Papal Conclave Accompanied by Reports of Scandals and Intrigue

Osservatore Romano/Reuters

Pope Benedict XVI, right, spoke to cardinals at the Vatican on Saturday.

VATICAN CITY — As cardinals from around the world begin arriving in Rome for a conclave to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, new shadows have fallen over the delicate transition, which the Vatican fears might influence the vote and with it the direction of the Roman Catholic Church.

In recent days, often speculative reports in the Italian news media — some even alleging gay sex scandals in the Vatican, others focusing on particular cardinals stung by the child sex abuse crisis — have dominated headlines, suggesting fierce internal struggles as prelates scramble to consolidate power and attack enemies in the dying days of a troubled papacy.

The reports, which the Vatican has vehemently denied, touch on some of the most vexing issues of Benedict’s reign, including the child sex abuse crisis and international criticisms of the Vatican Bank’s opaque record-keeping. The recent explosion of bad press — which some Vatican experts say is fed by carefully orchestrated leaks meant to weaken some papal contenders — also speak to Benedict’s own difficulties governing, which analysts say he is trying to address, albeit belatedly, with several high-profile personnel changes.

The drumbeat of scandal has reached such a fever pitch that on Saturday, the Vatican Secretariat of State issued a rare pointed rebuke, calling it “deplorable” that ahead of the conclave there was “a widespread distribution of often unverified, unverifiable or completely false news stories, that cause serious damage to persons and institutions.”

The Vatican compared the news reports to past attempts by foreign states to exert pressure on the papal election, saying the latest efforts to skew the choice of the next pope by trying to shape public opinion were “based on judgments that do not typically capture the spiritual aspect of the moment that the Church is living.”

Benedict had hoped to address at least one scandal with the Feb. 15 appointment of a new head of the Vatican Bank. It is less clear why he reassigned a powerful Vatican diplomatic official to a posting outside Rome, though experts say it diminishes the official’s role in helping steer Vatican policy.

On Feb. 11, Benedict made history by announcing that he would step down by month’s end. He said he was worn down by age and was resigning “in full liberty and for the good of the Church.” The volley of news reports since appeared to underscore the backbiting in the Vatican that Benedict was unable to control, and provided a hint of why he might have decided that someone younger and stronger should lead the church.

At the conclusion of the Vatican’s Lenten spiritual retreat, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the director of the Pontifical Council for Culture and a papal contender, spoke darkly of the “divisions, dissent, careerism, jealousies” that he said plagued the Vatican hierarchy.

The recent spate of news reports were linked to an earlier scandal in which the pope’s butler stole confidential documents that was considered one of the gravest security breaches in the modern history of the church.

Last week, largely unsourced articles in the center-left daily La Repubblica and the center-right weekly Panorama reported that three cardinals whom Benedict had asked last summer to investigate the leaking of the documents, known as the “VatiLeaks” scandal, had found evidence of Vatican officials who had been put in compromising positions.

The newspapers reported that, after interviewing dozens of people inside and outside the Vatican, the cardinals produced a hefty dossier. “The report is explicit. Some high prelates are subject to ‘external influence’ — we would call it blackmail — by nonchurch men to whom they are bound by ‘worldly’ ties,” La Repubblica wrote.

Vatican experts speculated that prelates eager to undermine opponents during the conclave were behind the leaks to the news media over the last week.

“The conclave is a mechanism that serves to create a dynasty in a monarchy without children, so it’s a complicated operation,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Center in Bologna and the author of a book on conclaves.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of a cardinal. His name is Roger M. Mahony, not Roger M. Mahoney.

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Eric Garcetti's role in L.A. budget fixes is in dispute

Pressed in the race for mayor of Los Angeles to say how he would fix a persistent budget gap that has led to the gutting of many city services, Eric Garcetti urges voters to look at what he has done in the past.

The onetime City Council president claims credit for reforms that he said cut the City Hall shortfall to just over $200 million from more than $1 billion. He sees "tremendous progress," principally in reducing pension and healthcare costs, and asserts: "I delivered that."

