Slim majority supports L.A. sales tax increase

A Los Angeles sales tax hike being promoted as vital to preserving public safety and helping end years of budget deficits is drawing support from a narrow majority of likely voters, according to a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll.

Fifty-three percent of surveyed voters said they definitely or probably would vote for Proposition A, which is on Tuesday's ballot and would raise $200 million a year by boosting the city's sales tax rate by half a cent to 9.5%, one of the highest in the state.

About 41% of respondents said they expected to vote against the measure, while 6% were undecided. The results offer hope to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other backers of Proposition A, which needs 50% plus one of the vote to pass.

GRAPHIC: Contributions to Yes on Prop. A

Because of the poll's 4.4-percentage-point margin of error, support could dip below 50% and passage can't be taken for granted, said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. "On one hand, [Proposition A] enjoys a fairly sizable lead in the polls," he said. "On the other hand, margins this close to 50% should always be cause for concern for an initiative's proponents."

The bipartisan USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Primary Poll canvassed 500 likely voters between Feb. 24 and 27. The poll was conducted jointly by the Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company.

Backers of Proposition A — using contributions from labor unions, billboard companies and real estate interests needing City Hall approvals — have been airing TV ads featuring images of accident victims being rushed to hospitals and a grim-faced Police Chief Charlie Beck warning that "public safety is now in danger."

Beck also has been warning at news conferences and in interviews that the Los Angeles Police Department will lose 500 officers if voters reject the tax increase.

Opponents, who lack the money to mount an advertising campaign, say voters are being asked to pay for bad City Hall spending decisions, including a deal that gives civilian city employees a 25% pay hike over seven years.

Some warn that city leaders will only give away the added sales tax collections by pursuing a proposed phase-out of the business receipts tax. The top five candidates for mayor have come out against Proposition A, and the poll results suggest that was politically wise. Close to half of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a mayoral candidate who supports the sales tax increase.

The poll indicates that the Proposition A language that city officials put on voters' ballots could end up pushing it to victory, said Chris St. Hilaire, chief executive of M4 Strategies, which helped conduct the poll.

The ballot title calls it the "neighborhood public safety and vital city services funding and accountability measure" and says it would help maintain 911 emergency and other services.

Retired nurse Annette Koppel, 80, voted by mail for the sales tax increase, but only reluctantly. Although she is living on a fixed income, Koppel — a victim of a carjacking in the late 1980s — said she worries about a decrease in the number of police, firefighters and paramedics.

"Without them, what are we going to do?" she asked.

Some, including a former top budget advisor to Villaraigosa who is now running for City Council, have questioned whether the budget crisis is as severe as city officials say.

James Cotton, 84, of Winnetka told The Times that he voted against the sales tax increase even though his daughter is an employee in the Fire Department. Cotton said lawmakers should look for other ways of balancing the budget and making better choices about how to spend taxpayer funds.

"I'm of the opinion that a lot of the money could be better spent," said Cotton, adding that the measure would hurt businesses and residents on fixed incomes.

The push for a sales tax increase is being led by City Council President Herb Wesson, who has helped raise more than $1.2 million for the pro-Proposition A campaign. More than one out of every four dollars has come from labor unions, most of them representing city employees. Service Employees International Union, which represents civilian city employees, has given $100,000. Its members at City Hall received a 3.75% pay increase last summer and are in line for another 1.75% raise in July and a 5.5% pay hike on Jan. 1, 2014.

As of Friday afternoon, real estate interests and billboard companies had provided one-third of the money collected in support of Proposition A, according to Ethics Commission records. Several donors are waiting for the City Council to approve their projects or have already received permission to use tax revenue to finance their projects.

The single biggest donor has been NFL stadium developer Anschutz Entertainment Group, which has received a series of lucrative deals with City Hall over the last decade. The company was given the right to keep up to $270 million in tax revenue generated by its hotels at the LA Live entertainment complex over 25 years.

AEG is also seeking to run the city's Convention Center.

The company, its top executive and its lawyers have given a combined $126,000 to get the measure passed, according to campaign reports.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.

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Evernote Hack Exposes User Data, Forces Extensive Password Resets

Evernote joins Twitter, Apple, and Facebook on the list of tech companies hacked in recent weeks.

