German Lawmakers Seek to Ban Far-Right Party

BERLIN — Nearly a decade after the German government embarrassingly failed in an attempt to ban the country’s leading extreme-right political party, the upper house of Parliament on Friday voted overwhelmingly to launch a new effort to have the National Democratic Party deemed unconstitutional.

The decision to ask the country’s highest court to open proceedings against the party, known by its German initials N.P.D., just before campaigning heats up for a parliamentary election next year raises the political stakes of a move that was already divisive.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking a third term in office at a time when her center-right government has been criticized by its opposition rivals, the center-left Social Democrats, for mishandling the investigation into a murderous neo-Nazi trio that terrorized Germany’s minority population for the better part of the past decade. Ms. Merkel cannot afford to be viewed as weak in fighting against far-right extremists.

Lawmakers are still struggling to untangle how that trio, which called itself the National Socialist Underground, was able to terrorize minorities from 2000 to 2007, murdering 10 people, setting off two bombs and robbing 15 banks. A leading member of the N.P.D. has confessed to having contacts with the neo-Nazi trio — a statement seized upon by opponents as further proof of the need to ban the party.

“These murders confronted us with a new level of far-right extremism,” Christine Lieberknecht, governor of the eastern state of Thuringia, told the upper house, the Bundesrat, on Friday. “Out of far-right extremism grew far-right terror.”

Germany’s Bundesrat, which represents the 16 states, drew up a petition based on findings gleaned from a review of documents, interviews and observations from security services about the N.P.D. Fifteen of the 16 state governors backed the petition to ban the party.

Ms. Lieberknecht said the governors felt confident that there was sufficient proof of the threat the party posed to Germany’s democratic principles.

“We are convinced that the N.P.D. violates the Constitution,” Ms. Lieberknecht said. “The N.P.D.’s attitude is anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic. Its goals, behavior and actions are similar in character to those of the Nazis.”

In a statement, the N.P.D. leadership called the latest attempt to ban the party “a foolhardy and stupid endeavor,” while insisting they viewed it with “necessary seriousness, but commensurate calmness.”

The Bundesrat’s decision is only an initial step in what could be a very long process. The greatest legal uncertainty is beyond German control, as the European Court of Justice may have a say in whether the party can be banned.

The previous attempt to outlaw the party collapsed in 2003 when it emerged that several of the government-paid informants keeping tabs on the party had simultaneously held high-ranking positions in it. The legal debacle — and the moral implications in a country with a long history of two-faced Nazi and Communist informants — proved an embarrassment for the then center-left Social Democrat government of Gerhard Schröder, which had initiated the ban.

So far, Ms. Merkel’s government has appeared reluctant to join the governors’ effort. After meeting them earlier this month, she expressed “understanding” for their position, but said her government would examine the “risks and chances” of the case before deciding on a position early next year.

Steffen Seibert, Ms. Merkel’s spokesman, said recently that there was understanding for the states’ move because the N.P.D. holds seats in some state legislatures “where they develop their politically unpleasant behavior, which should be rejected.”

The N.P.D. had 6,300 members last year, according to government figures. It is not represented at the national level, but remains a force in the east, especially Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where its representatives sit in regional legislatures. It also is allowed, like all political parties in Germany, to draw public financing, which particularly galls those who consider it an extremist group.

Germans widely agree with banning the party, recent surveys show. A poll released Thursday indicated that 67 percent of Germans supported a ban, and 21 percent opposed it, Emnid pollsters said.

Not all politicians believe that the effort to ban will succeed, and if it fails again, the move may even strengthen the party. Norbert Lammert, president of the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, expressed concern that the motion could give the N.P.D. what he called “an instrument of propaganda” for the national campaign next year.

“I consider the political risks that could result from such a motion far greater than the hoped-for advantages,” Mr. Lammert said in an interview Friday with German public radio Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

Even without support from the government and the lower house, the constitutional court must still act on the Bundesrat petition. The country’s Constitution sets high hurdles for censuring political parties and only two have been banned in postwar Germany: the successor to the Nazi Party, in 1952, and the Communist Party, in 1956.

