Son of Nick Van Exel sentenced to 60 years on murder conviction

Nick Van Exel was taken 37th overall by the Lakers in the 1993 draft. (Vince Compagnone / Los Angeles Times / February 2, 2013)

By Eric Pincus

February 2, 2013, 7:06 a.m.

Sad news for a former Lakers All-Star. Nickey Maxwell Van Exel, the son of Nick Van Exel, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for murder in Texas on Friday.

The 22-year-old was found guilty Thursday of shooting Bradley Bassey Eyo in 2010.

Nick Van Exel was selected by the Lakers with the 37th overall pick in the 1993 NBA draft.

Before the arrival of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant in 1996, Van Exel was the team's leader and go-to player.

Van Exel played with the Lakers until 1998, then was traded after an All-Star season for Tony Battie and the draft rights to Tyronn Lue.

He is currently on staff with the Atlanta Hawks in player development.

ALSO:

Lakers top Minnesota for first road win of 2013

Dwight Howard flying home for nonsurgical PRP procedure

Short list of players who fit within Lakers disabled player exception

Email Eric Pincus at eric.pincus@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @EricPincus.

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The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization

It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.

The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.

Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.

Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.

Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.

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Last of 1940s hitmakers Andrews Sisters dies in California

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Patty Andrews, the last surviving member of popular The Andrews Sisters singing trio of the 1940s and 1950s, has died in California at the age of 94, her spokesman said on Wednesday.

Alan Eichler said Andrews died of natural causes at her home in the Northridge area of Los Angeles.

Patty Andrews was the youngest of the threesome who made up The Andrews Sisters, whose tight harmonies with “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” were hits.

The Andrews Sisters sold more than 75 million records and became household names in the 1940s when they entertained World War Two troops in Africa, the United States and Europe.

The sisters specialized in swing and played with some of the best-known big bands of the era, including those led by Glen Miller, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey.

They also appeared in 16 films, including roles alongside Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in “Buck Privates” and “Hold that Ghost,” and with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in “Road to Rio.”

Born in Minnesota, the sisters started their careers by performing in local talent shows and moved to California after finding fame. LaVerne Andrews died of cancer in 1967, and Maxene Andrews died in 1995 of a heart attack.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Philip Barbara)

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.

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The AR-15, the Most Wanted Gun in America

Steve Ruark for The New York Times

At the Pasadena Pawn and Gun Shop in Maryland, customers can join a waiting list to buy an AR-15-style rifle. “It’s kind of fashionable,” Frank Loane Sr., the shop’s proprietor, said of the gun.

THE phone rings again at Pasadena Pawn and Gun, and a familiar question comes down the line: “Got any ARs?”

The answer is no. Pasadena Pawn and Gun, a gun retailer and pawnshop 15 miles south of Baltimore, is pretty much sold out of America’s most wanted gun, the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. Since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., in December, the AR-15, the military-style weapon that the police say was used in the shootings, has been selling fast here and across the nation.

Before Newtown, the rifles sold for about $1,100, on average. Now some retailers charge twice that. At Pasadena Pawn, on the wall behind glass counters of handguns, are three dozen or so AR-15-style rifles. Dangling from nearly every one is a tag that says “Sold.”

“The AR-15, it’s kind of fashionable,” says Frank Loane Sr., the proprietor. His shop has a revolving waiting list for the rifles, and a handful of people are now on it. “The young generation likes them, the assault-looking guns.”

On one level, what is happening here and elsewhere simply reflects supply and demand. The gun industry has spent decades stoking demand for the AR-15 and rifles like it. Now, after the mass killings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, President Obama wants to reduce the supply. He has asked Congress for tougher controls, including a ban on what are commonly called “military-style assault weapons”; the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on gun violence last Wednesday. Many enthusiasts are rushing to buy one of the rifles now, in case the president prevails.

But how did gun makers stir up the demand for these particular guns in the first place? The answer is a story of shrewd advertising, aggressive marketing and savvy manufacturing — a virtual recasting of the place of guns in American life. With speed and skill, firearms manufacturers transformed a niche market for the AR-15 and similar rifles into a fast-growing profit center.

When certain rifles and features were banned under federal law from 1994 to 2004, gun makers tweaked their manufacturing specifications — and introduced more AR-15-style rifles than ever. With ads celebrating the rifle’s military connections, they lured a new and eager audience to weapons that, not long ago, few serious gun enthusiasts would buy.

It might seem remarkable, given the national conversation about gun control, but guns are a relatively small business in the United States. Sales of commercial guns and ammunition — as opposed to those sold to the military and police — amounted to about $5 billion in 2012. That’s less than half of the profits that Apple earned in the final 13 weeks of last year. But despite the headlines, and partly because of them, commercial gun sales are growing. Last year, they were up 16 percent industrywide, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade association. Semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 are responsible for a significant share of that growth.

By now, many Americans probably recognize the AR-15, whether or not they recognize the term. Unlike its military counterpart, the M-16, the civilian AR-15 cannot spray a continuous stream of ammunition with one pull of the trigger. But, as a semiautomatic, it can fire individual bullets as fast as the trigger can be squeezed. By design, it looks and feels like something commandos might carry. That is part of its appeal, and of manufacturers’ pitch.

