Kerry Is Hoping to Nudge Egypt Toward Reforms

CAIRO — Secretary of State John Kerry told Egypt’s political and business leaders on Saturday that it was urgent their country institute economic reforms and satisfy the conditions the International Monetary Fund has set for a $4.8 billion loan.

“It is paramount, essential, urgent that the Egyptian economy get stronger, that it gets back on its feet,” Mr. Kerry told a group of Egyptian and American business executives in Cairo. “It’s clear to us that the I.M.F. arrangement needs to be reached, that we need to give the market that confidence.”

Mr. Kerry’s visit — his first trip to an Arab capital as secretary of state — comes at a time of economic peril in Egypt. The country’s economy has teetered near collapse for months, with soaring unemployment, a gaping budget deficit, dwindling hard-currency reserves and steep declines in the currency’s value.

The fund’s loan is critical, economists say, because it would provide a seal of approval that Egypt’s economy is on a path toward self-sufficiency, allowing it to obtain enough other international loans to fill in its deficit. Both the United States and the European Union are prepared to provide substantial additional assistance if Egypt and the I.M.F. can come to terms.

But even as Mr. Kerry stressed the need for prompt economic steps — and the political peace needed to achieve those changes — some opponents of President Mohamed Morsi sought to put the spotlight on the nation’s uneasy political course.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled for April. The major opposition group, the National Salvation Front, has announced that it plans to boycott the vote to protest what it says is a push by Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies to dominate politics.

The Obama administration has been criticized by some of Mr. Morsi’s rivals as being too supportive of the Egyptian president, as has Mr. Kerry, who was the first American senator to meet Mr. Morsi.

The delicacy of the issue was apparent when members of the political opposition were invited to a Saturday session with Mr. Kerry. Some members, including Hamdeen Sabahi, who came in third in the presidential election last year, decided not to attend. Mohamed ElBaradei, one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front, chose not to go, but to speak by phone with Mr. Kerry instead.

Those that attended, Mr. Kerry later said, engaged in a “very, very spirited” discussion.

 Mohamed El Orabi, a former foreign minister and a leading member of the National Congress Party who went to the meeting, said that Mr. Kerry had talked about the importance of democracy while driving home his message on the economy.

Mr. Kerry also met separately with Amr Moussa, a former secretary general of the Arab League and the head of the National Congress Party.

The two years of tumult that began with the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak has sharply slowed foreign investment and tourism, and economists say the Egyptian government urgently needs a cash infusion of several billion dollars to fend off the risk of an economic calamity that could lead to more unrest and instability.

In September, the United States brought more than 100 business executives to Cairo to encourage trade and economic development. But continuing political protests, including when demonstrators scaled the walls of the American Embassy here on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, discouraged many businessmen from following up, Mr. Kerry noted. (The protesters that day were angry over an amateurish American-made video denouncing Islam.)

The International Monetary Fund has held on-again, off-again negotiations with Egypt for more than a year about providing the $4.8 billion.

The fund has imposed two difficult conditions. It has required the Egyptian government to commit itself to undertaking painful reforms like raising taxes and reducing energy subsidies.

It has also required a demonstration of political support for the reforms and the loan, to ensure that the government will honor its commitments in the future. That requires a dependable political process, as well as a degree of consensus that Egypt’s political factions have been unable to sustain.

On Sunday, Mr. Kerry is scheduled to meet with Mr. Morsi. The secretary of state said he would discuss specific steps the United States could take to boost the Egyptian economy if Egypt worked out a loan package with the I.M.F. That will be Mr. Kerry’s final meeting in Egypt before departing for Saudi Arabia, the seventh stop on his nine-nation tour.

The protests and street violence that have destabilized Egypt’s transition continued Saturday. The Egyptian state media reported that a demonstrator in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura was killed when he was run over by an armored police vehicle.

Violence also flared again in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, where the state media reported that protesters had burned down a police station. The Port Said protests began Jan. 26 after 21 local soccer fans were sentenced to death for their role in a deadly riot at a match last year.

But over the past month, the demonstrations in Port Said have blurred together with sometimes-violent protests in several other cities along the Suez Canal or in the Nile Delta. Some protesters are angry at Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, accusing them of failing to deliver fast enough on the anticipated rewards of the revolution, including economic benefits.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Cairo, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Istanbul.

Read More..

Michelle Williams & Jason Segel's Breakup Saddened Readers

By Andrea Billups

03/02/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Jason Segel and Michelle Williams

AKM-GSI

From breakups to bad fashion, this week's news had you laughing, smiling and feeling blue. The endearing display of fatherhood from new dad Nick Lachey, who put mini-me son Camden on his new album cover, made you smile, while Michelle Williams and Jason Segel's split made you sad.

Check out the articles with the top reactions on the site this week, and keep clicking on the emoticons at the bottom of every story to tell us what you think!

Readers showed big love for Lachey's precious baby photo, which adorns the singer's latest record cover, for A Father's Lullaby. Lachey, 39, is loving being a first-time dad, and his son with wife Vanessa Lachey, is an uncanny mini-me version of the pop singer, with thick brown hair and deep blue eyes.

Britney Spears has debuted many looks in her career, but her latest chestnut haircolor – a welcome change from her usual blonde – has our readers offering their approval. The singer's new look, which she showed off at Elton John's Oscar night party, comes as a fresh start after her January break-up with fiancé Jason Trawick.

If outspoken Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Brandi Glanville wasn't provocative enough already, her revealing Oscar dress drew angry responses from readers who said its cleavage-spilling bodice wasn't property fitted to house to her ample assets.

The breakup of actors Michelle Williams, 32, and Jason Segel, 33, saddened our readers, many of whom no doubt wanted a fairy tale ending for the actress and her daughter, Matilda, 7. A source told PEOPLE that the couple's long-distance relationship – she lives in New York, he in Los Angeles – was to blame.

Josh Duhamel, expecting a baby with wife Fergie, describes himself as a big kid, and his drag-inspired parody of Taylor Swift, in an oversized dress and blonde wig, no less, made our readers laugh out loud. The outfit was a part of his promotion for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards, set for March 23 on Nickelodeon, where Duhamel, 40, will serve as host.

Check back next week for another must-read roundup, and see what readers are reacting to every day here.

Read More..

WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

__

Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

Read More..

'Fight for Air' participants are stepping up and up and up

Downtown skyscraper manager Peter Anastassiou knew what steps to take when asked to help with an American Lung Assn. charity event: all 1,391 in his building.

His 62-story Aon Center at 707 Wilshire Blvd. will host as many as 800 stair climbers in the group's sixth annual "Fight for Air" fundraising event April 6.

Access to most high-rises has been restricted for outsiders since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But Anastassiou opens his stairwells on Tuesdays and Thursdays to people who registered for the event and want to get in shape.

"We are probably the only building downtown that does this," Anastassiou said.

