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With his striking beard and starched uniform, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop became one of the most recognizable figures of the Reagan era — and one of the most unexpectedly enduring.
His nomination in 1981 met a wall of opposition from women's groups and liberal politicians, who complained President Ronald Reagan selected Koop, a pediatric surgeon and evangelical Christian from Philadelphia, only because of his conservative views, especially his staunch opposition to abortion.
Soon, though, he was a hero to AIDS activists, who chanted "Koop, Koop" at his appearances but booed other officials. And when he left his post in 1989, he left behind a landscape where AIDS was a top research and educational priority, smoking was considered a public health hazard, and access to abortion remained largely intact.
Koop, who turned his once-obscure post into a bully pulpit for seven years during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and who surprised both ends of the political spectrum by setting aside his conservative personal views on issues such as homosexuality and abortion to keep his focus sharply medical, died Monday at his home in Hanover, N.H. He was 96.
An assistant at Koop's Dartmouth College institute, Susan Wills, confirmed his death but didn't disclose its cause.
Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as surgeon general a decade ago under President George W. Bush, said Koop was a mentor to him and preached the importance of staying true to the science even if it made politicians uncomfortable.
"He set the bar high for all who followed in his footsteps," Carmona said.
Although the surgeon general has no real authority to set government policy, Koop described himself as "the health conscience of the country" and said modestly just before leaving his post that "my only influence was through moral suasion."
A former pipe smoker, Koop carried out a crusade to end smoking in the United States; his goal had been to do so by 2000. He said cigarettes were as addictive as heroin and cocaine. And he shocked his conservative supporters when he endorsed condoms and sex education to stop the spread of AIDS.
Chris Collins, a vice president of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, said many people don't realize what an important role Koop played in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
"At the time, he really changed the national conversation, and he showed real courage in pursuing the duties of his job," Collins said.
Even after leaving office, Koop continued to promote public health causes, from preventing childhood accidents to better training for doctors.
"I will use the written word, the spoken word and whatever I can in the electronic media to deliver health messages to this country as long as people will listen," he promised.
In 1996, he rapped Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole for suggesting that tobacco was not invariably addictive, saying Dole's comments "either exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge of nicotine addiction or his blind support of the tobacco industry."
Although Koop eventually won wide respect with his blend of old-fashioned values, pragmatism and empathy, his nomination met staunch opposition.
Foes noted that Koop traveled the country in 1979 and 1980 giving speeches that predicted a progression "from liberalized abortion to infanticide to passive euthanasia to active euthanasia, indeed to the very beginnings of the political climate that led to Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen."
But Koop, a devout Presbyterian, was confirmed after he told a Senate panel he would not use the surgeon general's post to promote his religious ideology. He kept his word.
In 1986, he issued a frank report on AIDS, urging the use of condoms for "safe sex" and advocating sex education as early as third grade.
He also maneuvered around uncooperative Reagan administration officials in 1988 to send an educational AIDS pamphlet to more than 100 million U.S. households, the largest public health mailing ever.
Koop personally opposed homosexuality and believed sex should be saved for marriage. But he insisted that Americans, especially young people, must not die because they were deprived of explicit information about how HIV was transmitted.
Koop further angered conservatives by refusing to issue a report requested by the Reagan White House, saying he could not find enough scientific evidence to determine whether abortion has harmful psychological effects on women.
Koop maintained his personal opposition to abortion, however. After he left office, he told medical students it violated their Hippocratic oath. In 2009, he wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urging that health care legislation include a provision to ensure doctors and medical students would not be forced to perform abortions. The letter briefly set off a security scare because it was hand delivered.
Koop served as chairman of the National Safe Kids Campaign and as an adviser to President Bill Clinton's health care reform plan.
At a congressional hearing in 2007, Koop spoke about political pressure on the surgeon general post. He said Reagan was pressed to fire him every day, but Reagan would not interfere.
Koop, worried that medicine had lost old-fashioned caring and personal relationships between doctors and patients, opened his institute at Dartmouth to teach medical students basic values and ethics. He also was a part-owner of a short-lived venture, drkoop.com, to provide consumer health care information via the Internet.
