At least 16 hurt in blast and fire at Kansas City restaurant

At least 16 people were hurt and a popular wine bar was destroyed by an apparent natural gas explosion and ensuing fire at an upscale shopping district in Kansas City, Mo., Tuesday evening.

Residents reported smelling natural gas and seeing utility crews in the area before the conflagration. A strong scent of gas hung in the air afterward.

“Early indications are that a contractor doing underground work struck a natural gas line, but the investigation continues,” Missouri Gas Energy, a natural-gas provider, said in a statement.

The Kansas City Fire Department said the incident was under investigation. “It does seem to be an accident,” Fire Chief Paul Berardi said during a late-night news briefing.

JJ's Restaurant and wine bar, just off Country Club Plaza, had apparently been partially evacuated before the blast occurred about 6 p.m.

"This was happy hour at the restaurant. There were patrons in the restaurant," Berardi said.

No fatalities were reported, but officials brought in cadaver dogs to check the rubble. The Kansas City Star reported that one JJ's employee was missing.

The fire raged for two hours, with thick smoke visible for miles. Victims streamed to hospitals; at least four people were in critical condition.

Initially, police said a car had hit a gas main, but officials later discounted that explanation.

Witnesses described a chaotic scene. 

"I was sitting in my living room folding laundry, and felt in my chest -- and heard -- an explosion," said Jamie Lawless, who lives about two blocks from JJ's. "I started freaking out, and I was looking around, and then I saw other people walking outside. You could see giant black smoke billowing up from the plaza area, and nobody really knew what it was."

Sally McVey, who lives across the street from JJ's, said the fire "was growing exponentially, incredibly quickly. It was not like a fire I’ve seen before, where it takes a long time to spread.”

A crowd gathered to watch firefighters battle the blaze. At an apartment building on JJ's block, a woman on a top-floor balcony called down to onlookers.  "'Is my building on fire?' and everybody says, 'Yes, come down!' " McVey said. "She’s like, 'Oh my gosh,' and a lot of people come out of that building with their computers and dogs. She did too.”

JJ's owner, Jimmy Frantze, was out of town, said Kansas City Mayor Sly James, who used to be a fixture at the restaurant. The business, which boasted a selection of 1,800 bottles, had been on the site for 28 years.

“It was 28 years of a great restaurant, and then it has to end like this,” Frantze told the Kansas City Star while driving back from Oklahoma. “I want to make sure to check on my employees to make sure they are all right.”

Kansas City Police Department's bomb squad and officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were expected to investigate the accident after the search dogs finished looking for victims, Berardi said.

 matt.pearce@latimes.com

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Robin Roberts returns to 'Good Morning America'

NEW YORK (AP) — Five months after undergoing a bone marrow transplant, Robin Roberts is back on television in the morning.

Roberts said Wednesday she'd been waiting 174 days "to say this, good morning America."

The morning-show host is recovering from MDS, a blood and bone marrow disease. She looked thin with close-cropped hair but was smiling broadly, back at work on "Good Morning America" at ABC's studio in New York.

Roberts was welcomed back in a taped message from President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, former ESPN colleagues and Magic Johnson.

ABC announced Roberts will interview the first lady later this week, to be shown next Tuesday.

ABC News President Ben Sherwood came into the studio to give fist bumps to the anchors at the 7:25 a.m. EST break. He said Roberts' health will be closely monitored to make sure she doesn't overdo it at the beginning.

"This was up to Robin, her doctors and God," Sherwood said. "It's a day that we all rejoice."

ABC didn't miss a beat with her absence, continuing in first place in the ratings after first overcoming NBC's "Today" show last spring. Sherwood said the success with Roberts' absence surprised him.

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The New Old Age Blog: The Reluctant Caregiver

Now and then, I refer to the people that caregivers tend to as “loved ones.” And whenever I do, a woman in Southern California tells me, I set her teeth on edge.

She visits her mother-in-law, runs errands, helps with the paperwork — all tasks she has shouldered with a grim sense of duty.  She doesn’t have much affection for this increasingly frail 90something or enjoy her company; her efforts bring no emotional reward. Her husband, an only child, feels nearly as detached. His mother wasn’t abusive, a completely different scenario, but they were never very close.