Stanislaw Tillich, the governor of Saxony, has had to grapple with N.P.D. representatives seeking to disrupt the regional legislature by calling Israel a “Jewish terror state,” or showing up in clothing by a well known neo-Nazi designer. He acknowledged the challenges the petition may face.

“Yes, we are taking a risk,” Mr. Tillich said. “But this is a risk worth taking.”

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Gunman's Father and Brother Are 'in Shock,' Says a Source

By Diane Herbst

12/14/2012 at 08:50 PM EST

State police personnel lead children to safety away from the Sandy Hook Elementary School

Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee/Reuters/Landov

The father and older brother of the gunman who was blamed for the Connecticut school shooting are being questioned by authorities but are not suspects, a law enforcement source tells PEOPLE.

The Associated Press reports that the gunman has been identified as 20-year-old Adam Lanza.

His unidentified father, who lives in New York City, and his older brother, Ryan, 24, of Hoboken, N.J., are "in shock," the law enforcement source tells PEOPLE.

They were being questioned by the FBI in the Hoboken police station but "are not suspects, they have no involvement," the source says.

"Imagine the 24 year old – he's lost his mother. Imagine the father, his son killed 20 kids," the source says."   

As for Adam, "It looks like there's mental history there," the law enforcement source says.

Adam Lanza died at the scene of the shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

His mother, Nancy Lanza, was found dead at her home, according to CNN.

The source describes the weapons used by Lanza as "legitimate." According to CNN, Lanza used two hand guns that were registered to his mother and a rifle.

Adam's parents were no longer together, the source says.   

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Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants

ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.

The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.

To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.

But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.

When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.

In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."

The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.

Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.

Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.

A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.

California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.

And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.

If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.

Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.

The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.

"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."

Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.

There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.

Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.

For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.

"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."

___

Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .

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There's no safety in our vast numbers of guns

In 2009, when I was trying to figure out why gun sales were so brisk, I visited a couple of gun shops in Riverside and Corona.

Back then, part of the reason people were arming themselves, they told me, was that President Obama had recently taken office, and they feared that he would crack down on gun ownership. A Riverside gun shop owner said he wasn't sure whether or not Obama was a Muslim, and if by chance someone took a shot at him, there could be rioting. People wanted to make sure they were armed and ready for war.

In Corona, another gun shop owner told me that "once private gun ownership is eliminated, there's nothing to stop the government from doing what it wants to do."

He seemed pretty sure we were headed in that direction, but gun ownership is never going to be eliminated in this country. We love guns. We have more than 300 million of them, which is nearly one for every man, woman and child. In 2010, nearly 5.5 million firearms were manufactured in this country, 95% of them for the U.S. market.

And our support for guns just keeps growing. In 1969, Gallup reported that 60% of Americans supported a ban on handguns. In 2011, a Gallup poll found that only 26% wanted a ban.

It doesn't matter how many thousands of lives are lost (between 2001 and 2010, about 270,000 U.S. residents died in shootings, including homicide, suicide and accidents). And it doesn't seem to matter how many mass killings there are, like the one Friday at the elementary school in Connecticut.

This year, there were mass killings at a mall in Oregon, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and a movie theater in Colorado.

We shudder at the horror, we call for prayer, we say something's got to be done, and then we move on.

In 2010, a week after U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded and six people were killed by a shooter who fired 31 rounds into a Tucson crowd, thousands of people attended a Tucson gun show. Some of them purchased semiautomatic handguns like the one Jared Loughner used on Giffords and the others.

In this country, you can legally buy assault weapons. What does that say about us?

Think about it. We have a national legislative body that fears the clout of the National Rifle Assn. more than it worries about the consequences of allowing people to buy weapons designed for war.

There used to be a federal ban on assault weapons, but it died in 2004. And Congress has not found the will to reinstate it. On Friday, referring to Connecticut, President Obama said it was time for "meaningful action," but he didn't explain what he meant by that.

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) used the Connecticut shooting to remind Californians on Friday that a gun control bill of his died this year in Sacramento. California has a ban on automatic weapons, and SB 249 would have closed a loophole that makes it possible for gun owners to use devices that allow weapons to be quickly and easily reloaded. But a legislative committee suggested the matter should be reviewed administratively, by the attorney general, rather than legislatively.

