Trial to resume in neo-Nazi leader's slaying

The murder trial resumes Monday for a 12-year-old Riverside boy accused of shooting his father, neo-Nazi leader Jeffrey Hall, as he slept on the family's living room couch in May 2011.

The proceeding began in October with testimony that the boy coldly plotted the killing because of fears that his father planned to leave the boy's stepmother and shatter the family. Hall, an unemployed plumber, allegedly beat and berated his son during drunken rages, his wife and son told investigators.

The trial was delayed to give the prosecution's mental health expert time to assess the boy's mental state. Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jean P. Leonard had barred testimony from the prosecution's initial expert because the psychologist had taken part in a confidential interview of the boy. A new expert has been chosen and is scheduled to testify.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Soccio, in his opening statement, said the sandy-haired boy made a calculated decision to kill his father, making him "no different than any other murderer." The prosecutor called Hall's role as a regional director of the National Socialist Movement a "red herring" that was immaterial to the case.

On Monday, Soccio is expected to call clinical psychologist Anna Salter of Madison, Wis., to testify. Salter is a consultant to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections and has expertise in child psychology and sexual abuse.

The fate of the boy, who was 10 at the time of the shooting and has learning disabilities, comes down to whether he realized his actions were wrong when he pulled the trigger.

The boy's name is not being released by The Times because of his age. He has been charged as a juvenile. If the allegations are found to be true, he could remain in juvenile custody until he is 23.

Public Defender Matthew Hardy argued that the boy's sense of right and wrong was corrupted from growing up in a household filled with violence and hate. Neo-Nazis frequently gathered at the family home in Riverside, family trips to the shooting range were common, and loaded guns were stashed around the house.

More telling, he said, was that social service investigators never tried to remove the boy from the home after they made more than 20 visits.

"He thought his situation was normal. All this did was confuse the kid even more," Hardy said in a recent interview. "He decided to kill his dad because he wanted to end the violence, protect the family and, to some extent, be the hero."

In court, Hardy alleged that the child was manipulated to kill Hall by his stepmother, Krista F. McCary, who worried that her husband would leave her.

The boy told detectives that his plan to kill his father was influenced by an episode of the television show "Criminal Minds," which chronicles the investigations of a fictional team of FBI profilers. In the videotaped police interview, he said he saw an episode in which a boy killed his abusive father and was not arrested.

"The kid did the exact same thing I did," he told police during the interview, which was played at the trial.

The boy told police he had grabbed his father's Rossi .357 magnum revolver from a closet and went downstairs, where his father was asleep on the couch. He pulled the hammer back, aimed the gun at his dad's ear and pulled the trigger. The boy then stashed the gun under his bed.

Little about the family's stucco home near UC Riverside differed from the rest of the well-kept suburban neighborhood, though neighbors complained about Hall's occasional neo-Nazi barbecues and gatherings. Inside, police found dirty clothes strewn across floors, bedrooms smelling of urine, filthy bathrooms and beer bottles littering the downstairs, under the swastika of a National Socialist Movement flag.

"It's clear that violence is the appropriate way in his world," psychologist Robert Geffner, a witness for the defense, testified in November. "A repeated theme in conversations with him was killing. Another part of his focus was guns."

Court records suggest the boy had a history of aggression and violence after Hall and his first wife went through a bitter divorce. Both Hall and his ex-wife, Leticia Neal of Spokane, Wash., accused each other of abusing and neglecting their two children. Hall was granted full custody.

The case will be weighed by the judge, who must decide whether the child knew that his actions were wrong at the time of the shooting. If Leonard rules that the boy did not comprehend that his actions were wrong, he would be set free. If she finds the boy responsible for the murder, a hearing will be held to determine punishment.

If the boy is released, it's unclear if he would be placed with relatives or in the custody of the department of social services, Hardy said. In August 2011, the boy's stepmother was convicted of child endangerment and weapons charges and placed on four years' probation.

McCary, 27, testified earlier in that trial that the boy was violence-prone and difficult to control. Her husband abused drugs and beat the boy more than the other four children living in the home, she told the court.

McCary testified that she was not upset by the possibility that her husband was having an affair. Still, she said, she wanted to end the marriage because of her husband's mood swings.

"You were never sure which Jeff you were going to get," she said.

phil.willon@latimes.com

Times' wire services contributed to this report.