Ms. A., as I’ll call her because her mother-in-law reads The Times on her computer, feels miserable about this. “She says she appreciates us, she’s counting on us. She thanks us,” Ms. A. said of her non-loved one. “It makes me feel worse, because I feel guilty.”

She has performed many services for her mother-in-law, who lives in a retirement community, “but I really didn’t want to. I know how grudging it was.”

Call her the Reluctant Caregiver. She and her husband didn’t invite his parents to follow them to the small city where they settled to take jobs. The elders did anyway, and as long as they stayed healthy and active, both couples maintained their own lives. Now that her mother-in-law is widowed and needy, Ms. A feels trapped.

Ashamed, too. She knows lots of adult children work much harder at caregiving yet see it as a privilege. For her, it is mere drudgery. “I don’t feel there’s anybody I can say that to,” she told me — except a friend in Phoenix and, anonymously, to us.

The friend, therapist Randy Weiss, has served as both a reluctant caregiver to her mother, who died very recently at 86, and a willing caregiver to her childless aunt, living in an assisted living dementia unit at 82. Spending time with each of them made Ms. Weiss conscious of the distinction.

Her visits involved many of the same activities, “but it feels very different,” she said. “I feel the appreciation from my aunt, even if she’s much less able to verbalize it.” A cherished confidante since adolescence, her aunt breaks into smiles when Ms. Weiss arrives and exclaims over every small gift, even a doughnut. She worked in the music industry for decades and, despite her memory loss, happily sings along with the jazz CDs Ms. Weiss brings.

Because she had no such connection with her mother, whom Ms. Weiss described as distant and critical, “it’s harder to do what I have to do,” she said. (We spoke before her mother’s death.) “One is an obligation I fulfill out of duty. One is done with love.”

Unlike her friend Ms. A, “I don’t feel guilty that I don’t feel warmly towards my mother,” Ms. Weiss said. “I’ve made my peace.”

Let’s acknowledge that at times almost every caregiver knows exhaustion, anger and resentment.  But to me, reluctant caregivers probably deserve more credit than most. They are not getting any of the good stuff back, no warmth or laughter, little tenderness, sometimes not even gratitude.

Yet they are doing this tough work anyway, usually because no one else can or will. Maybe an early death or a divorce means that the person who would ordinarily have provided care can’t. Or maybe the reluctant caregiver is simply the one who can’t walk away.

“It’s important to acknowledge that every relationship doesn’t come from ‘The Cosby Show,’” said Barbara Moscowitz when I called to ask her about reluctance. Ms. Moscowitz, a senior geriatric social worker at Massachusetts General Hospital, has heard many such tales from caregivers in her clinical practice and support groups.

“We need to allow people to be reluctant,” she said. “It means they’re dutiful; they’re responsible. Those are admirable qualities.”

Yet, she recognizes, “they feel oppressed by the platitudes. ‘Your mother is so lucky to have you!’” Such praise just makes people like Ms. A. squirm.

Ms. Moscowitz also worries about reluctant caregivers, and urges them to find support groups where they can say the supposedly unsay-able, and to sign up early for community services — hotlines, senior centers, day programs, meals on wheels — that can help lighten the load.

“Caregiving only goes one way – it gets harder, more complex,” she said. “Support groups and community resources are like having a first aid kit. It’s going to feel like even more of a burden, and you need to be armed.”

I wonder, too, if reluctant caregivers have a romanticized view of what the task is like for everyone else. Elder care can be a wonderful experience, satisfying and meaningful, but guilt and resentment are also standard parts of the job description, at least occasionally.

For a reluctant caregiver, “the satisfaction is, you haven’t turned your back,” Ms. Moscowitz said. “You can take pride in that.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Filmmaker blends vintage photos with green screen to make drama

Filmmaker Salvador Litvak knew he had a good story about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and his longtime bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon.

What Litvak didn't know was how to bring the story, which he wrote with his wife, Nina, to the big screen. As an independent filmmaker, he had to produce a period drama with a budget of less than $1 million, a trickle compared to the $65 million it took to make the Oscar-nominated "Lincoln," directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

So Litvak came up with a novel approach: He would use hundreds of Civil War-era photographs to create digital backgrounds that would allow the movie to be filmed entirely on a soundstage in downtown Los Angeles — without having to spend money traveling to film locations and building costly sets.