On one level, marketing military-style weapons to civilians is not so different from pitching professional sports equipment to high-school athletes. Garry James, the senior field editor at Guns & Ammo, says a military pedigree inspires consumer confidence in a gun’s reliability.

“Credibility of performance is what appeals to the firearms enthusiast,” Mr. James wrote in an e-mail.

Yet marketing combat-derived weapons to civilians is a risky business, particularly now. The industry itself has promoted the guns by using battle imagery and words like “assault” and “combat.” Bushmaster Firearms, a leading maker of AR-15-style guns, and whose rifles have been used in several mass shootings, features the Bushmaster ACR, short for adaptive combat rifle, on its Web site. “Forces of opposition, bow down,” part of the site says. All the same, gun makers say customers buy these weapons with peaceable intentions.

The AR-15 isn’t the first military-style weapon to gain a consumer following. After World War II, some people bought surplus German service rifles made by Mauser and repurposed them for hunting and competitive shooting. But the selling of the AR-15 represents the first mass marketing of a military-style semiautomatic rifle made by a number of different gun makers. Its success has led to an increasing militarization of the entire consumer firearms market, says Tom Diaz, a gun industry researcher and gun control advocate.

“It speaks to the fact that there are a lot of young men in the U.S. who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood,” says Mr. Diaz, the author of “The Last Gun,” a forthcoming book on the industry. “Owning an assault weapon is a passport to that.”

A REMINGTON MODEL 870, a classic pump-action shotgun with an all-steel receiver and walnut stock, sits on a brown gingham tablecloth along with a slice of apple pie, a mug of coffee and an issue of the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

This is how guns were marketed in 1981. That year, the Remington 870 was featured on the back cover of the July issue of Guns & Ammo, in an ad that emphasized quality and durability. “The 870,” the ad read. “Still as American as apple pie.”

The front cover of the same issue showed something very different: a photograph of two gleaming black rifles, with the cover line: “The New Breed of Assault Rifle.”

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Edward Koch dies at 88; outspoken mayor led New York City comeback

Edward I. Koch, a Greenwich Village lawyer who became mayor of New York in the late 1970s and led the city out of one of its worst financial crises by stabilizing the budget and restoring its swagger, has died. He was 88.

Koch died early Friday of congestive heart failure in a Manhattan hospital, his friend and spokesman, George Arzt said. Koch had been hospitalized Monday, a day before a documentary about him, "Koch," premiered in New York City. He had complained of trouble breathing and other ailments, and it was the latest of several hospitalizations for the former mayor in recent months.

For most of his adult life, Koch had lived alone in an apartment off Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. It's where he departed the morning he rode a public bus to City Hall to be sworn in as the 105th mayor and where he returned 12 years later, at age 65, after a disastrous fourth run to keep the job he clearly relished and worked hard at. Voters had finally tired of his infatuation with himself and his racially divisive rhetoric; but far from retiring, Koch spent the rest of his life out of public office but never out of public view.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2013

He juggled almost a dozen jobs including law partner, columnist, author, radio show host, playwright, movie reviewer, public speaker and appeared relentlessly in the media, a shtick-artist with one of the most recognizable New York accents in the world. When he wasn't bellowing at opponents on political round tables, he was hawking everything from diet aids to soft drinks in advertisements and popping up in screen cameos playing always himself, the quintessential New Yorker, alongside Carrie and the girls in episodes of "Sex in the City" or with Big Bird in "The Muppets Take Manhattan."

He was pivotal in a September 2011 upset that put a Republican into the heavily Democratic congressional district that had been held by Rep. Anthony Weiner, who had been forced to resign in a "sexting" scandal. Koch helped catapult Republican Bob Turner to an unlikely victory in the special election to replace Weiner after he endorsed Turner to show his anger with President Obama's Middle East policy. "Ed Koch was enough to turn this around," Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said after Turner's win.

For his 86th birthday, New York's current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, renamed the Queensboro Bridge linking Manhattan to Koch's home borough of Queens after him, saying the bridge – now officially known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge -- was like Koch: "a resilient, hard-working New York City icon."

"He was a great mayor, a great man, and a great friend," Bloomberg said in a statement Friday after Koch's death. "In elected office and as a private citizen, he was our most tireless, fearless, and guileless civic crusader. Through his tough, determined leadership and responsible fiscal stewardship, Ed helped lift the city out of its darkest days and set it on course for an incredible comeback."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo echoed the sentiment. "No New Yorker has -- or likely ever will -- voice their love for New York City in such a passionate and outspoken manner than Ed Koch," said Cuomo. "New York City would not be the place it is today without Ed Koch's leadership over three terms at City Hall."

City flags were ordered flown at half-staff.

"He was the epitome of New York--loud, funny, opinionated, smart," said Arzt, a former reporter who became Koch's spokesman in City Hall and had lunch with him every Saturday after he left, along with 10 other alumni of the administration. "Ed was very much a straight shooter, a champion of the middle class, a moderate Democrat akin to a Harry Truman. He defied categories."

In fact, Koch loved to enrage liberals by doing and saying the unthinkable--endorsing Republican politicians (John Lindsay, Rudolph Giuliani, George W. Bush) and their beliefs (the death penalty). But Koch also held fast to many liberal values. A civil libertarian, Koch made one of his first executive orders when he became mayor to add sexual preference to a citywide ban on job discrimination.

