Cemetery tour guide loves her dead-end job

With her chiseled features, 1940s-style black dress, retro sunglasses and lacy black parasol, tour guide Karie Bible strolls the 60 acres of Hollywood Forever Cemetery looking as if she might be a wayward mourner from the funeral of Tyrone Power or another Tinseltown luminary.

She answers the obvious questions that, yes, her name really is Karie Bible, and, yes, she really was born on Halloween, saying, "I can't make this up."

Being a cemetery tour guide may seem an unlikely avocation. But it's the logical fusion of two of Bible's childhood influences: horror films and family vacations to Civil War battlefields.

"We went to Vicksburg, Miss., one summer ... and I remember the docent had this beautiful antebellum gown on even though it was a billion degrees, and she let me touch a cannonball that was lodged in the wall of this old antebellum mansion," Bible said. "Going to those battlefields is just history brought to life. As a kid, that was just the most exciting thing in the world to me."

At home, she consumed old horror movies broadcast on television. "I didn't like Barbie, but I loved Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Those were my little girlhood heroes," Bible said. After earning a film degree from what is now the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Bible headed west. "I came out here in 2000 and fell in love with this cemetery," she said.

She walks the cemetery like a historian exploring a Civil War battlefield. Unlike the usual rumor-laden Hollywood death tour, there's not an ounce of fiction as she tells visitors about the famous and nearly forgotten, from Vampira to Valentino, among the cemetery's roughly 89,000 residents.

"There's this sense that you can write anything you want about a Hollywood star and people take it at face value," she said. "You couldn't write a trashy, sleazy tell-all about someone like Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln…. But if you write that about Joan Crawford or Valentino, people just believe it."

Not that the facts are always easy to discern. Consider the erroneous birth year on Jayne Mansfield's cenotaph (the actress is actually buried elsewhere, but her fans wanted her to have a marker in Hollywood). "Lying about your age is common in Hollywood, even unto death," Bible said.

Every Aug. 23, on the anniversary of Rudolph Valentino's 1926 death, Bible dons a period costume to evoke Hollywood's iconic Lady in Black, who mourned at the silent film star's crypt, but she considers herself more of a "Historian in Black."

"I really endeavor to humanize these people," she said. "They're not just tabloid fodder. They are real flesh-and-blood people who lived and walked the earth and mattered." And although she was born in the 1970s, "way too late to meet a lot of these amazing people," the next best thing is meeting their families and asking questions. The research for her tours never ends, she said.

The variety of monuments placed at Hollywood Forever, mostly hidden behind a strip mall on Santa Monica Boulevard, offers a rebuttal to the popular wisdom that death is the great equalizer. There's a towering obelisk at the grave of Griffith J. Griffith — who notoriously shot his wife and donated land for Griffith Park — and there's a black-and-gold spire at the tomb of fashion critic Mr. Blackwell. But Hollywood giant John Huston's headstone, with a crack across one corner, is about the same size as those of his more obscure neighbors.

"That's the weird thing about this place," Bible said of the contrast. "It's not what you'd expect. But I guess in L.A., things aren't always what they seem."

Among the stops on Bible's standard two-hour tour (she also offers "Hidden Hollywood" and "Jewish Heritage" tours) are Florence Lawrence, the first movie star, whose grave was unmarked until actor Roddy McDowall paid for a headstone, and David White of the TV show "Bewitched," who is buried in a niche with his son Jonathan, a victim of the 1988 bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

And then there is Virginia Rappe, whose mysterious 1921 death resulted in murder charges and three trials for film comic Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle before he was acquitted on allegations of manslaughter.

"To me, she had a sad life," Bible said of Rappe, who is buried next to her fiance, Henry Lehrman. "She never knew the identity of her father; her mom was a chorus girl who died when she was about 13 years old. She was left to be raised by her grandma, who died when she was 20."

Today, Rappe's story is best known by the lurid account in "Hollywood Babylon," Kenneth Anger's notoriously sleazy book about studio scandals, frustrating people like Bible who seek to set the record straight.