PHOTOS: Hollywood Backlot moments

The blending of vintage photographs with state-of-the-art green-screen technology, in a process known as cinecollage, allowed "Saving Lincoln" to be made at a fraction of the cost of a conventional period drama.

Although "Saving Lincoln" may not get much attention in the shadow of the critically acclaimed "Lincoln," it is making history in its own way. Other films, such as last year's HBO movie "Hemingway & Gellhorn," have used a similar process of marrying digital effects with historical footage, but "Saving Lincoln" is believed to be one of the first movies to use the process so extensively.

All but one of the 730 shots in the film involved creating digital composites from hundreds of historic photographs that Litvak downloaded for free from a website operated by the Library of Congress.

"This hasn't been done before for a whole film," said Litvak, a UCLA film school graduate who also directed the Passover comedy "When Do We Eat?" "Audiences have never seen anything like this."

Litvak spent about a year assembling the photos, initially as part of his research for the movie, which debuted last week at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.

He collected more than 1,000 photos, including pictures of an unfinished Washington Monument, an unfinished dome on the U.S. Capitol, battlefield scenes from Gettysburg and pictures of the streets of Washington as they looked in the 1860s.

"I would spend hours and hours looking at these prints," Litvak said. "I'd be poking around deep inside these pictures with the cursor from my computer and I suddenly realized — I could move the camera around these photographs instead of the cursor. That was the 'aha' moment."

"Saving Lincoln," which stars Tom Amandes as Lincoln, Penelope Ann Miller as Mary Todd Lincoln and Lea Coco as Ward Hill Lamon, was shot over four weeks in August 2011 on a large soundstage at Atomic Studios in downtown L.A.

Actors worked with just a few historical props in front of a giant 140-foot-wide green screen that would later be filled with the digital composites of the original historic photographs.

The historic photos were fed into a computer program that enabled the cinematographer to match the camera angles and perspective used by the original photographer. Visual effects compositors later would add depth and dimension to the flat images.

To help keep costs down, producers partly relied on volunteer students from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco to assist in the visual effects work.

"The students were instrumental in helping us create this," said Reuben Lim, a producer on the film. "We couldn't have done it without them."

Litvak and his team used social media to spread the word about the film, launching a Facebook page that has more than 50,000 friends. They also relied on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise $62,000 to offset marketing and distribution costs.

North Hollywood prop house History for Hire also gave them a break on rates for such props as a doctor's amputation kit and telegraph equipment used in Spielberg's "Lincoln." (The telegraph equipment also made an appearance in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.")

Litvak is already thinking about using the cinecollage process on other historical movies, including one about California's gold rush.

"It used to be if you wanted to tell a wonderful story from our nation's past, you could only do that if somebody was going to give you $100 million," he said. "Now we can take a great story like this on a very modest budget and we can get it into theaters. There are so many wonderful stories that can be told this way."

richard.verrier@latimes.com

Where the cameras roll: Sample of neighborhoods with permitted TV, film and commercial shoots scheduled this week. Permits are subject to last-minute changes. Sources: FilmL.A. Inc., cities of Beverly Hills, Pasadena and Santa Clarita. Thomas Suh Lauder / Los Angeles Times

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Oscar Pistorius denies charge of premeditated murder

PRETORIA, South Africa -- As his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, cowered behind a locked door in a tiny bathroom, Oscar Pistorius strapped on his prosthetic legs, grabbed his pistol, strode seven yards to the door and fired through it four times, killing her, prosecutors alleged Tuesday as they laid out their case against the double-amputee Olympic runner in Pretoria Magistrate’s Court.

According to prosecutor Gerrie Nel, Pistorius’ actions amounted to premeditated murder.

But in an affidavit read in court, Pistorius said he was deeply in love with Steenkamp and denied any intent to kill her. “I know she felt the same way," he said in the document.

As the affidavit was read, Pistorius wept so bitterly that Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair had to halt the proceedings to allow the athlete time to compose himself.

But in a major blow for Pistorius, Nair agreed with the prosecution, ruling that for the purposes of Tuesday's bail hearing the charge against Pistorius was premeditated murder, a decision that will make it difficult for him to be granted bail.

Under South African law, those charged with a category six offense, the most serious category, must show exceptional circumstances as to why they should be released on bail.