He not only never shied away from controversy, he invited it; unlike successors Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, he enjoyed confrontation. He once wrestled an egg-throwing heckler to the floor before the police could move in.

Altogether Koch wrote (mostly co-authored) 15 books, including eight autobiographies, two children's books and multiple mystery novels starring himself as the detective. He also regularly reviewed movies and restaurants, and at last count had more than 6,200 followers on Twitter (@mayoredkoch).

Really, Koch would opine to whomever, whenever, never mincing words: Movie tickets were too expensive; the United Nations, after an anti-Israel vote, was "made up of gangsters, cutthroats and piranhas"; a Puerto Rican mayoral rival was a "poverty pimp"; Sarah Palin was likable "but she scares the hell out of me." He never lost interest in his absolutely favorite subject—himself. "How'm I doin'?" was his trademark question.

The only topics that remained off limits were his heroic service as an infantryman in World War II—he was awarded two battle stars—and his sexuality. A lifelong bachelor, Koch refused to delve into rumors of his homosexuality. "I ran in a total of 24 elections and won 21," he once told the New York Times. "I will not be a coward and say I am straight or I'm gay, because it's no one's business. I got where I am today not because of sexuality or gender but because people thought I was the best at what I did...."

In recent years, though Koch appeared to mellow, seeking reconciliation with many of his former rivals, he refused to yield when it came to standards for public service. As recently as the summer of 2010, at age 85, he ginned up a campaign called "New York Uprising" to reform state government. Despite a history of heart disease that left him with two pacemakers and a degenerative spinal disorder that caused the once-strapping 6-foot-1 former mayor to be stooped in old age, he embarked in a rented Jeep on a campaign-style press tour around upstate New York to shame reluctant legislators in their home districts to signing a pledge to "clean up Albany."

"I didn't willingly take this on," he told reporters. "I was waiting for someone else to do it.... It's only after six months or a year of going to every breakfast, lunch and dinner, where all they talked about is the dysfunctional Legislature ... I'm thinking somebody is going to stand up and challenge this in some form. But nobody did. So I said to myself, 'Well, if nobody will, I will.' "

This was shortly after Koch, ever the showman, revealed he'd finalized plans for his funeral and penned his gravestone epitaph about his love of his religion, Judaism, his city and his country.

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Superomniphobic Material Vigorously Repels All Fluids

Dr. Anish Tuteja has developed a coating that will repel just about any liquid.

You may have heard of oleophobic coatings (which reduce smudges on your touchscreen) or hydrophobic coatings (which repel water). Working with a team at the University of Michigan, he’s developed a new coating for material that will repel both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids of just about any kind. They’re calling it superomniphobic.

According to Dr. Tuteja, the key to making fluids bounce off a material is to trap pockets of air between the fluid at the surface. This starts as a chemistry problem (you want a material with low surface energy) but quickly becomes a physics problem. “With chemistry we can cause water to bead up but not oil,” he says. “To get to the next step you have to design the geometry or the shape of the coating.”

To create the coating, the team takes a polymer solution and applies an electric field to it. By tuning the concentration of the polymer solution, they can change how the solution breaks up into microscopic droplets. These droplets are then deposited on the surface, and Dr. Tuteja says they can coat any material.

The result is a hierarchical texture, where a highly porous surface is itself made up of nanopores. There are so many millions of tiny pockets of air trapped under the droplet that the fluid and the surface barely come into contact at all. Dr. Tuteja says they’ve left samples submerged for up to two months. They come out completely dry.

OK, so is this stuff magical? Not so, says Dr. Tuteja, for while it’s basically invulnerable to fluids (including monsters like hydrochloric acid) thanks to its properties at the nano scale, it’s very vulnerable at the mechanical scale. “Durability remains a big issue. It’s easy to peel this one off,” he says.

The good news is they are working on a more durable coating. It’s made using similar principles but the polymers and the manufacturing process are different. Applications for such a material run from protecting gadgets in the field to making coatings for boats that reduce drag as they slice through the water.

It’s all part of a series of investigations that Dr. Tuteja says the team has been running for five years since he was a post doc at MIT. As they progress, some materials can be commercialized quickly, while others help them learn new principles for application to the next project. “All the work we do in my lab is to a particular application,” he says. “We try to think of novel ways to solve a particular problem. We try to figure out if there is a better way to address that and find the scientific principles along the way.”

“It’s a very visual field, you immediately know whether you have succeeded or failed.”

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Macklemore & Ryan Lewis score unlikely hit

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The rapper Macklemore thinks there’s a simple reason the hit “Thrift Shop” appears to be going viral: It dares to be different.

“There’s a certain sound that has kind of flooded the mainstream airwaves as far as hip-hop music,” he said a few hours after taping a performance on “Late Show with David Letterman” on Thursday night with producing partner Ryan Lewis. “The beat doesn’t sound anything like that, the lyrics are kind of completely polar opposite from what you hear from most commercial rap records and it’s got a hook that’s very catchy. So I think that you combine those three things and it equates to an original sounding song that’s refreshing to the audience that hears it.”

Listeners have responded with rare enthusiasm to the song about “poppin’ tags” to develop your own unique sense of swag. “Thrift Shop” sits atop the Billboard Hot 100 radio airplay chart, the Nielsen SoundScan Digital Songs chart and is the No. 1 song on Spotify for two consecutive weeks. Only one other song, Bruno Mars‘ “Locked Out of Heaven,” has reached the top of those lists simultaneously.