Evernote “has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service,” according to a statement posted on the company’s website earlier today. “As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset.”

About 50 million passwords have been changed following the breach.

The hackers accessed usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords. The company is now requiring its users to update their passwords. To facilitate this, Evernote is releasing app updates.

The company claims they’ve found “no evidence” that user content was changed or lost nor that payment information was accessed.

Some users, however, said they had to resync their off-line content as a result of the hack in the Evernote forum.

In a statement sent to CNET, a company representative claims the company caught the hackers early and that they “believe this activity follows a similar pattern of the many high profile attacks on other Internet-based companies that have taken place over the last several weeks.”

The rep went on to say Evernote is “actively communicating to our users about this attack through our blog, direct e-mails, social media, and support.” The Evernote homepage implies email notifications have been sent to users. This author has not yet received one at time of publishing.

The company thinks “creating strong, new passwords will help ensure that user accounts remain secure.” But that’s questionable. Wired’s Mat Honan has suggested abandoning passwords altogether in favor of alternative methods for keeping data secure after he was hacked earlier this summer.

Reactions to the news have quickly spread through Twitter. One user noted, “I’ve had that disturbing feeling this was inevitable.” Patrick LaForge, an editor at the New York Times quipped, “The least the Evernote hackers could do is organize my folders of random clipping and wine label photos.”

This hack comes a day after Evernote made changes to its privacy policies, user guidelines and terms of service.

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England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet

LONDON — Visitors to England right now, be warned. The big topic on people’s minds — from cabdrivers to corporate executives — is not Kate Middleton’s increasingly visible baby bump (though the craze does involve the size of one’s waistline), but rather a best-selling diet book that has sent the British into a fasting frenzy.

“The Fast Diet,” published in mid-January in Britain, could do the same in the United States if Americans eat it up. The United States edition arrived last week.

The book has held the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s British site nearly every day since its publication in January, according to Rebecca Nicolson, a founder of Short Books, the independent publishing company behind the sensation. “It is selling,” she said, “like hot cakes,” which coincidentally are something one can actually eat on this revolutionary diet.

With an alluring cover line that reads, “Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer,” the premise of this latest weight-loss regimen — or “slimming” as the British call “dieting” — is intermittent fasting, or what has become known here as the 5:2 diet: five days of eating and drinking whatever you want, dispersed with two days of fasting.

A typical fasting day consists of two meals of roughly 250 to 300 calories each, depending on the person’s sex (500 calories for women, 600 for men). Think two eggs and a slice of ham for breakfast, and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for dinner.

It is not much sustenance, but the secret to weight loss, according to the book, is that even after just a few hours of fasting, the body begins to turn off the fat-storing mechanisms and turn on the fat-burning systems.

“I’ve always been into self-experimentation,” said Dr. Michael Mosley, one of the book’s two authors and a well-known medical journalist on the BBC who is often called the Sanjay Gupta of Britain.

He researched the science of the diet and its health benefits by putting himself through intermittent fasting and filming it for a BBC documentary last August called “Eat, Fast and Live Longer.” (The broadcast gained high ratings, three million viewers, despite running during the London Olympics. PBS plans to air it in April.)

“This started because I was not feeling well last year,” Dr. Mosley said recently over a cup of tea and half a cookie (it was not one of his fasting days). “It turns out I was suffering from high blood sugar, high cholesterol and had a kind of visceral fat inside my gut.”

Though hardly obese at the time, at 5 feet 11 inches and 187 pounds, Dr. Mosley, 55, had a body mass index and body fat percentage that were a few points higher than the recommended amount for men. “Given that my father had died at age 73 of complications from diabetes, and I was now looking prediabetic, I knew something had to change,” he added.

The result was a documentary, almost the opposite of “Super Size Me,” in which Dr. Mosley not only fasted, but also interviewed scientific researchers, mostly in the United States, about the positive results of various forms of intermittent fasting, tested primarily on rats but in some cases human volunteers. The prominent benefits, he discovered, were weight loss, a lower risk of cancer and heart disease, and increased energy.

“The body goes into a repair-and-recover mode when it no longer has the work of storing the food being consumed,” he said.

Though Dr. Mosley quickly gave up on the most extreme forms of fasting (he ate little more than one cup of low-calorie soup every 24 hours for four consecutive days in his first trial), he finally settled on the 5:2 ratio as a more sustainable, less painful option that could realistically be followed without annihilating his social life or work.

