From a solid-gold rocking horse to a diamond-encrusted pacifier, see what we hope will be on the couple's baby registry
Updated: Thursday Jan 03, 2013 | 06:00 AM EST
By: Shanelle Rein-Olowokere
NEW YORK (AP) — This could give you nightmares: 1 in 24 U.S. adults say they recently fell asleep while driving.
And health officials behind the study think the number is probably higher. That's because some people don't realize it when they nod off for a second or two behind the wheel.
"If I'm on the road, I'd be a little worried about the other drivers," said the study's lead author, Anne Wheaton of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the CDC study released Thursday, about 4 percent of U.S. adults said they nodded off or fell asleep at least once while driving in the previous month. Some earlier studies reached a similar conclusion, but the CDC telephone survey of 147,000 adults was far larger. It was conducted in 19 states and the District of Columbia in 2009 and 2010.
CDC researchers found drowsy driving was more common in men, people ages 25 to 34, those who averaged less than six hours of sleep each night, and — for some unexplained reason — Texans.
Wheaton said it's possible the Texas survey sample included larger numbers of sleep-deprived young adults or apnea-suffering overweight people.
Most of the CDC findings are not surprising to those who study this problem.
"A lot of people are getting insufficient sleep," said Dr. Gregory Belenky, director of Washington State University's Sleep and Performance Research Center in Spokane.
The government estimates that about 3 percent of fatal traffic crashes involve drowsy drivers, but other estimates have put that number as high as 33 percent.
Warning signs of drowsy driving: Feeling very tired, not remembering the last mile or two, or drifting onto rumble strips on the side of the road. That signals a driver should get off the road and rest, Wheaton said.
Even a brief moment nodding off can be extremely dangerous, she noted. At 60 mph, a single second translates to speeding along for 88 feet — the length of two school buses.
To prevent drowsy driving, health officials recommend getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night, treating any sleep disorders and not drinking alcohol before getting behind the wheel.
__
Online:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power repeatedly bypassed its competitive bidding process when it awarded $480,000 in contracts to lobby Sacramento decision-makers, according to a report issued by City Controller Wendy Greuel.
DWP executives issued four no-bid contracts for state lobbying over the last two years, two of them to Mercury Public Affairs, a firm that includes former state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez as one of its partners. No public debate or vote by the utility's five-member Board of Commissioners was required under DWP contracting rules because each agreement was $150,000 or less.
Greuel, who is running for mayor in the March 5 election, said the city utility had "lax controls" over the lobbying contracts and failed to require that two of the firms prepare reports showing what they had accomplished. Mercury also was paid $50,000 for a month of work to help secure passage of legislation on power plant upgrades that had been withdrawn on the first day of the firm's contract, the report found.
"DWP should have terminated" the contract, Greuel wrote.
The inquiry, which was conducted with help from the city Ethics Commission, was launched last year after Greuel's office received a tip alleging that the lobbying work was awarded in exchange for favors. But no evidence of "a 'pay to play' arrangement" was found, her report said.
Mercury received DWP lobbying contracts worth $50,000 in 2010 and $150,000 in 2011, both focused on state government. The firm also received a no-bid, nine-month contract worth $141,000 in 2010 for lobbying at the federal level, which was not examined in the controller's report.
The DWP said the no-bid contracts were reviewed and approved by the city's lawyers. The three lobbying firms helped shape costly state regulations dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and pollution of ocean plant life caused by coastal power plants, utility officials said.
"Their effective advocacy contributed to favorable outcomes that will save LADWP's customers in excess of a billion dollars," the DWP said in a statement.
Mercury Managing Director Roger Salazar said his firm provided strategy for dealing with water quality regulators, as well as state lawmakers. "The legislative process doesn't always end with the pulling of a bill," he added.
The DWP's hiring practices for outside lobbyists attracted scrutiny in 2009 after high-level officials proposed a contract worth up to $2.4 million with Conservation Strategy Group — a Sacramento-based firm that planned to use Mercury and a second company as subcontractors.
The deal would have included the involvement of Nuñez, author of the state's landmark 2006 climate change law. But it was scuttled after DWP commissioners raised questions about the cost. The agency already was paying $15,000 to its in-house lobbyist Cindy Montañez, a former Assembly member who is now a City Council candidate.
DWP officials subsequently began using simple purchase orders instead of competitive bidding procedures to hire lobbying firms. The utility awarded a one-year, $130,000 agreement to Weideman Group in 2010 and a one-year, $150,000 agreement with Conservation Strategy Group in 2011.
