressive condition of unknown cause that leads to scarring in the lungs. The illness forced her to quit a part-time job with Nielsen, the market research firm.

Then in April, on a trip to the South Carolina coast, she found that she was too breathless to join her frolicking grandchildren on the beach. Tethered to an oxygen tank, she watched from the boardwalk, growing sad and angry and then determined to reclaim her health.

“I wanted to be around and be a part of their lives,” Ms. Tomczak recalled, dabbing at tears.

She knew there was danger in refusing to take blood. But she thought the greater peril would come from offending God.

“I know,” she said, “that if I did anything that violates Jehovah’s law, I would not make it into the new system, where he’s going to make earth into a paradise. I know there are risks. But I think I am covered.”

Cutting Risks, and Costs

The approach Dr. Scheinin would use — originally called “bloodless medicine” but later re-branded as “patient blood management” — has been around for decades. His mentor at Methodist, Dr. Denton A. Cooley, the renowned cardiac pioneer, performed heart surgery on hundreds of Witnesses starting in the late 1950s. The first bloodless lung transplant, at Johns Hopkins, was in 1996.

But nearly 17 years later, the degree of difficulty for such procedures remains so high that Dr. Scheinin and his team are among the very few willing to attempt them.

In 2009, after analyzing Methodist’s own data, Dr. Scheinin became convinced that if he selected patients carefully, he could perform lung transplants without transfusions. Hospital administrators resisted at first, knowing that even small numbers of deaths could bring scrutiny from federal regulators.

“My job is to push risk away,” said Dr. A. Osama Gaber, the hospital’s director of transplantation, “so I wasn’t really excited about it. But the numbers were very convincing.”

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Haruhiko Kuroda Expected to Be Named Head of Bank of Japan

TOKYO — A financial policy expert and harsh critic of the Bank of Japan’s efforts to combat deflation is set to be the government’s choice to take over the nation’s central bank.

Toru Hanai/Reuters

Haruhiko Kuroda is a harsh critic of the Bank of Japan’s track record on deflation.

The official, Haruhiko Kuroda, a veteran of global financial circles and current head of the Asian Development Bank, will be nominated as the bank’s governor to take over next month, according to a ruling party lawmaker with knowledge of those plans.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has instructed ruling party officials to start negotiating with opposition parties to clear the way for Mr. Kuroda’s appointment, which must be approved by a divided parliament, the lawmaker said.

“This is a critical time for Japan’s economy, and we must avoid, at all costs, a failure to gain parliamentary approval for this appointment,” NHK, the public broadcaster, quoted Mr. Abe as telling ruling party executives Monday morning.

With Mr. Kuroda at its helm, the bank could take much bolder steps to kick-start economic growth. Mr. Kuroda has publicly criticized the Bank of Japan for not going far enough to fight deflation, and has urged the bank to adopt inflation targets and to expand an asset-buying program to pump more cash into the Japanese economy.

Mr. Kuroda’s global experience — as vice minister for international affairs at Japan’s powerful Finance Ministry from 1999 to 2003, and as president of the Manila-based Asian Development Bank starting in 2005 — could also help Tokyo navigate foreign criticism that its monetary policies are intended to weaken the yen to give Japanese exporters a competitive edge.

The yen has weakened by over 10 percent in the last three months as Mr. Abe laid out his monetary agenda, pushing the outgoing central bank governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, to start taking a more aggressive monetary stance. But Mr. Abe had indicated that a change at the bank’s top ranks was needed to break with the bank’s cautious past. On Monday, the yen fell to a 33-month low.

Kikuo Iwata, a professor at Gakushuin University in Tokyo and another vocal critic of the central bank, is set to be tapped for one of its two deputy governor spots, according to the lawmaker. Mr. Iwata is the author of several books, including “Stop Deflation, Now” and “Is the Bank of Japan Really Trustworthy?”

Mr. Kuroda beat out a fellow former senior Finance Ministry official, Toshiro Muto, who had strong backing among both bureaucrats and local politicians but lacks the top-level global contacts. Mr. Muto was also viewed as being more cautious than Mr. Kuroda on monetary policy.

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Political Memo: Fault-Finding Grows Intense as Cuts Near

WASHINGTON — First the White House and Congress created a potential fiscal crisis, agreeing more than a year ago to once-unthinkable governmentwide spending cuts in 2013 unless the two parties agreed to alternative ways to reduce budget deficits.

Now that those cuts are imminent — because compromise is not — they have created one of Washington’s odder blame games over just whose bad idea this was.

The battle lines over cuts that are scheduled to begin on Friday, known in budget parlance as sequestration, were evident on Saturday in President Obama’s weekly address and the Republican response, by Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota.