"I had a lady on my tour who kept correcting me in front of everybody. She'd say, 'That's not what's was written in "Hollywood Babylon."' And I wanted to be polite as possible, but I said, 'You know what? Just because something makes it into a book doesn't mean it's true,'" Bible said.

In her 10 years of leading tours at the cemetery, she had a chance encounter with Anjelica Huston tending the grave of her father, John; stood by as a group of French tourists sang at the grave of French pop star Joe Dassin; and saw people leave plastic fangs on the headstone of Vampira (Maila Nurmi), who introduced horror movies on local TV in the 1950s. Today, Nurmi is mostly remembered for one day's work in a non-speaking role in Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space," sometimes described as the worst movie ever made.

Of all the monuments at Hollywood Forever, Valentino's grave, still marked with lipstick prints, is the most celebrated, visited and talked-about, Bible said.

"People still constantly kiss that grave," Bible said. "When I get younger people that maybe don't know about him, I kind of compare it to the recent death of Michael Jackson." Some of the cemetery's residents were famous only in their time, but Valentino, who died at 31, is one who transcends his era, she said.

"There's something incredibly romantic about dying young," Bible said, comparing him to James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow. "You don't get old, you don't get heavy, you don't make bad movies, you're kind of frozen in time. I think there's something incredibly romantic about that."

As for Hollywood Forever, Bible said: "I feel such a sense of peace when I'm here…. I'm not a ghost chaser. I'm not into psychic stuff. I've been to certain [cemeteries] where I don't have a good feeling. Here I do. I feel peace."

larry.harnisch@latimes.com

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Bangladesh Fire Kills More Than 100 and Injures Many

MUMBAI, India — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.

It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.

“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”

Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have easily been avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.

Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.

“These brands have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement. “Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”

The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high, with the top three floors under construction, according to a garment industry official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, the industry official said, as many as 600 workers were still inside working overtime.

The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.

Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not enough exits. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire Department, according to The Associated Press.

In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from a cigarette.

In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tazreen Fashions, said he was too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.

Television news reports showed badly burned bodies lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.

The industry official said that many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.

One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way down.

“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”

A document posted on Tazreen Fashions’ Web site indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged “violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would not receive any Walmart orders for a year.

A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”

But the International Labor Rights Forum, which tracks fires in the Bangladesh garment industry, said documents and logos found in the debris indicated that the factory produced clothes for Walmart’s Faded Glory line as well as for other American and foreign companies.

Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the world’s lowest-paid, with entry-level workers making the government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month or slightly above.

Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Stephanie Clifford and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Tom Cruise Films Helicopter Scene in Empty Trafalgar Square

11/25/2012 at 05:15 PM EST

Tom Cruise in Trafalgar Square

FameFlynet

Back to work!

After spending Thanksgiving with daughter Suri, 6, Tom Cruise filmed scenes for the sci-fi action film All You Need Is Kill in London on Sunday.

The actor, who plays alien fighter Lt. Col. Bill Cage, landed in a helicopter in the middle of the usually bustling Trafalgar Square, which was shut down for the scene, in the heart of London.

Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's novel, the movie follows Cage as he battles the Mimics, a violent race of alien invaders, while stuck in a time loop.

Emily Blunt also stars in the film as Special Forces fighter Rita Vrataski, who according to Deadline.com, has destroyed more Mimics than anyone else on earth.

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New California community colleges head is taking things slow

In assuming the reins of California's community colleges system, Brice W. Harris takes over at a pivotal time of long-range budget uncertainty, fluctuating goals and ever-intensifying pressure to educate a sizable portion of the state's workforce.

Harris became chancellor of the nation's largest two-year system Nov. 6 when voters approved Proposition 30, the tax hike measure that avoided a $338-million cut to the colleges. Instead, the system will receive about $210 million more in state funding and is poised to serve 20,000 additional students this spring.

