Ashley Hebert and J.P. Rosenbaum Are Married

People Exclusive

By Monica Rizzo

12/01/2012 at 06:15 PM EST

J.P. Rosenbaum and Ashley Hebert

Victor Chavez/Getty

It’s official: Bachelorette star Ashley Hebert and her fiancé J.P. Rosenbaum tied the knot Saturday afternoon in Pasadena, Calif.

Surrounded by family, friends and fellow Bachelor and Bachelorette alumni like Ali Fedotowsky, Emily Maynard, and Jason and Molly Mesnick, the couple said "I do" in an outdoor ceremony officiated by franchise host Chris Harrison.

"Today is all about our friends and family," Hebert, whose nuptials will air Dec. 16 on a two-hour special on ABC, tells PEOPLE. "It's about standing with J.P., looking around at all the people we love in the same room there to celebrate our love."

The 28-year-old dentist from Madawaska, Maine, met New York construction manager Rosenbaum, 35, on season 7 of The Bachelorette. The couple became engaged on the season finale.

Hebert and Rosenbaum are the second couple in the franchise's 24 seasons to make it from their show finale to the altar, following in the footsteps of Bachelorette Trista Rehn, who married Vail, Colo., firefighter Ryan Sutter in 2003.

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Asperger's dropped from revised diagnosis manual

CHICAGO (AP) — The now familiar term "Asperger's disorder" is being dropped. And abnormally bad and frequent temper tantrums will be given a scientific-sounding diagnosis called DMDD. But "dyslexia" and other learning disorders remain.

The revisions come in the first major rewrite in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic guide used by the nation's psychiatrists. Changes were approved Saturday.

Full details of all the revisions will come next May when the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic manual is published, but the impact will be huge, affecting millions of children and adults worldwide. The manual also is important for the insurance industry in deciding what treatment to pay for, and it helps schools decide how to allot special education.

This diagnostic guide "defines what constellations of symptoms" doctors recognize as mental disorders, said Dr. Mark Olfson, a Columbia University psychiatry professor. More important, he said, it "shapes who will receive what treatment. Even seemingly subtle changes to the criteria can have substantial effects on patterns of care."

Olfson was not involved in the revision process. The changes were approved Saturday in suburban Washington, D.C., by the psychiatric association's board of trustees.

The aim is not to expand the number of people diagnosed with mental illness, but to ensure that affected children and adults are more accurately diagnosed so they can get the most appropriate treatment, said Dr. David Kupfer. He chaired the task force in charge of revising the manual and is a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

One of the most hotly argued changes was how to define the various ranges of autism. Some advocates opposed the idea of dropping the specific diagnosis for Asperger's disorder. People with that disorder often have high intelligence and vast knowledge on narrow subjects but lack social skills. Some who have the condition embrace their quirkiness and vow to continue to use the label.

And some Asperger's families opposed any change, fearing their kids would lose a diagnosis and no longer be eligible for special services.

But the revision will not affect their education services, experts say.

The new manual adds the term "autism spectrum disorder," which already is used by many experts in the field. Asperger's disorder will be dropped and incorporated under that umbrella diagnosis. The new category will include kids with severe autism, who often don't talk or interact, as well as those with milder forms.

Kelli Gibson of Battle Creek, Mich., who has four sons with various forms of autism, said Saturday she welcomes the change. Her boys all had different labels in the old diagnostic manual, including a 14-year-old with Asperger's.

"To give it separate names never made sense to me," Gibson said. "To me, my children all had autism."

Three of her boys receive special education services in public school; the fourth is enrolled in a school for disabled children. The new autism diagnosis won't affect those services, Gibson said. She also has a 3-year-old daughter without autism.

People with dyslexia also were closely watching for the new updated doctors' guide. Many with the reading disorder did not want their diagnosis to be dropped. And it won't be. Instead, the new manual will have a broader learning disorder category to cover several conditions including dyslexia, which causes difficulty understanding letters and recognizing written words.

The trustees on Saturday made the final decision on what proposals made the cut; recommendations came from experts in several work groups assigned to evaluate different mental illnesses.

The revised guidebook "represents a significant step forward for the field. It will improve our ability to accurately diagnose psychiatric disorders," Dr. David Fassler, the group's treasurer and a University of Vermont psychiatry professor, said after the vote.

The shorthand name for the new edition, the organization's fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is DSM-5. Group leaders said specifics won't be disclosed until the manual is published but they confirmed some changes. A 2000 edition of the manual made minor changes but the last major edition was published in 1994.