Pistorius may now face months in jail before his trial. If convicted of premeditated murder, the 26-year-old Pistorius, who inspired the world by overcoming adversity to compete in the Olympic Games in London last year, faces life in jail.

The hearing took place at the same time as Steenkamp's family was holding a private funeral for the model.

Though Tuesday’s proceedings were a bail hearing, some of the main contentions of the prosecution and defense cases were aired.

Pistorius wept through much of the hearing, while his brother, Carl Pistorius, put his hand on the athlete’s back in a gesture of comfort. Asked by Nair if he understood the arguments being made, Pistorius replied in a soft, clear voice, "Yes."

Pistorius' defense attorney, Barry Roux, denied there had been any murder, and the runner’s family has made it clear that he will plead not guilty when his trial begins.

Roux argued that the killing was not premeditated. "It’s not even murder. There's no agreement there, not even concession that this is murder," he said, adding that there were many cases of men shooting their wives through doors, mistaking them for robbers.

In the affidavit, Pistorius said, "I deny the allegation in the strongest terms. Nothing can be further from the truth. I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder, let alone premeditated ... as I had no intention to kill my girlfriend."

According to his version of events, the couple had a quiet dinner on Valentine's Day, and he watched TV with his prosthetic legs off while she did yoga. Then, they turned in.

During the night, he said, he went outside to the balcony to get a fan -- without his prosthetic legs -- and heard noises in the bathroom. It was pitch black, and assuming a robber had gained entry, he felt horror and fear sweep through him, he said.

Feeling vulnerable without his prosthetic legs, he said, he grabbed his gun from under his bed, screamed out at the intruder and opened fire through the toilet door, yelling at Steenkamp to phone the police.

It was only after he returned to the bedroom and saw that she was not in bed that he realized it must be her in the toilet, he said.

According to Pistorius, he broke down the bathroom door with a cricket bat and carried her downstairs.

“She died in my arms,” he said.

Nel said there was no evidence available that supported the athlete’s contention that he thought Steenkamp was a burglar and shot and killed her by mistake.

"There is no possible information to support his version that it was a burglar," the prosecutor said.

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McCready's death renews questions for Dr. Drew

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The criticism of Dr. Drew Pinsky spread on the Internet almost as quickly as news of Mindy McCready's death.

The country singer with the tumultuous personal life became the fifth cast member of his "Celebrity Rehab" series to die since appearing on the show and the third from Season 3. The previous deaths stirred up rumors of a curse and a debate about the show's helpfulness. McCready's apparent suicide upped the pitch of the reaction, however.

Singer Richard Marx on Twitter compared Pinsky to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the so-called suicide doctor: "Same results."

Marx backed off later Monday, saying the crack went too far. But he restated his thoughts in a way that summed up much of the reaction in the first 24 hours since the 37-year-old McCready's death Sunday afternoon in Heber Springs, Ark.

"It is, however, my opinion that what Dr. D does is exploitation and his TV track record is not good," Marx wrote.

VH1's "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew" is not currently on the air. Pinsky switched his focus to non-celebrities in Season 6 last fall and changed the title to "Rehab." The show spawned two spinoffs, "Sober House" and "Sex Rehab."

Season 3, shot in 2009, featured McCready, former NBA star Dennis Rodman, actors Tom Sizemore and Mackenzie Phillips, former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and a handful of lesser known celebrity types.

McCready was a sympathetic character on the show and appeared to be far less damaged than her fellow cast members, some of whom experienced fairly graphic symptoms of opiate withdrawal in front of the cameras. McCready suffered a seizure while on the show, further endearing her to Pinsky and the others.

She said in a 2010 interview with The Associated Press that she initially turned Pinsky down.

"But Dr. Drew said something to me that just mowed me over literally, just floored me," she said. "He said, 'You've been being treated for the symptoms of what's wrong with you, not the problem. And you're going to have to put your family aside for a moment, put their feelings aside for a moment and worry about you because if you don't get better, it doesn't matter what your family thinks. You're not going to be there anymore.'"

Pinsky diagnosed her with "love addiction" during the series' run and called her an "angel" in the finale. In an interview with The Associated Press several months later, he said McCready had a good shot at recovery if she remained in treatment.