“Our earliest antecedents,” Dr. Mosley argued, “lived a feast-or-famine existence, gorging themselves after a big hunt and then not eating until they scored the next one.” Similarly, he explained, temporary fasting is a ritual of religions like Islam and Judaism — as demonstrated by Ramadan and Yom Kippur. “We shouldn’t have a fear of hunger if it is just temporary,” he said.

What Dr. Mosley found most astounding, however, were his personal results. Not only did he lose 20 pounds (he currently weighs 168 pounds) in nine weeks, but his glucose and cholesterol levels went down, as did his body fat. “What’s more, I have a whole new level of energy,” he said.

The documentary became an instant hit, which in turn led Mimi Spencer, a food and fashion writer, to propose that they collaborate on a book. “I could see this was not a faddish diet but one that was sustainable with long-term health results, beyond the obvious weight-loss benefit,” said Ms. Spencer, 45, who has lost 20 pounds on the diet within four months and lowered her B.M.I. by 2 points.

The result is a 200-page paperback: the first half written by Dr. Mosley outlining the scientific findings of intermittent fasting; the second by Ms. Spencer, with encouraging text on how to get through the first days of fasting, from keeping busy so you don’t hear your rumbling belly, to waiting 15 minutes for your meal or snack.

She also provides fasting recipes with tantalizing photos like feta niçoise salad and Mexican pizza, and a calorie counter at the back. (Who knew a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar dressing added up to a whopping 209 calories?)

In London, the diet has taken off with the help of well-known British celebrity chefs and food writers like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who raved about it in The Guardian after his sixth day of fasting, having already lost eight pounds. (“I feel lean and sharper,” he wrote, “and find the whole thing rather exhilarating.”)

The diet is also particularly popular among men, according to Dr. Mosley, who has heard from many of his converts via e-mail and Twitter, where he has around 24,000 followers. “They find it easy to work into their schedules because dieting for a day here and there doesn’t feel torturous,” he said, adding that couples also particularly like doing it together.

But not everyone is singing the diet’s praises. The National Health System, Britain’s publicly funded medical establishment, put out a statement on its Web site shortly after the book came out: “Despite its increasing popularity, there is a great deal of uncertainty about I.F. (intermittent fasting) with significant gaps in the evidence.”

The health agency also listed some side effects, including bad breath, anxiety, dehydration and irritability. Yet people in London do not seem too concerned. A slew of fasting diet books have come out in recent weeks, notably the “The 5:2 Diet Book” and “The Feast and Fast Diet.”

There is also a crop of new cookbooks featuring fasting-friendly recipes. Let’s just say, the British are hungry for them.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the national healthcare organization in Britain. It is the National Health Service, not the National Health System. The article also misidentified the Balsamic product that has 209 calories per cup. It is Balsamic vinegar dressing, not Balsamic vinegar.

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DealBook: Buffett’s Annual Letter Plays Up Newspapers’ Value

Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.

Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has bought 28 dailies in the last 15 months.

“There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job,” he wrote.

Those purchases, which cost Mr. Buffett a total of $344 million, are relatively minor deals for Berkshire, and just a small part of the giant conglomerate. Mr. Buffett bemoaned his inability to do a major deal in 2012. “I pursued a couple of elephants, but came up empty-handed,” he said. “Our luck, however, changed earlier this year.”

Mr. Buffett was making a reference to one of his largest-ever deals. Last month, Berkshire, along with a Brazilian investment group, announced a $23.6 billion takeover,of the ketchup maker H. J. Heinz.

Written in accessible prose largely free of financial jargon, Berkshire’s annual letter holds appeal far beyond Wall Street. This year’s dispatch contained plenty of Mr. Buffett’s folksy observations about investing and business that his devotees relish.

“More than 50 years ago, Charlie told me that it was far better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than to buy a fair business at a wonderful price,” Mr. Buffett wrote, referring to his longtime partner at Berkshire, Charlie Munger.

Mr. Buffett also struck a patriotic tone, directly appealing to his fellow chief executives “that opportunities abound in America.” He noted that the United States gross domestic product, on an inflation-adjusted basis, had more than quadrupled over the last six decades.