Climbers include Michael Carcieri, a 61-year-old financial officer from Silver Lake; Mark Trahanovsky, a 54-year-old Yorba Linda salesman; and Pasadena options trader Jeff Dinkin, 47. They all are making the most of the opportunity.

"You look up at a tall building with a sense of dread.  You know it's going to be painful. There's nothing pretty about a stairwell," Trahanovsky said.

Another participant, Zivadin Zivkovic, travels to the building twice a week from San Diego, where he works in information technology. "Sometimes it takes me three hours each way, so I stay here for the full two-hour practice session and get five, six, sometimes seven climbs in. If I was really fast, I could get in eight or nine climbs," said Zivkovic, 47.

Stan Schwarz, computer system administrator for Caltech's earthquake office, has measured the steps and mapped out the Aon Center's zigzagging stairwells for other climbers. He said he first undertook the climb in 2009 after seeing photographs of earlier participants on the tower's helipad.

"I figured you never get to stand on the roof of these buildings normally. But the first time I did it I thought I was going to die. I told myself up on the roof I'd never do it again — it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. But by the time we got back down to the ground and they posted the times I said, 'Hey, I'm doing this again,'" said Schwarz, 53, of Pasadena.

Climber Lisa Zeigel, a 54-year-old personal trainer from Altadena, agreed the climb is tough but that the view — and the sense of accomplishment — makes it all worthwhile. "When you reach the top, you're out of anything left in the legs or the lungs. But on the roof I feel this indescribable elation, a kind of high," she said.

Two other Los Angeles high-rises also host annual stair climbs, but neither are open for training. The 73-story U.S. Bank Tower is the scene of the Ketchum-Downtown YMCA climb each September, and the 53-story Figueroa at Wilshire building is used for the Step Up to the Challenge climb staged in November by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

The Aon Center is the second-tallest building in town. "Since climbers go all the way to the helipad on the roof, we say it's 63 stories of climbing," Anastassiou said. "A lot of the tenants here use the stairs for exercise at lunch, too. They're very positive about having climbers in the building."

About 60 companies — law offices, insurance firms, bankers — occupy the Aon Center, which was the tallest skyscraper in Los Angeles when it was built in 1974.

Those practicing for the April climbing event take elevators to get back down. Stairwell doors are locked to prevent them from wandering through the building's hallways. Climbers who encounter difficulty while training can use a stairwell intercom to summon help.

Jill Arnstein, executive director of the Lung Assn.'s Los Angeles chapter, said money raised from participants' $25 entry fees and required minimum of $100 in pledges is spent for research into lung disease and public awareness of asthma and other pulmonary problems.

Vanessa Petersen, who is helping organize the climb, said faster climbers will be allowed to go first on April 6. So will firefighters from Los Angeles and neighboring cities, who will climb carrying about 60 pounds of gear.

The event is good training for them, too: In 1988, firefighters had to carry equipment up what was then called the First Interstate Bank Tower to battle a raging high-rise fire. That blaze killed a building maintenance worker and injured 49 others, including 14 firefighters.

The stair climbs have so far raised about $650,000 for the Lung Assn. Last year, Anastassiou was among 744 climbers who raised $161,000. This year's goal is to raise $178,000, he said.

Fast climbers can reach the top in around eight minutes; last year, Anastassiou climbed the steps in 18. He's improved: "The first year it took me 28 minutes," he said.

bob.pool@latimes.com

Read More..

French and Chad Forces Bear Down on Militants in Mali

DAKAR, Senegal — The French military struck at Islamist militants dug in along the remote, rocky mountain ranges of northern Mali over the last week, killing scores, a French military spokesman said Friday.

The week’s operations, conducted with Chadian troops, were a further sign that the French military intervention against the jihadists in Mali, initially viewed as a quick strike, was not winding down soon.

Meanwhile, the Chadian president, Idriss Déby Itno, confirmed that Abu Zeid, the most important commander in Al Qaeda’s regional franchise, had been killed in combat, Mr. Déby’s communications director, Dieudonné Djonabaye, said Friday night.

The Algerian newspaper El Khabar asserted that samples from the corpse presumed to be that of Abu Zeid — he was of Algerian birth — had been sent to Algiers for testing against relatives; a senior Algerian official declined to confirm the report on Friday night.

Abu Zeid’s death would represent a significant blow to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as he was considered the toughest, most resilient of the local Qaeda commanders, and the most ruthless. Abu Zeid is held responsible for the executions of at least two Western hostages in 2009 and 2010 — an elderly Frenchman and an elderly Briton — and his Qaeda unit is believed to be holding perhaps half a dozen other Western hostages. In addition, he has an extensive network of contacts throughout the region, allowing him to recruit in many countries, analysts said.

Abu Zeid had been spotted at Timbuktu during the Islamist ascendancy in northern Mali last year, and the harsh Shariah rule instituted there — public whippings, destruction of monuments, banning of music and other leisure activities — is attributed at least in part to him.

Still, hundreds of jihadist fighters remain in the mountains, said a senior official with the Tuareg rebel movement, which is playing a supporting role in the French military campaign. Analysts suggested nonetheless that the French and Chadian successes this week — as many as 130 terrorists were killed in ground and air operations, according to the French spokesman — did not mean the French were getting bogged down in Mali, but rather that intelligence was improving and more extremists were being flushed out of their mountain retreats.

The French have some 1,200 soldiers in the region, and the Chadians 800, and they are concentrating their efforts on a 15-mile zone in the Adrar des Ifoghas, the rocky, barren mountains at Mali’s Algerian border, according to Col. Thierry Burkhard, the French military spokesman.

“From the beginning this has been the refuge of the region’s terrorist groups,” Colonel Burkhard said of the area around Tessalit, a settlement near the Algerian border. “Our objective is to comb through this zone, find the terrorist groups, then neutralize them.”

Colonel Burkhard said French forces alone had killed some 40 jihadists over the last week, while Chadian troops had eliminated perhaps 90. The French said there had been about 60 airstrikes, and about 10 of the jihadists’ vehicles had been destroyed.

“They are hanging on in a very determined fashion,” Colonel Burkhard said. “They are not looking to retreat. They want to hang on to their positions. They’ve been implanted in this region for a long time, and they’ve prepared the terrain. They’ve got foxholes, and they’ve got enough weapons to resist over the long term.”

Some 25 Chadian soldiers were killed in clashes with the jihadists last week — deaths that provoked Mr. Déby to call on other African nations to relieve Chad of some of the burden. Although other countries have deployed in Mali, they are generally well away from the fighting.

French and Chadian forces are carrying on the fight, more or less alone. “It’s not prolonged because of failure,” a Western defense attaché in the Malian capital, Bamako, said Friday night. “They are finding more jihadists. The French are very much keeping the tempo up. They are inflicting significant attrition,” but he added that the jihadists “are proving surprisingly resilient.”

Adam Nossiter reported from Dakar, Senegal, and Maïa de la Baume from Paris. Martin Zoutane contributed reporting from Ndjamena, Chad.

Read More..