But the truth is in dispute. Although there is not a singular view about any aspect of the city's troubled finances, most of those in the thick of recent budget fights depict Garcetti not as a fiscal hard-liner but as a conciliator who used his leadership position to chart a middle ground on the most significant changes.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, city administrative officer Miguel Santana and one of Garcetti's rivals in the mayoral race, Councilwoman Jan Perry, were among those who pushed for bigger workforce reductions and larger employee contributions toward pensions and healthcare. Labor leaders and their champions on the City Council, including Paul Koretz and Richard Alarcon, sought to cushion the blow for workers.

Garcetti and his supporters say he moderated between those extremes. His critics said he worried too much about process and airing every viewpoint rather than focusing relentlessly on shoring up the city's bottom line.

"It was through the mayor's persistence and steadfast position that we got ongoing concessions," said Santana, the chief budget official for Los Angeles. "It was in collaboration with the council leadership that we finally reached agreements with labor."

The $1-billion-plus deficit Garcetti speaks of shrinking refers not to a single year but to the total of budget gaps that confronted Los Angeles over four years if no corrective action had been taken. The city's fiscal crisis worsened during that time because Garcetti and his fellow council members — including Perry and mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel — approved a city employee pay raise of 25% over five years just before the country stumbled into the recession. (Greuel left the council in 2009 when she was elected city controller.)

Although Garcetti focuses on his role, a portion of the financial improvements were outside his control. The state's elimination of redevelopment agencies in 2012 returned millions to L.A.'s general fund. Tax revenue also ticked upward with the economic recovery.

Garcetti's position as council president from 2006 through 2011 did put him at the center of debate about annual shortfalls that ranged to more than $400 million.

In 2009, he supported an early retirement plan that knocked 2,400 workers off the payroll. "I really pushed that through," the councilman said in an interview. Two participants in confidential contract talks at the heart of the deal had diametrically opposed views. "He made it happen, period," one said; the other offered: "I wouldn't say he was a major mover."

The plan saves the city a maximum of $230 million a year in salary and pension reductions in the short run. But Los Angeles borrowed to spread the costs of the program over 15 years, with current employees and retirees expected to shoulder the cost of the early exits.

The early retirements are expected to do nothing to resolve the long-term "structural deficit" — the $200 million to $400 million a year that Los Angeles spends above what it takes in. And early retirements could even be a net negative in the long run if, as city revenue recovers, new employees are put in those 2,400 empty positions too quickly.

In 2010 the city completed a budget fix that did attack the structural imbalance.

Garcetti's initial proposal called for upping the retirement age for new city employees to 60 from 55 and requiring workers to contribute a minimum of 2% of salary toward their retiree health care.

Budget chief Santana offered a markedly tougher plan. It required a 4% retiree health contribution, halved the health subsidy for retirees and capped pension benefits at 75% of salary instead of 100%. Santana's plan, also for new employees, became the basis of the reform.

Some who served with Garcetti on the council committee that leads employee negotiations pushed for even greater sacrifices. But Garcetti fought against ratcheting up demands on workers, saying it would be useless to approve a plan that would not survive subsequent union votes.

The councilman's greatest contribution may have come after city leaders set their position on pensions. Garcetti took the unusual step of visiting groups of workers. Some employees booed. Some asked him why city lawmakers, among the highest paid in the nation at $178,000 a year, didn't cut their own salaries.

"There was a lot of anger," said a labor leader who spoke on condition of anonymity because that union has not endorsed in the race. "But Eric talked to people as if they were adults and stayed until he answered all their questions. People appreciated him ... taking that kind of heat."

Matt Szabo, a former deputy mayor who helped negotiate with labor, said Garcetti deserved "every bit of credit" he has claimed for deficit reduction. "He knew he was running for mayor, and he was doing the right thing, but it was something that was going to cost him later" in terms of union support, said Szabo, who is running to replace Garcetti on the council.

