Retooling Pap test to spot more kinds of cancer

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, doctors have lamented that there's no Pap test for deadly ovarian cancer. Wednesday, scientists reported encouraging signs that one day, there might be.

Researchers are trying to retool the Pap, a test for cervical cancer that millions of women get, so that it could spot early signs of other gynecologic cancers, too.

How? It turns out that cells can flake off of tumors in the ovaries or the lining of the uterus, and float down to rest in the cervix, where Pap tests are performed. These cells are too rare to recognize under the microscope. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University used some sophisticated DNA testing on the Pap samples to uncover the evidence — gene mutations that show cancer is present.

In a pilot study, they analyzed Pap smears from 46 women who already were diagnosed with either ovarian or endometrial cancer. The new technique found all the endometrial cancers and 41 percent of the ovarian tumors, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

This is very early-stage research, and women shouldn't expect any change in their routine Paps. It will take years of additional testing to prove if the so-called PapGene technique really could work as a screening tool, used to spot cancer in women who thought they were healthy.

"Now the hard work begins," said Hopkins oncologist Dr. Luis Diaz, whose team is collecting hundreds of additional Pap samples for more study and is exploring ways to enhance the detection of ovarian cancer.

But if it ultimately pans out, "the neat part about this is, the patient won't feel anything different," and the Pap wouldn't be performed differently, Diaz added. The extra work would come in a lab.

The gene-based technique marks a new approach toward cancer screening, and specialists are watching closely.

"This is very encouraging, and it shows great potential," said American Cancer Society genetics expert Michael Melner.

"We are a long way from being able to see any impact on our patients," cautioned Dr. Shannon Westin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She reviewed the research in an accompanying editorial, and said the ovarian cancer detection would need improvement if the test is to work.

But she noted that ovarian cancer has poor survival rates because it's rarely caught early. "If this screening test could identify ovarian cancer at an early stage, there would be a profound impact on patient outcomes and mortality," Westin said.

More than 22,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and more than 15,000 die. Symptoms such as pain and bloating seldom are obvious until the cancer is more advanced, and numerous attempts at screening tests have failed.

Endometrial cancer affects about 47,000 women a year, and kills about 8,000. There is no screening test for it either, but most women are diagnosed early because of postmenopausal bleeding.

The Hopkins research piggybacks on one of the most successful cancer screening tools, the Pap, and a newer technology used along with it. With a standard Pap, a little brush scrapes off cells from the cervix, which are stored in a vial to examine for signs of cervical cancer. Today, many women's Paps undergo an additional DNA-based test to see if they harbor the HPV virus, which can spur cervical cancer.

So the Hopkins team, funded largely by cancer advocacy groups, decided to look for DNA evidence of other gynecologic tumors. It developed a method to rapidly screen the Pap samples for those mutations using standard genetics equipment that Diaz said wouldn't add much to the cost of a Pap-plus-HPV test. He said the technique could detect both early-stage and more advanced tumors. Importantly, tests of Paps from 14 healthy women turned up no false alarms.

The endometrial cancers may have been easier to find because cells from those tumors don't have as far to travel as ovarian cancer cells, Diaz said. Researchers will study whether inserting the Pap brush deeper, testing during different times of the menstrual cycle, or other factors might improve detection of ovarian cancer.

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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News Analysis: Obama Nominees in Step on Light Footprint

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

President Obama named John O. Brennan, right, as his choice for C.I.A. director and chose Chuck Hagel, left, to be his next defense secretary.

WASHINGTON — With the selection of a new national security team deeply suspicious of the wisdom of American military interventions around the world, President Obama appears to have ended, at least for the moment, many of the internal administration debates that played out in the Situation Room over the past four years.

He has sided, without quite saying so, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s view — argued, for the most part, in the confines of the White House — that caution, covert action and a modest American military footprint around the world fit the geopolitical moment. The question is whether that approach will fit the coming challenges of stopping Iran’s nuclear program and the potential collapse of Syria.