Koop was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the only son of a Manhattan banker and the nephew of a doctor. He said by age 5 he knew he wanted to be a surgeon and at age 13 he practiced his skills on neighborhood cats.
He attended Dartmouth, where he received the nickname Chick, short for "chicken Koop." It stuck for life.
Koop received his medical degree at Cornell Medical College, choosing pediatric surgery because so few surgeons practiced it.
In 1938, he married Elizabeth Flanagan, the daughter of a Connecticut doctor. They had four children, one of whom died in a mountain climbing accident when he was 20.
Koop was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
He pioneered surgery on newborns and successfully separated three sets of conjoined twins. He won national acclaim by reconstructing the chest of a baby born with the heart outside the body.
Although raised as a Baptist, he was drawn to a Presbyterian church near the hospital, where he developed an abiding faith. He began praying at the bedside of his young patients — ignoring the snickers of some of his colleagues.
Koop's wife died in 2007, and he married Cora Hogue in 2010.
He was by far the best-known surgeon general and for decades afterward was still a recognized personality.
"I was walking down the street with him one time" about five years ago, recalled Dr. George Wohlreich, director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a medical society with which Koop had longstanding ties. "People were yelling out, 'There goes Dr. Koop!' You'd have thought he was a rock star."
___
Ring reported from Montpelier, Vt. Cass reported from Washington. AP Medical Writers Lauran Neergaard in Washington and Mike Stobbe in New York contributed to this report.
One night on Mt. Wilson about 1908, a short, powerfully built man with a handlebar mustache looked through the largest telescope in the world. What he saw transformed him, and would put Los Angeles at the forefront of a movement to make astronomy the people's science.
We may never know whether Col. Griffith J. Griffith saw the rings of Saturn or another celestial object with the then-new 60-inch reflector telescope, but we can be sure that it inspired his vision of a world-class observatory for the people of Los Angeles, allowing the masses a glimpse of the heavens.
"If all mankind could look through that telescope," he said that night, "it would change the world."
PHOTOS: Images of space
Griffith's contribution was not just his namesake observatory, but his rejection of the notion more common in his time that an observatory belonged on a remote mountaintop and should be restricted to scientists.
Griffith sought to make astronomy a public science — a notion embodied by Griffith Observatory, built near what is now the middle of the city, where it is accessible to anyone.
Or, as observatory Director Ed Krupp says: "Location, location, location."
The observatory has embraced this public-spirited view of science in other ways too: From its beginning in the 1930s, it was popularized by Hollywood, becoming a movie icon in its own right.
"Griffith had an inkling of the power of motion pictures and he wanted a motion picture theater of some kind incorporated into this public observatory," Krupp says. "The planetarium hadn't been invented at the time ... and so a movie theater was really the closest thing that he could imagine to an immersive experience in astronomy and in science."
The 1955 film "Rebel Without a Cause" made the observatory an international emblem of the city, but even before the building opened in 1935, it was used to film scenes in Gene Autry's bizarre cowboy-science fiction mash-up "The Phantom Empire," Krupp says. "At the time, the building seemed classic yet futuristic, and that made it a draw for science fiction," Krupp says. "It was, in fact, the palace of Ming the Merciless on the Planet Mongo in the Flash Gordon space opera."
Today, "its stardom attracts a steady stream of visitors from all over the planet," he says.
Griffith and the observatory were a main focus of a program titled "Making Astronomy Public, Los Angeles Style" held during the American Astronomical Society meeting held earlier this year in Long Beach.
Speakers at the meeting sought to expand the conventional view of Griffith, who donated about 3,000 acres for a city park in 1896, shot his wife in the head in 1903 and served two years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon.
He was a despised character in Los Angeles after the shooting, says Anthony Cook, an astronomer at the observatory who spoke at the conference. But although many have questioned whether the observatory was an attempt to buy back the goodwill of the city, Cook says the gift was sincere.