"Like with anybody I treat, it's really up to them," Pinsky said. "I never know. If they do the work they're supposed to do, yes (there can be success). If she does the work it will be great. It's up to her how much of that she does, how much she feels she needs to do. It seems like she's doing rather well right now so I hope she continues to do so."

Three years later, she's dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot to the head. McCready walked away from treatment several days ago after her father asked a judge to intervene. Her body was found on the front porch of a home she shared with David Wilson, the longtime boyfriend and father of her youngest son who appears to have killed himself in the same spot last month.

Pinsky wasn't available for comment, his publicist said, but he issued a statement Sunday night that noted he'd spoken with McCready recently.

"She is a lovely woman who will be missed by many," the statement said. "Although I have not treated her for a few years, I had reached out to her recently upon hearing about the apparent suicide of her boyfriend and father of her younger (child). She was devastated. Although she was fearful of stigma and ridicule she agreed with me that she needed to make her health and safety a priority. Unfortunately it seems that Mindy did not sustain her treatment."

A lack of continued treatment also appears to have led to the deaths of McCready's Season 3 castmates Mike Starr, bassist for Alice in Chains, and Joey Kovar, a "Real World" participant. Los Angeles riots spark Rodney King and actor Jeff Conaway also have passed away. Starr and Kovar overdosed and King was found dead in his pool with alcohol and marijuana in his system. Conaway was initially thought to have overdosed, but died of pneumonia and an infection.

Bob Forrest, a chemical dependency counselor who appeared on Season 3 of "Celebrity Rehab" and continues to work with Pinsky, said a discussion about mental health and substance abuse issues is important. But attacking Pinsky has only distracted from the real issues.

"Regardless of your feelings about how we do it with the TV show, calling Dr. Drew 'Dr. Kevorkian,' what kind of dialogue is that?" he said. "It's a good headline. We're going through a growth spurt in regards to who we are as a country. I really feel there's something going on in America beyond Mindy McCready's death."

The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show there were 38,364 suicides in the U.S. in 2010 — an average of 105 a day. Thirty-three percent of suicides tested positive for alcohol in 2009 and 20 percent for opiates, including heroin and prescription painkillers.

There were no immediate numbers available for suicides or overdoses post-rehab, but a patient with substance abuse problems is a higher risk for an attempt.

Dr. Sharon Hirsch, an associate professor in the University of Chicago's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, says patients can get trapped in the yin and yang of addiction. She was not familiar with McCready's case, but noted people abusing alcohol or drugs have a lower impulse control. And their lows when they're off drugs become more difficult to overcome, also lowering their resolve.

Dealing with loss, as McCready was, also increases risk, especially around anniversaries.

Hirsch said mental health and addiction issues have to be taken as seriously as a heart attack.

"Depression and substance dependence are all very malignant disorders and I think people forget that," Hirsch said. "They think of cancer, strokes and heart attacks killing people, but depression, substance abuse and eating disorders, too, all kill people. There are very, very high rates of deaths in those illnesses."

Pinsky's shows drew attention to the struggle. But did they help patients? Pinsky has taken an interest in cast members after the shows end and referred them to continuing treatment. But ultimately Hirsch wonders who was on call the last time McCready pondered killing herself.

"One of the key components of any treatment is to talk confidentially with your treatment provider about every aspect of what is going on with you, to be able to get the best care you can," she said. "I just don't know how that could occur in the context of an internationally televised show. And so it would be difficult for me to envision it as a complete treatment program. ... It just really strikes me as entertainment and not as treatment."

___

Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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Former Obama campaign staffers parlay innovations into start-ups

WASHINGTON — As chief technology officer for President Obama's reelection effort, Harper Reed oversaw the development of projects such as Narwhal, an intricate platform that linked the campaign's myriad databases and allowed officials to plot strategy with new precision.

The heady and exhausting 19-month gig convinced Reed, former technology officer for the online T-shirt retailer Threadless, that he should launch his own venture.

"When you go from building T-shirts to software for a presidential campaign used by a cast of millions, it's pretty easy to think, 'OK, we can build something pretty big,'" Reed said.

He and his business partner, Dylan Richard, the campaign's former director of engineering, now are "looking to do something large" with their new business software start-up, he said. They're not the only ones.

Obama's 50,000-square-foot campaign headquarters on the sixth floor of a Chicago office tower also served during the campaign as a business incubator, which now is generating new ventures that seek to parlay its innovations into private-sector enterprises.