Even with the measure's success, however, the pressure on California's 112 community colleges has barely lifted. Funding has been cut by $809 million, classes have been slashed by nearly a quarter and enrollment has dropped by 500,000 students in recent years. Most students need remedial classes and don't transfer to four-year schools or graduate with associate's degrees.

Harris' role is part lobbyist, part fundraiser and part cheerleader. He can suggest systemwide policies to the 72 locally elected district boards that run the campuses. He can lobby the Legislature and governor's office on behalf of the system's 2.4 million students.

And he said he will lead a broad public discussion about the direction of community colleges, including the state's commitment to its Master Plan for Higher Education, advocating open access and quality, and an embrace of new technology, especially online education.

Harris said educators need to advise policymakers on what is in the colleges' best interests rather than allow legislators to make those decisions. But he has not developed a detailed agenda for his first year.

"I think there's a real risk in charting a specific vision too soon," Harris, 64, said in a recent interview. "A lot of people who are going to accomplish that need to be consulted. We need to talk to faculty, staff and the Board of Governors about what they want to see."

Harris has been widely praised for his energy, efficient and collaborative management style and for gaining the respect of faculty and students over 16 years at the Los Rios Community College District near Sacramento.

But he faces immense hurdles, education experts said.

"Frankly, he was in a much more authoritative and stronger position to effect change in the Los Rios district than he will have as systemwide chancellor," said Steve Boilard, executive director of the Center for California Studies at Cal State Sacramento. "The community college system is a weak system where a tremendous amount of autonomy is granted to individual districts."

Still, his predecessor, Jack Scott, succeeded in steering the schools toward a stronger focus on job training and helping students transfer. To that end, Scott set into place — with the help of the Legislature and the governor — new policies that deemphasize programs for adults seeking recreational activities such as art, language and theater classes.

Boilard, formerly director of higher education for the state's Legislative Analyst's Office, said Harris will immediately have to decide how far to follow that path, which is not universally accepted by faculty or the wider communities the colleges serve.

"I know he's going to have some push-back from others in the system that would rather the cuts fall elsewhere," Boilard said. "Let's just assume that everything community colleges do has some value. The question is: what has less value?"

Another issue the chancellor will have to address is the low rate of student completion and large achievement gaps hindering low-income and minority students, educators and others said.

Harris should pursue measures to make colleges more transparent about how their students are performing, including campus-based score cards, said Michele Siqueiros, executive director of the Campaign for College Opportunity, an advocacy group in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

The new chancellor also will have to deal with requirements easing the transfer process. Legislation in 2010 required community colleges to offer associate's degrees that would guarantee a student admission to California State University as a junior. But a new report by Siqueiros' group has found efforts at some colleges have fallen short.

"One big critique of California is that it doesn't have a coordinating body for higher education," Siqueiros said. "It becomes even more important for Harris and the other two higher-education leaders [at UC and Cal State] to work together and for the Legislature to expect better coordination between the systems."

Although he has not developed detailed strategies, Harris is a strong supporter of measures recommended by a systemwide task force of which he was a member. Many of the steps, such as mandatory education planning, enrollment prioritization and tracking students' academic progress online, were initiated by Harris at Los Rios and have improved success rates there.

But Harris said it is counterproductive to try to control education from the central office and that local colleges must be left to decide the best approach to teaching and learning.

His familiarity with the system was key to his appointment, said Scott Himelstein, immediate past president of the community colleges Board of Governors and chairman of the selection committee.

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Morsi Urged to Retract Edict to Bypass Judges in Egypt

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Protesters lit flares and denounced the edict of President Mohamed Morsi during clashes with riot police officers in front of the high court building in Cairo on Saturday. More Photos »

CAIRO — The association of judges here called Saturday for courts across Egypt to suspend all but their most vital activities to protest an edict by President Mohamed Morsi granting himself unchecked power by setting his decrees above judicial review until the ratification of a new constitution.

The judges’ strike, which drew the support of the leader of the national lawyers’ association, would be the steepest escalation yet in a political struggle between the country’s new Islamist leaders and the institutions of the authoritarian government that was overthrown last year. As it spills into the courts and the streets, the dispute also increasingly threatens to undermine the credibility of Egypt’s political transition as well.