Olfson said the manual "seeks to capture the current state of knowledge of psychiatric disorders. Since 2000 ... there have been important advances in our understanding of the nature of psychiatric disorders."

Catherine Lord, an autism expert at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York who was on the psychiatric group's autism task force, said anyone who met criteria for Asperger's in the old manual would be included in the new diagnosis.

One reason for the change is that some states and school systems don't provide services for children and adults with Asperger's, or provide fewer services than those given an autism diagnosis, she said.

Autism researcher Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said small studies have suggested the new criteria will be effective. But she said it will be crucial to monitor so that children don't lose services.

Other changes include:

—A new diagnosis for severe recurrent temper tantrums — disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. Critics say it will medicalize kids' who have normal tantrums. Supporters say it will address concerns about too many kids being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with powerful psychiatric drugs. Bipolar disorder involves sharp mood swings and affected children are sometimes very irritable or have explosive tantrums.

—Eliminating the term "gender identity disorder." It has been used for children or adults who strongly believe that they were born the wrong gender. But many activists believe the condition isn't a disorder and say calling it one is stigmatizing. The term would be replaced with "gender dysphoria," which means emotional distress over one's gender. Supporters equated the change with removing homosexuality as a mental illness in the diagnostic manual, which happened decades ago.

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AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner .

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Pete's Harbor live-aboards fight for their way of life

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Pete Uccelli took 20 acres of swampland and transformed it into a boatyard and marina, welcoming visitors and residents of his beloved town to stroll the docks and feed the ducks.

His restaurant on the southern edge of San Francisco Bay became a gathering spot — hosting Rotary Club meetings, business lunches and quinceañeras.

"Pete's Harbor" also was a haven for "live-aboards," who rejoiced in the riches of the wildlife refuge a stone's throw away and often shared their unique lifestyle over barbecue and beers.

But after nearly six decades, it looks like it all may be coming to an end.

Boaters and motor-home owners — well over 100 of them full-time residents — were told by Uccelli's widow, Paula, that they'd have to clear out by Jan. 15.

Her husband had started talking about selling the land for development more than a decade ago. After several starts and stops, planning commissioners in late October approved a Colorado builder's plan to raze the restaurant, construct more than 400 condos and apartments and restrict the marina's slips to use by the new residents.

Although many boaters gave up and pulled out — their slips have been cordoned off with yellow tape to ensure that they stay vacant — a dedicated group of residents is calling for compromise.

"It's not really about us," said Roger Smith, 68, who used to dine at Pete's restaurant when it was a thatch-roofed hamburger shack. He parked his motor home here for good seven years ago. "It's about Redwood City and the rest of the region — and what it's going to lose."

Just up Redwood Creek from Pete's, the same developer demolished hundreds of live-aboard boat slips a few years back. At marinas with slips directly on San Francisco Bay waters — as some of Pete's are — a state conservation commission limits live-aboards to 10% of the total, and waiting lists for larger vessels tend to be long. Marinas without adequate parking, bathrooms or pump-out facilities don't allow live-aboards at all.

The current residents of Pete's Harbor have appealed the city Planning Commission's decision and suggested that an alternative plan could allow for some development while still preserving a commercial marina that would let them stay. After all, they noted, the city's General Plan pays plenty of lip service to the value of "floating communities" here — both culturally and as affordable housing.

Behind the grass-roots offensive is a history of opposition to bayfront development in Redwood City — a community of 80,000 on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. In fact, voters eight years ago rejected a zoning change that would have allowed a much larger project to be built on the same land.

This time, opponents asserted, the plan was jammed through without adequate public scrutiny at a time when the city is reassessing its vision for its inner harbor area.

"It was a done deal," said Buckley Stone, 54, a boisterous veteran who has lived here for 20 years with his wife, Wendy.

But the city planning manager, Blake Lyon, said the project fit the area's zoning designation and did not warrant greater input because the environmental impact report conducted years ago for the larger project needed only to be amended, not redone.

Still, the appeal will give live-aboard tenants a chance to air their concerns before the City Council in late January.

According to Ted Hannig, a longtime friend and attorney of the Uccellis, the current residents have had month-to-month leases since 2002 and knew the harbor would one day change hands. Ninety percent of them, he added, even signed a lease addendum that noted the marina was up for sale and agreed to leave their slips when asked.