Gone for the second term are the powerful personalities, and more hawkish voices, that pressed Mr. Obama to pursue the surge in Afghanistan in 2009, a gamble championed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Robert M. Gates, the former secretary of defense. Gone from the C.I.A. is the man who urged Mr. Obama to keep troops there longer, David H. Petraeus.

The new team will include two Vietnam veterans, Senator John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, who bear the scars of a war that ended when the president was a teenager, and a counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, who helped devise the “light footprint” strategy of limiting American interventions, whenever possible, to drones, cyberattacks and Special Operations forces. All are advocates of those low-cost, low-American-casualty tools, and all have sounded dismissive of attempts to send thousands of troops to rewire foreign nations as wasteful and ill-conceived.

Most important to Mr. Obama and his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, all three are likely to accommodate themselves, in ways their predecessors often did not, to a White House that has insisted on running national security policy from the West Wing.

“One of the characteristics of this administration has been that decision-making has been centered in the White House,” said Dennis B. Ross, a Mideast expert who left the Obama administration a year ago but never wandered far from some of its key debates. “And most second-term administrations don’t change their sociology.”

But if they grab hold of the national security levers after what many predict will be, for Mr. Hagel and Mr. Brennan, bruising confirmation hearings, they will confront problems that may test whether the light footprint carries enough weight.

“Issues 1 and 2 will be cutting the defense budget and confronting Iran,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a political scientist whose 2010 book, “The Frugal Superpower,” dealt with the challenge of trying to manage the world on the cheap. “And then you will have issues like Syria, which test the question of whether you can manage to control a dangerous situation with no boots on the ground — and unless something dramatic changes, there will be no boots.”

Mr. Hagel, who was both a senator and a cellphone entrepreneur, has long been a critic of Pentagon bloat. But others with business experience, like Donald Rumsfeld, have believed they could bring market discipline to one of the country’s most sprawling enterprises, only to discover that killing off unneeded weapons systems has almost nothing to do with business decisions and everything to do with the politics of Congressional districts and campaign funds.

Mr. Obama’s bet was that by appointing a Republican, he will better his chances of overcoming those obstacles. What he discovered even before announcing Mr. Hagel’s appointment is that the former senator burned many bridges with his Republican colleagues, in part with his outspoken opposition to the Iraq war, despite voting in 2002 to authorize military action, and to the 2008 surge when President George W. Bush was still in office.

“If the president thinks Chuck Hagel can get him the Republican votes to downsize the Pentagon,” said one former senior aide to Mr. Bush, who declined to speak on the record, “I think he is in for a very rude surprise.”

Then there is Iran, which will be a test for all three men, for different reasons. Mr. Hagel has been particularly vocal about the dangers of a military confrontation with Tehran. While both Mr. Gates and his successor, Leon E. Panetta, expressed similar concerns at various points in the first term, Mr. Hagel’s view is considerably to the left of Mr. Obama’s. The president has, gradually, endorsed “coercive diplomacy,” telling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March, “As I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

But Mr. Hagel has opposed unilateral sanctions and suggested that threatening Iran just closes down opportunities for dialogue.

“The key to coercive diplomacy is that the side you are trying to influence is convinced you are willing to follow through on the threat,” said Mr. Ross, who drafted some of those threats. “The president has been clear, but from others there have been mixed messages.”

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AP Exclusive: Richardson pressing NKorean test ban

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Wednesday that his delegation is pressing North Korea to put a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests and to allow more cell phones and an open Internet for its citizens.

Richardson told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview in Pyongyang that the group is also asking for fair and humane treatment for an American citizen detained in North Korea.

“The citizens of the DPRK (North Korea) will be better off with more cell phones and an active Internet. Those are the three messages we’ve given to a variety of foreign policy officials, scientists” and government officials, Richardson said.

He is accompanied by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas think tank Director Jared Cohen on what Richardson has called a private, humanitarian trip. Schmidt, who is the highest-profile U.S. business executive to visit North Korea since leader Kim Jong Un took power a year ago, has not spoken publicly about the reasons behind the journey to North Korea.