“Throughout that period, every tomorrow has been uncertain,” he wrote. “America’s destiny, however, has always been clear: ever-increasing abundance.”

The letter provides more than entertainment value and patriotic stirrings, delivering to Berkshire shareholders an update on the company’s vast collection of businesses. With a market capitalization of $250 billion, Berkshire ranks among the largest companies in the United States.

Its holdings vary, with big companies like the railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the electric utility MidAmerican Energy, and smaller ones like the running-shoe outfit Brooks Sports and the chocolatier See’s Candies. All told, Berkshire employs about 288,000 people.

The letter, once again, did not answer a question that has vexed Berkshire shareholders and Buffett-ologists: Who will succeed Mr. Buffett, who is 82, as chief executive?

Last year, he acknowledged that he had chosen a successor, but he did not name the candidate.

He has said that upon his death, Berkshire will split his job in three, naming a chief executive, a nonexecutive chairman and several investment managers of its publicly traded holdings.

In 2010, he said that his son, Howard Buffett, would succeed him as nonexecutive chairman.

Berkshire’s share price recently traded at a record high, surpassing its prefinancial crisis peak reached in 2007 and rising about 22 percent over the last year.

The company reported net income last year of about $14.8 billion, up about 45 percent from 2011. Yet the company’s book value, or net worth — Mr. Buffett’s preferred performance measure — lagged the broader stock market, increasing 14.4 percent, compared with the market’s 16 percent return.

Mr. Buffett lamented that 2012 was only the ninth time in 48 years that Berkshire’s book value increase was less than the gain of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. But he pointed out that in eight of those nine years, the S.& P. had a gain of 15 percent or more, suggesting that Berkshire proved to be a most valuable investment during bad market periods.

“We do better when the wind is in our face,” he wrote.

For Berkshire’s largest collection of assets, its insurance operations, the wind has been at its back. We “shot the lights out last year” in insurance, Mr. Buffett said.

He lavished praise on the auto insurer Geico, giving a special shout-out to the company’s mascot, the Gecko lizard.

Investors also keep a keen eye on changes in Berkshire’s roughly $87 billion stock portfolio. Its holdings include large positions in iconic companies like International Business Machines, Coca-Cola, American Express and Wells Fargo. He said Berkshire’s investment in each of those was likely to increase in the future.

“Mae West had it right: ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ ” Mr. Buffett wrote.

He also complimented two relatively new hires, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who now each manage about $5 billion in stock portfolios for Berkshire. Both men ran unheralded, modest-size money management firms before Mr. Buffett plucked them out of obscurity and moved them to Omaha to work for him.

He called the men “a perfect cultural fit” and indicated that the two would manage Berkshire’s entire stock portfolio once he steps aside. “We hit the jackpot with these two,” Mr. Buffett said, noting that last year, each outperformed the S.& P. by double-digit margins.

Then, sheepishly, employing supertiny type, he wrote: “They left me in the dust as well.”

A former paperboy and member of the Newspaper Association of America’s carrier hall of fame, Mr. Buffett devoted nearly three out of 24 pages of his annual report to newspapers.

While Mr. Buffett has been a longtime owner of The Buffalo News and a stakeholder in The Washington Post Company, he told shareholders four years ago that he wouldn’t buy a newspaper at any price.

But his latest note reflects how much his opinion has turned. His buying spree started in November 2011, when he struck a deal to buy The Omaha World-Herald Company, this hometown paper, for a reported $200 million. By May 2012, he bought out the chain of newspapers owned by Media General, except for The Tampa Tribune. In recent months, he continued to express his interest in buying more papers “at appropriate prices — and that means a very low multiple of current earnings.”

“Papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time,” wrote Mr. Buffett.

Mr. Buffett said in a telephone interview last month that he would consider buying The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., a paper that the Tribune Company is considering selling. But Mr. Buffett said he had not contacted Tribune executives.

“It’s solely a question of the specifics of it and the price,” he said about the Allentown paper. “But it’s similar to the kinds of communities that we bought papers in.”

Mr. Buffett has plenty of cash to make more newspaper acquisitions. To cover his portion of the Heinz purchase, Mr. Buffett will deploy about $12 billion of Berkshire’s $42 billion cash hoard. That leaves a lot of money for Mr. Buffett to continue his shopping spree for newspapers — and more major deals like Heinz.