Taylor Lautner Hurls a Dog Bowl at Nikki Reed in This Unseen Breaking Dawn Clip

Watch your back, Rosalie!

The fictional character, played by Nikki Reed, 24, in the Twilght saga, is attacked in the head by Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), 21, with a dog bowl in a never-before-seen clip from the extended edition of Breaking Dawn: Part 1.

Rosalie sets down the dog bowl, which contains a hot dog, next to Jacob, telling him, "Enjoy, mongrel," with a smirk.

After taking a bite of the meal, Lautner proceeds to hurl the bowl at her head, as she walks away with her back facing him.

"He hit me in the head with that bowl, but it was a rubber bowl," Reed tells PEOPLE of the prop. "I mean, it doesn't matter what Taylor throws, it's all going to be painful."

The extra clip is a scene that was written up in the original Breaking Dawn book, but never made it to the big screen version. The extended DVD, along with the Breaking Dawn: Part 2 DVD, is available (separately) March 2.

"We love giving the fans any opportunity to see more," Reed says. "And as an actor making these films, you kind of know these stories revolve around the love story with Bella, Edward and Jacob. The books contain a lot more, but the films can only be so long. We shoot a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily make it into the film, but they're always on the DVD."

Reflecting back on the cast and her time filming, Reed calls their bond "undeniable," saying, "I think that we will all continue to put in the effort. We're always all over the place and it's hard to find each other. It does take work, but I think we all care about each other."

In fact, fellow costar, Peter Facinelli, already has a regular reunion plan.

"Peter was like, 'Hey, should we do like every Sunday brunch?' " Reed says. "I said, 'Sure, if I'm in town, I'm in.' I'm positive there will be a massive reunion. I'm not sure who is going to organize it, but I am happy to."

Read More..

WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

__

Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

Read More..

Population growth is threat to other species, poll respondents say

Nearly two-thirds of American voters believe that human population growth is driving other animal species to extinction and that if the situation gets worse, society has a "moral responsibility to address the problem," according to new national public opinion poll.

A slightly lower percentage of those polled — 59% — believes that population growth is an important environmental issue and 54% believe that stabilizing the population will help protect the environment.

The survey was conducted on behalf of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which unlike other environmental groups has targeted population growth as part of its campaign to save wildlife species from extinction.

The center has handed out more than half a million condoms at music concerts, farmers markets, churches and college campuses with labels featuring drawings of endangered species and playful, even humorous, messages such as, "Wrap with care, save the polar bear."

The organization hired a polling firm to show other environmental groups that their fears about alienating the public by bringing up population matters are overblown, said Kieran Suckling, the center's executive director. When the center broke the near-silence on population growth with its condom campaign, other environmental leaders "reacted with a mix of worry and horror that we were going to experience a huge backlash and drag them into it," he said.

Instead, Suckling said the campaign has swelled its membership — now about 500,000 — and donations and energized 5,000 volunteers who pass out prophylactics. He said a common response is, "Thank God, someone is talking about this critical issue."

The poll results, he said, show such views are mainstream.

In the survey, the pollsters explained that the world population hit 7 billion last year and is projected to reach 10 billion by the end of the century. Given those facts, 50% of people reached by telephone said they think the world population is growing too fast, while 38% said population growth was on the right pace and 4% thought it was growing too slowly. About 8% were not sure.

Sixty-one percent of respondents expressed concerned about disappearing wildlife. Depending how the question was phrased, 57% to 64% of respondents said population growth was having an adverse effect. If widespread wildlife extinctions were unavoidable without slowing human population growth, 60% agreed that society has a moral responsibility to address the problem.

Respondents didn't make as clear a connection between population and climate change, reflecting the decades-old debate over population growth versus consumption. Although 57% of respondents agreed that population growth is making climate change worse, only 46% said they think having more people will make it harder to solve, and 34% said the number of people will make no difference.

Asked about natural resources, 48% said they think the average American consumes too much. The view split sharply along party lines, with 62% of Democrats saying the average American consumes too much, compared with 29% of Republicans. Independents fell in the middle at 49%.

The survey of 657 registered voters was conducted Feb. 22-24 by Public Policy Polling, a Raleigh, N.C., firm that takes the pulse of voters for Democratic candidates and Democratic-leaning clients. It has a margin of error of 3.9%.

ken.weiss@latimes.com

Read More..

Czechs Split Deeply Over Joining the Euro

PRAGUE — Vaclav Klaus, the departing president of the Czech Republic, has equated the European Union to the former Soviet bloc, blamed the euro for the Greek crisis and called the single currency a mistake. He has even refused to hang the Union’s gold-starred flag at the Prague Castle, the seat of the Czech president.

So when Mr. Klaus, a Thatcher-loving economist who became a potent spokesman for continental Europhobes, steps down next week to make way for Milos Zeman as president, euro enthusiasts here will rejoice. Mr. Zeman has not only promised to hang the Union’s flag at the castle but has also suggested a referendum on whether to join the euro zone and suggested 2017 as the earliest possible date for entry.

But the celebrating could be premature. While the presidency, a largely ceremonial post, has the power to influence the debate, the Czech Republic remains deeply polarized between a business community clamoring to get into the euro club and skeptics who associate the currency with the economic pain buffeting Europe’s southern tier.

More than 80 percent of Czechs are against entering the euro zone, according to the latest Eurobarometer poll, making the Czechs the strongest opponents among the seven former Soviet bloc members in the European Union that have yet to join. Deeply resistant to embracing the euro’s one-size-fits-all monetary policy and loath to bail out cash-poor countries like Greece, many policy makers here insist that the Czech Republic is a striking example of why life outside the euro is simply better.

“Being inside the euro is not a sign of the quality of a country’s economy — the crisis has proved that,” Mojmir Hampl, 37, vice governor of the Czech National Bank, said in an interview. “The average Czech household says, ‘Thank God we don’t have to pay for these profligate Greeks.”’

Such sentiments are not limited to the Czech Republic, and enthusiasm for the euro is diminishing in most of those former Soviet-bloc countries, according to the Eurobarometer poll. The European Commission, which commissions the poll, noted that 54 percent of people in these countries, which include Poland, Hungary and Romania, think the euro will have negative consequences for their countries. Even in Latvia, which wants to adopt the euro by next year, 68 percent of people believe that joining would constitute losing part of their national identity.

Here in the Czech Republic, pushed and pulled between East and West over the centuries, the national sense of self has also played an important part in stoking ambivalence. Petr Pithart, a lawyer and former prime minister, argued that the antipathy toward the euro was a byproduct of a deep-seated mistrust of the West in the Czech soul, planted in 1938, when France and Britain yielded to Nazi pressure and allowed Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. “Those wounds have not completely healed,” he said. “Klaus knew how to exploit this very well.”

Yet Mr. Hampl, an appointee of Mr. Klaus whose current term at the Czech National Bank ends in 2018, said the main reason for resisting the euro came down to hard-headed economics. Mr. Hampl argued that an independent monetary policy had allowed the central bank to cut interest rates in August 2008 after the crisis first hit hard, thereby helping to cushion the country against the worst effects of the downturn.