Some are classically political. Last month, senior field staffers Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird launched 270 Strategies, a political consulting shop offering clients the kind of data-driven organizing model that helped Obama win.

And Katie Ingebretson and Karine Jean-Pierre, who helped run campaign operations in battleground states, opened a communications and government relations firm in Los Angeles last year.

But the new ventures go beyond political consulting firms. Some of the Obama team's top technologists and data crunchers, including former chief analytics officer Daniel Wagner and product developer Mari Huertas, are contemplating their own tech start-ups.

Their business projects are still in the planning stages, but the new entrepreneurs already have a receptive audience in Silicon Valley.

"The credibility earned by being part of the core Obama campaign team couldn't be higher," said Chris Sacca, a venture investor and Obama fundraiser who has backed companies such as Twitter Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and Bitly Inc.

"Point to another company that goes from zero to $525 million raised digitally in less than two years," he wrote in an email.

The initial products that Obama campaign veterans pitch may be less important than their pedigree, said Scott Weiss, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He already has had informal talks with some former staffers.

Weiss, who co-founded the Internet security firm IronPort Systems Inc. in San Bruno, Calif., noted that the campaign offered a rare opportunity to build "a system that had to hold so much load and be so bulletproof in a short amount of time."

"If you think about the pressure cooker of putting the smartest people together to fix a hard problem like that, it's almost like going through Navy SEAL training together," he said. "Of course they are going to come up with a lot of innovative, creative things."

The keen interest in the nascent start-ups speaks to how a presidential campaign functions as a testing ground for new ideas — as well as a potentially lucrative calling card for political operatives.

"There is something inherently entrepreneurial about a presidential campaign, if you're doing it right," said Joe Rospars, a founding partner of Blue State Digital, the go-to Democratic digital consulting firm that emerged from Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid.

"It's such an interesting challenge to build an organization from scratch that you know is going to go out of business," Rospars said.

Obama's two presidential bids offered particularly ripe environments for out-of-the-box thinking, starting in 2007 when he was running as an underdog first-term U.S. senator.

"We just had to be innovative," said Stewart, who started out as the campaign's Iowa caucus director.

Dan Siroker, a Google Inc. product manager who took a leave to volunteer on Obama's first bid, had the idea to run what are called A/B tests on the campaign website, a tactic that measures the effectiveness of different design elements. The resulting product led to a surge of email sign-ups on the homepage and got him hired to run the analytics team.

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Mary Jo White could face conflicts of interest as SEC chairwoman

NEW YORK — As a lawyer in private practice, Mary Jo White worked for Wall Street all-stars: banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co., auditor Deloitte & Touche, former Bank of America Corp. chief Ken Lewis.

White, President Obama's pick to lead the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, even did legal work for former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director Rajat Gupta, the highest-profile catch in the federal government's crackdown on insider trading, according to disclosures White filed ahead of her U.S. Senate confirmation hearing.

If she wins approval to lead the country's top financial watchdog, government ethics rules could force White to sit out of some SEC decisions. Potential conflicts of interest — or the appearances of conflicts — could arise from her work at the high-powered New York law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, and that of her husband John White, a partner at the prestigious firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

Obama's appointment of White, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan known for high-profile prosecutions of mobsters and terrorists, was seen as a signal the administration was getting tougher on Wall Street. Her confirmation hearing in the Senate has not yet been scheduled but is expected in the next several weeks.

"She would have quite a minefield to navigate," said Robert Kelner, an attorney who is an expert in government ethics rules at the law firm Covington & Burling in Washington. "But this is not unusual for a senior-level appointee coming out of a law firm."

White could have to abstain from votes on matters involving former clients at a time when the SEC has been struggling to regain investor confidence among regulators and financial markets.

Government ethics rules generally prevent commissioners from participating in matters in which they or their spouses have any financial stake, or have any interest that could raise questions about their impartiality, Kelner said.

These rules generally restrict commissioners from taking part in cases they worked on while in the private sector — whether to bring a securities fraud lawsuit against a former client, for example, Kelner said.

White could still be involved in other matters dealing with former clients, just as long as she hasn't previously worked on the other side of particular cases before the SEC, Kelner said.

What could also complicate White's tenure at the SEC is an ethics pledge Obama has required executive-branch appointees to sign since he took office.