“Charlie and I have again donned our safari outfits,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “and resumed our search for elephants.”

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Bell jurors ordered to begin anew after panelist is dismissed

After nearly five days of deliberations, jurors in the Bell corruption trial were ordered Thursday to begin anew after a member of the panel was dismissed for misconduct and replaced by an alternate.

The original juror, a white-haired woman identified only as Juror No. 3, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy she had gone onto a legal website to look up jury instructions and then asked her daughter to help find a definition for the word "coercion."

Although all but one defense attorney requested that the woman stay, Kennedy said the juror needed to be removed. "She has spoken about the deliberations with her daughter, she has conducted research on the Internet, and I've repeatedly, repeatedly throughout this trial — probably hundreds of times — cautioned the jury not to do that," the judge said.

The removal came after jurors notified the judge that they were deadlocked and that continued deliberations seemed fruitless.

It was unclear how to interpret the day's events, whether the dismissed juror had been a lone holdout or an indication of a fractured jury.

The juror started to tell the judge which way she was leaning in the case, saying she had gone online "looking to see at what point can I get the harassment to stop.... How long do I have to stay in there and deliberate with them when I have made my decision that I didn't think there was —"

Kennedy cut her off before she could finish.

The woman clasped her hands over her mouth and said, "I'm sorry."

Two defense attorneys thought she was leaning toward acquittal and wanted her to stay. "I would have preferred the deadlock to a guilty verdict," said Alex Kessel, the attorney for George Mirabal, one of six former council members charged with misappropriation of public funds.

The council members are charged with inflating their salaries in what prosecutors contend was a far-reaching web of corruption in which fat paychecks were placed ahead of the needs of the city's largely immigrant, working-poor constituents.

When attorneys and defendants were summoned to the courtroom Thursday morning, they were initially told that the jury appeared to be deadlocked.

"Your honor, we have reached a point where as a jury we have fundamental disagreements and cannot reach a unanimous verdict in this case," read a note signed by two jurors, including the foreman, that was given to Kennedy.

A note from another juror alerted the judge that Juror No. 3 had consulted an outside attorney. That did not appear to be the case, but her other actions were revealed under questioning from the judge.

The same juror made a tearful request Monday to be removed from the panel because she felt others were picking on her. Kennedy told the woman that although discussions can get heated, it was important to continue deliberating.

On Thursday, however, the juror again broke into tears and said she had spoken with her daughter about "the abuse I have suffered." She said her daughter told her, "Mom, they're trying to find the weak link."

The woman said she had turned to the Internet to better understand the rules about jury deliberations and came across the word "coercion." After her daughter helped her look up the word's definition, she wrote it down on a piece of paper and brought it with her to court. When the judge asked to see the paper she went into the jury room to retrieve it.

The woman later left the courtroom in tears.

With an alternate in place, Kennedy told the panel to act as if the earlier deliberations had not taken place. The alternate had sat in the jury box during the four-week trial but did not take part in deliberations.

Former council members Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and Mirabal are accused of drawing annual salaries of as much as $100,000 a year by serving on boards that did little work and seldom met, part of a scandal that drew national attention to the small city in 2010.

Prosecutors said that Bell's charter follows state law regarding council members' compensation. In a city the size of Bell, council members should be paid no more than $8,076 a year.

The trial began in late January, and the case went to the jury last Friday.

As the jury resumed deliberations in downtown Los Angeles, the verdict was clearly in on the streets of Bell.

One resident unfurled old protest banners and signs from the days when the pay scandal was first exposed and then called former members of an activist group that had led the charge for reform in the city.

"We're holding our breaths and waiting," Denise Rodarte, a member of the grassroots group Bell Assn. to Stop the Abuse, said in regard to a verdict.

"It's cut and dry: Local elected officials were supposed to make a certain amount of money, and they made a lot more."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

jeff.gottlieb@latimes.com

Times staff writer Ruben Vives contributed to this report.

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Thruster Problem Forces SpaceX to Reschedule ISS Docking

An anomaly with the thrusters aboard its Dragon spacecraft caused SpaceX to miss a scheduled burn to adjust the capsule orbit on Friday, causing SpaceX to delay by at least 24 hours Saturday’s planned rendezvous with the International Space Station.