A council that oversees the judiciary denounced Mr. Morsi’s decree, which was issued Thursday, as “an unprecedented attack on judicial independence,” and urged the president to retract parts of the decree eliminating judicial oversight.

State news media reported that judges and prosecutors had already walked out in Alexandria, and there were other news reports of walkouts in Qulubiya and Beheira, but those could not be confirmed.

Outside Egypt’s high court in Cairo, the police fired tear gas at protesters who were denouncing Mr. Morsi and trying to force their way into the building, the second day in a row that protesters took to the streets over the presidential decree, which critics have assailed as a return to autocracy.

Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, a prosecutor appointed by Mr. Morsi’s predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, declared to a crowd of cheering judges that the presidential decree was “null and void.” He denounced what he described as “the systematic campaign against the country’s institutions in general and the judiciary in particular.”

A coalition of disparate opposition leaders including the liberal former United Nations diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, the leftist-nationalist Hamdeen Sabahy, and the former Mubarak-government foreign minister Amr Moussa formed a self-proclaimed National Salvation Front to oppose the decree. In addition to demanding the dissolution of the constitutional assembly, the group declared that it would not speak with Mr. Morsi until he withdrew his decree.

“We will not enter into a dialogue about anything while this constitutional declaration remains intact and in force,” Mr. Moussa said. “We demand that it be withdrawn and then we can talk.”

As the judges group called for a suspension of the courts, a growing number of lawyers filed claims demanding that the courts seek to overturn Mr. Morsi’s decree, joining the battle between the executive and judicial powers.

Advisers to Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, defended his action, saying he was trying to prevent the courts from disbanding the Islamist-dominated constitutional assembly, which is writing a new constitution. The nation’s top courts had already dissolved the Islamist-led parliament and an earlier Islamist-led constituent assembly.

The advisers said a court decision on the new constitutional assembly had been expected as soon as next Sunday.

The judges’ group, as well as the newly unified secular opposition, have demanded that Mr. Morsi withdraw his decree, and that he disband and replace the current constitutional assembly. Many of the assembly’s non-Islamist members, including secularists and representatives of the Coptic Church, had already quit the body to protest the Islamists’ domination.

The increasingly vocal criticism of the assembly threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the ultimate charter, and has only increased the likelihood that the Islamist leaders may seek to pass and ratify it on their own, over the opposition of other groups, further damaging its credibility.

The opposition to the decree has also reinforced the fears of Islamists that judges appointed by Mr. Mubarak and the secular opposition were deliberately seeking to derail the process rather than accept their defeats at the polls.

Nevine Ramzy and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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AP PHOTOS: Simple surgery heals blind Indonesians

PADANG SIDEMPUAN, Indonesia (AP) — They came from the remotest parts of Indonesia, taking crowded overnight ferries and riding for hours in cars or buses — all in the hope that a simple, and free, surgical procedure would restore their eyesight.

Many patients were elderly and needed help to reach two hospitals in Sumatra where mass eye camps were held earlier this month by Nepalese surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit. During eight days, more than 1,400 cataracts were removed.

The patients camped out, sleeping side-by-side on military cots, eating donated food while fire trucks supplied water for showers and toilets. Many who had given up hope of seeing again left smiling after their bandages were removed.

"I've been blind for three years, and it's really bad," said Arlita Tobing, 65, whose sight was restored after the surgery. "I worked on someone's farm, but I couldn't work anymore."

Indonesia has one of the highest rates of blindness in the world, making it a target country for Ruit who travels throughout the developing world holding free mass eye camps while training doctors to perform the simple, stitch-free procedure he pioneered. He often visits hard-to-reach remote areas where health care is scarce and patients are poor. He believes that by teaching doctors how to perform his method of cataract removal, the rate of blindness can be reduced worldwide.

Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness globally, affecting about 20 million people who mostly live in poor countries, according to the World Health Organization.