The Seattle-based duo has sold 2.3 million copies so far — a million in the last month alone — and sales continue to grow week to week. Macklemore, whose real name is Ben Haggerty, said he and Lewis thought the song might appeal to a “niche demographic” and didn’t envision it becoming a single. The song’s sense of humor is key, but Haggerty says there’s also a deeper message about individuality and modern culture’s obsession with expensive fashion.

“The more expensive the better is kind of the American way and if you spent $ 600 for a sweatshirt, then that makes it better,” Haggerty said. “And I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. If it’s a $ 600 sweatshirt that’s fresh, that’s fantastic if it looks great. But to me to just pay a ridiculous amount of money for something just because of the logo isn’t creative and it’s just unfortunate that people equate spending money to style.”

___

Online:

http://macklemore.com

___

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

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Well: Gluten-Free Muffin Recipes

For people who need to eliminate gluten from their diet, baking becomes a challenge. Beginners often find gluten-free baked goods too dense. Even the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman didn’t like the flavor of a commercial gluten-free flour mix, which left her gluten-free cookies and tart-shells with a strong taste of bean flour. As a result, she created her own gluten-free mix for baking muffins. She writes:

My son Liam still doesn’t know that the muffins he has been devouring all week are gluten-free.

I put together my own gluten-free flour mix, one without bean flour, and turned to America’s favorite Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahem, for guidance. I was already thinking about making muffins, and I wanted a mix that could replace the whole wheat flour I usually use in conjunction with other grains or flours. Her formula for a whole-grain flour mix is simple – 70 percent ground gluten-free grain like rice flour, millet flour, buckwheat flour or teff (the list on her site is a long one) and 30 percent starch like potato starch, cornstarch or arrowroot.

For this week’s recipes, I used what I had, which was brown rice flour, potato starch and cornstarch – 20 percent potato starch and 10 percent cornstarch — and that’s the basis for the nutritional analyses of this week’s recipes. I used this mix in conjunction with a gluten-free meal or flour, so the amount of pure starch in the batters is much less than 30 percent.

When you bake anything it is much simpler and results are more consistent if you use grams and scale your ingredients. This is especially true with gluten-free baking, since you are working with grain and starch formulas. Digital scales are not expensive and I urge you to switch over to this method if you like to bake. I have given approximate cup measures so the recipes will work both ways, but scaling is more accurate.

Here are five ways to bake gluten-free muffins:

Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins: These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal, Fig and Orange Muffins: A sweet and grainy cornmeal mixture makes for a delicious muffin.

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Gluten-Free Whole Grain Cheese and Mustard Muffins: A savory muffin with a delicious strong flavor.

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Gluten-Free Buckwheat, Poppy Seed and Blueberry Muffins: The buckwheat flour is high-fiber and makes a dark, richly-flavored muffin.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal Molasses Muffins: Strong molasses provides a good source of iron in an easy-to-make muffin.

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DealBook: Amid Bank's Legal Problems, Barclays C.E.O. Gives Up Bonus

LONDON – Antony P. Jenkins, the new chief executive of Barclays, said on Friday that he would not accept a bonus as the British bank struggles to rebuild its reputation after a series of recent scandals.

The announcement comes as British regulators investigate new allegations that Barclays failed to properly disclose to shareholders a loan to a group of Qatari investors that gave the British bank a cash infusion during the financial crisis, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Last year, the bank disclosed that British and American authorities were investigating the legality of the payments related to the $7.1 billion cash injection to Qatar Holding, the sovereign wealth fund.

Mr. Jenkins is dealing with a spate of legal headaches.

In June, Barclays agreed to pay a $450 million settlement with United States and British regulators over rate manipulation. The case forced a number of the bank’s top executives to resign, including the chief executive at the time, Robert. E. Diamond Jr.

The British firm has also set aside $3.2 billion to cover legal costs related to the inappropriately selling of insurance to consumers. British authorities recently told the bank that it must review the sale of certain interest-rate hedging products after 90 percent of a sample of the complex instruments were found to have been sold improperly. Analysts say the investigation may lead to millions of dollars of new legal costs.

In light of the controversy surrounding the bank, Mr. Jenkins said he did not want to be considered for a bonus that could have totaled up to $4.3 million, adding that many of the problems engulfing the bank were of its own making. The Barclays chief’s annual salary is $1.7 million.

“I think it only right that I bear an appropriate degree of accountability for those matters,” Mr. Jenkins said in a statement. “It would be wrong for me to receive a bonus for 2012.”

A spokesman for Barclays declined to comment about the investigation into potential wrongdoing connected to the loan to Qatari investors.

By forgoing his bonus, Mr. Jenkins contrasts with his predecessor. Mr. Diamond was in line for a $4.3 million bonus in deferred shares for 2011 despite criticism about his handling of the bank’s performance. Faced with mounting opposition, Mr. Diamond and Chris Lucas, the bank’s finance director, eventually agreed to receive only half of the 2011 deferred stock bonus if the British bank failed to reach a number of its financial targets.