SpaceX engineers have been working full-throttle to resolve the thruster issue, which followed a picture-perfect launch atop the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and NASA officials said they are confident Musk’s engineers will resolve the problem quickly and could have Dragon on track for a rendezvous Sunday.

Engineers at SpaceX mission control in southern California saw the first signs of trouble shortly after Dragon reached orbit.

“It was a little frightening there,” Musk told reporters in a post-flight press conference. “We noticed after separation that only one of the four thruster quads was ready to engage. We saw that the oxidizer pressure in three of the four tanks was low.”

Dragon has four thruster quads, used to maneuver the spacecraft in orbit. They are essential to the docking procedure and three of them are required by NASA to be working flawlessly in order to make the final approach to the International Space Station. Two of the “quads” are comprised of four small Draco thrusters while the other two actually have five thrusters apiece. The Dracos are initially used to adjust Dragon’s orbit to begin its rendezvous with the station. Once Dragon has used them to achieve general proximity with the ISS, they are used to make the small adjustments needed for docking.

An initial investigation by SpaceX points to a possible blockage in a line that leads from a helium tank to an oxidizer tank that provides the oxygen needed for combustion. Inert helium is used to pressurize the four oxidizer tanks. There are four corresponding kerosene fuel tanks for the thrusters as well.

Musk called the problem, “a glitch of some kind, and not a serious thing.” He says the best guess is a piece of “frozen oxidizer” got stuck in the line. The oxidizer is liquid oxygen, and Musk says he believes it eventually warmed up enough that the liquid oxygen could resume flowing.

“We’ve been able to free that up by cycling the valves,” he said, referring to the control valves between the helium and oxidizer tanks.

As the day wore on, Musk said the four oxidizer tanks and the thruster quads were operating nominally. A successful co-elliptical burn happened late in the afternoon to raise Dragon from an altitude of 200 kilometers to something between 250 and 300 kilometers. This procedure was essential, Musk said, because Dragon’s orbit would decay within days at the lower altitude, forcing an unwanted re-entry.

With only one of the thruster quads ready to go shortly after launch, there was a delay in deploying Dragon’s power-generating solar arrays because engineers want two functioning thrusters so they can maneuver the capsule prior to the deployment. Engineers later decided to proceed with deployment with a single thruster after temperatures continued dropping on the array’s actuators. Deploying the arrays provides Dragon with power beyond the on-board batteries.

Because SpaceX missed the initial burn required to begin the rendezvous with the space station, Dragon will miss Saturday morning’s planned docking with the ISS. Once engineers have confirmed all four thruster quads are working properly, they’ll begin the planned burns and maneuvers needed to approach the station. NASA officials said those maneuvers will allow them to see if the thrusters are working properly and provide the confidence needed to proceed with docking.

In order to operate inside of a safe ellipsoid around the ISS, Dragon must have at least three working thruster quads. Once inside the ellipsoid, there are several contingency plans that allow for aborting the approach. The final safety zone around the station is known by the acronym KOS — the Keep Out Sphere, an area 200 meters around the space station. The final decision to enter KOS will be made only if everything is functioning properly.

NASA officials said the next likely chance for docking will be Sunday and there are several windows of opportunity during the next week, but both NASA and SpaceX said they must wait until they know Dragon is working as planned. There is no rush, everyone said, and Musk said that, in a worst-case scenario, SpaceX “would keep [Dragon] up there for at least a month” to troubleshoot the problem. The only blackout days are on and around March 15, when six astronauts aboard the station are slated to come home aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule.

This isn’t the first time SpaceX has had problems during flight. During the demonstration flight to the space station in May, a stuck nitrogen purge valve led to an automatic engine shutdown that aborted the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket.

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Well: A Rainbow of Root Vegetables

This week’s Recipes for Health is as much a treat for the eyes as the palate. Colorful root vegetables from bright orange carrots and red scallions to purple and yellow potatoes and pale green leeks will add color and flavor to your table.

Since root vegetables and tubers keep well and can be cooked up into something delicious even after they have begun to go limp in the refrigerator, this week’s Recipes for Health should be useful. Root vegetables, tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are called yams by most vendors – I mean the ones with dark orange flesh), winter squash and cabbages are the only local vegetables available during the winter months in colder regions, so these recipes will be timely for many readers.