“Unfortunately, it appears that Republicans in Congress have decided that instead of compromising, instead of asking anything of the wealthiest Americans, they would rather let these cuts fall squarely on the middle class,” said Mr. Obama, who proposed a substitute mix of spending cuts and revenues from repealing some tax breaks for wealthy people and corporations.

He added: “Are Republicans in Congress really willing to let these cuts fall on our kids’ schools and mental health care just to protect tax loopholes for corporate jet owners? Are they really willing to slash military health care and the Border Patrol just because they refuse to eliminate tax breaks for big oil companies?”

For Republicans, who oppose any tax increases, Mr. Hoeven countered: “He blames Congress for the sequester, but Bob Woodward, in his book ‘The Price of Politics’ sets the record straight. Woodward says it was President Obama who proposed — and promoted — the sequester.”

What makes this debate over blame so odd is that both sides’ fingerprints — and votes — are all over the sequestration concept. The point of sequestration, in fact, was to define cuts that were so arbitrary and widespread that they would be unpalatable to both sides and force a deal.

That won Republicans’ support for increasing the government’s debt limit in 2011, and averted the nation’s first default. The Republican-led House and Democratic-led Senate each passed the accord overwhelmingly, and Mr. Obama gladly signed it.

The idea for sequestration did come from the White House, as news accounts made clear at the time. Jacob J. Lew, then Mr. Obama’s budget director and now his nominee for Treasury secretary, was the main proponent.

Mr. Lew, who was a senior adviser to the House speaker in the 1980s, lifted language from a 1985 law he helped negotiate, the Gramm-Rudman law. It was conceived by two Republican senators to be “a sword of Damocles,” poised to strike both parties unless they compromised on deficit reduction.

The law was ruled unconstitutional, and afterward, the Democratic-controlled Congress and President Ronald Reagan enacted a modified version, which resulted in relatively minor cuts until 1990. That year, the law’s call for much larger cuts in the face of growing deficits helped force Congress and President George Bush to negotiate spending cuts and tax increases widely credited with contributing to balanced budgets later that decade.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2011. Mr. Obama and Congressional Republicans, once again facing deficits, were able to agree to nearly $1 trillion in reductions over a decade in “discretionary” spending programs, which cover just about everything the government does except the entitlement benefit programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

But they could not agree on the final $1.2 trillion. The president demanded that that amount come from higher taxes on the wealthy and some reductions in entitlement spending. Republicans insisted on entitlement cuts only.

So both parties started negotiating for a trigger, as they called it — an undesirable, automatic action that would slash deficits if Democrats and Republicans could not. Mr. Obama and Democrats wanted a trigger mandating automatic spending cuts and tax increases; Republicans insisted on spending cuts only.

Democrats conceded, and that is when Mr. Lew — along with Gene Sperling, director of Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council — proposed the Gramm-Rudman sequestration. Given that law’s Republican parentage, the Obama advisers figured this kind of trigger would appeal to Republicans, and it did.

Speaker John A. Boehner and three-quarters of House Republicans voted for the agreement. To use Mr. Hoeven’s word, both parties “promoted” their compromise, including sequestration. Mr. Boehner said he had gotten “98 percent” of what he wanted.

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Dozens of stars rehearse day before Oscar ceremony

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Some dressed down in jeans and hoodies. Others looked camera-ready in suits or chic dresses and spiky stilettos.

But no matter how they looked, all of the stars who rehearsed Saturday for the 85th Academy Awards seemed excited about being a part of the big show.

They paraded through the Dolby Theatre in 15-minute increments: Meryl Streep. Ben Affleck. Reese Witherspoon. Richard Gere. Jennifer Aniston. John Travolta. Nicole Kidman. Jack Nicholson. And dozens more.

Each practiced their lines in front of an audience of show workers and awarded prop Oscars to rehearsal actors. They also scanned the theater from the stage, searching for their show-night seats.

"Oh, wow. That's a very dramatic picture of me," best-actress nominee Jessica Chastain said after spotting her seat-saving placard. "I'm looking at everyone's headshots. It's kind of incredible."

Affleck confessed his excitement from the stage as he looked out at all the famous faces expected Sunday.

"This is like the most memorable aspect of the Oscars," the "Argo" director said. "You see all these place cards (at rehearsal), then you come back and they're all here!"

Affleck also chatted backstage with the college film students who won a contest to serve as trophy carriers during the ceremony.

"I love that," he said. "It's super cool."

Travolta spent time with the students, too.

"I was there when that idea was born and I said it was the best idea they could possibly come up with," he told the aspiring filmmakers backstage. "And here you are!"

Travolta plans to bring his 13-year-old daughter, Ella Bleu, to the ceremony.

Kidman made rehearsals a family affair. Husband Keith Urban and their eldest daughter, Sunday, watched from the audience as Kidman ran through her lines.

She looked impeccable in a wine-colored dress and tall metallic shoes, but other stars were decidedly more casual. Kristen Stewart arrived in jeans, sneakers and a backward ball cap. (She also limped on an injured right foot.) Renee Zellweger also opted for comfort in jeans and running shoes.