Moreover, he estimated that being outside the euro zone — and not contributing to the European Union’s bailout fund — had saved the country roughly €280 billion, or about $370 billion, in potential liabilities over a three-year period. “Knowing that we haven’t been saddled with that debt has helped me to sleep at night,” he said.

Yet the Czech Republic has hardly been immune from the European debt crisis, and some economists counter that in a country where 80 percent of exports go the euro zone countries, the economy is inextricably linked to the fate of the euro, even if the Czechs use the koruna instead.

Indeed, the country has slumped into a modest recession since 2011, weighed down by weak demand for Czech products like cars and Bohemian crystal. Consumption at home has also been lackluster as the center-right coalition government has instituted tough austerity measures, including raising sales taxes and slashing spending. Unemployment of about 7.5 percent in December was a far cry from the roughly 25 percent in Spain or Greece, but it has hit especially hard in the poorer parts of the country.

Against that backdrop, euro entry remains a hard sell for officials like Tomas Zidek, the deputy finance minister, who said in an interview that the European Union and the euro were now vastly different propositions than what the Czechs had signed up for when they joined the Union in 2004. The current efforts to shore up the monetary union by integrating banking and fiscal measures, he added, were as ill-advised in an economically diverse bloc as trying to call a Czech pilsner a German beer.

Mr. Zidek acknowledged that the Finance Ministry was under pressure to join the euro from Czech companies that face huge transaction costs because the country is outside the zone. “Companies complain all the time,” he said. “Our exports are hit by the lack of exchange rate stability.”

Skoda, the Czech automobile company that is owned by Volkswagen, said it supported the Czech Republic’s joining the euro, “the faster, the better,” because the company exports 60 percent of its cars to countries in the European Union and does the bulk of its business in euros. Michal Kadera, a senior manager at Skoda, said that production planning for cars took at least two years and that sudden fluctuations in the koruna against the euro made planning much more difficult and expensive.

Tomas Sedlacek, an economist who has advised President Vaclav Havel, said that not being in the euro zone was costing Czech companies billions of korunas a year in hedging costs associated with the fluctuation of the koruna against the euro. An independent monetary policy was no panacea, he added, pointing to Hungary, which has held on to its currency, the forint, and had sought a bailout before Greece.

“Those Czechs like Klaus,” he said, “who think having the koruna has saved us from the crisis, are living in a dream world.”

Hana de Goeij contributed reporting.

Read More..

Josh Duhamel Has 'Full Conversations' with His Unborn Child

FameFlynet

Daddy-to-be Josh Duhamel is so excited about welcoming his first child that he’s begun to bond with wife Fergie‘s belly.

“I’ve had full conversations with the baby already,” Duhamel jokes to PEOPLE at Tuesday’s Nickelodeon upfront presentation in New York. “I’m trying my best to communicate from beyond the womb. Whether it can hear me, I don’t know, but I’m talking to it a lot.”

In addition to enjoying his chats with Fergie’s baby bump, the Safe Haven star, 40, admits he loves the Black Eyed Peas singer’s pregnancy glow.

“She looks so beautiful,” he says. “I look at her now as not only as my beautiful wife, but also as the woman carrying our child. That takes our relationship to a whole new level.”

As for dealing with the sleepless nights, diaper duty and constant feedings, the actor claims he’s up for the challenge.

“I actually look forward to that stuff that people warn you about,” he says. “I don’t mind waking up and dealing with the middle of the night stuff. I wake up early anyway. So I’m definitely ready for it. More so than I’ve ever been.”

There is one task Duhamel really wants to be ready for: ”I hope to be a great dad.”

“I have a lot more life experience than I had at 24. I feel like I’m a little more patient and more wise than I was before,” he explains. “It’s easier said than done, but I’m just looking to raise a good person.”

He adds, “When we saw the ultrasound, that thing was moving around a lot. So I think we are going to have our hands full.”

In the meantime, Duhamel will be busy preparing to host Nickelodeon’s 26th annual Kids’ Choice Awards, airing March 23 at 8 p.m..

“It’s truly bonkers what this show is going to be,” he says. “I’m trying to do things as a host that people would never expect me to do. So if people didn’t take me seriously before, they definitely won’t take me seriously now.”

– Paul Chi

Read More..

WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

__

Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

Read More..

Eric Garcetti showed political savvy during busy student years

Fourth in a series of articles focusing on key periods in the lives of the mayoral hopefuls.

Ben Jealous still recalls walking into a Columbia University meeting of a new group called Black Men for Anita Hill and seeing a half-Jewish, half-Mexican kid from Los Angeles leading the discussion.

"What's he doing here?" he asked the professor who organized the meeting.

"Honestly brother," the teacher replied, "he's the only one here I'm certain will really work hard."

L.A. ELECTIONS 2013: Sign up for our email newsletter

It was Jealous' first exposure to Eric Garcetti, a committed young progressive known on campus for gliding between different worlds and liberal causes. As a political science major at Columbia, Garcetti patched plaster and painted walls in low-income apartments in Harlem while also serving as the president of an exclusive literary society known for its wealthy membership. He led a men's discussion group on gender and sexuality, ran successfully for student government, and wrote and performed in musicals.

His busy student years offered hints of the future political persona that would later help him win a Los Angeles City Council seat and emerge as a leading candidate for mayor. As he pursued countless progressive causes — improved race relations in New York City, democracy in Burma and human rights in Ethiopia — Garcetti also exhibited a careful stewardship of his image and a desire to get along with everyone.

Some of his critics complain that he is confrontation averse, and say his chameleon-like abilities are political. Others complain that he has lost touch with his activist roots, citing his recent advocacy for a plan to allow taller and bigger buildings in Hollywood despite strong opposition from some community members.

FULL COVERAGE: L.A.'s race for mayor

But Jealous, who went on to study with Garcetti at Oxford, where they were both Rhodes scholars, remembers his classmate as "authentically committed" to social justice and naturally at ease in different settings. That was a valuable trait in early 1990s New York City, when tensions between whites and blacks were high, said Jealous, who is now the president of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. Against a backdrop of racial violence, including the stabbing of the Rev. Al Sharpton in Brooklyn in 1991, "there was an urgent need to build bridges," he said.

On Columbia's campus, Garcetti pushed to involve more men in Take Back the Night protests against sexual violence and tracked hate crimes as president of the National Student Coalition Against Harassment. He also worked against homelessness and founded the Columbia Urban Experience, a program that exposes incoming freshmen to city life through volunteerism.

Judith Russell, a Columbia professor who taught Garcetti in a yearlong urban politics course, remembers him as a skilled organizer. "Eric was one of the best people I've ever met at getting people to agree," she said.

He was also ambitious. Russell says she wrote countless recommendation letters for Garcetti, who was always applying for some new opportunity. "For most people I have a file or two. For Eric I have a folder," she said.