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Memo From London: Argentina’s Call for Return of Falkland Islands Causes a Stir

LONDON — They have barely 3,000 inhabitants and far more sheep than people. They are more than 8,700 miles from London. For much of the year, they are bitterly cold and wind-swept, with only open sea and ice between them and Antarctica. President Ronald Reagan, who tussled with Margaret Thatcher over them as he rarely did on any other issue that engaged the two leaders, described them once as “that little ice-cold bunch of land down there.”

But the Falkland Islands, the focus of a short war between Britain and Argentina in 1982, have been in the headlines again recently.

Politicians, newspapers and military leaders in both countries have been back at the barricades making the old arguments about who is the islands’ rightful owner. Their arguments suggest what has long been evident: nothing lasting was settled by the conflict that killed 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as 3 civilians on the islands.

The British newspaper The Guardian heralded the latest outburst in an editorial on Friday that struck an exhausted note. “Here we go again,” it said, tacitly acknowledging that the paper has been stuck in something of a rut of its own on the issue for years in its calls for a negotiated settlement.

As it was in 1982, few British politicians, and only a minority of mostly left-of-center opinion in Britain, have been ready to deviate from the unyielding stance that Mrs. Thatcher adopted. She sent a British naval task force to recapture the islands after the Argentine military dictatorship of Leopoldo Galtieri dispatched troops to overrun the meager British garrison there.

To many on the British left, there is little to be served by rehashing the old arguments that were set off when President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina wrote an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain on Thursday. It was published as an advertisement in The Guardian and another left-of-center British daily, The Independent.

The letter appeared on the 180th anniversary of Jan. 3, 1833, when an armed clash between the two nations took place on the islands. The episode has been settled on by Argentina as a watershed moment in a convoluted colonial story that goes back to the 16th century and involves competing claims to sovereignty by Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, which was the colonial power in Argentina until the country gained independence in 1816. In the statement that ran in the British papers, Mrs. Kirchner asserted that “Argentina was forcibly stripped of the Malvinas Islands” — Argentina’s name for the territory — in the murky 1833 episode. The clash involved a British sloop, an outgunned Argentine vessel and an Argentine commander’s submission to a British demand that he remove the remnants of a mutinous Argentine garrison from the islands.

Britain has always rebutted Argentine claims that the people who were expelled included Argentine civilians, and it contends that British sovereignty was established by a much earlier settlement, dating to the mid-18th century.

The Guardian, in its editorial, dismissed this as political window dressing, ultimately irrelevant to the present dispute. Mrs. Kirchner’s letter, it said, had more to do with a populist bid to revive her slumping popularity in Argentina than “anything a British brig-sloop did 180 years ago.” The newspaper added, “Any objective reader of the history of these islands would more likely conclude that this history is mixed, to say the least, and that the rival sovereignty claims are finely balanced.” The editorial urged the two countries to grapple with the issue diplomatically and to aim, initially, for an agreement on sharing in the bounty of fisheries and in recently discovered offshore oil reserves that some economists believe could turn into a 21st-century bonanza for the islands.

Mr. Cameron, though, is having none of it. Within hours of Mrs. Kirchner’s statement, he went before television cameras, saying that the future of the islands would be determined by the Falkland Islanders and that they would make their feelings known in a referendum to be held in March on the islands’ political status.

That was the expedient Britain adopted last year when Mrs. Kirchner campaigned in Argentina, and at the United Nations in New York, for a reopening of the sovereignty issue on the 30th anniversary of the 1982 war.

“As long as they choose to stay with the United Kingdom, they have my 100 percent backing,” Mr. Cameron said.

For the British leader, it is a safe bet. About 70 percent of the islanders are of British descent, and visitors there say there is no more than a scattering of support for an Argentine takeover. Tying the Falklands’ future to the islanders’ choice leaves Britain essentially where it was under Mrs. Thatcher. She remains a revered figure for Mr. Cameron, not only for her conservative stewardship at 10 Downing Street but also for her success in turning the Falklands issue into her second general-election victory, in 1983. It is a precedent unlikely to be lost on the current prime minister as he contemplates the general election he must face in 2015.

If there is a worry for Mr. Cameron, it lies in the possibility that Argentina, with popular passions heightened by Mrs. Kirchner, may make another attempt to seize the islands by force. British military commanders say they consider that highly unlikely, since Argentina’s armed forces have been barely modernized since the military junta there collapsed in the wake of the 1982 conflict, and they lack the power they had then to project air and naval power.