Barclays, which will unveil a major overhaul of its operations when it reports earnings on Feb. 12, is expected to slash up to 2,000 jobs in its investment bank in an effort to reduce its exposure to risky trading activity, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

As part of the changes, the British bank has hired Hector Sants, the former chief of the Financial Services Authority, the British regulator, as its new head of compliance.

Mr. Jenkins, who previously ran Barclays’ consumer banking business, told employees in January that they should leave the bank if they were not willing to help rebuild the firm’s reputation.

“My message to those people is simple,” Mr. Jenkins wrote in an internal note obtained by DealBook. “Barclays is not the place for you. The rules have changed.”

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of the article indicated that Barclays chief executive told employees earlier this month that they should leave the bank if they were not willing to help rebuild the firm’s reputation. He told them in January.

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California's population to grow 39% by 2060, report says

By Chris Megerian

January 31, 2013, 10:48 a.m.

California's population will reach nearly 52.7 million by 2060, according to a new state report. 

The projection, released by Gov. Jerry Brown's Department of Finance, said the state will cross the 50 million threshold by 2049.

The report showed 39% growth in the state's population. By comparison, if there was a state made only from the difference between the California's current population and its projected population in 2060, it would be the fifth-largest state in the nation. 

California's demographics are also in for a major shift, according to the report: For the first time since California became a state, Latinos will be a plurality in early 2014. By 2060, they will be nearly half of the state's population. 

Although the state's Asian population is also growing, it will only be a little more than 13% of the state's population, the report said.

Comments are filtered for language and registration is required. The Times makes no guarantee of comments' factual accuracy. Readers may report inappropriate comments by clicking the Report Abuse link next to a comment. Here are the full legal terms you agree to by using this comment form.

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Apple's Automotive Invasion Continues as Honda Embraces Siri

Apple’s automotive invasion continues, with Honda’s announcement that Siri Eyes Free will come to three models this year. That follows Chevrolet’s integration of Apple’s virtual assistant last fall, a trend that will continue throughout the year as seven more automakers look to Cupertino for help.

But this is about much more than putting Apple’s virtual assistant into cars. It’s about giving automakers voice controls on the cheap and giving drivers what they really want: a seamless connection between their iPhone and their car.

“[The] iPhone has become so integral to people’s lives that they continue to use them in their vehicles,” said Vicki Poponi, assistant VP of product planning for American Honda. “Offering Honda and Acura owners Siri and its Eyes Free mode via Bluetooth is an incredible opportunity to provide next-generation connectivity and meet our customer’s ever-changing needs.”

Siri will be available to owners of the 2013 Honda Accord, all-new Acura RLX and ILX later this year through a dealer-installed software update. Although Honda isn’t providing a price or exact date, a Honda spokeswoman told Wired no additional hardware is required, which means Siri functionality could relatively easily and cheaply expand to other Honda and Acura models.

Activating Siri Eyes Free while driving is dead simple. Driver’s long-press the steering wheel-mounted voice control button to access Siri and issue commands using microphones embedded in the vehicle. Want to use the car’s built-in voice control? A short press on the same button bypasses Siri altogether — a smart implementation we expect other automakers to duplicate.

The integration allows drivers to use Siri to make calls, dictate text messages, play music or podcasts and access nearly everything else the virtual assistant has control over. And just to ensure drivers aren’t taking their eyes off the road, the iPhone’s screen won’t illuminate during the interactions, so don’t expect to see Yelp recommendations or Google search results in your peripheral vision.

For automakers like Honda, which are having a hard time keeping pace with competitors and the consumer electronics world, Siri Eyes Free integration is a voice-controlled lifeline. They can offer the features customers want without having to expend massive resources on on-board or data-connected voice recognition systems. It’s simply a matter of getting the cars’ systems to play nicely with Siri, particularly the embedded microphones, which have to clearly pick up on voice commands while eliminating extraneous background noise.

But in a twist to the natural order of in-car tech, the only vehicles to integrate Siri thus far are at the low end of the automotive spectrum. The first implementation came to the sub-$20k Chevrolet Sonic and Spark ultra-compacts. Mercedes will offer Siri on its entry-level A-Class in Europe. The Acura RLX is the brand’s new flagship, but Siri will also be available on the more pedestrian ILX (a sedan based on the Honda Civic).

“For Apple this is certainly good news as well since it represents an additional automaker that will allow Apple to have consumers interact with its ecosystem even when driving,” says Thilo Koslowski, an auto analyst for Gartner. But it poses a potential long-term problem for automakers who’ve invested heavily in creating their own infotainment ecosystems.

“By bringing in technology leaders’ offerings into the automobile they are also bringing in their subsequent ecosystems — and that could bite automakers’ own efforts to create a leading connectivity platform with applications and services,” says Koslowski. “Once Siri evolves into accessing and controlling applications on the phone, consumers might not show much interest in an automaker’s navigation offering… that’s just fine from a consumer perspective, but in the end it might turn some automakers into simple hardware manufacturers.”

For now, it’s a way for automakers to get the latest cloud-connected voice-control system in their vehicles with minimal outlay, but the long-term implications could be far more dire for automakers relying on an outside company — particularly one as massive as Apple – to provide what’s becoming a checkmark on new car buyer’s shopping lists.

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Glut of R-rated movies putting Box Office on overload

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Bullet to the Head,” the guns-blazing, axe-swinging action film from Sylvester Stallone, arrives Friday and is the latest violent, R-rated movie to open in January. The month itself could be rated “R” – for Repetitious.