Roasting is a good place to begin with most root vegetables. They sweeten as they caramelize in a hot oven. I roasted baby carrots and thick red scallions (they may have been baby onions; I didn’t get the information from the farmer, I just bought them because they were lush and pretty) together and seasoned them with fresh thyme leaves, then sprinkled them with chopped toasted hazelnuts. I also roasted a medley of potatoes, including sweet potatoes, after tossing them with olive oil and sage, and got a wonderful range of colors, textures and tastes ranging from sweet to savory.

Sweet winter vegetables also pair well with spicy seasonings. I like to combine sweet potatoes and chipotle peppers, and this time in a hearty lentil stew that we enjoyed all week.

Here are five colorful and delicious dishes made with root vegetables.

Spicy Lentil and Sweet Potato Stew With Chipotles: The combination of sweet potatoes and spicy chipotles with savory lentils is a winner.

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Roasted Carrots and Scallions With Thyme and Hazelnuts: Toasted hazelnuts add a crunchy texture and nutty finish to this dish.

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Carrot Wraps: A vegetarian sandwich that satisfies like a full meal.

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Rainbow Potato Roast: A multicolored mix that can be vegan, or not.

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Leek Quiche: A lighter version of a Flemish classic.

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A Volatile Week Ends With Modest Gains

Stocks advanced modestly on Friday, leaving the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index with slight gains after a volatile week, as strong economic data overshadowed growth concerns in China and Europe and let investors discount the impact of federal spending cuts.

Data reported early in the day showed that Asian factories were slowing and European output was falling, setting off a sharp drop at the beginning of trading in New York. But most of the losses evaporated after a report showed that United States manufacturing activity had expanded in February at the fastest pace in 20 months. Consumer sentiment also rose in February as Americans turned more optimistic about the job market.

As $85 billion in government budget cuts took effect on Friday, President Obama blamed Republicans for the lack of a compromise to avert the so-called sequester. But the stock market appeared to have already priced in legislators’ failure to reach an agreement.

“We were able to dig out of that hole, but not make any great strides on it either,” said Peter M. Jankovskis, co-chief investment officer at OakBrook Investments in Lisle, Ill. “We will probably be in a holding pattern pending some big development on a broader budget deal.”

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 35.17 points, or 0.25 percent, to 14,089.66. The S.& P. 500 rose 3.52 points, or 0.23 percent, to 1,518.20. The Nasdaq composite index advanced 9.55 points, or 0.3 percent, to 3,169.74.

For the week, the Dow rose 0.64 percent, the S.& P. 500 edged up 0.17 percent and the Nasdaq gained 0.25 percent.

It was a bumpy road to the week’s slight gains. The markets slid on Monday after inconclusive elections in Italy revived concerns about the euro zone, only to rebound in the next two sessions after the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, defended the central bank’s stimulus measures.

The low interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy have helped equities continue to attract investors. The Dow is less than 1 percent away from its nominal intraday record of 14,198.10. Declines have been shallow and short-lived, with investors jumping in to buy when the market dips.

Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a ratio of about 17 to 13, while on the Nasdaq, about seven stocks rose for every five that fell.

Shares of Intuitive Surgical jumped 8.5 percent on Friday, to $553.40, after a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst, Jeremy Feffer, upgraded the stock, saying a slide of more than 11 percent on Thursday had been a gross overreaction to a news report.

Groupon shares surged 12.6 percent, to $5.10, a day after the company fired its chief executive in response to weak quarterly results.

Gap stock rose 2.9 percent, to $33.87, after the company reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat expectations and raised its dividend by 20 percent. Salesforce.com posted sales that beat forecasts, driving its stock up 7.6 percent, to $182.

Chesapeake Energy shares fell 2.4 percent, to $19.67, after the Securities and Exchange Commission escalated its investigation of the company and its chief executive, Aubrey McClendon, over a perk that granted him a share in each of the natural gas producer’s wells.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose 10/32, to 101 13/32, and its yield fell to 1.85 percent from 1.88 percent late on Thursday.

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Jury in Bell corruption trial may be deadlocked

A court spokeswoman said Thursday the jury in the Bell corruption case appears to be deadlocked.