The high-profile visit comes just weeks after North Korea launched a long-range rocket to send a satellite into space. Washington has condemned the launch as a banned test of missile technology.

Schmidt, who oversaw Google‘s expansion into a global Internet giant, speaks frequently about the importance of providing people around the world with Internet access and technology. Google now has offices in more than 40 countries, including all three of North Korea’s neighbors: Russia, South Korea and China, another country criticized for systematic Internet censorship.

He and Cohen have collaborated on a book about the Internet’s role in shaping society called “The New Digital Age” that comes out in April.

Using science and technology to build North Korea’s beleaguered economy was the highlight of a New Year’s Day speech by leader Kim Jong Un.

New red banners promoting slogans drawn from Kim’s speech line Pyongyang’s snowy streets, and North Koreans are still cramming to study the lengthy speech. It was the first time in 19 years for North Koreans to hear their leader give a New Year’s Day speech. During the rule of late leader Kim Jong Il, state policy was distributed through North Korea’s three main newspapers.

___

Follow AP’s bureau chief for Pyongyang and Seoul at www.twitter.com/newsjean.

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Kangaroo Gets Loose at Melbourne Airport

People Pets

01/08/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Travelers passing through Australia's Melbourne Airport on Monday may have been greeted by an unexpected baggage handler.

At around 7 a.m., a 3-year-old eastern gray kangaroo was spotted in the airport's parking garage, where it hopped around for almost two hours, giving security officers the slip in the process.

Wildlife officer Manfred Zabinskas was then called in to catch the young animal, who was tranquilized in order to be transported to safety. Analyzing the critter, Zabinskas noted he had been away from his natural habitat for some time, and that the romp through the parking garage had done some damage to his feet. Prior to being re-released into the wild, the kangaroo will be looked at by a veterinarian.

This is the second time a kangaroo has paid a visit to the Melbourne Airport. Last October, another marsupial made its way up to the fifth floor of the parking garage before being spotted.

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Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.

Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.

"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.

But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.

Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.

The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.

Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.

Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.

But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.

Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.

Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.

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U.S. Supreme Court hands L.A. County a victory in water lawsuit

Los Angeles County got a reprieve in an ongoing dispute over who is responsible for pollution from storm water when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ruling won by environmentalists.

However, the court's 9-0 decision Tuesday did not deal with the larger question of how to regulate storm water and urban runoff flowing into the region's waterways.

Gary Hildebrand, assistant deputy director of the county's Department of Public Works, said the court's decision "validates the approach the flood control district has been taking to deal with water management."

The ruling allows the district to move forward with updated storm water regulations that the regional water board put in place in November, he said.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper — now Los Angeles Waterkeeper — sued the flood control district in 2008 alleging that it had violated its storm water permit. The lawsuit cited high pollution readings at monitoring stations in the county's rivers.

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the county was liable for pollution in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, and referred to the water flowing from the "concrete channels" into the natural part of the lower river as discharges of pollutants.

The Supreme Court said the 9th Circuit's opinion rested on a mistaken premise and reversed it. The water flowing from one "concrete" section of the river to another section cannot be deemed a "discharge" of pollutants, the court said. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said "no pollutants are 'added' to a water body when water is merely transferred between different portions of that body."

Steve Fleischli, water program director and senior attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, said the question that the court decided was never in dispute between the parties. He called the ruling a "temporary setback" in efforts to hold the county accountable.

"It doesn't close the door on our enforcement efforts against the county, and it doesn't limit the county's obligation to comply with the Clean Water Act," he said.

County officials have also argued that the flood control district is not primarily to blame for the pollution in the rivers, because there are dozens of cities discharging polluted runoff upstream from the monitoring sites. With only one monitoring station in each river, it is difficult to find the original source of the pollution.

The Supreme Court did not weigh in on that point, but when the case was argued last month, the justices commented that the county needs a better means of monitoring storm water runoff.