Mercury received its $150,000 contract in April 2011, during the same week that Nuñez contributed $3,000 to three of the mayor's legal defense funds and $1,000 to a separate officeholder account belonging to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The defense funds were set up to pay nearly $42,000 in ethics fines levied against Villaraigosa for accepting free tickets to sports and cultural events.
Salazar said there was no link between the contracts and the donations from Nuñez. "Any insinuation that they are connected is absurd and irresponsible," he said.
Last month, the DWP's five-member board awarded a Sacramento lobbying contract worth $1 million annually to KP Public Affairs. That vote was taken after a competitive search process.
david.zahniser@latimes.com
Prosecutors in Cairo opened a criminal investigation on Tuesday into allegations that a popular television comedian, Bassem Youssef, who has taken special aim at ultraconservative Islamists on his program, had insulted Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, during his satirical monologues.
The accusations against Mr. Youssef come amid growing fears among Egypt’s media professionals that the country’s newly ratified Constitution offers scant protections for freedom of expression.
Since Mr. Morsi was elected in June, the authorities have opened investigations into several media figures accused of insulting him or the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group he once led.
An Islamist lawyer who filed the complaint against Mr. Youssef, Ramadan al-Aqsuri, said a skit in which the comedian printed a picture of Mr. Morsi’s face on a red pillow amounted to a “sharp attack on the person of the president.” Separately, a Muslim Brotherhood lawyer filed a lawsuit asking the state to pull Mr. Youssef’s show off the air and to close down the channel that carries it, citing “sarcasm against the president.”
Princes Charles, William and Harry
Getty (2), REX USA
The 64-year-old soon-to-be grandfather reigns at No. 8 on GQ 's annual best dressed list – well ahead of dashing William, who came in at 37.
Natalie Massenet of Net-a-Porter and head of the British Fashion Council calls Charles always "on trend." His method being simple: "This is a man who knows what he likes, knows how to wear it, and sticks with it whatever the prevailing fashions," she says in the February issue of the magazine out Thursday in the U.K. and next week in the U.S.
Since marrying Kate, 30-year-old William is noted to have improved sartorially, donning suits by Richard James and Spencer Hart.
And despite coming in far down the list, the debonair prince still get some raves and is said by the men's magazine to epitomize "true British style."
Meanwhile, guess who topped the list of 50: Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens beat Robert Pattinson, Homeland's Damian Lewis and Idris Alba for the No. 1 spot. He is "always a class act," the magazine says.
This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.
After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.
It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.
All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.
For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.
Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."
What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.
"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.
What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.
A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.
The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.
Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.
Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.
"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.
A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.
Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.
"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."
___
Online:
Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe
Herve Sevi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
People injured in a stampede in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, were treated at the Cocody hospital on Tuesday.
At least 60 people were killed in Ivory Coast’s economic capital, Abidjan, as a New Year’s fireworks celebration turned into a deadly stampede early on Tuesday.
The crowd of thousands was leaving the sprawling stadium in the downtown Plateau neighborhood after the last fireworks had signaled the new year when panic struck. In the crush, dozens were trampled underfoot, officials in Abidjan said Tuesday.
Many were pushed into a small gully adjoining the Houphouët-Boigny stadium on the Boulevard de la République, in the heart of the city’s compact central business district, then crushed as the panicked crowd surged over them.
Children appeared to be among the injured and dead: the state television station, RTI, showed images of wounded children in one of the city’s hospitals, as well as pregnant women stretched on cots.
Ivorian officials Tuesday said that they were baffled as to what set off the stampede but that an investigation had been launched.
“The precise circumstances of this tragic occurrence are being looked into by the security services,” Ivory Coast’s interior minister, Hamed Bakayoko, said on RTI Tuesday. RTI showed rescue workers carrying bodies through the streets and ambulances lined up in the darkness.
Mr. Bakayoko told RTI that “the New Year’s Eve celebrations brought many onto the streets of Plateau. There were 50,000 people on the streets. They were going home, and there was a stampede.”
At the scene, witnesses said there were piles of abandoned shoes.
The head of the rescue services, Lt. Col. Issa Sakho, told an RTI reporter that the “flow of people created a great crush, and in the stampede there were people who were trampled, people who were suffocated.” More than 200 were wounded, officials said.
Careless police action could have incited the stampede, witnesses said. At the hospital in the city’s adjoining Cocody neighborhood, one of the wounded — a young man who declined to give his name — said that the police had tried to disperse the crowd as it was leaving the stadium. That action provoked a mass panic, the young man said, and the crowd surged forward.
