Ireland Seeks Easing of Its Debt Terms

DUBLIN — Ireland has been widely praised as the good pupil of the euro zone’s austerity school of thought. Now it wants to be rewarded.

Ireland, whose banking crisis required it to receive a bailout of €85 billion, or $110 billion, by international lenders in 2010, is pressing for the right to ease the payback terms of billions of euros of debt it incurred in that process. It is also pushing other European capitals to stick to a promise made last year that the euro zone’s bailout fund could eventually be used to prop up struggling banks directly, relieving governments of that burden.

Ireland’s proposals are likely to come up when European finance ministers begin two days of meetings in Brussels on Monday.

The issue is significant because it could have a decisive impact on the ability of a fragile Irish economy to emerge from the crisis, officials say. And within European politics, a new relief package would be significant because Ireland is the only bailed-out euro zone country so far that in hewing to the harsh austerity terms of its rescue has shown clear, if early, signs of an economic recovery.

Since 2008 the country has come up with spending cuts and tax increases totaling 18 percent of its gross domestic product. But unemployment remains high and households remain weighed down with debt, a legacy of the real estate crash that was the main cause of the banks’ troubles.

And yet, visiting Dublin on Thursday, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said that Ireland had “turned the corner,” proving that the international rescue programs put together by the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund “can work and that there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Ireland is pressing an issue raised at a European Union summit meeting last June, when leaders promised that the euro zone’s bailout fund would eventually be able to lend directly to troubled banks, once a more centralized banking system was in place for the 17-nation euro zone.

At the time the deal was seen as significant because it could alleviate the debt burdens that bank bailouts had placed on the governments of Ireland and Spain, among others. But in subsequent months, the finance ministers of Germany, Finland and the Netherlands sought to dilute the agreement, arguing that it referred only to new bank rescues and not to so-called historic or legacy assets.

In addition to direct help for its banks, Ireland is also pressing for longer maturity dates on its international loans. Mr. Barroso, asked by reporters Thursday about Ireland’s proposals, said that the European Commission — the administrative arm of the Union — “has been arguing for rewards to those who are the good performers in terms of the programs.”

He cited Ireland and another bailed-out euro member, Portugal, as the members “we have a positive attitude toward.”

Under Ireland’s definition, its “dead banks,” which were crushed by the weight of bad debt incurred in the property and credit bubble, would not qualify. These include Irish Bank Resolution Corp., which took over Anglo Irish Bank, and the Irish Nationwide Building Society.

But banks that still operate but have been recapitalized by the state could receive help.

Michael Noonan, the Irish finance minister, said there was “a distinction being drawn between the word ‘legacy’ and the word ‘retrospective.”’

“If you have a dead bank there are legacy issues, and we are not negotiating for anything broadly to be done for Anglo Irish-I.B.R.C.,” Mr. Noonan said.

He said that about €28 billion was invested in banks that were still trading, and that this was debt his government would like the euro zone bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, to assume.

Though no direct recapitalization of banks from that fund is likely to take effect before the end of the year, a promise that Ireland could receive such help could bolster market confidence. That might aid Ireland’s effort to emerge from the bailout program and return to the bond markets fully next year.

Alan Barrett, head of the economic analysis division at Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute, said there were several factors that could derail the government’s plans. These include a lack of domestic economic demand, the weakness of vital export markets including the euro zone, and the appreciation of the euro against the currency of Ireland’s neighbor and key trading partner, Britain.

And while Ireland’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product has been forecast as peaking soon at around 120 percent and then begin to fall, Mr. Barrett estimated that there was still a 30 percent chance that this would not happen. “We are basically of the view that this is a fairly unstable situation,” he said.

Read More..

Jury in Bell corruption trial may be deadlocked

A court spokeswoman said Thursday the jury in the Bell corruption case appears to be deadlocked.

“The jurors may be at an impasse,” said Patricia Kelly, a spokeswoman for L.A. County Superior Court.

Jurors sent a note to the judge Thursday morning, and all the attorneys in the case were called in.

Six former Bell City Council members are accused of stealing public money by paying themselves extraordinary salaries in one of Los Angeles County’s poorest cities.

Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal are accused of misappropriation of public funds, felony counts that could bring prison terms.

They were arrested in September 2010 and have been free on bail.

The nearly $100,000 salaries drawn by most of the former elected officials are part of a much larger municipal corruption case in the southeast Los Angeles County city in which prosecutors allege that money from the city’s modest general fund flowed freely to top officials.

The three defendants who testified painted a picture of a city as a place led by a controlling, manipulative administrator who handed out enormous salaries, loaned city money and padded future pensions. Robert Rizzo, the former adminstrator, and ex-assistant city manager Angela Spaccia are also awaiting trial.

The four-week trial of the former council members turned on extremes.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller said the council members were little more than common thieves who were consumed with fattening their paychecks at the expense of the city’s largely immigrant, working-poor residents.

Miller said the accused represented the “one-percenters" of Bell who had “apparently forgotten who they are and where they live."

Defense attorneys said the former city leaders -- one a pastor, another a mom-and-pop grocery store owner, another a funeral director -- were dedicated public servants who put in long hours and tirelessly responded to the needs of their constituents.