"Pete's Harbor has no obligation to have live-aboards there," said Hannig, who has considered himself a boater since he built his first raft out of bamboo and bedsheets at age 11. "What they don't want to say is that they're not keeping their word to a dead man or to Paula, his widow."

Even some who sympathize with the Pete's Harbor residents said they should have known their paradise wouldn't last forever.

"It's like a hurricane in the Gulf," said Mark Sanders, who recently opened the nearby Westpoint Harbor Marina — the Bay Area's first new facility in decades. "If you're living in Jacksonville, Fla., you know you're going to get whacked with a hurricane. You just don't know when."

When Paula Uccelli told her boating and RV tenants in September that they'd have to be out after the New Year's holidays, they started mobilizing. Public meetings had already begun on the development but no one bothered to let them know, they contend.

Alison Madden — a technology attorney who moved here in an Airstream trailer in May with her two kids while she searched for a boat — kicked into research mode. Leslie Webster, a freelance writer and communications consultant, helped start a blog. Brenda Hattery — who with her husband has cruised the West Coast and parts of Mexico in a pre-World War II schooner and settled here a year ago — put together a video to set the record straight on the kind of people live-aboards are — and aren't.

They gathered 1,600 signatures in one frenzied week and showed up in force at the Planning Commission hearing Oct. 30. But commissioners were unanimous: The project complied with the area's zoning, and the owner had a right to sell.

Still, the live-aboards are not giving up.

They are lobbying the California State Lands Commission and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, both of which have jurisdiction over some of the land and still must sign off on the development as in the public interest.

"I think what they fail to understand," said Webster, "is that even if we move, we're still going to be pursuing this."

But every day now, said resident Wendy Stone, someone else floats off, making the marina "a little less beautiful."

lee.romney@latimes.com

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The Saturday Profile: Mazarine Pingeot, Mitterrand Daughter, Looks Back

PARIS SHE would sneak into the Élysée Palace to see her father, the president of France, through a back door that led directly to his private apartments. On winter days, they dined together in the library, by the fireplace.

Mazarine Pingeot is the daughter of François Mitterrand and Anne Pingeot, his longtime mistress, and for much of her youth and nearly his entire 14-year presidency she was a state secret.

“When he was absent, he was the president,” said Ms. Pingeot (pronounced pan-JOH), who has her father’s intense dark eyes. “When he was home, he was for me.”

Mr. Mitterrand, who was known as the Sphinx, began his double life long before he was elected president, but the existence of his second family was revealed only near the end of his political career. Less than a year after leaving office in 1995, he died of cancer, an illness he also tried to keep secret. Anne and Mazarine Pingeot attended the state funeral along with Mr. Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, and the Mitterrands’ two sons.

During his presidency, Mr. Mitterrand lived officially with Danielle in his home on the Rue de Bièvre, on the Left Bank. But he spent most nights with Anne Pingeot, who was a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, and Mazarine, who still uses her mother’s family name. In 1984, while president, Mr. Mitterrand legally recognized Ms. Pingeot as his daughter, but that was kept secret, too, as was the existence of his second family until near the end of his life.

Ms. Pingeot, now 37, an author and philosophy professor, lived with her mother in an apartment owned by the French state, under the protection of government bodyguards. It was not until 1994 that the story came out, when pictures of her and her father were published in the magazine Paris Match.

Last month, Ms. Pingeot published “Bon Petit Soldat,” (“Good Little Soldier”), a diary that includes memories of her childhood as a state secret. It is another attempt, she said, to “unravel” the enigmas of her past, seven years after she published “Bouche Cousue” (“Sealed Lips”).

“Being unable to share a secret makes this secret very heavy,” she said in an interview at Julliard, her publisher. “You protect it rather than protecting yourself.”

Ms. Pingeot described in her autobiographical books and in interviews how Mr. Mitterrand spent almost every night of his 14 years in office with his daughter and mistress in a secret apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, across the river and three miles from the Élysée.

Ms. Pingeot spent her childhood surrounded by books, pets and eight bodyguards. She wrote poems and read Flaubert, Balzac and Zola because “literature goes with loneliness,” and when she got a bicycle, her bodyguards followed her on bicycles, too.

Mr. Mitterrand liked “ambivalence,” Ms. Pingeot said. It was a different age, one more protective of the private lives of high officials, and, she said, Mr. Mitterrand liked to eat with her at restaurants and stroll with her along the banks of the Seine.