Most of the employee groups that have endorsed thus far in the mayor's race have come out for Greuel. One political advantage for the controller: She left the council in 2009, before the city began making its toughest demands on workers.

Garcetti found himself stuck the middle again with another 2010 vote, this one over the elimination of 232 jobs — most of them in libraries and day care operations at city parks. Garcetti voted for the layoffs. Later he voted to reconsider, though he said recently that he intended only to re-air the issue, not to keep the workers on the job.

Labor leaders faulted Garcetti for giving the appearance he might be ready to save the jobs when he really wasn't. The reductions remain a sore point, because a "poison pill" in the contract required that any layoffs be accompanied by immediate pay raises for remaining city employees. Fierce disagreement remains over whether the layoffs saved the city any money.

"That became part of the negative picture" of Garcetti, said one labor leader, who asked not to be named out of concern about alienating a possible future mayor. The candidate said in an interview that he frequently found himself hewing a middle ground between some colleagues "who simply hope more revenue would come in" and others who wanted to use an "ax," making indiscriminate cuts. He added: "To me, both views were equally unacceptable."

Critics find Garcetti too malleable, ready to shift to the last argument he has heard. But others appreciate his quest for the middle, saying the fact he sometimes irritated both budget hard-liners and unions showed he had taken a reasoned approach.

"The criticism of Eric is also sort of the good news," said one of the union reps. "He has this very process-y, kumbaya, can't-we-all-get-along style. It drove us all crazy. But now I really miss it because it seems to be all politics over policy."

james.rainey@latimes.com

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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug

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.

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The Hunger Games: Katniss & Peeta's Victory Tour Look Revealed

02/22/2013 at 06:00 PM EST

They survived the Hunger Games – but will they survive the Victory Tour?

Sporting bridal-like attire, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) pose for a promotional poster for the Victory Tour – which – in the Hunger Games universe – is when the victor of the annual Hunger Games tournament visits each of the fictional Panem's districts.

As true Hunger Games fans know, there is usually only one victor – but Katniss and Peeta rebelled against the Capitol in the first movie, originally opting for joint suicide instead of murder.

The softer look is a deliberate statement, meant to continue the charade that Katniss and Peeta were blinded by love when they rebelled against the rules in the arena.

The second film, Catching Fire, hits theaters Nov. 22.

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‘Anonymous’ becomes latest victim in Twitter hacking spree

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Scud Missile Attack Reported in Aleppo

Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

People gathered to search for survivors under rubble after what activists said was a Scud missile hit in Aleppo's Tariq al Bab neighborhood on Friday.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Antigovernment activists in Syria said Scud missiles fired by the Syrian military slammed into at least three rebel-held districts of Aleppo on Friday, flattening dozens of houses, leaving at least 12 civilians dead and burying an undetermined number of others, perhaps dozens, under piles of rubble.

The assertion, corroborated by videos posted on the Internet, came one day after Syrian government targets in central Damascus were hit by multiple car bombings that were among the deadliest and most destructive so far in the nearly two-year-old conflict.

The reported attack on Aleppo’s Hamra, Tariq al Bab and Hanano areas with Scuds, which are not known for their accuracy, was the second time this week that the Syrian opposition has accused the military of using such missiles on Aleppo’s rebel-held areas.

Aleppo, the embattled northern city that was once Syria’s commercial capital during more peaceful times, has become one of the focal points of rebellion in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. On Tuesday, according to activists in Aleppo, a Syrian missile leveled part of Jabal Badro, another neighborhood controlled by the rebels, killing at least 19 people.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group with contacts inside Syria, said in a statement that the victims of missile explosions in Aleppo on Friday included children and that the number of victims “is expected to rise significantly because there are dozens of wounded under the rubble.”

There was no immediate mention of the Aleppo attacks by Syria’s state-run media. The Web site of Syria’s official SANA news agency was dominated by the aftermath of the car bombings that had hit central Damascus on Thursday and had left more than 70 people dead. The ferocity and scope of those bombings were unusual for central Damascus, which up until now has been largely insulated from much of the carnage and destruction wrought by the conflict in the outer Damascus suburbs and other parts of the country.