Even as a student, Garcetti went to great lengths to guard his image and public reputation. In a 1991 letter to a campus newspaper, a 20-year-old Garcetti sought a retraction of a quote that he acknowledged was accurate. A reporter wrote that Garcetti called owners of a store that declined to participate in a Columbia-sponsored can recycling program "assholes." Garcetti said the comment was off the record.

"I would ask, then, if you would retract the quote, not because of the morality of my position, rather the ethics of the quoting," he wrote.

That self-awareness came partly from being raised in a politically active family. Back in Los Angeles, his father was mounting a successful campaign for county district attorney. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy clothier, ran a community foundation. Her father, who had been President Lyndon B. Johnson's tailor, made headlines in the 1960s when he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling on Johnson to exit the Vietnam War.

Garcetti's family wealth allowed him to carry on the legacy of political activism. While attending L.A.'s exclusive Harvard School for Boys, he traveled to Ethiopia to deliver medical supplies. In college, while other students worked at summer jobs, he traveled twice to Burma to teach democracy to leaders of the resistance movement.

In 1993, after receiving a master's degree from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, Garcetti departed for Oxford. There he met Cory Booker, a fellow Rhodes scholar who is now the mayor of Newark, N.J., and a likely candidate for the U.S. Senate. Garcetti, Booker said, "was one of those guys who would be in the pub at midnight talking passionately about making a better world."

In England, Garcetti worked with Amnesty International and also met his future wife, Amy Wakeland, another Rhodes scholar with activist leanings. Garcetti remembers being impressed when Wakeland missed President Clinton's visit to the Rhodes House at Oxford because she was on the streets protesting tuition hikes. Her worldview aligned with his, he told friends.

In his second year at Oxford, Garcetti persuaded student leaders to join him in a hunger strike after the passage of Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot measure that denied immigrants access to state healthcare and schools.

Read More..

The Lede: Syrians Describe Apparent Missile Strikes on Aleppo

A Human Rights Watch video report on the aftermath of apparent missile strikes in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.

Human Rights Watch investigators who visited Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, have concluded that the Syrian government fired at least four ballistic missiles into civilian neighborhoods there last week, killing more than 141 people, including 71 children. As my colleague Anne Barnard explained, the rights group released details of the four documented strikes, and a video report, on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, opposition activists added English subtitles to an emotional account of the devastation caused by one missile strike on Aleppo from a young boy who said he survived the bombing, but lost several family members and neighbors.

An interview with a boy who said he had survived a missile attack on a neighborhood in Aleppo.

The original interview with the boy was posted on YouTube on Monday by Orient News, a private Syrian satellite channel that began broadcasting from Dubai before the antigovernment uprising began. Within a week of the first protests in Syria, Ghassan Aboud, the Syrian businessman who owns the channel, told a Saudi broadcaster that senior government officials close to President Bashar al-Assad had threatened to kidnap his journalists if they did not stop covering the demonstrations.

The boy’s account was subtitled by the ANA New Media Association, a group of opposition video activists led by Rami Jarrah, who blogs as Alexander Page.

The new reports come weeks after experts told The Lede that video of a huge explosion at Aleppo University last month suggested that the campus had been hit by a ballistic missile.

When Liz Sly of the Washington Post visited Aleppo’s Ard al-Hamra neighborhood after two missile strikes, residents gave similarly graphic accounts of pulling the mangled bodies of victims from wrecked buildings. The scenes of devastation, she wrote, more closely resembled “those of an earthquake, with homes pulverized beyond recognition, people torn to shreds in an instant and what had once been thriving communities reduced to mountains of rubble.”

Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch researcher who helped document the damage in Aleppo, drew attention to video posted online by opposition activists, which is said to show the desperate search for survivors immediately after the strike on Ard al-Hamra.

Video said to show a neighborhood in Aleppo after a missile strike last week.

As Mr. Solvang assessed the wreckage in person on Thursday and Friday, he described the damage to Aleppo and a neighboring town in words and images posted on Twitter.

Visited a site of similar attack in Tel Rifat today. 25 houses destroyed and 3 killed last Monday. Unbelievable. http://t.co/FaFhNFiAsS

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 22 Feb 13

Today visited site of yesterday’s missile attack on Ard al Hamra in #Aleppo #Syria. Dozens houses destroyed. Unbelievable destruction. @hrw

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 23 Feb 13

Bodies are still under the rubble. 3 found during our 30 min visit. Casualty # still unclear. #Aleppo #Syria @hrw http://t.co/gaT7COpRT3

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 23 Feb 13

Late Tuesday, an Aleppo blogger who supported the uprising but has been critical of the armed rebellion on his @edwardedark Twitter feed, reported that another huge blast had shaken the city.

a massive blast shockwave shakes Aleppo city just now. no idea what it is yet #Syria

— edward dark (@edwardedark) 26 Feb 13

Ms. Sly reported on Twitter on Wednesday night that two more missiles were fired at rural Aleppo. “They landed in fields,” she observed. “That’s how accurate they are. Seems a bit pointless.”

Late Wednesday, Mr. Solvang pointed to video posted on YouTube by opposition activists, showing what they said were distant images of a missile being launched from Damascus in the direction of Aleppo.

Video said to show a missile being fired by Syrian government forces outside the capital, Damascus, on Wednesday night.

Read More..

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's Son Samuel Turns 1

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/27/2013 at 10:00 AM ET

FameFlynet

Look who’s growing up!

His father Ben Affleck (here with his little man in Beverly Hills on Jan. 25) may have won another Oscar (this time for Best Picture), but it’s Samuel‘s recent milestone — he turns 1 today! — that has his family abuzz.

Two days after his parents wrapped up a whirlwind awards season, the tyke headed out with mom Jennifer Garner and big sisters Violet, 7, and Seraphina, 4, to a Brentwood, Calif. toy store Tuesday.

Not sure what cool playthings the family picked up, but we’re positive Samuel’s birthday party will be a homey, low-key affair befitting the Garner-Affleck clan.

And however they decide to celebrate, Ben and Jen’s 1-year-old will continue to be one of their biggest fans.

“He reaches when he sees me and he laughs a lot,” Garner shared. “He thinks I’m super funny. What more do you want?”

PHOTO SPECIAL: Jen & Ben’s Close-knit Clan

– Shanelle Rein-Olowokere

Read More..

Huge study: 5 mental disorders share genetic links

WASHINGTON (AP) — The largest genetic study of mental illnesses to date finds five major disorders may not look much alike but they share some gene-based risks. The surprising discovery comes in the quest to unravel what causes psychiatric disorders and how to better diagnose and treat them.

The disorders — autism, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia — are considered distinct problems. But findings published online Wednesday suggest they're related in some way.

"These disorders that we thought of as quite different may not have such sharp boundaries," said Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead researchers for the international study appearing in The Lancet.