The gun lobby had pulled out all the heavy artillery against SB 249, which was supported by the California Medical Assn. and the California Nurses Assn. Yee said he was flooded with racist, vulgar and derisive comments and caricatures, and that some of his critics told him to go back to China.

Yee told me he thinks most gun owners are responsible people who respect the power of their weapons and don't abuse that deadly potential. But in its zeal, he said, the gun lobby lets deadly weapons fall into the hands of less-responsible citizens.

"For God's sake," Yee pleaded, "how many people have to die before you come to your senses?"

I checked Friday with Annie Get Your Gun, the Corona shop I visited in 2009. Owner Jerry Fried told me sales are up about 35% this year over last, with customers buying firearms for home protection or recreational shooting. His wife, Annie, said it's been particularly brisk during the holiday season.

"People are buying Christmas gifts," said Annie, who noted a run on rifles.

I also dropped in to Turner's Outdoorsman in Pasadena. Several customers had taken numbers, like you do at a deli, and were waiting for their turn at the gun counter. A sign warned that it was the last day to buy a gun and have the paperwork completed before Christmas. I flipped through the store's holiday flier and counted 114 discounted guns, rifles and shotguns.

A shopper who declined to give his name said he was getting his wife a gun for Christmas, and that she'd be using it for recreational shooting. He hadn't heard about the massacre in Connecticut, but I told him a few details and asked if he thought the latest tragedy might bring new calls for more gun control.

"Whether a gun is legal or not, if bad guys want to get it, they'll get it," said the shopper. "You can legislate all you want, and it's not going to stop the bad guys."

I suspect he's right, but that doesn't mean we're helpless to do the things that might make us a little safer.

The vast majority of gun violence does not involve people with mental health issues. But when mental health services are in short supply for many people, guns are nearly as easy to buy as garden tools, and violence is used to sell music, movies and video games, the shocking thing is that we don't have more tragedies like Connecticut.

When I left the gun shop in Pasadena, I noticed that right next door is a place called My Gym, a children's fitness center.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

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In Cairo Crisis, Unheard Voice From the Poor

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

In Boulaq, so long neglected that houses regularly collapse, there had been little expectation that leaders would provide. But the disregard of the new president has been harder to take. More Photos »

CAIRO — A faded poster of Hosni Mubarak hangs on a wall in a crumbling neighborhood here, reminding residents of an empty pledge to find jobs for young people. Down the street, a campaign banner for his successor, Mohamed Morsi, hangs across the road, a reminder of more recent promises unkept.

In the neighborhood, called Boulaq, so long neglected that houses regularly collapse, there was little expectation that Mr. Mubarak would provide. But Mr. Morsi’s disregard has been much harder to take.

“We had high hopes in God, that things would improve,” Fathi Hussein said as he built a desk of dark wood for one of his clients, who are dwindling. “I elected a president to be good for the country. I did not elect him to impose his opinions on me.”

Away from the protests and violence that have marked the painful struggle over Egypt’s identity in the run-up to a referendum on Saturday on a constitution, residents of Boulaq have their own reasons to be consumed with the crisis. The chants of the protesters, for bread and freedom, resonate in Boulaq’s alleyways. In many of its industrial workshops, passed from struggling fathers to penniless sons, disappointment with the president, his Muslim Brotherhood supporters as well as the leaders of the opposition grows daily.

There is a sense in Boulaq that the raging arguments would be better resolved in places like this, where most Egyptians live, carrying the burdens of poverty with no help from an indifferent state, and where the revolution’s promise of dignity is long overdue.

When he took office five months ago, Mr. Morsi seemed to understand. “He talked about the conditions of the poor, the people in the slums,” said Amr Abdul Hafiz, a barber. “He talked about the street vendors and the tuk-tuk drivers. We thought he felt for us.”

The barber and many of his neighbors were convinced that Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood had earned their chance to rule. People remembered the Brotherhood’s charity after the earthquake in 1992, and its decades of struggle as an outlaw movement. In stages, though, doubts grew as the Brotherhood broke its promises and Mr. Morsi seized power, culminating in his decision to ram through his constitution. Boulaq’s residents, including the president’s supporters, bristled at the thought of being treated as subjects again.