Most of the casualties in Damascus were caused by an especially powerful bomb near the headquarters of President Assad’s Baath Party and the Embassy of Russia, which were both damaged, according to witnesses contacted inside Damascus and Russian news reports. SANA said a hospital and neighboring schools also were damaged.

No group has taken responsibility for the Damascus bombings but the government has said they were carried out by terrorists, its generic description of the alliance of armed rebels seeking to depose Mr. Assad. The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main Syrian group for the opposition which was meeting in Cairo at the time, condemned the bombings, as did its Western supporters, including the United States.

Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Thursday that the United States denounces such bombings as “indiscriminate acts of violence against civilians or against diplomatic facilities, which violate international law, and we continue to emphasize that perpetrators on all sides have to be held accountable.”

Nonetheless, the bombings appeared to create a new source of diplomatic friction between the United States and Russia, which has consistently supported the Syrian government during the conflict and has rejected any proposed solution that would force Mr. Assad to relinquish power.

Russia’s mission to the United Nations accused the United States of blocking its attempt to seek approval of a Security Council statement that would have condemned the Damascus bombings as terrorism. The United States mission denied the Russian accusation, saying it had only requested that the Russian statement include a paragraph that also condemned the Syrian government’s “continued, indiscriminate use of heavy weaponry against civilians.”

Erin Pelton, a spokeswoman for the United States mission, said in news release posted Friday on its Web site that “Unfortunately, if predictably, Russia rejected the U.S. suggested language as ‘totally unacceptable’ and withdrew its draft statement.”

Other insurgency-related violence was reported by the Syrian Observatory and other activists elsewhere in Syria on Friday, including random sniping attacks in the north-central city of Raqqa that killed four people during an antigovernment demonstration, and seven people killed around a mosque in Dara’a, the southern city where the anti-Assad uprising first began in March 2011.

The Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad network of activists, reported that fighters from the Free Syrian Army and other groups had taken control of at least two military facilities in the suburbs of Deir al-Zour, the eastern city that has been a battleground for many months. The report, which could not be corroborated, also claimed that rebels had gained control of a missile facility in Deir al-Zour that was formerly the site of a partly built nuclear reactor bombed by Israeli warplanes in 2007. Syria disclosed the existence of the missile facility four years ago at a technical meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Hwaida Saad reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Doctor sexually assaulted unconscious patients, police say

An Orange County anesthesiologist convicted of sexually assaulting three unconscious female patients  has been sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation, despite the objections of prosecutors who wanted state prison time.

Yashwant Balgiri Giri, 60, pleaded guilty to a court offer to multiple felony counts related to the sexual battery of patients, including a 16-year-old, according to a statement from the Orange County district attorney's office.

Giri will have to register as a lifetime sex offender and will have his medical license revoked, in addition to the jail time and probation.

Prosecutors sought a state prison sentence, citing a violation of his "position of power and trust" with the women at a particularly vulnerable time.

Giri, who lives in Cypress, was working at Placentia-Linda Hospital at the time of the crimes, prosecutors said. He previously worked at several hospitals in Anaheim and Lakewood.

Through a spokeswoman, Placentia-Linda Hospital declined to comment.

Prosecutors said that in February 2009,  while a 16-year-old was unconscious from medication, Giri assaulted the girl when a scrub nurse preparing surgery tools had her back turned. The nurse witnessed the assault, prosecutors said, and reported it immediately to a hospital official.

Prosecutors allege that the hospital did not report the incident to police at the time.

In March 2011, prosecutors said, a hospital employee witnessed Giri fondling the breasts of a 36-year-old woman while she was under anesthesia for an outpatient surgery procedure.

An employee allegedly witnessed the incident  Prosecutors said the fondling continued for an extended period of time, as his actions were concealed from the surgeon and nurse.