BUT he was careful, too, even suspicious. He ordered his security staff to wiretap those who knew about her existence, including a journalist, Jean-Edern Hallier. He spoke of his daughter to a tiny circle of friends, said Christian Prouteau, Mr. Mitterrand’s chief of security, but sheltered his second family in houses bought with state money.

For the outside world, Ms. Pingeot was “the lovely little lie,” as she described herself in “Bouche Cousue.” She met Mr. Mitterrand’s official children several days before her father’s funeral, and discovered Jarnac, her father’s native village in southwestern France, after he died in 1996.

At home, Ms. Pingeot was the cherished only daughter, where she would joke with her father and he would act very unpresidential. “My father would hide an egg behind his back and say, ‘Look at me: I’m a hen,’ ” Ms. Pingeot said, smiling shyly.

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Is Facebook planning to develop its own games? Revised Zynga terms open the door

As Zynga (ZNGA) continues its free fall into irrelevancy with layoffs and its one-hit social games, the gaming company has revised its contract with Facebook (FB) to free it from being “forced to launch games exclusively on the Facebook platform” and “obligated to use Facebook Credits for Zynga game pages,” according to AllThingsD. The change of terms filed with the SEC also includes a clause that states “Facebook will no longer be prohibited from developing its own games” on March 31, 2013. Could Facebook start developing its own social games? Theoretically, yes. But would Facebook really jeopardize its relationships with game developers who already make games for its social network? Probably not.

“We’re not in the business of building games and we have no plans to do so,” a Facebook spokesman told AllThingsD. “We’re focused on being the platform where games and apps are built.”

AllThingsD’s report says the change in terms isn’t so much as a bid by Facebook to make its own games, but to shed its dependence on Zynga to supply it with hit games. The new revised terms give Facebook more leverage and other game developers such as Wooga and King.com greater incentive to create games.

At the end of the day, Facebook is a publicly traded company chasing profits, despite what CEO Mark Zuckerberg says. It might not be developing games today, but that doesn’t mean it won’t create them in the future. The new terms with Zynga now leaves that door open, should it want to make its own games one day.

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Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Dennis Quaid Files for Divorce, Seeks Joint Custody

By Mike Fleeman

11/30/2012 at 09:20 PM EST

Kimberly Buffington-Quaid and Dennis Quaid

Casey Rodgers/NBC/AP

Dennis Quaid is ready to end his marriage for good.

After his wife of eight years, Kimberly Buffington-Quaid, sought legal separation in October, the Vegas star filed Friday for divorce in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The actor requests joint physical and legal custody of their 4-year-old twins, Thomas and Zoe, and offers to pay spousal support, according to the petition.

This will be the third divorce for Quaid, 58, who was previously married to Meg Ryan and P.J. Soles.

Kimberly, a former real estate agent, initially filed for divorce in March. She
put the divorce on hold a month later, pulling the papers so they could work on their marriage, before then filing for separation.

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Kenya village pairs AIDS orphans with grandparents

NYUMBANI, Kenya (AP) — There are no middle-aged people in Nyumbani. They all died years ago, before this village of hope in Kenya began. Only the young and old live here.

Nyumbani was born of the AIDS crisis. The 938 children here all saw their parents die. The 97 grandparents — eight grandfathers among them — saw their middle-aged children die. But put together, the bookend generations take care of one another.

Saturday is World AIDS Day, but the executive director of the aid group Nyumbani, which oversees the village of the same name, hates the name which is given to the day because for her the word AIDS is so freighted with doom and death. These days, it doesn't necessarily mean a death sentence. Millions live with the virus with the help of anti-retroviral drugs, or ARVs. And the village she runs is an example of that.

"AIDS is not a word that we should be using. At the beginning when we came up against HIV, it was a terminal disease and people were presenting at the last phase, which we call AIDS," said Sister Mary Owens. "There is no known limit to the lifespan now so that word AIDS should not be used. So I hate World AIDS Day, follow? Because we have moved beyond talking about AIDS, the terminal stage. None of our children are in the terminal stage."

In the village, each grandparent is charged with caring for about a dozen "grandchildren," one or two of whom will be biological family. That responsibility has been a life-changer for Janet Kitheka, who lost one daughter to AIDS in 2003. Another daughter died from cancer in 2004. A son died in a tree-cutting accident in 2006 and the 63-year-old lost two grandchildren in 2007, including one from AIDS.