“He became occupied with other issues,” Mr. Abdul Hafiz said. “They want power, to make up for all the injustice they suffered, as if we were the ones who inflicted the injustice on them.”

At night, the arguments rage at a storied cafe on Abu Talib Street, with an intensity that no one here recalls seeing before. By day, the arguments simmer, in a neighborhood whose former grandeur still peeks out from underneath the rot.

Everywhere, people tell stories about the government’s failures, suggesting that the new leaders had turned out no better than the old ones.

In the shadow of a fallen dwelling, one of many that make Boulaq look as if it suffered a war, a widow stood over workmen she had hired to fix a ruptured sewer pipe. The ministry assigned to handle such matters had ignored her calls for three months, so she and her neighbors collected the money to pay for the repairs themselves.

On Abu Talib Street, Mr. Abdul Hafiz fretted over the dangers facing his pregnant wife, whose belly was swelling with excessive amniotic fluid. An appointment to see a doctor at a private hospital, which would cost $80, was too expensive. The administrators at a public hospital told her she could see a doctor a month after she was supposed to give birth.

Security guards threw Mr. Abdul Hafiz out of the hospital when he pointed out how ridiculous that was.

He wanted a change from Mr. Mubarak, who had coverings placed over the houses in Boulaq during the public opening of a nearby building “to hide insects like us.” It was part of a pattern of neglect that stretched back for decades, when the land under the residents was sold to investors in shady deals that no one has untangled.

Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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The X Factor Reveals Season 2 Finalists

TV Watch

The X Factor

12/13/2012 at 09:10 PM EST

Carly Rose Sonenclar, Emblem3, Tate Stevens and Fifth Harmony

Ray Mickshaw/FOX (4)

Sparks will fly at the finale!

On Thursday, The X Factor revealed its top three acts, who will perform next week in the final night of competition – in hopes of taking home the $5 million recording contract.

Simon Cowell said it would take a miracle to get his girl group, Fifth Harmony, to the finale after they performed Shontelle's "Impossible" and Ellie Goulding's "Anything Could Happen" on Wednesday. Keep reading to find out if their dream came true ...

Apparently, miracles do happen! Fifth Harmony was the first act to be sent through to the finale.

They will compete against departing judge L.A. Reid's country singer, Tate Stevens, and Britney Spears's only remaining contestant, Carly Rose Sonenclar.

That means Simon's promising boy band, Emblem3, are out of the running for the big prize.

"This is the way it goes on competitions," Simon said. "I'm gutted really for them ... But it happens."

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Study: People worldwide living longer, but sicker

LONDON (AP) — Nearly everywhere around the world, people are living longer and fewer children are dying. But increasingly, people are grappling with the diseases and disabilities of modern life, according to the most expansive global look so far at life expectancy and the biggest health threats.

The last comprehensive study was in 1990 and the top health problem then was the death of children under 5 — more than 10 million each year. Since then, campaigns to vaccinate kids against diseases like polio and measles have reduced the number of children dying to about 7 million.

Malnutrition was once the main health threat for children. Now, everywhere except Africa, they are much more likely to overeat than to starve.

With more children surviving, chronic illnesses and disabilities that strike later in life are taking a bigger toll, the research said. High blood pressure has become the leading health risk worldwide, followed by smoking and alcohol.

"The biggest contributor to the global health burden isn't premature (deaths), but chronic diseases, injuries, mental health conditions and all the bone and joint diseases," said one of the study leaders, Christopher Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

In developed countries, such conditions now account for more than half of the health problems, fueled by an aging population. While life expectancy is climbing nearly everywhere, so too are the number of years people will live with things like vision or hearing loss and mental health issues like depression.

The research appears in seven papers published online Thursday by the journal Lancet. More than 480 researchers in 50 countries gathered data up to 2010 from surveys, censuses and past studies. They used statistical modeling to fill in the gaps for countries with little information. The series was mainly paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

As in 1990, Japan topped the life expectancy list in 2010, with 79 for men and 86 for women. In the U.S. that year, life expectancy for men was 76 and for women, 81.