The alleged assault was reported to a hospital official and then to Placentia police, prosecutors said.

Soon after an investigation began, Giri resigned from his duties at the hospital.

After he was arrested in May 2011, a third alleged victim stepped forward, saying she had been assaulted by Giri.

In April 2010, prosecutors said, Giri assaulted a 27-year-old woman while she was being put under anesthesia but before she was unconscious. Prosecutors said he touched the woman under the pretense of performing an examination, although it had no legitimate medical purpose.

During a sentencing hearing, a statement from the then-36-year-old woman, who was fondled, was read by prosecutors.

"His actions make me question every single doctor, nurse, medical decision and procedure I encounter within my everyday life," she said. "I not only fear for myself, I fear for my child, my friends, my family. This is a burden caused by the perverted actions of this predator."

ALSO:

 O.C. shootings: Listen to frantic 911 call

Hollywood Park Casino might lay off all 600 workers

San Diego sheriff confident 2 wounded deputies will fully recover

-- Rick Rojas

Photo: Yashwant Balgiri Giri. Credit: Orange County district attorney's office.

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Do the Hemsworth Brothers Have a Type?

Stylewatch
Style News Now

02/20/2013 at 04:30 PM ET

AKM-GSI (2)

Miley Cyrus has been very open about fiancé Liam Hemsworth’s fondness for her bold new do — and he’s obviously a fan of her increasingly funky ensembles as well.

And now that we’ve spotted Hemsworth’s brother Chris out with his wife, Elsa Pataky, who’s rocking a Cyrus-esque ensemble herself, we have to wonder: do the Hemsworth boys have a type?

Both of the Aussie hotties’ significant others share an affinity for shredded denim, chunky engineer boots and choppy, super-short blonde hair.

And when we spotted the tiny girls standing next to the bulky brothers, both clad in V-necks, slouchy jeans and aviators, we admit we had to do a double take to deduce which couple was which.

Fortunately, Chris travels with the ultimate accessory — his adorable baby daughter — which makes them a bit easier to tell apart. But we still have to guess there’s a lot of confusion around the Hemsworth household at holidays.

Tell us: Do you and your siblings go for the same “type?” Are you amused that the Hemsworth boys seem to?

–Alex Apatoff

GET MORE STAR DATE STYLE INSPIRATION HERE!

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Why Twitter Makes Us Want to Add Extra Letterssss

For the March issue of The Atlantic, I spoke with linguists about this thingggg we’re doing with words — a growing habit in which otherwise reasonable people cavalierly add extra letters to the words in their texts, emails, tweets, and so forth — to find out why. One of the experts I met while working on that piece was Tyler Schnoebelen, a recent PhD from Stanford who wrote his dissertation on emotion in language and blogs about newsworthy word-findings at Corpus Linguistics. He’s been focusing lately on the phenomenon of word lengthening or “expressive lengthening” on Twitter. (He’s also one of the researchers behind a recent study about how men and women tweet.) For his dissertation, he analyzed data consisting of 3,775,174 tweets from 102,304 different English-speaking authors, tweeted in the six months between January to June of 2011 in the U.S. He was looking at the way people used emoticons in their tweets, but in that exploration he found something else: Along with those emoticons, people were adding letters to their words, too. Or toooooo. In the interest of learning more about why word lengthening exists, even on an inherently character-limited social media platform like Twitter, I turned to him with a few questions. 

RELATED: Exploring the Character of a Bad Word

What words get lengthened the most on Twitter, and why? The main ones are the expressive things you don’t think of as words — mmmm, oh, ah, aw. You can put as many letters on those as you want. That gets extended to words like hey, no, yes, and the letters that get extended are usually the ones you can hold onto, vowels or ns or ses. Then it gets even crazier — OMgggg or LMAOoo or LOLlll, though you’re not actually saying “laughing my ass off off off” or “laugh out loud loud loud loud.” From that there’s extending real words you can’t pronounce, shittttt or happppppy or amazinggggg. You start with these expressions that don’t have a proper spelling, things no one tells you how to write, and you add and go beyond that to make words more affective and expressive.