"He came out of San Quentin after two years really a reformed person. He stayed away from alcohol, he actually supported his ex-wife, any philanthropic enterprise that she wanted to do, helped his son maintain caring for her, and also turned his attentions to what he hoped would benefit everybody, which was by developing Griffith Park."
A onetime newspaper reporter who covered mining and became wealthy as an expert on the subject, Griffith remained a popularizer throughout his life. In drafting the observatory's detailed specifications, he had lengthy discussions with George Ellery Hale, who with Andrew Carnegie founded the first astrophysical telescope in Los Angeles, and Walter Adams, who later became director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory.
Although an observatory — or at least a tower with a telescope — had been suggested for the highest point in the park as early as 1897, it wasn't until Griffith's epiphany on Mt. Wilson that he broadened his vision into an ambitious plan for a large observatory and hall of science.
"Griffith was very civic-minded," Cook says. "He wanted to do things unifying the huge, diverse population settled in Los Angeles."
Before Griffith died in 1919, he established a generous trust fund to build an observatory in Griffith Park — when the time was right. Perhaps due to his lingering notoriety, nothing was done until the 1930s, when a handful of major U.S. cities began building the newly invented planetariums. But unlike those being constructed elsewhere, Los Angeles' planetarium would be a part of what is primarily an observatory.
A competition was held for the design of the building — Richard Neutra proposed a sleek Art Deco structure that raises tantalizing possibilities of what might have been — and prominent civic architects John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley were chosen.
The result was what the Smithsonian Institution's David DeVorkin — a former observatory tour guide — calls "the hood ornament of Los Angeles."
True to its public aspirations, the observatory emphasized showmanship. The facility's Hollywood connections meant it could tap skilled studio artists and technicians for exhibits and planetarium shows.
The philosophy from the beginning was to turn visitors into observers in a building full of scientific instruments, Krupp says. In fact, the $93-million renovation and expansion of the observatory in 2006 was guided by the concept that the entire building is an instrument.
Krupp returned to Griffith's famous quote on Mt. Wilson: "If all mankind could look through that telescope it would change the world."
It reflects Griffith's view that seeing into the cosmos could affect people personally, and perhaps transform society. That's what makes his observatory so special, Krupp says: "He wanted a place that would make the universe intelligible to the public through personal engagement with the sky."
larry.harnisch@latimes.com
WASHINGTON — When the Obama administration circulated to the nation’s Internet providers last week a lengthy confidential list of computer addresses linked to a hacking group that has stolen terabytes of data from American corporations, it left out one crucial fact: that nearly every one of the digital addresses could be traced to the neighborhood in Shanghai that is headquarters to the Chinese military’s cybercommand.
A building that houses a Chinese military unit on the outskirts of Shanghai, believed to be the source of hacking attacks.
That deliberate omission underscored the heightened sensitivities inside the Obama administration over just how directly to confront China’s untested new leadership over the hacking issue, as the administration escalates demands that China halt the state-sponsored attacks that Beijing insists it is not mounting.
The issue illustrates how different the worsening cyber-cold war between the world’s two largest economies is from the more familiar superpower conflicts of past decades — in some ways less dangerous, in others more complex and pernicious.
Administration officials say they are now more willing than before to call out the Chinese directly — as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. did last week in announcing a new strategy to combat theft of intellectual property. But President Obama avoided mentioning China by name — or Russia or Iran, the other two countries the president worries most about — when he declared in his State of the Union address that “we know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.” He added: “Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air traffic control systems.”
Defining “enemies” in this case is not always an easy task. China is not an outright foe of the United States, the way the Soviet Union once was; rather, China is both an economic competitor and a crucial supplier and customer. The two countries traded $425 billion in goods last year, and China remains, despite many diplomatic tensions, a critical financier of American debt. As Hillary Rodham Clinton put it to Australia’s prime minister in 2009 on her way to visit China for the first time as secretary of state, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”
In the case of the evidence that the People’s Liberation Army is probably the force behind “Comment Crew,” the biggest of roughly 20 hacking groups that American intelligence agencies follow, the answer is that the United States is being highly circumspect. Administration officials were perfectly happy to have Mandiant, a private security firm, issue the report tracing the cyberattacks to the door of China’s cybercommand; American officials said privately that they had no problems with Mandiant’s conclusions, but they did not want to say so on the record.