British forces on the islands have been expensively upgraded, with 800 troops, a new military airfield equipped to take heavy transport jets, a squadron of Typhoon fighter-bombers and, at times of tension, a nuclear attack submarine prowling the South Atlantic.

But Britain miscalculated before, in 1982, when Mrs. Thatcher’s government brushed aside diplomatic warnings of an invasion.

“I never, never expected the Argentines to invade the Falklands head-on,” she told an inquiry after the war, according to secret cabinet papers from the period that were released in late December. “It was such a stupid thing to do, as events happened, such a stupid thing even to contemplate doing.”

The papers included another kind of warning. Little noticed among the newly published documents was the last dispatch of Britain’s ambassador to Argentina when the Falklands invasion took place.

The envoy, Anthony Williams, who was never assigned as an ambassador again, argued eloquently that Britain had been wrong to regard the Argentine invasion as “a simple act of brigandage.” He said that although the country had “its share of vandals, hooligans and roughs,” it also had a case that the ambassador suggested could be compared to the seizure of the Suez Canal from its British and French owners in 1956 by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

“If our rightness is not so absolute as it now seems to us, no more is Argentine wrongness,” he said.

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We Salute the First Baby Senator

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

RELATED: Claire McCaskill and How to Attack the Opponent You’re Rooting For

Here’s our suggestion to improve the (already pretty hilarious) swearing-in process for U.S. Senators: Each new member of Congress must bring a cute baby.

RELATED: Rand Paul Doesn’t Want You to Go to Jail for Smoking Pot

RELATED: Larry David’s Two-Minute Guide to Etiquette

Apparently the BBC has decided to market a line of lunch boxes specifically made for hungry polar bears. They are still working out the kinks: 

RELATED: Homer Simpson, Fox News Pundit; Books After Dark

RELATED: Bo Obama Stays On Message; Sarah Palin Can See HBO in Her House

The Golden Globes will be bittersweet this year. Don’t get us wrong — we’re really excited to watch Amy Poehler and Tina Fey entertain us. But we’ll also be also really sad when this thing is over because it means the end of these promos:

And finally, it’s Friday. And it’s time to dance. Enjoy your weekend. 

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Bethenny Frankel Divorcing Jason Hoppy

By Sarah Michaud

01/05/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy

Albert Michael/Startraks

It's official – Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy's marriage is over.

Having announced a separation over the holidays, the reality star began the divorce process by filing earlier this week in New York, TMZ reports.

"It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating," Frankel, 42, had said in a statement Dec. 23. "This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family."

The split comes after months of rumors that the pair – who married in 2010 and are parents to daughter Bryn, 2½ – were on the rocks.

"Bethenny is devastated," a friend tells PEOPLE.

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FDA: New rules will make food safer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration says its new guidelines would make the food Americans eat safer and help prevent the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that sicken or kill thousands of consumers each year.

The rules, the most sweeping food safety guidelines in decades, would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. The new guidelines were announced Friday.

Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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Trail at Grant Park gives Ventura a new walking point

For 95 years, Grant Park loomed over downtown Ventura without drawing much notice.

Now, with the help of a city government willing to lease the park's 107 acres for $1 a year and a group of residents willing to raise millions for a botanical garden, it's sprung to life.

On Saturday, hundreds of residents, their dogs and their kids trooped up a new mile-long trail with seed-filled Dixie cups, dumping them in spots where California bluebells, golden lupine, white yarrow, mission red monkey flowers and a host of other plants might bloom in the spring.

For many, it was the first time they'd visited the park in years.

"The reality is there wasn't much reason to go," said Doug Halter, a landscape contractor and president of the nonprofit Ventura Botanical Gardens. "Now you can have breakfast downtown and walk it off on the trail."

Opened last October, the serpentine trail winds through slopes and canyons of sage and cactus, commanding stunning ocean views at every turn. Gently rising from Ventura's ornate 101-year-old City Hall to a spot some 600 feet up, it has drawn a legion of locals — an unexpected amenity in a town more oriented to the beach at its feet than the mountains at its back.