The research found wide variations in what's killing people around the world. Some of the most striking findings highlighted by the researchers: — Homicide is the No. 3 killer of men in Latin America; it ranks 20th worldwide. In the U.S., it is the 21st cause of death in men, and in Western Europe, 57th.

— While suicide ranks globally as the 21st leading killer, it is as high as the ninth top cause of death in women across Asia's "suicide belt," from India to China. Suicide ranks 14th in North America and 15th in Western Europe.

— In people aged 15-49, diabetes is a bigger killer in Africa than in Western Europe (8.8 deaths versus 1 death per 100,000).

— Central and Southeast Asia have the highest rates of fatal stroke in young adults at about 15 cases per 100,000 deaths. In North America, the rate is about 3 per 100,000.

Globally, heart disease and stroke remain the top killers. Reflecting an older population, lung cancer moved to the 5th cause of death globally, while other cancers including those of the liver, stomach and colon are also in the top 20. AIDS jumped from the 35th cause of death in 1990 to the sixth leading cause two decades later.

While chronic diseases are killing more people nearly everywhere, the overall trend is the opposite in Africa, where illnesses like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are still major threats. And experts warn again shifting too much of the focus away from those ailments.

"It's the nature of infectious disease epidemics that if you turn away from them, they will crop right back up," said Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders.

Still, she acknowledged the need to address the surge of other health problems across Africa. Cohn said the agency was considering ways to treat things like heart disease and diabetes. "The way we treat HIV could be a good model for chronic care," she said.

Others said more concrete information is needed before making any big changes to public health policies.

"We have to take this data with some grains of salt," said Sandy Cairncross, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

He said the information in some of the Lancet research was too thin and didn't fully consider all the relevant health risk factors.

"We're getting a better picture, but it's still incomplete," he said.

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Online:

www.lancet.com

http://healthmetricsandevaluation.org

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Ray Briem dies at 82; all-night radio host in L.A.

Ray Briem, the longtime KABC-AM talk show host who ruled all-night radio for nearly three decades with his phone calls to the famous and the quirky and his opinionated banter slamming liberals, championing conservative causes and extolling the big-band music he loved, died Wednesday at his Malibu home. He was 82.

The cause was cancer, said his son Bryan.

Briem spent most of his life on the radio, reaching his largest audience as the host of a popular midnight-to-5 a.m. talk show on KABC from 1967 to 1994. During those 27 years he helped set the mold for what has become a major radio genre.

"We consider him one of the most important radio talk-show hosts of all time," said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, the main trade publication for the talk radio industry. "There were only a handful of stations in the entire country doing talk then. It hadn't been formulated, researched, standardized and consulted. It was all based on these creative characters … and Ray Briem was one of the originals."

One of the first conservatives to establish a beachhead in radio, Briem dominated the post-midnight hours, consistently attracting the largest ratings of any overnight talk show. The year he left KABC he was drawing 15.7% of the available audience, a remarkable share in any era. He was also one of the station's most effective pitchmen, whose show "brought in more than a million dollars a year in revenue," said former KABC General Manager George Green.

His political crusades also turned tides.

Briem gave Proposition 13 author Howard Jarvis a regular platform during the 1970s and was credited by Jarvis for helping build the public groundswell that led to the anti-tax measure's resounding victory in 1978. Its passage proved that conservative radio did not play "only to the fringe," Briem said, but had mainstream appeal. "We spoke to the people, and the people responded," he told The Times in 1996.

The veteran broadcaster later bolstered the campaign for Proposition 187 led by Harold Ezell, who credited Briem with helping to get the controversial initiative cutting state services for illegal immigrants on the 1994 state ballot.

Briem also defended President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, which so endeared him to one loyal listener that when she died at 100 she left Briem her house.

An avid pilot, Briem sold the house to buy an airplane.

"He was of a different era," said Michael Jackson, another talk-radio icon who was a daily presence on KABC but attracted a more liberal base than Briem. "Politically we disagreed on almost everything, but I liked him — you couldn't help it. He had no affectation. He cared about the caller. He was always fair.... And his audience trusted him."