"When I came here I was released from the grief because I am always busy instead of thinking about the dead," said Kitheka. "Now I am thinking about building a new house with 12 children. They are orphans. I said to myself, 'Think about the living ones now.' I'm very happy because of the children."

As she walks around Nyumbani, which is three hours' drive east of Nairobi, 73-year-old Sister Mary is greeted like a rock star by little girls in matching colorful school uniforms. Children run and play, and sleep in bunk beds inside mud-brick homes. High schoolers study carpentry or tailoring. But before 2006, this village did not exist, not until a Catholic charity petitioned the Kenyan government for land on which to house orphans.

Everyone here has been touched by HIV or AIDS. But only 80 children have HIV and thanks to anti-retroviral drugs, none of them has AIDS.

"They can dream their dreams and live a long life," Owens said.

Nyumbani relies heavily on U.S. funds but it is aiming to be self-sustaining.

The kids' bunk beds are made in the technical school's shop. A small aquaponics project is trying to grow edible fish. The mud bricks are made on site. Each grandparent has a plot of land for farming.

The biggest chunk of aid comes from the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has given the village $2.5 million since 2006. A British couple gives $50,000 a year. A tree-growing project in the village begun by an American, John Noel, now stands six years from its first harvest. Some 120,000 trees have already been planted and thousands more were being planted last week.

"My wife and I got married as teenagers and started out being very poor. Lived in a trailer. And we found out what it was like to be in a situation where you can't support yourself," he said. "As an entrepreneur I looked to my enterprise skills to see what we could do to sustain the village forever, because we are in our 60s and we wanted to make sure that the thousand babies and children, all the little ones, were taken care of."

He hopes that after a decade the timber profits from the trees will make the village totally self-sustaining.

But while the future is looking brighter, the losses the orphans' suffered can resurface, particularly when class lessons are about family or medicine, said Winnie Joseph, the deputy headmaster at the village's elementary school. Kitheka says she tries to teach the kids how to love one another and how to cook and clean. But older kids sometimes will threaten to hit her after accusing her of favoring her biological grandchildren, she said.

For the most part, though, the children in Nyumbani appear to know how lucky they are, having landed in a village where they are cared for. An estimated 23.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have HIV as of 2011, representing 69 percent of the global HIV population, according to UNAIDS. Eastern and southern Africa are the hardest-hit regions. Millions of people — many of them parents — have died.

Kitheka noted that children just outside the village frequently go to bed hungry. And ARVs are harder to come by outside the village. The World Health Organization says about 61 percent of Kenyans with HIV are covered by ARVs across the country.

Paul Lgina, 14, contrasted the difference between life in Nyumbani, which in Swahili means simply "home," and his earlier life.

"In the village I get support. At my mother's home I did not have enough food, and I had to go to the river to fetch water," said Lina, who, like all the children in the village, has neither a mother or a father.

When Sister Mary first began caring for AIDS orphans in the early 1990s, she said her group was often told not to bother.

"At the beginning nobody knew what to do with them. In 1992 we were told these children are going to die anyway," she said. "But that wasn't our spirit. Today, kids we were told would die have graduated from high school."

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On the Internet:

http://www.trees4children.org/

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Student scores may be used in LAUSD teacher ratings

After months of tense negotiations, leaders of the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union have tentatively agreed to use student test scores to evaluate instructors for the first time, officials announced Friday.

Under the breakthrough agreement, the nation's second-largest school district would join Chicago and a growing number of other cities in using test scores as one measure of how much teachers help their students progress academically in a year.

Alarm over low student performance, especially in impoverished and minority communities, has prompted the Obama administration and others to press school districts nationwide to craft better ways to identify struggling teachers for improvement.

The Los Angeles pact proposes to do that using a unique mix of individual and schoolwide testing data — including state standardized test scores, high school exit exams and district assessments, along with rates of attendance, graduation and suspensions.

But the tentative agreement leaves unanswered the most controversial question: how much to count student test scores in measuring teacher effectiveness. The school district and the union agreed only that the test scores would not be "sole, primary or controlling factors" in a teacher's final evaluation.

"It is crystal clear that what we're doing is historic and very positive," said L.A. Supt. John Deasy, who has fought to use student test scores in teacher performance reviews since taking the district's helm nearly two years ago. "This will help develop the skills of the teaching profession and hold us accountable for student achievement."

Members of United Teachers Los Angeles, however, still need to ratify the agreement. Many teachers have long opposed using test scores in their evaluations, saying test scores are unreliable measures of teacher ability.