The cast of "Chicago," including Gere, Zellweger, Queen Latifah and Catherine Zeta-Jones, injected their rehearsal with silliness. Latifah purposely over-enunciated her lines, and when a pair of rehearsal actors claimed an Oscar onstage and gave an acceptance speech, Zeta-Jones started to play them off with an imaginary violin.

"Get outta here!" Gere said with a smile.

Octavia Spencer, who won the supporting actress Oscar last year for her performance in "The Help," also had a little fun.

"I'm going to do a soft-shoe," she said, shuffling off stage.

Streep and Jane Fonda were each wowed by the set design. Fonda snapped a photo with her iPhone, and Streep marveled at how far the walk to the microphone was.

"All the way to here?!" she asked. "Oh my God."

Halle Berry literally stumbled during her first rehearsal, her pointy heel catching on part of the stage. She insisted on trying again.

"Woo hoo," she said. "Made it."

___

AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/APSandy .

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The Texas Tribune: Advocates Seek Mental Health Changes, Including Power to Detain

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

The Sherman grave of Andre Thomas’s victims.

SHERMAN — A worried call from his daughter’s boyfriend sent Paul Boren rushing to her apartment on the morning of March 27, 2004. He drove the eight blocks to her apartment, peering into his neighbors’ yards, searching for Andre Thomas, Laura Boren’s estranged husband.

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

For more articles on mental health and criminal justice in Texas, as well as a timeline of the Andre Thomas case: texastribune.org

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

Laura Boren

He drove past the brightly colored slides, swings and bouncy plastic animals in Fairview Park across the street from the apartment where Ms. Boren, 20, and her two children lived. He pulled into a parking spot below and immediately saw that her door was broken. As his heart raced, Mr. Boren, a white-haired giant of a man, bounded up the stairwell, calling out for his daughter.

He found her on the white carpet, smeared with blood, a gaping hole in her chest. Beside her left leg, a one-dollar bill was folded lengthwise, the radiating eye of the pyramid facing up. Mr. Boren knew she was gone.

In a panic, he rushed past the stuffed animals, dolls and plastic toys strewn along the hallway to the bedroom shared by his two grandchildren. The body of 13-month-old Leyha Hughes lay on the floor next to a blood-spattered doll nearly as big as she was.

Andre Boren, 4, lay on his back in his white children’s bed just above Leyha. He looked as if he could have been sleeping — a moment away from revealing the toothy grin that typically spread from one of his round cheeks to the other — except for the massive chest wound that matched the ones his father, Andre Thomas (the boy was also known as Andre Jr.), had inflicted on his mother and his half-sister as he tried to remove their hearts.

“You just can’t believe that it’s real,” said Sherry Boren, Laura Boren’s mother. “You’re hoping that it’s not, that it’s a dream or something, that you’re going to wake up at any minute.”

Mr. Thomas, who confessed to the murders of his wife, their son and her daughter by another man, was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death at age 21. While awaiting trial in 2004, he gouged out one of his eyes, and in 2008 on death row, he removed the other and ate it.

At least twice in the three weeks before the crime, Mr. Thomas had sought mental health treatment, babbling illogically and threatening to commit suicide. On two occasions, staff members at the medical facilities were so worried that his psychosis made him a threat to himself or others that they sought emergency detention warrants for him.

Despite talk of suicide and bizarre biblical delusions, he was not detained for treatment. Mr. Thomas later told the police that he was convinced that Ms. Boren was the wicked Jezebel from the Bible, that his own son was the Antichrist and that Leyha was involved in an evil conspiracy with them.

He was on a mission from God, he said, to free their hearts of demons.

Hospitals do not have legal authority to detain people who voluntarily enter their facilities in search of mental health care but then decide to leave. It is one of many holes in the state’s nearly 30-year-old mental health code that advocates, police officers and judges say lawmakers need to fix. In a report last year, Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit advocacy organization, called on lawmakers to replace the existing code with one that reflects contemporary mental health needs.

“It was last fully revised in 1985, and clearly the mental health system has changed drastically since then,” said Susan Stone, a lawyer and psychiatrist who led the two-year Texas Appleseed project to study and recommend reforms to the code. Lawmakers have said that although the code may need to be revamped, it will not happen in this year’s legislative session. Such an undertaking requires legislative studies that have not been conducted. But advocates are urging legislators to make a few critical changes that they say could prevent tragedies, including giving hospitals the right to detain someone who is having a mental health crisis.

From the time Mr. Thomas was 10, he had told friends he heard demons in his head instructing him to do bad things. The cacophony drove him to attempt suicide repeatedly as an adolescent, according to court records. He drank and abused drugs to try to quiet the noise.

bgrissom@texastribune.org

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