Briem was born Jan. 19, 1930, in Ogden, Utah, where his mother was a teacher and his father was a railroad engineer. He briefly attended the University of Utah, where he studied chemistry but abandoned his plans for a science career after "he blew up his chemistry set in the house," his son said.

By then Briem already had the radio bug. When he was 15, he and his buddies conceived a 15-minute radio drama called "The Adventures of Vivacious Vicky" that Ogden's tiny radio station agreed to air. When a staffer at the station went on a drunken binge on V-E Day in 1945, Briem was asked to fill in. Later that year, he was hired full time.

He worked with Armed Forces Radio during the Korean War, hosting live shows with big-name bands, including those led by Harry James, Guy Lombardo, Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

In 1953, after completing his military service, Briem moved to Los Angeles to spin records at KGIL-AM. He remained a deejay through the early 1960s, including a stint in Seattle where he worked for King Broadcasting on both its radio and TV outlets. He hosted a popular teen dance show that led fans to call him "the Dick Clark of Seattle."

In 1958, he married Elsie Child. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964. He is survived by their two children, Bryan, of Malibu, and Kevin, of San Diego; and five grandchildren.

In 1960 Briem came to Los Angeles to deejay at KLAC-AM. He was mentored there by Joe Pyne, the abrasive forerunner of confrontational talk show hosts such as Wally George, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. When the station asked Briem to switch to nighttime talk, "I went into it kicking and screaming," and endured a steep learning curve, he told The Times. "I realized what a dumb head I was. I knew very little about politics or the workings of government, and the first year I was an embarrassment."

But he built up a following during his seven-year stint, engaging listeners with straightforward topics, "like cats, frogs and even submarines," he said in a 1966 Times interview, noting that the submarine show elicited a call from a Nazi U-boat commander who had settled in L.A.

Briem also made "Kooky Calls," the most celebrated of which featured a Hogansville, Ga., police chief who regaled L.A. night owls with stories about confiscating and testing Georgia moonshine. When Briem brought the chief to Hollywood for a week of V.I.P. treatment, he was met by a welcoming party of 300 KLAC listeners.

When Briem was hired at KABC in 1967, he continued to fill the hours with unusual phone calls. One of his most memorable long-term phone pals was Vladimir Pozner, the Radio Moscow commentator who went on to become a Western media celebrity.

After thousands of nights helping the lonely and insomniac pass the hours, Briem "pulled the plug" in 1994. KABC threw him a retirement party at the Century Plaza, which drew more than 1,000 Briem listeners who paid $50 apiece to see their idol and listen to some of his favorite musical artists, including Frankie Laine and the Mills Brothers.

"I'm 65 and my body says staying up all night ain't the right thing to do," he told The Times shortly before he retired. "You never get used to it. Your biological clock, your circadian rhythms are always upset. There will be times when I will miss it, but being able to sleep at night — oh, how wonderful! That will more than compensate for the pangs of not having a forum."

His retirement was brief. Less than a year later he was back on the air, anchoring an afternoon drive show for KIEV-AM. He retired for good in 1997.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Dec. 22 at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 575 Los Liones Drive, Pacific Palisades.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

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World Briefing | The Americas: Cuban Foreign Minister Named to Top Party Body

Cuba has elevated its foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, to the Communist Party’s Political Bureau, where he will join a handful of other senior leaders who are a generation younger than Fidel and Raúl Castro. Mr. Rodríguez, 54, is a former military officer, law professor and ambassador to the United Nations. He became the foreign minister in 2009. Known for his command of English and his loyalty to the Castros, he delivered a speech last month to the United Nations criticizing President Obama for failing to advance United States-Cuba relations despite the president’s promise to “launch a new chapter of engagement.”

The announcement about his rise to the Political Bureau in Granma, Cuba’s state-run newspaper, did not say whether he was replacing one of the 14 current members of the Political Bureau, nor did it signal whether Mr. Rodríguez was being considered as a successor to Raúl Castro, 81. But it did describe the move as part of a generational transition, and as a necessary break from what it called a “blockade of thinking that still persists when the time comes to select and prepare young leaders.”

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