That explains why China went unmentioned as the location of the suspect servers in the warning to Internet providers. “We were told that directly embarrassing the Chinese would backfire,” one intelligence official said. “It would only make them more defensive, and more nationalistic.”
That view is beginning to change, though. On the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was asked whether he believed that the Chinese military and civilian government were behind the economic espionage. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he replied.
In the next few months, American officials say, there will be many private warnings delivered by Washington to Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, who will soon assume China’s presidency. Both Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mrs. Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, have trips to China in the offing. Those private conversations are expected to make a case that the sheer size and sophistication of the attacks over the past few years threaten to erode support for China among the country’s biggest allies in Washington, the American business community.
“America’s biggest global firms have been ballast in the relationship” with China, said Kurt M. Campbell, who recently resigned as assistant secretary of state for East Asia to start a consulting firm, the Asia Group, to manage the prickly commercial relationships. “And now they are the ones telling the Chinese that these pernicious attacks are undermining what has been built up over decades.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 24, 2013
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect month for a visit to the Pentagon by a senior Chinese military leader. The visit took place in May 2011, not April 2011.
Kristen Stewart attended the 85th Annual Academy Awards on Sunday sporting quite the fashion statement – crutches.
The On the Road actress was forced to use them to help her make her way onto the red carpet after she stepped on glass.
The star's makeup artist, Beau Nelson, tells PEOPLE she "cut the ball of her foot, quite severely on glass two days ago." But a true pro, Stewart, 22, managed to pose for photographs without any crutches, showing off her cream-colored Reem Acra gown. Nelson adds that Stewart is "a little bit of pain" and it was a scramble to find suitable flats!
While she isn't nominated for any Oscars, Stewart's film Breaking Dawn Part 2 did sweep the 33rd annual Golden Raspberry Awards – better known as the Razzies – with seven awards.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.
The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.
Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.
"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."
Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.
The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.
Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.
FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.
Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.
FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer
Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.
Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.
Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.
TEHRAN (AP) — Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Saturday that they had captured a foreign unmanned aircraft during a military exercise in southern Iran.
Gen. Hamid Sarkheili, a spokesman for the military exercise, said the guards’ electronic warfare unit spotted signals indicating that foreign drones were trying to enter Iranian airspace. General Sarkheili said experts took control of one drone’s navigation system and brought it down near the city of Sirjan, where the military drills began Saturday.
“While probing signals in the area, we spotted foreign and enemy drones which attempted to enter the area of the war game,” the official IRNA news agency quoted the general as saying. “We were able to get one enemy drone to land.”
General Sarkheili did not say whether the drone was American.
In Washington, a C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.
Iran has claimed to have captured several American drones, including an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel C.I.A. spy drone in December 2011 and at least three ScanEagle aircraft.
Taylor Lautner and Mackenzie Foy, in Breaking Dawn – Part 2
Andrew Cooper, SMPSP/Summit
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, Adam Sandler and Rihanna are among the "winners" of the 33rd annual Golden Raspberry Awards – the Razzies – which are not so much handed out as they are thrown at those who are voted as perpetrating Hollywood's worst achievements of the year.
Breaking Dawn – Part 2, the fifth and final installment in Stephenie Meyer's vampire saga, was recognized in seven categories, including worst picture.
The flick's Kristen Stewart was also cited as worst actress; Taylor Lautner, worst supporting actor; Lautner and 12-year-old Mackenzie Foy, worst screen couple; the entire cast, including Robert Pattinson, worst screen ensemble, and Bill Condon, worst director.
In addition, the film, which since opening last November has taken in more than $828 million at the box office, was named worst sequel.
Sandler, who last year monopolized the Razzies – and set a record by winning in 10 categories with the "comedy" Jack & Jill – this year got only two awards: for worst actor of the year and worst screenplay, both for That's My Boy.