Nine of the 11 movies released widely since the start of the year and Friday are rated “R.” Of last weekend’s top 10 films, eight carried the restricted rating, which requires youngsters under 17 to be accompanied by an adult.

Hollywood distribution executives regularly maintain that variety in the marketplace –including films with a range of ratings – is essential to doing strong overall business. January, traditionally a slow box-office month, is running roughly 10 percent ahead of last year. But last week was the first week to be down from 2012, and it’s possible the preponderance of R-rated offerings is taking a toll.

“There’s been one PG-13 release this month – ‘Mama’ – and it went right to No. 1,” Exhibitor Relations senior analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap, “and I expect ‘Warm Bodies’ will do the same this weekend.”

“Warm Bodies,” which comes out Friday from Lionsgate, is a PG-13 teenage zombie romance based on a young adult novel. “There has to be a degree of pent-up demand from kids out there,” Bock said.

It’s violence more than sex that’s driving the R-rated trend. Two of the nine releases –”Texas Chainsaw” and “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” – were 3D gore fests. Three – “Parker,” “Broken City” and “Gangster Squad” – were crime dramas. Two – “The Last Stand” and Warner Bros.‘ “Bullet to the Head” – are action films, and two were comedies: “The Haunted House” and “Movie 43.”

Several R-rated films have scored at the box office this month. Best Picture Oscar nominees “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Django” and “Silver Linings Playbook” over performed. “Texas Chainsaw” and “Hansel and Gretel” both went to the head of the class with openings in the $ 20 million range.

But too many movies of the same sort can leave some demographic groups underserved, as well as limit a film’s playability. For example, there’s a good chance MGM and Paramount’s action fantasy “Hansel and Gretel” might have done better had teenagers been able to get in without bringing an adult.

“With some films,” explained distribution chief Don Harris of Paramount of “Hansel and Gretel,” “you really don’t have a choice. From the time it was conceived, this one was going to be an R-rated movie and there was no amount of editing or tweaking that was going to change that.”

Harris noted that of the top four comedies released last year, three – Universal‘s “Ted” and “This Is 40,” and Warner Bros.‘ “The Campaign” – were rated R.

“That is clearly a developing genre,” Harris said, “with a high ceiling.” Exhibit A might be “Ted,” which has taken in $ 515 million worldwide, with nearly $ 300 million coming from overseas.

The other top comedy, “Parental Guidance” from Fox, has very much benefited from its PG rating. “We were the only true family movie in the market place for weeks, and it paid off,” Fox distribution chief Chris Aronson said. “Parental Guidance” has taken in about $ 70 million since opening on Christmas Day.

The trend won’t end any time soon. After this Super Bowl weekend, both of the following week’s wide releases – the Universal comedy “Identity Thief” and the Open Road Films crime drama “Side Effects” – are rated R.

It won’t be until Valentine’s Day that things will change. On that Thursday, the PG-13 Warner Bros. drama “Beautiful Creatures,” the PG-13 Relativity romance “Safe Haven” and the Weinstein Company’s PG animated film “Escape From Planet Earth” will all hit theaters. The latter will be the first kids film to hit the marketplace since Disney re-released “Monsters Inc.” in December.

But those who like their film mayhem full-on needn’t despair. Fox’s Bruce Willis action film “A Good Day to Die Hard” opens that day, too. And it’s rated R.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Personal Health: Keeping Blood Pressure in Check

Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.

But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:

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Jane Brody speaks about hypertension.

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¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.

¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.

¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.

¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.

Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.

Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.

Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.

“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”

But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.

“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.

The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.

¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.

¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.

¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.

According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.

One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.

After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.

But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.

Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.

Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.

“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.

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How to Measure Your Blood Pressure

Mistaken readings, which can occur in doctors’ offices as well as at home, can result in misdiagnosis of hypertension and improper treatment. Dr. Samuel J. Mann, of Weill Cornell Medical College, suggests these guidelines to reduce the risk of errors:

¶ Use an automatic monitor rather than a manual one, and check the accuracy of your home monitor at the doctor’s office.

¶ Use a monitor with an arm cuff, not a wrist or finger cuff, and use a large cuff if you have a large arm.

¶ Sit quietly for a few minutes, without talking, after putting on the cuff and before checking your pressure.

¶ Check your pressure in one arm only, and take three readings (not more) one or two minutes apart.

¶ Measure your blood pressure no more than twice a week unless you have severe hypertension or are changing medications.

¶ Check your pressure at random, ordinary times of the day, not just when you think it is high.

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STMicroelectronics May Pay $500 Million to Exit Venture

PARIS — STMicroelectronics, the biggest European chip maker, may have to spend up to $500 million this year to wind down the mobile chip-making joint venture with Ericsson that has been a ball-and-chain on its results, the company’s chief executive said Thursday.

“We’re committed to going fast,” Carlo Bozotti, the chief executive, said during a briefing in Paris. “It’s important for us to move on, to become a leaner company.”

Mr. Bozotti also said he had seen “encouraging signs” that the semiconductor market was improving this year after a rocky 2012, but “we’ll have to see if that’s sustainable.”

Shares of STMicroelectronics closed up 3.5 percent in Paris trading. Analysts said positive outlooks issued by STMicroelectronics and the company’s German rival, Infineon Technologies, helped lift the stock price.