"We get only one life, and that life is very short. I am blessed by God to have this opportunity," said Ruit, who runs the Tilganga Eye Center in Katmandu, Nepal. "The most important of that is training, taking the idea to other people."

During the recent camps, Ruit trained six doctors from Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

Here, in images, are scenes from the mobile eye camps:

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Kettleman City activists seek to block expansion of toxic dump

KETTLEMAN CITY, Calif. — Environmental activists and leaders of this impoverished community, outraged by unreported spills of cancer-causing chemicals, are trying to block expansion of a toxic waste dump that is the largest of its kind west of the Mississippi River.

Activists say the history of the troubled Chemical Waste Management dump and new citations alleging failure to report 72 hazardous materials spills over the last four years show the company cannot be trusted to protect public health. The state Department of Toxic Substances Control issued the citations earlier this month — and is the agency that must rule on the proposed expansion.

"If this new case is not enough to demonstrate a pattern and practice of violations, I don't know what else the agency would need to see," said Ingrid Brostrom, an attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. The 1,600-acre dump is just off Interstate 5 in Central California.

PHOTOS: Kettleman City's toxic spills

Company officials say the 30-year-old landfill is among the most heavily regulated and monitored facilities of its kind, overseen by nearly a dozen state and federal agencies. During a recent tour of the facility, Bob Henry, Chemical Waste senior district manager, said the spills in question were small, caused by third parties and cleaned up on the site.

State regulators "are simply saying we were supposed to report the spills verbally and with a written report," Henry said. "Is this a major issue? No."

Brian Johnson, the state agency's deputy director of enforcement, disagreed. "It is very serious," he said. "We view these violations as consistent with a troubling pattern and emblematic of a system failure on Chemical Waste's part."

Residents of this close-knit community of 1,500, most of them low-income farmworkers, have long distrusted the facility 3.2 miles from the city. They believe the dump, the only one in California licensed to accept carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, is responsible for serious illnesses, birth defects and deaths among children.

A survey by state health investigators ruled out the dump as the reason 11 babies were born with illnesses including cleft palates and other physical deformities in Kettleman City between September 2007 and March 2010. Three of the babies died.

Despite those findings, many residents blame the landfill. This month, the city has rallied around Ivonne Rangel, whose 2-year-old son Daniel died of leukemia Nov. 12.

Standing last week beside a living-room shrine composed of cheery portraits of her son, fresh roses, toys, rosary beads and candles, Rangel said, "The first thing that came to my mind after my son was diagnosed with aggressive leukemia was that toxic waste dump.

"They say there is no connection between our sick children and the dump, but that is big lie," Rangel said, her eyes filled with tears.

Family and friends held a memorial service and funeral for the boy several days ago.

Maria Saucedo, whose daughter, Ashley, was born with a cleft palate and other ailments and died at 11 months, said she felt "offended and let down by a system that would even consider expanding the dump after all the legal problems and children born with defects."

Chemical Waste officials say the facility is running out of room. With less available space, the company has reduced the amount of hazardous materials it receives from throughout the state to roughly 120,000 tons a year. About 1% of that is PCBs, which are found in electrical transformers, voltage regulators and additives to lubricating and cutting oils.

In 1985, the Environmental Protection Agency fined the company $2.1 million for violations that included operating additional landfills and waste ponds without authorization.

In 2003, the waste dump was among 22 such facilities that California EPA officials determined emitted unusually high levels of radiation.

In 2005, the company was fined $10,000 for violating federal PCB monitoring requirements. It was cited again in 2007 for failing to properly analyze incoming wastes, storm water runoff and leachate for PCBs, and for failing to properly calibrate analytical equipment.

In 2010, the EPA levied a $302,100 fine against the facility for failing to properly manage PCBs. A year later, the facility agreed to pay $400,000 in fines and spend $600,000 on laboratory upgrades needed to properly manage hazardous materials.