In her opinion, Ginsburg noted that the renewed storm water permit put in place by the Los Angeles regional water board will include monitoring the water quality at "discharge points" where storm drains flow into the rivers, which will provide more localized data.

Hildebrand said the ruling will not have an impact on a parcel fee the county is pursuing to raise about $290 million a year for projects that would help clean up storm water pollution. A hearing on that proposal is set for Jan. 15, and the Board of Supervisors may vote then to place the proposed fee on the ballot.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

david.savage@latimes.com

Sewell reported from Los Angeles and Savage from Washington, D.C.

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Supporters Back Strike at Newspaper in China

James Pomfret/Reuters

Protesters gathered on Monday outside the headquarters of the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend in Guangzhou, China.

BEIJING — Hundreds of people gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China on Monday, intensifying a battle over media censorship that poses a test of the willingness of China’s new leadership to tolerate calls for change.

The demonstration was an outpouring of support for journalists at the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend, who erupted in fury late last week over what they called overbearing interference by local propaganda officials.

At the same time, the embattled newsroom received backing on the Internet from celebrities and other prominent commentators that turned what began as a local censorship dispute into a national display of solidarity.

“Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter,” Li Bingbing, an actress, said to her 19 million followers on a microblog account. Yao Chen, an actress with more than 31 million followers, quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Disputes between media organizations and local party leaders over the limits of reporting and expressions of opinion are common in China, but rarely emerge into public view. This time, calls to support the frustrated journalists spread quickly in Chinese online forums over the weekend, and those who showed up on Monday outside the media offices in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, ran the gamut from high school and university students to retirees.

Many carried banners scrawled with slogans and white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning. One banner read: “Get rid of censorship. The Chinese people want freedom.” Police officers watched, but did not interfere.

The journalists at Southern Weekend have been calling for the ouster of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, who took up his post last May.

They blame him for overseeing a change in a New Year’s editorial that originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights under the headline “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism.”

The editorial went through layers of changes and ultimately became one praising the direction of the current political system, in which the Communist Party continues to exercise authority over all aspects of governance.

A well-known entrepreneur, Hung Huang, said online that the actions of Mr. Tuo had “destroyed, overnight, all the credibility the country’s top leadership had labored to re-establish since the 18th Party Congress,” the November gathering in Beijing that was the climax of the leadership transition installing Xi Jinping as Communist Party chief. Mr. Xi, who is also scheduled to assume the nation’s presidency in March, has raised expectations that he might pursue a more open-minded approach to molding China’s economic and political models during his planned decade-long tenure.

But more recently, he has said China must respect its socialist roots, which appeared to be a move to placate conservatives in the party.

One journalist for Southern Weekend said Monday night that talks between the various parties had taken place that afternoon, but there were no results to announce. “The negotiations did not go well at all,” the journalist said in a telephone interview.

Signs had emerged earlier that central propaganda officials were moving to dismantle support for the protest. A fiery editorial by Global Times, a populist newspaper, attacked the rebels at Southern Weekend and essentially accused them of conspiring against the government. Xinhua, the state news agency, and other prominent news sites published the editorial online, apparently at the orders of propaganda officials.

“Propaganda is still on the old road,” said an editor at a party media organization.

But by Tuesday morning, the news portals run by large Internet companies like Sina and Sohu rather than by the state had posted disclaimers with the Global Times editorial, saying the opinions did not reflect those of the companies.

It was on the Internet where the campaign to support the beleaguered journalists was reaching full bloom. Bloggers with large readerships, Han Han and Li Chengpeng, urged defiance of press censorship, and calls spread on microblogs for more rallies outside the newspaper offices on Tuesday.

It was unclear how many employees in the Southern Weekend newsroom had heeded calls by reporters for a strike to display their determination to resist censorship. A local journalist who went by the newspaper’s Beijing office on Monday said the building appeared to be open, but quiet. One employee at the site, where about 30 people work, told the journalist that the office was not on strike.