STMicroelectronics, an Italian-French company with its headquarters in Geneva, and the Swedish mobile networking giant Ericsson bet big on chips to power smartphones. But their joint venture, ST-Ericsson, foundered as big customers like Nokia and BlackBerry were smashed by competition from Apple and Samsung, which rely heavily on chips made by Qualcomm. The venture has lost about $2.8 billion since 2009.

Negotiations to sell or close down the company, which employs more than 5,000 people, will be a delicate matter. Complicating any deal, at a time of economic stagnation and fears for the future of European industry, is the fact that the French and Italian governments own a combined 27.5 percent stake in STMicroelectronics. At any rate, a near-term closure of the company is thought to be unlikely, as ST-Ericsson has long-term supplier contracts it has promised to fulfill.

Mr. Bozotti said STMicroelectronics expected to dispose of its ST-Ericsson stake “during the third quarter of 2013,” though he gave no indication of how the company planned to do so. The cost would probably be in the range of $300 million to $500 million, he said, “including around $100 million in the first quarter.”

STMicroelectronics is one of the biggest high-technology enterprises in Europe and an industry leader in areas with strong growth prospects, like sensors and microcontrollers. Its chip-making and research and development facilities around Grenoble are at the heart of the innovation cluster that serves as France’s answer to Silicon Valley.

Mr. Bozotti spoke after STMicroelectronics announced late Wednesday a $544 million write-down of good will and other intangible assets on its share of ST-Ericsson, a charge that reduced the accounting value of the 50-50 joint venture to “a negligible amount” on its books. The charge led the company’s fourth-quarter net loss to balloon to $428 million from an $11 million loss a year earlier.

STMicroelectronics said its full-year 2012 revenue slid nearly 13 percent, to $8.5 billion, largely because sales to Nokia fell. Just four years ago, the Finnish cellphone maker accounted for about a fifth of all its sales; STMicroelectronics did not disclose the current level but acknowledged that it was far lower.

The bottom line was “horrible,” Thomas Becker, an electronics sector analyst at Commerzbank, said of the results, “but the underlying numbers were not that bad.”

He said that shares of STMicroelectronics and Infineon — which forecast a rise in second-quarter sales and operating profit on Thursday — got a lift “because some investors may be hoping to get in on the upswing in the semiconductor cycle.”

The company is refocusing its business, Mr. Bozotti said, and expects growth in 2013 to be driven primarily by sales of devices in its imaging, analog and microsensor, and microcontroller businesses. He said STMicroelectronics would cut its quarterly costs to $600 million to $650 million by 2014, from around $900 million currently.

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Retired barber charged in fatal shooting of Newport Beach doctor

By Nicole Santa Cruz

January 30, 2013, 10:43 a.m.

Prosecutors have filed charges against a 75-year-old man who is accused of murdering his urologist during an appointment in Newport Beach.

Stanwood Fred Elkus of Lake Elsinore has been charged with one felony count of special circumstances murder by lying in wait and a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a firearm causing death, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors say Elkus, a retired barber, arrived for an appointment at his doctor’s office Monday afternoon and waited in an exam room until Ronald Gilbert entered.

Elkus is accused of shooting Gilbert several times in the upper body, according to prosecutors and police.

Other doctors heard the shots and attempted to revive Gilbert, prosecutors said. Elkus gave his gun to a staff member in the office and was arrested without incident, they said.

Elkus, who is being held at the Orange County jail on no bail, was expected in court Wednesday.

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Skip the Lists for a More Accessible Web

Somewhere far in the web’s primordial past it was decided that the best way to mark up a menu in HTML was to use the unordered list element: <ul>. The vast majority of tutorials – if not all – you’ll ever see for creating navigation menus use the familiar list element structure, nesting links inside <li> tags. Menu plugins for WordPress and other popular publishing systems use lists for menus as well. Even the HTML5 spec uses an unordered list in its <nav> element examples.

There is, as CSS-Tricks’ Chris Coyier writes, “no debate” about how menus should be marked up. But HTML5 adds the <nav> element and there’s also a navigation role in WAI-ARIA so should we still be using lists to mark up menus?

Coyier says no. He’s dropped lists from his <nav> elements and instead uses just links and span tags. Coyier cites a talk by Reinhard Stebner, who is blind, and suggests that with most screen readers the far better solution for menus is to use divs and spans for menus.

Be sure to read through Coyier’s post for some more data on why ditching the list might be a good idea and check out Jim Doran’s write up on Stebner’s original talk, which makes a distinction between accessible and usable. That is, a technically “accessible” site might still be a usability nightmare for some users.

However, as Mozilla’s Chris Heilmann points out in the comments of Coyier’s post, the problems lists cause in some screen readers are really a result of the sorry state of screen readers. “Screen readers are damn slow to update and vary immensely between different versions… I gave up a long time ago calling something accessible or not when it works in Jaws.”

Lists for menus have advantages over the div and span route, like some extra elements for styling and the fact that they render as, well, lists even in the absence of CSS.

What do you think? Are lists for menus a legacy workaround we no longer need in the day and age of <nav> and role="navigation"? Or do they still offer enough advantages to keep using for menus?