Maricela Mares-Alatorre, an activist with Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice and a Kettleman City mother of two, said activists hope the latest citations will be "an eye-opener for state regulators."

louis.sahagun@latimes.com

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Protests Erupt After Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power

CAIRO — Opponents of President Mohamed Morsi were reported to have set fire to his party’s offices in several Egyptian cities on Friday in a spasm of protest and clashes after he granted himself broad powers above any court declaring himself the guardian of Egypt‘s revolution, and used his new authority to order the retrial of Hosni Mubarak.

Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press

Egyptian protesters chanted antigovernment slogans and waved a national flag in Tahrir Square on Friday.

In the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, the opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party clashed with followers of Mr. Morsi, an Islamist, who won Western and regional plaudits only days ago for brokering a cease-fire to halt eight days of lethal exchanges between Israeli forces and militants in the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, portrayed his decree assuming the new powers as an attempt to fulfill popular demands for justice and protect the transition to a constitutional democracy. He said it was necessary to overcome gridlock and competing interests. But the unexpected breadth of the powers he seized raised immediate fears that he might become a new strongman.

“We are, God willing, moving forward, and no one stands in our way,” Reuters quoted Mr. Morsi as saying on Friday said in a suburban mosque here after Friday prayers.

“I fulfill my duties to please God and the nation and I take decisions after consulting with everyone,” he said. “Victory does not come without a clear plan and this is what I have.”

He spoke as state television reported that his party’s offices in the Suez Canal cities of Suez, Port Said and Ismailia had been burned as his foes rampaged. Thousands of people protesting Mr. Morsi’s power grab gathered in Tahrir Square here — the focal point of protests that, last year, swept away Mr. Mubarak. Elsewhere in the capital, the president’s supporters massed in even larger numbers outside the presidential palace where Mr. Morsi said his aim was “to achieve political, social and economic stability.”

“I am for all Egyptians. I will not be biased against any son of Egypt,” he said on a stage outside the presidential palace, Reuters, reported, adding he was working for social and economic stability. “Opposition in Egypt does not worry me, but it has to be real and strong,” he said.

Sounding defensive at times and employing some of the language favored by his autocratic predecessor, Mr. Morsi justified his power grab as necessary to move Egypt’s revolution forward.

“The people wanted me to be the guardian of these steps in this phase,” he said, reminding his audience that he was freely elected after a contest “that the whole world has witnessed.”

“I don’t like, and don’t want — and there is no need — to use exceptional measures,” he said. “But those who are trying to gnaw the bones of the nation,” he added, “must be held accountable.”

News reports said clashes spread from Alexandria to the southern city of Assyut. But the severity of the clashes was not immediately clear.

Mr. Morsi’s new powers prompted one prominent adversary, Mohamed ElBaradei, to say on Twitter: “Morsi today usurped all state powers & appointed himself Egypt’s new pharaoh.”

“An absolute presidential tyranny,” Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of the dissolved Parliament and prominent political scientist, wrote in an online commentary. “Egypt is facing a horrifying coup against legitimacy and the rule of law and a complete assassination of the democratic transition.”

Mr. Morsi issued the decree on Thursday at a high point in his five-month-old presidency, when he was basking in praise from the White House and around the world for his central role in negotiating a cease-fire that the previous night had stopped the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

But his political opponents immediately called for demonstrations on Friday to protest his new powers. “Passing a revolutionary demand within a package of autocratic decisions is a setback for the revolution,” Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a more liberal former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a former presidential candidate, wrote online. And the chief of the Supreme Constitutional Court indicated that it did not accept the decree.

In Washington on Thursday, the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, released a statement saying: “The decisions and declarations announced on November 22 raise concerns from many Egyptians and the international community,” and noting that “one of the aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly concentrated in that hands of any one person or institution.” The statement called for resolution “through democratic dialogue.”

David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported from Cairo and Alan Cowell from Paris. Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

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AP PHOTOS: Simple surgery heals blind Indonesians

PADANG SIDEMPUAN, Indonesia (AP) — They came from the remotest parts of Indonesia, taking crowded overnight ferries and riding for hours in cars or buses — all in the hope that a simple, and free, surgical procedure would restore their eyesight.