That has implications for learning how to diagnose mental illnesses with the same precision that physical illnesses are diagnosed, said Dr. Bruce Cuthbert of the National Institute on Mental Health, which funded the research.

Consider: Just because someone has chest pain doesn't mean it's a heart attack; doctors have a variety of tests to find out. But there's no blood test for schizophrenia or other mental illnesses. Instead, doctors rely on symptoms agreed upon by experts. Learning the genetic underpinnings of mental illnesses is part of one day knowing if someone's symptoms really are schizophrenia and not something a bit different.

"If we really want to diagnose and treat people effectively, we have to get to these more fine-grained understandings of what's actually going wrong biologically," Cuthbert explained.

Added Mass General's Smoller: "We are still in the early stages of understanding what are the causes of mental illnesses, so these are clues."

The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, a collaboration of researchers in 19 countries, analyzed the genomes of more than 61,000 people, some with one of the five disorders and some without. They found four regions of the genetic code where variation was linked to all five disorders.

Of particular interest are disruptions in two specific genes that regulate the flow of calcium in brain cells, key to how neurons signal each other. That suggests that this change in a basic brain function could be one early pathway that leaves someone vulnerable to developing these disorders, depending on what else goes wrong.

For patients and their families, the research offers no immediate benefit. These disorders are thought to be caused by a complex mix of numerous genes and other risk factors that range from exposures in the womb to the experiences of daily life.

"There may be many paths to each of these illnesses," Smoller cautioned.

But the study offers a lead in the hunt for psychiatric treatments, said NIMH's Cuthbert. Drugs that affect calcium channels in other parts of the body are used for such conditions as high blood pressure, and scientists could explore whether they'd be useful for psychiatric disorders as well.

The findings make sense, as there is some overlap in the symptoms of the different disorders, he said. People with schizophrenia can have some of the same social withdrawal that's so characteristic of autism, for example. Nor is it uncommon for people to be affected by more than one psychiatric disorder.

___

Online:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)60223-8/abstract

Read More..

Two L.A. mayoral candidates unlikely backers of business tax cut

In the debate over who should be the next mayor of Los Angeles, who would you suppose argues for elimination of a business tax to kick-start economic growth?

Not the one-time investment banker who dropped out of the race early and says killing the business tax would leave a huge hole in the city treasury. Not the lone Republican in the field, who wants more modest business tax reform. Not a City Council fiscal hawk, also a candidate for mayor, who says cutting the tax could leave the city with a $400-million shortfall.

Instead it's two liberal Democrats — City Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti — pushing what sounds a lot like Ronald Reagan- or Mitt Romney-style "supply side" fiscal dogma. Cut taxes for business, Garcetti and Greuel contend, and the overall economic pie will grow, with benefits trickling down in the form of more jobs for Angelenos and more money in the city's general fund.

The duo's insistence on ending the tax on businesses' gross receipts puts them at odds with not only Democratic Party orthodoxy nationally but also with several figures viewed as leading watchdogs on municipal finance — former deputy mayor and investment banker Austin Beutner, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and Miguel Santana, the city's top budget official.

"It's an interesting strategy, but there is no proposal of what we would do to backfill the loss of that revenue," says Councilwoman Jan Perry, a mayoral candidate and among the more conservative city lawmakers on financial matters. "Who makes up the difference?"

Political observers believe that Garcetti and Greuel, both of whom have been identified as allies of organized labor, offer the elimination of the tax, at least in part, as a signal to the business community that they have more than one dimension.

"Mayoral candidates have to court business," said Jack Pitney, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. "There is a widespread perception that L.A. is not business friendly and anyone who aspires to be mayor has to fight that perception."

But will lost revenue from killing the tax be made up from other sources?

"It's rare that a tax cut actually pays for itself," Pitney said. "The best kind of tax cut is the kind that raises revenue and that actually has happened from time to time. It's not impossible. But the more reasonable prediction is it might end up losing less revenue than one would think otherwise."

Greuel and Garcetti reject what they say is conventional thinking. Both say they have seen the benefits of previous business tax cuts, with employers coming to the city after they were granted relief from the levy, currently the highest of its kind in Los Angeles County. They also say they would phase out the tax incrementally and only as it proved to help the city's bottom line.

It's another irony of the tax debate that Garcetti and Greuel — sharp rivals and perceived front-runners in the race to replace Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — have worked closely on previous reforms of the business levy and agree on the need for its elimination.

Greuel calls herself the "architect" of business tax reform, pointing to a 2006 council vote she led that cut the rate 15% over several years and reduced the number of tax categories from 42 to fewer than 10. The controller said the 2006 rate reduction not only brought in more businesses but that the city government also "saw more revenue as it related to those businesses coming into Los Angeles."

City budget officials say, however, that the previous tax changes came during a time of economic growth and they can't tease out how much of those increases accumulated because of the natural business cycle versus the city's tax cut.

Critics say that the incremental rate reductions of the past offer no proof that the revenue lost from wholesale elimination of the tax could be replaced. The debate has been complicated by the conflicting analysis of experts hired by the city.

In 2011, USC accounting professor Charles Swenson issued a report that found the death of the business tax would provoke such strong growth that the city would more than recoup the $400 million in lost revenue with the expansion of other taxes.

Last year, the city hired a consulting firm that picked apart Swenson's analysis, concluding that business would expand but that little of the tax revenue would be recouped from other sources. That is the prevailing view of Santana, the city's administrative officer, and outsiders like Beutner, the businessman who worked for a year and a half as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's "jobs czar."

Beutner said that in his time working at City Hall businesses most commonly complained about regulatory delays and the uncertainty of doing business in Los Angeles.

"They talked about how hard it was to get a permit, how anti-business the city is in its attitude," Beutner said. "Waving a magic wand and reducing a tax rate doesn't address those other issues."

Los Angeles only receives a fraction of property and sales taxes and other levies, but it receives 100% of every dollar brought in by its gross receipts tax, which charges businesses roughly one-tenth of a cent to half a penny per dollar of revenue.

Those tiny incremental payments add up, Beutner said. "So if you take a whole dollar in those taxes away, please show me how I get that dollar back with pennies from these other taxes," said Beutner. "It's not enough to just say, 'The whole pie grows.' Here you have a couple of progressives … espousing trickle-down. And this is the most indirect form of trickledown one can imagine."

Garcetti agreed that many factors influence where companies make their homes, but he said "not a week goes by" that he doesn't have executives complain about L.A.'s gross receipts tax. Online retailer Shopzilla and ratings company Nielsen decided they could stay in Los Angeles, but only after getting a break on the tax, the councilman said. Online law document service Legal Zoom, in contrast, fled for Glendale and its lower rents and business levy. The company bolstered its bottom line by a few million dollars because of Glendale's lower tax, Garcetti said.

Greuel and Garcetti said they would phase out the tax over 15 years, only proceeding with incremental cuts each year if other tax revenues increased enough to make up for the money lost from the business levy. "Its not a Republican or Democratic issue," Greuel said. "It's about being responsible and being business-friendly."