Aiming to limit the effects of the "revolving door" between government officials and the private sectors they regulate, the ethics pledge precludes appointees from participating in any matter involving "specific parties that is directly and substantially related" to their "former employer or former clients." Kelner said the pledge generally would not apply to broad regulations or policies.

The White House could grant White a waiver from the ethics pledge.

White did not respond to an email request for comment. Nominees typically do not speak publicly ahead of their confirmation hearings.

White would take over the SEC at a time when the agency faces major regulatory issues, aside from enforcement issues. The five-member commission, under former Chairwoman Mary Schapiro, failed to pass a sweeping overhaul of money-market funds, which federal officials say remain a weak link in the financial system.

Also before the SEC are rules governing high-speed stock trading and how the increasingly fragmented stock market is structured. The agency still must mete out myriad regulations called for by the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul of 2010.

John Coffee, a securities law expert at Columbia University in New York, said White has no apparent conflicts involving the marquee regulatory matters facing the SEC.

"There is just a forest of bayonets waiting out there if she looked like she was protecting a former client from an enforcement action," Coffee said. "I think she's also too smart to put herself in that kind of position."

andrew.tangel@latimes.com

Times staff writer Jim Puzzanghera in Washington contributed to this report.

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Singer Mindy McCready dies in apparent suicide

HEBER SPRINGS, Ark. (AP) — Perhaps there was one heartbreak too many for Mindy McCready.

The former country star apparently took her own life Sunday afternoon in Heber Springs, Ark. Authorities say McCready died of a suspected self-inflicted gunshot to the head and an autopsy is planned. She was 37, the mother of two young sons.

McCready has had at least three suicide attempts since 2005 among a series of tumultuous public events that marked much of the singer's adult life.

Speaking to The Associated Press in 2010, McCready smiled wryly while talking about the string of issues she'd dealt with over the last half-decade.

"It is a giant whirlwind of chaos all the time," she said of her life. "I call my life a beautiful mess and organized chaos. It's just always been like that. My entire life things have been attracted to me and vice versa that turn into chaotic nightmares or I create the chaos myself. I think that's really the life of a celebrity, of a big, huge, giant personality."

This time it seems the whirlwind overwhelmed McCready.

Her death comes a month after that of David Wilson, her longtime boyfriend and the father of her youngest son. He is believed to have shot himself on the same porch of the home they shared in the small wooded community of large lakefront houses about 65 miles north of Little Rock, Ark., and his death also was investigated as a suicide.

It was the most difficult moment in a life full of them. McCready issued a statement last month lamenting his death. And she called him her soul mate and a caregiver to her sons in an interview with NBC's "Today" show.

"I just keep telling myself that the more suffering that I go through, the greater character I'll have," she said, according to a transcript of the interview.

Like so many times before, McCready showed a little toughness in the midst of a personal storm, again endearing herself to her fans. But as usual, the brave face for the camera hid a much more complicated internal struggle that surfaced publicly time and again over the last 10 years.

This time, along with her remembrances of finding Wilson as he lay dying, she also answered questions about whether they'd argued earlier that evening about an affair and if she'd shot him.

"Oh, my God," the "Today" transcript reads. "No. Oh, my God. No. He was my life. We were each other's life."

It's unclear what circumstances led to McCready taking her own life, but it appears she was struggling again with twin issues that have persisted for years — substance abuse and the custody of her children. She checked into court-ordered rehab and gave her children up to foster care earlier this month after her father asked a judge to intervene, saying she'd stopped taking care of herself and her sons and was abusing alcohol and prescription drugs.

It's not clear where her sons, 6-year-old Zander and infant Zayne, were Sunday.

A deputy stationed outside McCready's home Sunday night referred questions to the Cleburne County sheriff, who was unavailable. Yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off the front yard and a dark-colored pickup truck sat in the driveway.

News of McCready's death spread quickly Sunday night on Twitter, with major country stars paying their respects to the onetime Nashville darling.

"Too much tragedy to overcome. R.I.P Mindy McCready," wrote Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks.

And Carrie Underwood added: "I grew up listening to Mindy McCready...so sad for her family tonight. Many prayers are going out to them..."