RELATED: David Cameron’s Semantic Chauvinism

You wrote a post about a friend who’d seen the word dumb tweeted as DUMBBB, which inspired you to take a look at which specific letters were added most frequently and why. Ooo was a big winner. Why do you think people pick the particular letters they do?  People love the o! I think it’s something about rounding your lips; it’s iconic of getting your mouth around something. Your lips, pursing forward, going out into the world … there’s something there. 

RELATED: The Ways in Which We Mistake Our Words

What about the more unusual added letters, like b or g? I think the gs are the most fun. People who use them are really taking this idea that you can extend things and going crazy with it. You can’t pronounce a word like Omgggg, but it’s been lifted away from the speech itself. In real speech, which is normally face to face, there are so many different ways to communicate — I’m not just happy but really happy — but we don’t have that in a tweet or text or email. Adding letters is a version of a big intonation, raised eyebrows. 

RELATED: Geoffrey Chaucer Coined ‘Twitter’

In terms of voicing, vowels make sense to lengthen because when we’re speaking that’s what we’re doing. Sometimes there are consonants, s or n, we do that in speech, too. But you don’t pronounce the b in dumb in English, so what does adding that letter mean? The end is a nice attractive spot, maybe, that gets across that you’re doing something. Clearly when people are doing this they’re being playful.  

RELATED: Embracing the Age of Autocorrect

So this is all about adding feeling to our too-brief 140-character missives? It’s not a waste of space, I guess, because of emotional layering gained? If you look at these words, a lot of them are from the expressive class. You’re already expressing some emotional state with them — aw — or you’re using them for augmentative purposes, like so and lots of affirmatives and negations: yeahhh, nooo, yesssss. But I think it’s telling that some of the other more frequent words that get extra letters are unpronounceable. People are trying to give some flavor to the communication. These additions really help get the point across and share intonation. That’s part of it: You can hear them in your ear.

Are specific usages unique to different people or subsets of Twitter? People using LMFAOOO tend to talk about Chris Brown and Nicki Minaj; there’s a hip-hop feel to that. People who write knowww with extra ws or youuu with extra us also use the word mum, they spell thankyou as one word, and they use xoxoxo.

Do you add letters to tweets or emails or texts? I’m a fond of adding extra ooos like most poeple. I don’t think I do it excessively. I tend to make my hms a single. 

There’s also a kind of a social meme-ing to these things. I’m tempted to use v. for very but I can’t help but associate that with Bridget Jones, who does that in her diary, and I have a problem with someone reading me as Bridget Jones. I tentatively aded a v. in a tweet the other day. I rearranged and deleted and put it back several times. Other people may not have a reference like this.

It makes you wonder how long the “curse of Bridget Jones” will hold. Speaking of things evolving and changing, this kind of behavior tends to inspire rants about how proper language and grammar is dying. What do you think about that?  As far as I understand, [the ranters] are full of it. This represents changing conventions; we’re not becoming impaired. We all have cues, while we’re talking on the phone, for instance, and we’d have even more if we were face to face. What we’re usually doing is negotiating what we know about a particular person and what we know about people in general. It has to do with expectations, my experience with you and everybody else. We generally accommodate each other. Over the course of a conversation, our vowels become more alike. Any of these things can be going on below our level of awareness, or they can come up to our level of awareness. We can tweak them, we can notice them.

Your research focused on tweets in which people had used emoticons. Do you think emoticon-users are more likely to add letters to the words they tweet?  They very much do exist together, emoticons and adding letters. It’s easy to call these habits nonstandard, but whether they’re really nonstandard …10 percent of tweets use emoticons. As for the percent of letters added to words, I don’t know. They’re clearly very frequent, especially the expressive sound ones. Emoticons and added letters are not warring with each other; in fact, they go together very well. It’s speculation, but my guess is, if you’re fine with lengthening, you’re probably fine adding emoticons.