Unlike the Oscars, which keep voting tallies a secret and will be handed out Sunday night during a very glamorous event, founder and Head RAZZberry John Wilson announced Razzie recipients Saturday night in the utilitarian Continental Breakfast Room of the Holiday Inn Express Hollywood Walk of Fame hotel, near (and yet so far from) the Dolby Theatre, home of the Academy Awards.
Wilson revealed to the press that although Rihanna, as worst supporting actress in the movie Battleship, won her Razzie by a landslide, worst screenwriter Sandler only beat the authors of Breaking Dawn by a single vote.
It's close shaves like that that really make or break the Razzies.
Adam Sandler, in That's My Boy, and Rihanna, in Battleship
Columbia; Universal
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.
The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.
Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.
"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."
Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.
The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.
Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.
FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.
Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.
FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer
Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.
Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.
Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.
An outdoor advertising company fighting to preserve dozens of digital billboards across Los Angeles warned this week that it would seek "substantially" more than $100 million from City Hall if it is ordered to remove any electronic signs targeted in a recent court ruling.
In an 11-page letter sent Friday, Clear Channel Outdoor told Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Atty. Carmen Trutanich and Council President Herb Wesson that its digital signs are "valuable assets that the city cannot attempt to take away without paying just compensation."
The letter comes two months after a three-judge panel struck down a 2006 legal settlement approved by the City Council allowing Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor to convert 840 existing billboards to digital formats. The company installed 79 digital signs before the settlement was blocked.
The 2nd District Court of Appeal ordered a lower court to invalidate all digital conversions permitted under the agreement. But Sara Lee Keller, Clear Channel's lawyer, warned that if the council instructs the company to turn off the signs, "it would be exposed to liability to Clear Channel for the fair market value of such signs, which substantially exceeds $100 million."
"While litigating these claims would be costly and time-consuming for all … we believe it is important to be clear about the consequences," wrote Keller, who contends that other factors make all of the company's signs legal.
The letter drew a sharp response from Summit Media, a competing sign company that successfully sued to block the 2006 agreement. Phil Recht, the company's attorney, said Clear Channel has "no regard for the rule of law."
"Clear Channel is trying to bully the city into submission so that they can continue to make hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits from these digital billboards two courts ruled to be illegal," he said.
Clear Channel sent its letter one day before neighborhood activists and outdoor-advertising lobbyists — including the company and its representatives — took part in a working group to discuss possible digital sign legislation. One proposal up for discussion would allow new digital billboards to be installed in exchange for removing a greater number of static billboards.
Summit promised to work with neighborhoods on digital sign issues, saying the technology diminishes quality of life. In recent years, it has described the original 2006 agreement as a "sweetheart deal" that gave CBS and Clear Channel hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Since the ruling, Clear Channel has been waging a publicity campaign in favor of digital billboards, putting together an advocacy group to argue on its behalf and touting support for its signs from such groups as AIDS Project Los Angeles, Art Share L.A. and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Those groups, among others, have asked the state Supreme Court to take another look at the ruling that invalidated the 2006 digital sign pact, according to Clear Channel's letter.
Clear Channel and a handful of other billboard companies also have been contributing tens of thousands of dollars in recent weeks to Proposition A, which is on the March 5 ballot and would raise the sales tax rate to 9.5% from 9%. That measure, if passed, is expected to generate more than $200 million annually for the city budget.
Meanwhile, Lamar Advertising, which has proposed its own plan for converting signs to digital formats, has been spending $5,000 per candidate on outdoor advertising promoting the City Council campaigns of Councilman Joe Buscaino, Assemblymen Bob Blumenfield (D-Woodland Hills) and Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), and former Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, as well as the city controller campaign of Councilman Dennis Zine.
Friday's letter from Clear Channel was accompanied by a legal claim, a document submitted before the filing of a lawsuit. Clear Channel spokesman Jim Cullinan said his company sent it because it must provide 90 days' notice before filing an action in court.
"This letter gives notice, but we hope it doesn't come to litigation," he said.
david.zahniser@latimes.com
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