The union characterized the agreement as a "limited" response to a Dec. 4 court-ordered deadline to show that test scores are being used in evaluations and said negotiations were continuing for future academic years. The deadline was imposed by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant, who ruled this year that state law requires L.A. Unified to use test scores in teacher performance reviews.

In a statement, the teachers union also emphasized that the agreement rejected the use of the district's method of measuring student academic progress for individual instructors. That measure, called Academic Growth Over Time, uses a mathematical formula to estimate how much a teacher helps students' performance, based on state test scores and controlling for such outside factors as income and race. Under the agreement, however, schoolwide scores using this method, also known as a value-added system, will be used.

For individual teachers, the agreement proposes to use raw state standardized test score data. Warren Fletcher, teachers union president, said that data give teachers more useful information about student performance on specific skills.

Critics of using test scores in teacher reviews praised Los Angeles' proposed new system, saying it uses a wide array of data to determine a teacher's effect on student learning.

Deasy said he will be developing guidelines for administrators on how to use the mix of data in teacher reviews and has said in the past that test scores should not count for more than 25% of the final rating.

"This is a complex agreement and possibly the most sophisticated evaluation agreement that I have seen," said Diane Ravitch, an educational historian and vocal critic of the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. "It assures that test scores will not be overused, will not be assigned an arbitrary and inappropriate weight, will not be the sole or primary determinant of a teacher's evaluation."

Teacher Brent Smiley at Lawrence Middle School in Chatsworth said: "I will vote yes. I have no doubt that my union leaders negotiated the best they could, given the adverse set of circumstances they faced."

Labor-relations expert Charles Kerchner called the agreement "a shotgun wedding," but added, "I think it's unabashed good news."

He said it's notable that value-added measures and test scores have been accepted in some form by the teachers union.

"UTLA has moved beyond a strategy of just saying no to a strategy of trying to craft a useful agreement," said Kerchner, a professor at Claremont Graduate University.

The district is currently developing a new evaluation system that uses Academic Growth Over Time — along with a more rigorous classroom observation process, student and parent feedback and a teacher's contributions to the school community. The new observations were tested last year on a voluntary basis with about 450 teachers and 320 administrators; this year, every principal and one volunteer teacher at each of the district's 1,200 schools are expected to be trained.

The teachers union has filed an unfair labor charge against the district, arguing that the system is being unilaterally imposed without required negotiations.

Some teachers who have participated in the new observation process say it offers more specific guidance on how they can improve. Other educators — teachers and administrators alike — complain that it is too time-consuming.

The tentative agreement, acknowledging the extra time the new evaluations would take, would extend the time between evaluations from two to as long as five years for teachers with 10 or more years of experience.

Bill Lucia of EdVoice, the Sacramento-based educational advocacy group that brought the lawsuit, said he was "cautiously optimistic."

But he expressed dismay that the union did not reach agreement a few weeks earlier, which he said would have given L.A. Unified a shot at a $40-million federal grant. The district applied for the Race to the Top grant without the required teacher union support and was eliminated from the competition this week.

Negotiations over the tentative pact, however, nearly fell apart. Earlier this week, the union pulled away from the deal on the table, L.A. Unified officials said. And the district discussed holding a Monday emergency school-board meeting to craft a formal response to the court order in anticipation that no deal would be reached. The options included adopting an evaluation system without the union's consent.

Some members of the Board of Education, who also will need to approve the pact, praised the agreement for taking student growth and achievement into account but gauging this growth through multiple measures. Steve Zimmer said that, just as important, this milestone was achieved through negotiation.

School board President Monica Garcia praised the tentative deal as "absolutely, by all accounts, better than what we have today."

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

howard.blume@latimes.com

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General Assembly Grants Palestine Upgraded Status in U.N.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority spoke at the United Nations before the General Assembly voted on Palestine's status as a “nonmember observer state” on Thursday.

UNITED NATIONS — More than 130 countries voted on Thursday to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, a triumph for Palestinian diplomacy and a sharp rebuke to the United States and Israel.

But the vote, at least for now, did little to bring either the Palestinians or the Israelis closer to the goal they claim to seek: two states living side by side, or increased Palestinian unity. Israel and the militant group Hamas both responded critically to the day’s events, though for different reasons.