Melinda Gayle McCready arrived in Nashville in 1994 still in her teens with tapes of her karaoke vocals and earned a recording contract with BNA Records. She had a few memorable moments professionally, scoring her first No. 1 hit almost immediately.

"Guys Do It All the Time," a self-assured dig at male chauvinism, endeared her to female fans in 1996. She also scored a hit with "Ten Thousand Angels," and her album of that title sold 2 million copies.

Beyond that, though, she's mostly remembered for a string of dramatic moments as she spent the next 15 years chasing another huge hit. Her problems included a custody battle with her mother over one of her sons, arrests, overdoses and discord in her love life.

She made headlines in April 2008 when she claimed a longtime relationship with baseball great Roger Clemens. Published reports at the time said she met the pitcher at a Florida karaoke bar when she was 15 and he was 28 and married. Clemens denied the relationship. A decade earlier she was engaged to actor Dean Cain, but the two never married.

She also had a turbulent relationship with Billy McKnight, a country singer who is the father of her oldest son. McKnight was arrested in 2005 on charges of attempted murder after authorities say he beat and choked her.

During this period she also pleaded guilty to obtaining the painkiller OxyContin fraudulently at a pharmacy and got probation. She violated the probation with a drunken driving arrest in May 2005, a few days before McKnight was arrested. And in July 2007, she was arrested in her hometown of Fort Myers, Fla., on misdemeanor charges of scratching her mother, Gayle Inge, on the face during a scuffle and resisting sheriff's deputies.

Less than a year later, McCready was arrested and charged with violating her probation by falsifying her community service records relating to the 2004 drug charge. A month later, she entered an extended care facility for undisclosed treatment, and followed that with a 60-day jail sentence. Inge took custody of Zander.

There were at least three suicide attempts between July 2005 and December 2008.

She tried to get help in an unusual way, joining the cast of "Celebrity Rehab 3" with Dr. Drew Pinsky. McCready came off as a sympathetic figure during the show's run. Pinsky called her an "angel" and in an interview in 2010 said it appeared McCready was doing "rather well."

Pinsky helped treat McCready for love addiction on the show and said he'd referred her to professionals who could continue to help her afterward.

"A love addict basically is somebody that really didn't have a good model for intimacy in their childhood, often times traumatized in one way or another, thereby intimacy becomes a risk place, becomes an intolerable place," Pinsky said. "And so what they tend to do is attach themselves to idealized, bigger than life, unavailable others, specifically go after some public figure that's married or go after some rock star who is himself a sex addict and not interested in a relationship, and then idealize that person and actively pursue them to the point of obsession."

McCready suffered a seizure in one of the show's scarier moments. Tests showed she has suffered brain damage, something she attributed to her abusive relationship with McKnight.

McCready is the fifth celebrity to pass away since appearing on Pinsky's show and the third from Season 3. Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr and "Real World" participant Joey Kovar both died of overdoses.

In the months after her stint, McCready said she found some peace, telling The Associated Press in early 2010 that she hoped to get her career restarted, write a book about her experiences and begin production on a reality show with her brothers. She'd just met Wilson and talked openly about their relationship, although the producer and musician declined to speak on the record.

With a publicist, reporters, cameras, makeup artists and musicians swirling around her during a press day for her last album, "I'm Still Here," McCready fended off questions about a sex tape and said she and Wilson started out as friends.

"And I've never had a relationship like that before where we started completely as friends," she said. "It turned into friends really caring about each other and then it turned into love and I've never had that happen before."

At the time, Pinsky thought the relationship was on the right track: "She's an easy person to like and to care about and we hope she does well," Pinsky said. "So far so good as far as I can tell."

McCready said her main goal in 2010 was to pull her family back together: "I would like my son back with me and for my brothers and I and he to be able to go and do this (TV reality show), and I think after that I will be a pretty happy girl."

The new album debuted at No. 71 and failed to gain radio airplay. McCready's plans never materialized and she soon was in legal trouble again, this time fighting for custody.

McCready took her older son from her mother, the boy's legal guardian, in late 2011. She fled to Arkansas without permission over what she called child abuse fears. Authorities eventually found McCready hiding in a home without permission and took the boy into custody.

She and Wilson had their son in April 2012.

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Music Writer Chris Talbott reported from Nashville, Tenn. Associated Press writer Tamara Lush contributed to this report from Tampa, Fla.

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