For his part Coyier says he’s going to keep building list-free menus. “Until I see some solid research that suggests that’s dumb, I’m sticking to it,” he writes. “As always, the best would be to get more information from real screen reader users like Reinhard.”

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Musical comedy “The Sapphires” sparkles at Aussie Oscars

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Home-grown romantic musical comedy “The Sapphires” shone at Australia‘s film industry awards on Wednesday, picking up best film and lead acting trophies for Deborah Mailman and “Bridesmaids” star Chris O’Dowd.

Awards host Russell Crowe, an Oscar winner for “Gladiator,” led a star-studded evening whose theme was pride in Australia’s outsized success on the international film stage.

“The Australian academy may be small but over the years we have won more than 60 BAFTAs and Oscars,” said Crowe at the second annual Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards, affectionately known as the “Aussie Oscars.”

Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Jeffrey Rush were all on hand for the event at Sydney’s Star casino, leading guest presenter Jeremy Renner to joke: “You can’t throw a bottle out the window in Hollywood without hitting an Australian.”

The Sapphires, a possibility for next year’s Oscars, tells the story of four women from a remote Aboriginal mission who are catapulted on to the world stage as Australia’s answer to the Supremes when a kind-hearted manager, played by O’Dowd, hears their powerful voices and sends them to entertain troops in Vietnam.

“Films find their way because of a certain strength,” Kidman told Reuters. “The Sapphires is such a unique story and it’s great music and great talent.”

Director Wayne Blair’s debut film also won for direction, cinematography, editing, best production design, costume design and sound.

Best Young Actor went to Saskia Rosendahl for her role in the Australian-German film “Lore”, about a teenage girl who leads her younger siblings across Germany at the end of World War Two. Rosendahl was just 17 when the film was made.

The awards weren’t without controversy after the director of “Bait”, the 3D shark-in-a-supermarket horror-comedy that was Australia’s highest grossing film internationally last year, accused the academy of snubbing his movie.

While The Sapphires was Australia’s top-grossing film domestically, with more than A$ 14 million ($ 14.63 million) in ticket sales, Bait snagged more than $ 41.8 million worldwide, more than half of that in China.

“It was never going to get best film or best director, but how can the cinematography, the visual effects, the editing, the sound design, the production design – we built a supermarket and put it underwater, for goodness’ sake – be overlooked?” said Kimble Rendall to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Prior to last year, the awards were known as the Australian Film Industry (AFI) awards.

($ 1 = 0.9566 Australian dollars)

(Reporting By Jane Wardell, editing by Elaine Lies)

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The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning.

Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women.

The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half.

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

Until 1993, women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from trials of new drugs. When the F.D.A. lifted the ban that year, agency researchers noted that because landmark studies on aspirin in heart disease and stroke had not included women, the scientific community was left “with doubts about whether aspirin was, in fact, effective in women for these indications.”

Because so many drugs were tested mostly or exclusively in men, scientists may know little of their effects on women until they reach the market. A Government Accountability Office study found that 8 of 10 drugs removed from the market from 1997 through 2000 posed greater health risks to women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

The sex differences cut both ways. Some drugs, like the high blood pressure drug Verapamil and the antibiotic erythromycin, appear to be more effective in women. On the other hand, women tend to wake up from anesthesia faster than men and are more likely to experience side effects from anesthetic drugs, according to the Society for Women’s Health Research.

Women also react differently to alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, studies have found.

It’s not just because women tend to be smaller than men. Women metabolize drugs differently because they have a higher percentage of body fat and experience hormonal fluctuations and the monthly menstrual cycle. “Some drugs are more water-based and like to hang out in the blood, and some like to hang out in the fat tissue,” said Wesley Lindsey, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Auburn University, who is a co-author of a paper on sex-based differences in drug activity.

“If the drug is lipophilic” — attracted to fat cells — “it will move into those tissues and hang around for longer,” Dr. Lindsey added. “The body won’t clear it as quickly, and you’ll see effects longer.”

There are also sex differences in liver metabolism, kidney function and certain gastric enzymes. Oral contraceptives, menopause and post-menopausal hormone treatment further complicate the picture. Some studies suggest, for example, that when estrogen levels are low, women may need higher doses of drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers to lower blood pressure, because they have higher levels of proteins that cause the blood vessels to constrict, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown.

Many researchers say data on these sex differences must be gathered at the very beginning of a drug’s development — even before trials on human subjects begin.

“The path to a new drug starts with the basic science — you study an animal model of the disease, and that’s where you discover a drug target,” Dr. Sandberg said. “But 90 percent of researchers are still studying male animal models of the disease.”

There have been improvements. In an interview, Dr. Robert Temple, with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said the agency’s new guidelines in 1993 called for studies of sex differences at the earliest stages of drug development, as well as for analysis of clinical trial data by sex.

He said early research on an irritable bowel syndrome drug, alosetron (Lotronex), suggested it would not be effective in men. As a result, only women were included in clinical trials, and it was approved only for women. (Its use is restricted now because of serious side effects.)

But some scientists say drug metabolism studies with only 10 or 15 subjects are too small to pick up sex differences. Even though more women participate in clinical trials than in the past, they are still underrepresented in trials for heart and kidney disease, according to one recent analysis, and even in cancer trials.

“The big problem is we’re not quite sure how much difference this makes,” Dr. Lindsey said. “We just don’t have a good handle on it.”

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