The new status will give the Palestinians more tools to challenge Israel in international legal forums for its occupation activities in the West Bank, including settlement-building, and it helped bolster the Palestinian Authority, weakened after eight days of battle between its rival Hamas and Israel.

But even as a small but determined crowd of 2,000 celebrated in central Ramallah in the West Bank, waving flags and dancing, there was an underlying sense of concerned resignation.

“I hope this is good,” said Munir Shafie, 36, an electrical engineer who was there. “But how are we going to benefit?”

Still, the General Assembly vote — 138 countries in favor, 9 opposed and 41 abstaining — showed impressive backing for the Palestinians at a difficult time. It was taken on the 65th anniversary of the vote to divide the former British mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, a vote Israel considers the international seal of approval for its birth.

The past two years of Arab uprisings have marginalized the Palestinian cause to some extent as nations that focused their political aspirations on the Palestinian struggle have turned inward. The vote on Thursday, coming so soon after the Gaza fighting, put the Palestinians again — if briefly, perhaps — at the center of international discussion.

“The question is, where do we go from here and what does it mean?” Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, who was in New York for the vote, said in an interview. “The sooner the tough rhetoric of this can subside and the more this is viewed as a logical consequence of many years of failure to move the process forward, the better.” He said nothing would change without deep American involvement.

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, speaking to the assembly’s member nations, said, “The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine,” and he condemned what he called Israeli racism and colonialism. His remarks seemed aimed in part at Israel and in part at Hamas. But both quickly attacked him for the parts they found offensive.

“The world watched a defamatory and venomous speech that was full of mendacious propaganda against the Israel Defense Forces and the citizens of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded. “Someone who wants peace does not talk in such a manner.”

While Hamas had officially backed the United Nations bid of Mr. Abbas, it quickly criticized his speech because the group does not recognize Israel.

“There are controversial issues in the points that Abbas raised, and Hamas has the right to preserve its position over them,” said Salah al-Bardaweel, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday.

“We do not recognize Israel, nor the partition of Palestine, and Israel has no right in Palestine,” he added. “Getting our membership in the U.N. bodies is our natural right, but without giving up any inch of Palestine’s soil.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, spoke after Mr. Abbas and said he was concerned that the Palestinian Authority failed to recognize Israel for what it is.

“Three months ago, Israel’s prime minister stood in this very hall and extended his hand in peace to President Abbas,” Mr. Prosor said. “He reiterated that his goal was to create a solution of two states for two peoples, where a demilitarized Palestinian state will recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“That’s right. Two states for two peoples. In fact, President Abbas, I did not hear you use the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ this afternoon. In fact, I have never heard you say the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ because the Palestinian leadership has never recognized that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

The Israelis also say that the fact that Mr. Abbas is not welcome in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave run by Hamas, from which he was ejected five years ago, shows that there is no viable Palestinian leadership living up to its obligations now.

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank.

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Thousands touched by photograph of New York cop helping shoeless man

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A photograph of a New York City police officer crouching by a shoeless panhandler to give him a new pair of boots on a cold night in Times Square has drawn a deluge of praise after it was published on the police department‘s Facebook page this week.

By Thursday afternoon, nearly 394,000 people had clicked a button on the department’s Facebook page to indicate that they “liked” the photograph. Tens of thousands left comments, most praising Officer Lawrence DePrimo for his charitable deed.

The photograph was snapped by Jennifer Foster, an employee of the Pinal County Sheriff‘s Office in Florence, Arizona, during a trip to New York this month, according to police.

She took the picture shortly after she noticed the man asking passersby for money.

“Right when I was about to approach, one of your officers came up behind him,” Foster wrote in an email to the New York Police Department accompanying the snapshot, according to the picture caption on the department’s Facebook page. She said she was some distance away, and the officer did not know he was being photographed.

“The officer said, ‘I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let’s put them on and take care of you.’ The officer squatted down on the ground and proceeded to put socks and the new boots on this man.”

DePrimo and Foster could not be reached for comment on Thursday, and the police department did not respond to queries about the photograph.

DePrimo, 25, joined the force in 2010 and lives with his parents on Long Island, according to The New York Times. He paid $ 75 for the boots from a nearby Skechers store after an employee there gave him a 25 percent discount upon learning they were to be donated to a man in need.

“I wish more cops were like this guy,” one person wrote on the department’s Facebook page. Others suggested there were plenty of good-hearted police officers about, even if their good deeds were not photographed or touted on Facebook.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Stacey Joyce)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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