Until recently, the park's main draw was the Serra Cross, a tribute to Junipero Serra, the Franciscan monk who in 1782 founded the mission at Ventura's heart. It remains a spot where couples wed and residents drive out-of-town guests to gaze out at the coastline, the crashing surf and, on the horizon, Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands.

To defuse a 2003 lawsuit challenging public ownership of the cross, the city sold the acre around it to a conservancy, which has maintained it ever since.

"Other than the cross, the park was almost unknown," said Matt South, an engineer who on Saturday morning was raking out a trail-side dirt patch to prepare it for an onslaught of seeds. "We'd sometimes take relatives up there to show them the view, but after a few minutes we'd be on our way."

Turning the brush-heavy park into a full-fledged botanical garden will take decades, say even its most optimistic boosters. The plan — described by Halter as potentially "transformative" for Ventura in the way Golden Gate Park was for San Francisco — calls for five zones planted with flora typical of coastal areas in Chile, Australia, South Africa, the Mediterranean and, naturally, California.

Whether funds can be raised for all of that — as well as the heritage center, the education building, the amphitheater and the funicular — is an open question.

Over seven years, the volunteer group behind the garden has received more than $400,000 from individuals and foundations, according to Halter, and the fundraising continues: The trail, officially the Ventura Botanical Gardens Demonstration Trail, can bear your name for $200,000. Adopting less of it runs $50 a foot.

Initially, planners figured they could use sturdy volunteers to hack out the 6-foot-wide path.

"It turned out to be impossible," said Martha Picciotti, an architect who sits on the group's board. "We realized that trails have to be built to meet certain standards, like roads or anything else. Those little twists and turns are built not just for beauty but to prevent erosion and runoff."

The $106,000 job went to Hans Keifer of Bellfree Contractors, one of perhaps a half-dozen professional trail builders in California.

Cobblestones hidden under a century's growth of brush would pop the tracks off his mini-excavators, making the work challenging, he said.

"You can't see what's under all that brush," he said. "It was very difficult."

Another long-buried feature also emerged. A century or more ago, portions of the hillside were terraced for farming, perhaps by Chinese immigrants who were not allowed to rent more usable parcels. Keifer incorporated about 200 feet of their stone walls into the trail.

That might have been one of the last moneymaking uses for the land that became Grant Park. Kenneth Grant, an entrepreneur, planned to build an observatory "where men of science might study the heavens," according to E.M. Sheridan, an early Ventura newspaperman.

That never got off the ground, nor did any of the city's efforts to figure out just what to do with the massive hill Grant deeded to it in 1918.

Although some staff time has been donated to the current project, Ventura doesn't have cash to spare, said Mayor Mike Tracy.

"The potential is incredible," said Tracy, the city's former police chief. "This group of citizens has come forward with energy and vision and, hopefully, the means. They've got the plan and the dream, and they're running with it."

steve.chawkins@latimes.com

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Crackdowns Make Fleeing North Korea Harder

Woohae Cho for the International Herald Tribune

The Rev. Kim Seung-eun at his church in Cheonan, a center for activists who help smuggle refugees from North Korea.

CHEONAN, South Korea — The Rev. Kim Seung-eun said he could measure the increasing difficulty of smuggling people out of North Korea by the higher cost of bribing North Korean soldiers on the Chinese border to look the other way.

“They demand not only more cash, but also all kinds of things for themselves and their superiors,” said Mr. Kim, a South Korean human rights activist who helps North Koreans flee their totalitarian homeland and resettle in the South. “They’ve developed a taste for South Korean goods, too.”

Under North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, human rights activists and South Korean officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to smuggle refugees out of the country, contributing to a sharp drop in the number of North Koreans reaching South Korea in the past year.

The number of refugees has never been particularly large, since most North Koreans are so impoverished they find it all but impossible to raise the money to attempt an escape. But the tightening of controls at the Chinese border led to a fall of about 44 percent from the previous year in the number of refugees reaching South Korea in 2012. The total was 1,509, according to South Korean government data.

Despite the relatively small number, the flow of North Koreans defecting to South Korea to escape poverty and oppression has long been a major embarrassment for the North. Lately, the Chinese also appear to have tightened their control at the river border to help protect their client government. “The crackdowns in China and North Korea came in tandem,” said Mr. Kim, who manages a network of activists and smugglers from his Caleb Mission church in Cheonan, a city about 60 miles south of Seoul. “It’s become more difficult for my people to operate in North Korea and China.”