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing. Mia Li contributed research from Guangzhou, China, and Shi Da from Beijing.

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Intel bets big on thin PCs and phones at Las Vegas show

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Top chipmaker Intel Corp on Monday announced shipments of a new low-power chip and showed off next-generation ultra thin laptops and convertible tablets in its latest bid to prove that the struggling PC industry still has a bright future.

At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas , Intel said new energy-efficient processors for tablets and laptops are available now, and it outlined features like voice recognition and drastically improved battery life on future PCs.

“Absolutely all-day battery life where you just don’t have to bring your power brick at all anymore,” Kirk Skaugen, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, said of laptops built with the company’s upcoming Haswell processor.

While macroeconomic troubles have weighed on sales for several quarters, the growing popularity of tablets and smartphones is seen as an existential threat to the PC industry.

Anxious to breathe new life into PCs and prove a recent slump in sales is not permanent, Intel and PC manufactures in Las Vegas this week will display a range of ultra thin laptops, dubbed Ultrabooks, and hybrid devices that convert into tablets.

On a stage flanked by dozens of tablets and laptops with rotatable and detachable screens, Skaugen said Intel’s newly available chip based on its current Ivy Bridge architecture sips just 7 watts of energy, more efficient than a previously planned 10 watts of power.

NO-EXCUSES PHONE

The Santa Clara, California-based company has long been king of the PC chip market, particularly through its historic “Wintel” alliance with Microsoft Corp, which led to breathtakingly high profit margins and an 80 percent market share.

But it has struggled to adapt its powerful PC processors for battery-powered smartphones and tablets, a fast-growing market led by Qualcomm Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, ARM Holdings Plc and others.

Mike Bell, who co-heads Intel’s mobile and wireless business, introduced a new processor platform, code named Lexington, targeted at low-priced smartphones in emerging markets like Latin America and Asia.

“It’s designed to be a no-excuses multimedia phone,” he said.

Acer, Safaricom and Lava have already agreed to use the new chips in future phones, Bell said.

A handful of manufacturers and telecom carriers in Europe and Asia have already launched smartphones using Intel’s Medfield processors this year. Google’s Motorola Mobility in September launched the Razr i in Europe and Latin America as the first handset of a multi-device agreement between the two groups.

But Intel is fighting an uphill battle in a market where chips made using technology from ARM Holdings have become ubiquitous. Intel also has yet to release a chip for 4G telephone networks, keeping it out of the running for major smartphone design wins in the United States.

Sales of smartphone processors soared 58 percent in the third quarter, but Intel had just 0.2 percent of that market, according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics.

By comparison, worldwide PC shipments fell 8.6 percent in the third quarter, according to IDC.

Intel said 3D cameras would be integrated in future Ultrabooks to allow consumers to use gestures and facial recognition to control their devices. Upcoming Ultrabooks will also include voice interaction, Skaugen said.

“We’re basically going to give the PC the same human senses we’ve all had,” he said.

Intel and other tech companies are increasingly looking for ways to let PCs and other devices use cameras, GPS chips, microphones and other kinds of sensors to predict their users’ needs.

“It’s this combination of computer devices doing things before you ask them to do it, in that they’re smart enough to know based on their sensors,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

(Reporting By Noel Randewich; Editing by Dan Grebler)

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Justin Bartha Is Dating Trainer Lia Smith

01/07/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Lia and Justin in Hawaii New Years Day

Pacific Coast News

Justin Bartha's "mystery woman" is in fact his girlfriend, trainer Lia Smith, a source reveals to PEOPLE.

The pair recently enjoyed a cozy trip to Smith's native Hawaii and were snapped basking in the sun on Maui on New Year's Day, which got people buzzing about her identity.

"They were very cute with each other," says an eyewitness. "They had their arms around each other and were kissing."

The couple also spent time with Smith's parents on Oahu. Bartha, who currently stars on The New Normal, was previously linked to Scarlett Johansson and dated Ashley Olsen for two years before breaking up in 2011.

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