Garcetti said he is a bit surprised at how his position on the tax has evolved.

"I started someplace else ideologically until I saw the impact this tax had," he said. Before, "I would have absolutely been a skeptic of things like this" tax cut, he added. "I realize [now] there are smart taxes and there are dumb taxes. This is a dumb tax."

james.rainey@latimes.com

Times staff writer Michael Finnegan contributed to this report.

Read More..

Balloon Explosion in Egypt Kills at Least 19 Tourists

CAIRO — The explosion of a hot-air balloon over the ancient temples at Luxor killed at least 19 sightseers Tuesday, delivering a grim blow to Egypt’s critical tourism business just as it had begun to show signs of recovery from the shock of the revolution two years ago.

All of those killed were tourists, including nine Chinese from Hong Kong, four Japanese, two French, two Britons, a Hungarian and an Egyptian, Health Ministry officials said. The balloon’s pilot and a British passenger survived by jumping from the balloon’s basket. But the surviving passenger’s wife, also British, died in the blaze.

“It is just another nail in tourism’s coffin,” Hisham A. Fahmy, the chief executive of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which represents international companies here, said of the crash. “They were probably the only tourists in Luxor as it was.”

Even Egyptians trying to minimize the disaster’s potential effect on the tourist business compared it to the 1997 massacre of 62 people, 58 of them tourists, at one of Luxor’s temples by a group of Islamist militants. At least this was an accident and not terrorism, Egyptian officials said Tuesday. Others noted hopefully that tourism had eventually recovered after 1997.

“I thought that would be the end of tourism,” said Heba Handoussa of the Economic Research Forum here. “But to my surprise, the next year it was back. People seem to take it in stride.”

The tombs and temples of Luxor and the nearby Valley of the Kings are among Egypt’s premier attractions, and hot-air balloon rides over the valley at dawn are a staple of the local tourist trade. In 2008 and 2009, balloons collided with utility poles and crashed to the ground, injuring passengers. But few visitors had raised safety concerns, tour operators said.

The disaster unfolded in just minutes, shortly after 7 a.m., as the balloon was preparing to land in a field of sugar cane. The pilot was pulling a rope to stabilize the balloon when a gas hose ripped and a fire started, security officials said.

The pilot and the passenger who survived quickly escaped over the side of the basket, risking a 30-foot fall. Then escaping gas or hot air from the fire evidently sent the balloon soaring back skyward. Some reports said it had climbed as high as 1,000 feet before a gas cylinder exploded and it burst into flames.

State media reported that some of the dead had been “cremated” in the fireball. The Health Ministry said it would use DNA testing to identify the remains.

The ministers of aviation and tourism said they were traveling to Luxor. Officials started investigations into the crash as well as an examination of the permit for the balloon and the license for its pilot.

Some in Luxor faulted regulators. Tharwat Agami, the chairman of the Luxor tourist industry trade group, accused the aviation ministry of renewing licenses for the balloon operator and others despite their failures to meet safety requirements. Like other forms of law enforcement, balloon regulation and inspection have deteriorated sharply since the revolution, he told the state newspaper Al Ahram.

“As if tourism can take any more!” Mr. Agami said, according to the newspaper. “Where is the inspection of each balloon before takeoff by civil aviation?”

Tourism typically accounted for about 11 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product before the revolution, economists say. More important, tourism is Egypt’s second-largest source of hard currency, after remittances sent home by Egyptians working abroad. It helps reduce the trade imbalance, supporting the sagging value of the Egyptian pound.

But in the two years of unrest since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted, tourism revenue has plummeted to just a quarter of its former level, said Ms. Handoussa, the economist.

She said government figures, widely believed to understate the malaise, put unemployment at 14 percent, up from 8 percent before the revolt, while the number of Egyptians officially considered to be living in poverty has risen to 25 percent from 20 percent.

Two major European tour operators, TUI of Germany and Thomas Cook of Britain, said around the beginning of this year that they saw signs of recovery in the demand for vacations to North Africa, including Tunisia and Egypt. Tour operators and travel agents say the Red Sea beach resorts, farther from the unrest in Cairo, have suffered far less than other destinations.

But then at the end of January, vandals in Cairo capitalized on the chaos surrounding a street protest to loot and ransack the lobby of the historic Semiramis InterContinental Hotel. It was the first time since Mr. Mubarak’s exit that the unrest had so directly affected a tourist institution. Now the balloon accident may add new concerns about safety to the continuing fears of political instability.

Mina Agnos, a vice president of Travelive, a high-end tour operator based in Athens and Montclair, N.J., said it had stopped marketing trips to Egypt. Each fall in the last two years, seasonal demand would pick up, and then violence would erupt again, as it did around the American Embassy here last September over an online video mocking Islam.

“Something would happen,” she said. “We found that a lot of people who were thinking of going to Egypt ended up going other places.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

Read More..

Michelle Williams and Jason Segel Split

By Sarah Michaud

02/26/2013 at 07:45 PM EST

Jason Segel and Michelle Williams

AKM-GSI

The fairytale is over for Michelle Williams and Jason Segel.

The Oz the Great and Powerful star and the How I Met Your Mother actor split a few weeks ago after dating for a year, a source confirms to PEOPLE.

The long distance – Williams, 32, is based in New York City, while Segel, 33, primarily resides in Los Angeles – was the reason behind the breakup, the source adds.

Earlier in the month, the actress told In Style that she cherished public support of her relationship.

"If people are happy about it that makes me feel good ... Any kind sentiment that the world can feed back, well, I won't turn it down," she explained.

The couple, who were often seen out and about with 7-year-old Matilda, Williams' daughter with the late Heath Ledger, began sharing a Brooklyn apartment last fall.

Reps for the actors have not commented.

Read More..

C. Everett Koop, 'rock star' surgeon general, dies

NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. C. Everett Koop has long been regarded as the nation's doctor— even though it has been nearly a quarter-century since he was surgeon general.

Koop, who died Monday at his home in Hanover, N.H., at age 96, was by far the best known and most influential person to carry that title. Koop, a 6-foot-1 evangelical Presbyterian with a biblical prophet's beard, donned a public health uniform in the early 1980s and became an enduring, science-based national spokesman on health issues.

He served for eight years during the Reagan administration and was a breed apart from his political bosses. He thundered about the evils of tobacco companies during a multiyear campaign to drive down smoking rates, and he became the government's spokesman on AIDS when it was still considered a "gay disease" by much of the public.

"He really changed the national conversation, and he showed real courage in pursuing the duties of his job," said Chris Collins, a vice president of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

Even before that, he had been a leading figure in medicine. He was one of the first U.S. doctors to specialize in pediatric surgery at a time when children with complicated conditions were often simply written off as untreatable. In the 1950s, he drew national headlines for innovative surgeries such as separating conjoined twins.

His medical heroics are well noted, but he may be better remembered for transforming from a pariah in the eyes of the public health community into a remarkable servant who elevated the influence of the surgeon general — if only temporarily.