A devastating famine in the 1990s caused many North Koreans to flee, and the number of refugees peaked at 2,917 in 2009. Today, about 24,000 people who escaped from North Korea live in South Korea.

In the last years of his rule, Kim Jong-il, the previous dictator and the current ruler’s father, added more checkpoints on the roads to the Chinese border, according to South Korean activists and researchers. North Korea built more barriers along the border and rotated patrols more frequently to discourage corruption.

Under Kim Jong-un, who took over a year ago after his father’s death, border controls have tightened further, officials and activists say. The government began to jam the Chinese cellphone signals that activists relied on to coordinate their smuggling operations with collaborators in the North. North Korea also deployed equipment to trace cellphone signals.

“That significantly narrowed the window for cross-border cellphone conversations,” said Kim Hee-tae, a leader of the International Network of North Korea Human Rights Activists. His group raises money from churches; until last year it typically arranged for 180 to 190 North Korean refugees annually to escape to the South. But this past year, he said, his organization managed to bring in only about 100 people.

“Even after the bribes are paid, there is no guarantee of success,” said Do Hee-youn, head of the Citizens’ Coalition for the Human Rights of North Korean Refugees, based in Seoul. “We have recently seen cases where border guards were not punished for having taken bribes when they turned over the refugees.” Adding to the difficulty, some of the missionaries and brokers involved in the smuggling were rounded up by the Chinese police.

“It just became impossible to use public transportation in China because these days you cannot buy a train or bus ticket without a proper ID, which the North Koreans don’t have,” said the Rev. Chun Ki-won, another veteran human rights activist, who runs the Durihana Mission, a Christian group based in Seoul.

But for all the tighter controls imposed by the North Koreans and Chinese, there are still ways of slipping through the cracks.

Landing a border assignment is seen by many North Korean soldiers as a chance to make a fortune by collecting bribes from smugglers. The police in North Korea sometimes protect families with relatives in the South so they can take a cut from cash remittances from the South.

North Koreans have also developed an appetite for outside news and entertainment. “If early defectors fled North Korea for sheer ‘survival,’ an increasing number of North Koreans reaching South Korea flee for ‘a better life’ than they had in the North,” Kim Soo-am, an expert on North Korean refugees at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, recently wrote.

A group of 15 North Koreans that the Caleb Mission team in Cheonan had smuggled out in early December included a striking example of one such defector: a 29-year-old woman who yearned to become a television celebrity. “She had watched so many South Korean soap operas that she developed an illusion about life in South Korea,” Mr. Kim said, pointing out a particularly well-dressed woman in a photograph of the 15 North Koreans. “When we smuggled her out of North Korea, she was already wearing nothing but South Korean-made clothes.”

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The Death of E-Readers Is All Your Fault

So there’s a reading gadget and a reading gadget with Angry Birds Star Wars. Which do you pick? Well, you, cultured person that you are, would select the dedicated e-reader, of course, just like you would rather watch Frontline instead of Honey Boo Boo, or pick up Vanity Fair instead of Us Weekly on the checkout line. Or at least that’s what the ideal version of yourself would do. But as Amazon and Barnes & Noble are quickly discovering this year, the highbrow ideal all too often gives way to the mass-market realities. Sales of the Kindle and especially the Nook fell this holiday season, despite lower prices than more fully functioning tablets, which are distinctly on the rise. And market researchers estimate that these divergent paths will continue — The Wall Street Journal reports that e-readers sales will be cut in half, from 14.9 million per year to just 7.8 million, by 2015. But the death of the e-reader has less to do with the iPad than what’s inside of it: from tablets to TV shows and everything in between, the most high-minded of ideas for cultural consumption always seem to devolve toward mindless entertainment.

RELATED: Gordon Brown Predicts the Future; Cormac McCarthy Doesn’t Tweet

Take Bravo, the once completely enlightened — and completely failing — network that, like Arts & Entertainment and The Learning Channel before they became A&E and TLC, once devoted itself to being a slightly less boring knockoff of PBS. In 1985, five years after its founding, The New York Times‘s Steve Schneider described Bravo’s success, measured then by its 350,000 subscribers, as follows: 

What has kept things afloat for the past five years has been an evolving mix of cultural programming. Nowadays, a spokesman said, approximately 70 percent of the premium service’s schedule is devoted to films, nearly all of which are either from abroad, from the fringes of American production or from times past. The remainder of the schedule is given over to the performing arts -jazz concerts, ballet, opera, modern dance and the like. From Woody Allen films to documentaries about Latin America to performances by the Pina Bausch dance troupe, the offerings range from the challenging to the downright esoteric.