What other things do people do on Twitter in order to convey emotion?  Other types of punctuation. You can underline, you can bold, you can do all caps. People do all caps all the time. Putting asterisks around words has existed for a long time, and tends to be used on the internet with verbs indicating what you are doing at the moment (*smiles*). Or you see underscore, word, underscore. Those punctuation techniques will give you a sense that this is important, but not a sense of how it’s said. The all-caps gives you a sense of how it’s said, but many people hear or read it as shouting, and you don’t always mean to do that. The awwwww (expressing condolences) is not something you shout. You can’t shout mmmm.

Mmmmm. Do you see an end to the “trend” of adding letters? Once we get to the point of digesting audio tweets, we won’t need to add letters.

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The Lede: Syrian Television's Most Outraged Bystander

Last Update, 4:47 p.m. In the aftermath of a deadly bombing in Damascus on Thursday, a man emerged from a small knot of bystanders crowded around a camera crew from Syrian state television to vent his anger at the foreign Islamist fighters he held responsible. “We the Syrian people,” he said, “place the blame on the Nusra Front, the Takfiri oppressors and armed Wahhabi terrorists from Saudi Arabia that are armed and trained in Turkey.”

A report on Thursday’s bombing in Damascus from Syrian state television’s YouTube channel.

Pointing at the ruined street near the headquarters of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Baath Party, the man described the location as “a civilian place — a mosque, an elementary school, the homes of local families.”

Watching a copy of the report online, Rime Allaf, a Syrian writer monitoring the conflict from Vienna, noticed that this man on the street, whose views so closely echoed those of the Syrian government, had a very familiar face. That is because, as opposition activists demonstrated last June, the same man had already appeared at least 18 times in the forefront or background of such reports since the start of the uprising.

Man who appears on #Syria TV as “innocent bystander” with every Damascus car bomb has again appeared today. http://t.co/PmPRhzUUBN

— Rime Allaf (@rallaf) 21 Feb 13

After she posted a screenshot of the man’s latest appearance, Ms. Allaf observed on Twitter that “it would be funny if there weren’t so many victims of Syria regime terrorism!”

As The Lede noted last year, the man was even featured in two reports the same day during a small pro-Assad rally in Damascus.

Two pro-Assad television channels in Syria interviewed the same man on the street at a rally in July 2012.

Mocking the dark comedy of government-run channels recycling the same die-hard Assad supporter in so many reports, activists put together several video compilations of his appearances in the state media. The most comprehensive, posted online last June, featured excerpts from 18 reports.

A compilation of Syrian state media reports featuring the same Assad supporter again and again.

Another highlight reel, uploaded to YouTube 13 months ago by a government critic, showed that after the man had spoken at least five times on state-run television, he appeared in the background of a BBC report wearing a military uniform.

A man who is frequently interviewed on Syrian state television in civilian dress appeared in the background of a BBC report wearing a military uniform.

As longtime readers of The Lede may recall, during the dispute over Iran’s 2009 presidential election, opposition bloggers noticed that one particularly die-hard supporter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also appeared again and again and again in photographs of pro-government rallies.

While there is no way to determine just who is responsible for Syrian television’s frequent interviews with this same man on the street, there is some evidence that Iran has advised Syria on how to report bombings on state television.

Last year, when The Guardian published a trove of hacked e-mails taken from the in-boxes of Syrian officials, one message forwarded to the president appeared to include advice from Iranian state television’s bureau chief in Damascus on what his Syrian counterparts should report after bombings. That e-mail, from Hussein Mortada, a Lebanese journalist who runs coverage of Syria for the Iranian government’s satellite news channels, complained that the government was not heeding directions he had received “from Iran and Hezbollah,” the Lebanese militant group, about who Syria should blame for bomb attacks. “It is not in our interest to say that Al Qaeda is behind” every bombing, Mr. Mortada wrote, “because such statements clear the U.S. administration and the Syrian opposition of any responsibility.”

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