The Ivorian police and security services, with a long record of brutality, are feared by the people of Abidjan, a sprawling city of some four million people. Arbitrary arrests, unpunished beatings, and impromptu traffic stops, often to extort money, are not uncommon in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
The police and security forces were the principal instruments in a campaign of repression that lasted months in 2010-2011 by the deposed former president, Laurent Gbagbo, who was ousted by rebel fighters and French forces after he failed to give up office after his electoral defeat. Some 3,000 people were killed in the civil war precipitated by Mr. Gbagbo’s refusal.
The fireworks celebration, sponsored by the government of the country’s president, Alassane Ouattara, was the second since Mr. Gbagbo’s ouster. It was intended as another sign that Ivory Coast, with its surging economic growth rate and renewed foreign investment, has emerged from years of political crisis, repression and civil war.
Social, ethnic and political tensions remain acute, however, with some observers warning that Mr. Ouattara has done too little to resolve problems left over from the Gbagbo years.
Happy New Year! Like most folks, I am working on some resolutions for 2013. One resolution I have is to be more productive. One way I am going to do this is by using my Android phone better. Now there are apps that I have, but really have not used to their fullest. As I work on this resolution, I might discover even better apps. For now I will focus on these impressive apps that can make anyone more productive.
I use Hootsuite on the computer, but rarely find myself engaging with it on my smartphone. With Hootsuite, you can manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare accounts. The free version allows for up to five accounts and one member of your team to access the account. There is a pro version with a monthly fee, in which you can have more accounts and team members and helpful analytics tools.
The design of the app is very good. If you sync the web version to mobile, you will have everything automatically downloaded to the phone. When viewing content, you swipe left or right to change columns or streams. If you are in the middle of a stream, simply tap the top menu bar to automatically return to the top. The app allows for multiple profiles and scheduled tweets. My goal is to keep up with my feeds and tweets in real-time rather than waiting until I get to a computer.
Another web service that I started to use, but find myself not using it to the fullest. Producteev is a web-based task management service. With Producteev you can work as an individual or in a team by setting up workspaces and then organize tasks by labels. For each task you can assign a priority, due date, and share with team members, if you have any. Overall, this is a great service, since I like making lists, even though I rarely remember having made them.
The Producteev app is available for all platforms. The app has a very clean interface and is easy to find tasks. Probably the best way to keep up with tasks is to use the different widget for the home screen. Seeing the widgets will help keep those key tasks in the forefront of your mind. The app will work offline and syncs in the background.
I read blogs every single day, especially those related to new apps, Android, or mobile news. The only way I can do that is via my Google Reader. I find myself trying to catch up each day on the computer (just like with Twitter activity) when I would be better off reading a little bit over time during the day. NewsRob is a Google Reader that I have had for years. The interface is very clean and easy to use. The developer created a bunch of customizations options, which really make this reader stand out.
With NewsRob you can set up a notification of new articles, how you synchronize with Google and when, how many articles to keep in your cache, and more. If you set up folders within Google Reader, NewsRob will download the folders, too. This enables you to read the posts by blog or folder. The app provides a very clean blogpost display optimized for smaller screens. With each post you can zoom in or out, mark a post read or unread, view in the browser, and share the link to email or services such as Evernote. There is a free version of the app.
The last task I need to work on to be more productive is to keep up with the calendar. I find myself checking on the computer, after the fact, finding out that I am either late or forgot about a meeting or appointment. Using Google calendar is a good place to start, but I have not found the standard calendar app on my Droid was all that helpful.
Business Calendar is a very capable calendar app that has a ton of features. The app lets you view your calendar in a number of different views, and has search and favorite-calendar features, to name a few. The option of viewing different calendars, color coding and being able to easily add, delete, and edit events is helpful. The ability to use widgets for reminders is important. The pro version has over 10 different sizes and allows for the import or export of calendar files in the iCalendar format. Business Calendar also has a free version.
So my top goal or resolution for 2013 is to be more productive. I think using these apps more will help me accomplish that goal. Are there any apps you have but not using to their fullest? What resolutions do you have for 2013?
Download the Appolicious Android app
Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Len Goodman of Dancing with the Stars tied the knot with his longtime girlfriend Sue Barrett on Sunday in London.
The couple exchanged vows during a surprise ceremony in front of 30 family members and friends.
Goodman, 68, and Barrett, 47, have been together for more than 10 years.
"I've had a marvelous day and now my gorgeous Sue is the new Mrs. Goodman," the ballroom dancing expert tells the Daily Mail.
This is Goodman's third marriage.
Copyright © News braggardism. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