All that changed when NBC bought Bravo in 2002 and gave it a makeover almost completely motivated by ratings. It started with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which in its first year delivered 3.3 million viewers per episode. Then came the much acclaimed era of Top Chef and Project Runway, which are still considered highbrow in their own way, but only in the context of their fellow reality shows like The Real Housewives. And let’s face it: Bravo is pretty much all Housewives all the time. Well, that and a show about Silicon Valley that features no computer programming at all.

RELATED: Barnes & Noble CEO Is Done with Books; 43 Famous Writers Walk into a Cafe

And remember The Learning Channel? It was founded by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, along with NASA. Really! Then in came Discovery as the new boss, and with it American Chopper and, eventually, TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras, which birthed Honey Boo Boo — not to mention major ratings. Arts & Entertainment has long been a corporate entity, but it gave way from highbrow post-Nickelodeon fare and devolved into, you know, Dog the Bounty Hunter and whatever Gene Simmons is up to these days.

RELATED: The New Kindles We’ll Probably See at Today’s Amazon Event

It’s all a little reminiscent of the days when Us magazine was actually a glossy movie magazine that Hollywood stars loved to pose for. The New York Times started it! Then came a partnership with Disney, and J.Lo, and on and on to the supermarket tabloid you now know as Us Weekly, one of the most successful print publications on Earth.

RELATED: Ebook Juggernaut John Locke Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You

So, in the slowly dwindling technological world of the e-reader and its advanced brethren, Amazon‘s Kindle is like old-school TLC and the B&N Nook is maybe a little younger and cooler, like Bravo, but still failing; the iPad, however, has Here Comes Honey Boo Boo written all over it. Not that there’s anything wrong with what Amazon and Barnes & Noble were trying to do — a small audience might enjoy a device that has novels and long biographies and maybe some newspapers and little more. But the majority of people these days want to spend their downtime with HBO Go and Netflix apps, with games and email and other ways to relax their entire brains… not just the fancy parts of it. With tablet prices falling to more affordable levels — Amazon sells a Kindle Fire for $ 159 and a Kindle Paperwhite for $ 119 — of course today’s readers are going to choose the thing that helps them go beyond boring old reading. It might not have that easy-on-the eyes screen, but the majority of time spent on tablets isn’t spent reading books but answering emails, reading the news (a shorter reading experience than an entire book), and playing games, according to Pew. Plus, the iPad has its own Kindle app, for those times when you do, after all, feel like indulging in something a bit more highbrow. Because people do, still read a lot of books. They just like doing everything else a lot more. If the death of the e-reader is nigh, maybe the age of the straight-and-narrow, undistracted smartypants isn’t far from ending, either.

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Courteney Cox: I'll 'Show My Boobs' on the New Season of Cougar Town

TV Watch

01/04/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Courteney Cox is taking the term "boob tube" literally.

The Cougar Town star, 48, whose show moves from ABC to TBS on Jan. 8, eagerly anticipates more um, revealing scenes once the program makes its way to the cable network.

"You will not see one scene that I don't show my boobs," Cox joked to reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association winter tour, according to Access Hollywood.

"You know what? I'm getting older, so I've decided at this point I'm taking less focus [on] the face, and focusing here," she added, pointing to her chest. "By the time I'm much older, I will just be absolutely nude. I think it's [going to] work for me, I hope."

The show's executive producer, Bill Lawrence, backed up Cox's comments. "There is one difference [with the show going to cable]," he said Friday. "I think I'm allowed to say … Courteney did declare this the year of her cleavage."

Still, the star isn't exactly baring it all. Although there is an episode themed "naked day" for Cox's character Jules and her on-camera hubby Grayson (Josh Hopkins), there will be no actual nudity on the show.

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FDA proposes sweeping new food safety rules

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed the most sweeping food safety rules in decades, requiring farmers and food companies to be more vigilant in the wake of deadly outbreaks in peanuts, cantaloupe and leafy greens.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

The FDA's proposed rules would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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