Many patients were elderly and needed help to reach two hospitals in Sumatra where mass eye camps were held earlier this month by Nepalese surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit. During eight days, more than 1,400 cataracts were removed.

The patients camped out, sleeping side-by-side on military cots, eating donated food while fire trucks supplied water for showers and toilets. Many who had given up hope of seeing again left smiling after their bandages were removed.

"I've been blind for three years, and it's really bad," said Arlita Tobing, 65, whose sight was restored after the surgery. "I worked on someone's farm, but I couldn't work anymore."

Indonesia has one of the highest rates of blindness in the world, making it a target country for Ruit who travels throughout the developing world holding free mass eye camps while training doctors to perform the simple, stitch-free procedure he pioneered. He often visits hard-to-reach remote areas where health care is scarce and patients are poor. He believes that by teaching doctors how to perform his method of cataract removal, the rate of blindness can be reduced worldwide.

Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness globally, affecting about 20 million people who mostly live in poor countries, according to the World Health Organization.

"We get only one life, and that life is very short. I am blessed by God to have this opportunity," said Ruit, who runs the Tilganga Eye Center in Katmandu, Nepal. "The most important of that is training, taking the idea to other people."

During the recent camps, Ruit trained six doctors from Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

Here, in images, are scenes from the mobile eye camps:

Read More..

Lessons from a disadvantaged children's charter school

It's not exactly where you might expect to find an example of public school success:

The campus is in a former flower mart, across the street from the Greyhound station and a short walk from skid row in an industrial area of downtown Los Angeles.

But inside the Para Los Niños Charter School, children defined by disadvantage are proving skeptics wrong.

I paid a visit to the school last month, after I'd mentioned it in a column about an effort by parents in nearby South Park to create a new Metro Charter school for children living in the upscale neighborhoods near LA Live downtown.

Some of those parents seem to have written off nearby Para Los Niños; it's too poor, too Latino, too linguistically deprived to offer their children enough of a challenge. They are business owners, architects, technology creators, accountants — not elitists, just upscale high-achievers worried that their dreams and the school's aspirations wouldn't be a good fit.

Those are the kinds of concerns on many middle-class minds. Para Los Niños is a magnified version of a city school system that gets less diverse and more economically challenged with every passing year.

Of the 410 students on Para Los Ninos' elementary campus, 99% are Latino and 96% hail from low-income families. More than two-thirds of the students are not fluent in English.

But the school is proving that demographics are not destiny.

Its test scores are on par with many suburban public schools. And its curriculum relies on the sort of child-centered approach favored by progressive private schools with five-figure tuition.

Admission is by lottery, and the school has twice as many applications as open spots some years. Most students live in the garment district, but others come from as far away as Lennox and Long Beach.

"If you had our parents in a room and asked how many want their kids to go to college, 100% would raise their hands," Principal Titus Campos told me.

Still, Campos knows that the school's student-body profile turns some parents off. "We hear it all the time," he said.

When they try to recruit in other neighborhoods to diversify enrollment, "the question asked most is 'Where do the children come from? Are they all Latino?'"

Does that matter?, I asked sixth-grader Ron Bellamy. He's biracial but looks black and didn't speak Spanish when he came to Para Los Niños four years ago.

"It was perplexing at first," Ron admitted. "But there was always somebody around to translate." Most of his classmates spoke both Spanish and English. Instruction after second grade is in English only.

What mattered most to Ron was not skin color or language but the well-stocked library, lively music classes and elaborate art projects, he said. "My other school didn't have any of that."

What would he say to parents worried that their non-Latino children wouldn't fit? "They'd get along just like all of us. We don't put people in groups," he said. "We don't judge by race."

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Social issues are part of the calculus that parents use to choose. But what happens in the classroom is what matters most. And the reality of Para Los Niños seems to me surprisingly close to the prospective Metro Charter's goals:

The focus is on learning by doing and fostering personal growth. Teachers aren't required to "teach to the test" but to reward curiosity and nurture creative thinking.

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