“The jurors may be at an impasse,” said Patricia Kelly, a spokeswoman for L.A. County Superior Court.

Jurors sent a note to the judge Thursday morning, and all the attorneys in the case were called in.

Six former Bell City Council members are accused of stealing public money by paying themselves extraordinary salaries in one of Los Angeles County’s poorest cities.

Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal are accused of misappropriation of public funds, felony counts that could bring prison terms.

They were arrested in September 2010 and have been free on bail.

The nearly $100,000 salaries drawn by most of the former elected officials are part of a much larger municipal corruption case in the southeast Los Angeles County city in which prosecutors allege that money from the city’s modest general fund flowed freely to top officials.

The three defendants who testified painted a picture of a city as a place led by a controlling, manipulative administrator who handed out enormous salaries, loaned city money and padded future pensions. Robert Rizzo, the former adminstrator, and ex-assistant city manager Angela Spaccia are also awaiting trial.

The four-week trial of the former council members turned on extremes.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller said the council members were little more than common thieves who were consumed with fattening their paychecks at the expense of the city’s largely immigrant, working-poor residents.

Miller said the accused represented the “one-percenters" of Bell who had “apparently forgotten who they are and where they live."

Defense attorneys said the former city leaders -- one a pastor, another a mom-and-pop grocery store owner, another a funeral director -- were dedicated public servants who put in long hours and tirelessly responded to the needs of their constituents.

Jacobo testified that Rizzo informed her she could quit her job as a real estate agent and receive a full-time salary as a council member. She said she asked City Attorney Edward Lee if that was possible and he nodded his head.

"I thought I was doing a very good job to be able to earn that, yes," Jacobo said.

Cole said Rizzo was so intimidating that the former councilman voted for a 12% annual pay raise out of fear the city programs he established would be gutted by Rizzo in retaliation if he opposed the pay hikes.

The defense argued that the prosecution failed to prove criminal negligence -- that their clients knew what they were doing was wrong or that a reasonable person would know it was wrong.

The attorney for Hernandez, the city’s mayor at the time of the arrests, said his client had only a grade-school education, was known more for his heart than his intellect and was, perhaps, not overly “scholarly.”

Prosecutors argued that the council members pushed up their salaries by serving on city boards that rarely met and, in one case, existed only as a means for paying them even more money.

Jurors were also left to deal with the question of whether council members were protected by a City Charter that was approved in a special election that drew fewer than 400 voters.

Defense attorneys say the charter allowed council members to be paid for serving on the authorities.

But the prosecutor argued that the charter -- a quasi-constitution for a city -- set salaries at what councils in similar-sized cities were receiving under state law: $8,076 a year. Because council members automatically serve on boards and commissions, the district attorney said the total compensation for all of each council member's work was included in that figure.

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Groupon CEO Fired as Daily-Deals Biz Bottoms Out

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has been fired after another quarterly earnings whiff from the onetime darling of the daily-deals business. It’s a business that doesn’t really have any darlings now.

Groupon under Mason’s leadership infamously spurned Google’s $6 billion buyout offer. Google promptly turned around and launched its own daily deals site. Today Groupon is worth less than half of what Google offered, and less than a quarter of its value following its 2011 stock market debut — at the time the biggest internet IPO since Google’s in 2004.

Google’s own daily-deals endeavor didn’t so much kill Groupon’s business as a competitor, but rather exposed the whole business model as flawed.

As many others have pointed out, Groupon was never really a tech company but for some reason was perceived as one. In reality, Groupon is a sales business that uses technology but still relies intensively on human labor to do the selling. As it turns out, the barrier to entry into a business like that is nearly nonexistent. Competitors proliferated just as businesses and consumers started losing interest in the whole concept.

Since then, Groupon has tried to diversify into other businesses such as discount e-commerce and mobile payments. But the changes seem like too little, too late for investors and for Mason, who confirmed his departure in a note he posted online. “The events of the last year-and-a-half speak for themselves,” Mason wrote. “As CEO, I am accountable.”

Here’s the full text of Mason’s note:

(This is for Groupon employees, but I’m posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)

People of Groupon,

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.

You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company – it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.

For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be – I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.

If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness – don’t waste the opportunity!

I will miss you terribly.

Love,

Andrew

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