"He set the bar high for all who followed in his footsteps," said Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as surgeon general a decade later under President George W. Bush.

Koop's religious beliefs grew after the 1968 death of his son David in a mountain-climbing accident, and he became an outspoken opponent of abortion. His activism is what brought him to the attention of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who decided to nominate him for surgeon general in 1981. Though once a position with real power, surgeon generals had been stripped of most of their responsibilities in the 1960s.

By the time Koop got the job, the position was kind of a glorified health educator.

But Koop ran with it. One of his early steps involved the admiral's uniform that is bestowed to the surgeon general but that Koop's predecessors had worn only on ceremonial occasions. In his first year in the post, Koop stopped wearing his trademark bowties and suit jackets and instead began wearing the uniform, seeing it as a way to raise the visual prestige of the office.

In those military suits, he surprised the officials who had appointed him by setting aside his religious beliefs and feelings about abortion and instead waging a series of science-based public health crusades.

He was arguably most effective on smoking. He issued a series of reports that detailed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and in speeches began calling for a smoke-free society by the year 2000. He didn't get his wish, but smoking rates did drop from 38 percent to 27 percent while he was in office — a huge decline.

Koop led other groundbreaking initiatives, but perhaps none is better remembered than his work on AIDS.

The disease was first identified in 1981, before Koop was officially in office, and it changed U.S. society. It destroyed the body's immune system and led to ghastly death, but initially was identified in gay men, and many people thought of it as something most heterosexuals didn't have to worry about.

U.S. scientists worked hard to identify the virus and work on ways to fight it, but the government's health education and policy efforts moved far more slowly. Reagan for years was silent on the issue. Following mounting criticism, Reagan in 1986 asked Koop to prepare a report on AIDS for the American public.

His report, released later that year, stressed that AIDS was a threat to all Americans and called for wider use of condoms and more comprehensive sex education, as early as the third grade. He went on to speak frankly about AIDS in an HBO special and engineered the mailing of an educational pamphlet on AIDS to more than 100 million U.S. households in 1988.

Koop personally opposed homosexuality and believed sex should be saved for marriage. But he insisted that Americans, especially young people, must not die because they were deprived of explicit information about how HIV was transmitted.

Koop's speeches and empathetic approach made him a hero to a wide swath of America, including public health workers, gay activists and journalists. Some called him a "scientific Bruce Springsteen." AIDS activists chanted "Koop, Koop" at his appearances and booed other officials.

"I was walking down the street with him one time" about five years ago, recalled Dr. George Wohlreich, director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a medical society with which Koop had longstanding ties. "People were yelling out, 'There goes Dr. Koop!' You'd have thought he was a rock star."

Koop angered conservatives by refusing to issue a report requested by the Reagan White House, saying he could not find enough scientific evidence to determine whether abortion has harmful psychological effects on women.

He got static from some staff at the White House for his actions, but Reagan himself never tried to silence Koop. At a congressional hearing in 2007, Koop spoke about political pressure on the surgeon general post. He said Reagan was pressed to fire him every day.

After his death was reported Monday, the tributes poured forth, including a statement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made smoking restrictions a hallmark of his tenure.

"The nation has lost a visionary public health leader today with the passing of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who was born and raised in Brooklyn," Bloomberg said. "Outspoken on the dangers of smoking, his leadership led to stronger warning labels on cigarettes and increased awareness about second-hand smoke, creating an environment that helped millions of Americans to stop smoking — and setting the stage for the dramatic changes in smoking laws that have occurred over the past decade."

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health taught Koop what was known about AIDS during quiet after-hours talks in the early 1980s and became a close friend.

"A less strong person would have bent under the pressure," Fauci said. "He was driven by what's the right thing to do."

Carmona, a surgeon general years later, said Koop was a mentor who preached the importance of staying true to the science in speeches and reports — even when it made certain politicians uncomfortable.

"We remember him for the example he set for all of us," Carmona said.

Koop's nomination originally was met with staunch opposition. Women's groups and liberal politicians complained Reagan had selected him only because of his conservative views, especially his staunch opposition to abortion.

Foes noted that Koop traveled the country in 1979 and 1980 giving speeches that predicted a progression "from liberalized abortion to infanticide to passive euthanasia to active euthanasia, indeed to the very beginnings of the political climate that led to Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen."

But Koop, a devout Presbyterian, was confirmed as surgeon general after he told a Senate panel he would not use the post to promote his religious ideology. He kept his word and eventually won wide respect with his blend of old-fashioned values, pragmatism and empathy.

Koop was modest about his accomplishments, saying before leaving office in 1989, "My only influence was through moral suasion."

The office declined after that. Few of his successors had his speaking ability or stage presence. Fewer still were able to secure the support of key political bosses and overcome the meddling of everyone else. The office gradually lost prestige and visibility, and now has come to a point where most people can't name the current surgeon general. (It's Dr. Regina Benjamin.)

Even after leaving office, Koop continued to promote public health causes, from preventing childhood accidents to better training for doctors.

"I will use the written word, the spoken word and whatever I can in the electronic media to deliver health messages to this country as long as people will listen," he promised.

In 1996, he rapped Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole for suggesting that tobacco was not invariably addictive, saying Dole's comments "either exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge of nicotine addiction or his blind support of the tobacco industry."

He maintained his personal opposition to abortion. After he left office, he told medical students it violated their Hippocratic oath. In 2009, he wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urging that health care legislation include a provision to ensure doctors and medical students would not be forced to perform abortions. The letter briefly set off a security scare because it was hand delivered.

Koop served as chairman of the National Safe Kids Campaign and as an adviser to President Bill Clinton's health care reform plan.

Worried that medicine had lost old-fashioned caring and personal relationships between doctors and patients, Koop opened an institute at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to teach medical students basic values and ethics. He also was a part-owner of a short-lived venture, drkoop.com, to provide consumer health care information via the Internet.

Koop was the only son of a Manhattan banker and the nephew of a doctor. He said by age 5 he knew he wanted to be a surgeon and at age 13 he practiced his skills on neighborhood cats. He attended Dartmouth, where he received the nickname Chick, short for "chicken Koop." It stuck for life.

He received his medical degree at Cornell Medical College, choosing pediatric surgery because so few surgeons practiced it. In 1938, he married Elizabeth Flanagan, the daughter of a Connecticut doctor. They had four children. Koop's wife died in 2007, and he married Cora Hogue in 2010.

He was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He pioneered surgery on newborns and successfully separated three sets of conjoined twins. He won national acclaim by reconstructing the chest of a baby born with the heart outside the body.

Although raised as a Baptist, he was drawn to a Presbyterian church near the hospital, where he developed an abiding faith. He began praying at the bedside of his young patients — ignoring the snickers of some of his colleagues.

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Wilson Ring in Montpelier, Vt.; Jeff McMillan in Philadelphia; and AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard in Washington.

Read More..