Jacobo testified that Rizzo informed her she could quit her job as a real estate agent and receive a full-time salary as a council member. She said she asked City Attorney Edward Lee if that was possible and he nodded his head.

"I thought I was doing a very good job to be able to earn that, yes," Jacobo said.

Cole said Rizzo was so intimidating that the former councilman voted for a 12% annual pay raise out of fear the city programs he established would be gutted by Rizzo in retaliation if he opposed the pay hikes.

The defense argued that the prosecution failed to prove criminal negligence -- that their clients knew what they were doing was wrong or that a reasonable person would know it was wrong.

The attorney for Hernandez, the city’s mayor at the time of the arrests, said his client had only a grade-school education, was known more for his heart than his intellect and was, perhaps, not overly “scholarly.”

Prosecutors argued that the council members pushed up their salaries by serving on city boards that rarely met and, in one case, existed only as a means for paying them even more money.

Jurors were also left to deal with the question of whether council members were protected by a City Charter that was approved in a special election that drew fewer than 400 voters.

Defense attorneys say the charter allowed council members to be paid for serving on the authorities.

But the prosecutor argued that the charter -- a quasi-constitution for a city -- set salaries at what councils in similar-sized cities were receiving under state law: $8,076 a year. Because council members automatically serve on boards and commissions, the district attorney said the total compensation for all of each council member's work was included in that figure.

Read More..

Resurrecting the Rainbow Colors of Insect Fossils

After squeezing and baking beetle wings, or soaking them in mud to let them decay, scientists think they’re closer to being able to reconstruct the original brilliant hues of some fossilized insects.

Some insects keep their colors after they become fossils, in some cases for millions of years. But others turn varying shades of brown and black. Scientists interested in the evolution of insect colors — and their role in things like camouflage, mating, and defense — want to better understand how colors change after fossilization.

What really turns a beetle brown, it turns out, is warm temperatures, a team of scientists reported Feb. 20 in Geology. “Temperature is the key to destroying the colors of fossils,” said paleontologist Maria McNamara, a study coauthor at the University of Bristol. McNamara and her colleagues based their conclusion on a battery of tests known as maturation experiments, during which scientists watched what happened when they subjected beetle bits to a variety of conditions that mimic those a dead insect might encounter after many millennia buried under dirt and debris.

“This opens potential pathways for recovering the color signature from specimens which have since lost their coloration,” said paleoentomologist Michael Engel of the University of Kansas. ”In time we may be able to look upon a drawer of fossils rendered black by preservation, but which we know were once colored, and reconstruct their lost hues and patterns.”

McNamara has been studying fossil insect colors for years. After identifying some trends in how fossil colors change, she decided to test some of the conditions that could produce color changes after a bug gets buried. To do this, McNamara and her colleagues took advantage of a Yale University lab equipped to do maturation experiments, a facility normally used by geochemists. Here, the high temperatures and pressures that can affect buried sediments are produced by autoclaves, instruments that heat- and pressure- sterilize lab equipment.

Except McNamara removed the forewings from jewel beetles and weevils and put them in the autoclave.

The shiny colors of the beetles’ outer cuticles come from microscopic structures. Some beetles, like the green jewel beetle (above left), get their shimmer from multiple layers of reflective compounds. Others, like the weevil (above right), derive their colors from tiny 3-D biophotonic crystals. These crystals, McNamara says, are among the most complex structures known – so complicated that scientists haven’t figured out how to replicate them artificially. Determining when the crystals showed up in the fossil record is a different question, since most fossils show no evidence for the structure.

The jewel beetle’s shiny covering fared well when subjected only to high pressure conditions, McNamara found. But turning up the heat as well as pressure produced a predictable color change, from green, to cyan, to blue, to indigo. And then, brown or black.

“Cook anything long enough and it’ll all end up black,” McNamara said.

The weevil’s outer layer responded similarly. Placing both types of insect cuticles in dirt and water for 18 months produced no color change, leading the team to conclude that post-burial temperatures are the most important factor in color change. High temperatures alter color-producing structures, shrinking layers and changing chemical compositions, which causes the tissue to bend light differently. “The color they produce is really dependent on how much the structure bends light,” McNamara said.

In support of her conclusion, McNamara points to fossils unearthed from various sites — buried at different depths and under different conditions — whose colors conform to the hypothesis.

Not everyone is convinced, though. Some scientists suggest McNamara is generalizing too much, and that color changes vary on a case-by-case basis, depending in part on species and precise post-burial conditions.

McNamara is working on resolving how these factors can influence a fossil’s color, and is planning on testing additional species and tissues. For now, she points to a tantalizing piece of evidence that emerged from her studies: Some of the black fossils she studied retain their original color-producing structures, which means that — with more information — scientists could eventually backtrack from those structures and determine what colors may have adorned paleo-insects.

Read More..

Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal

VIENNA (Reuters) – A new film based on the story of Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.

Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a windowless cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped in 2006, causing a sensation in Austria and abroad. Priklopil committed suicide.

Kampusch had always refused to respond to claims that she had had sex with Priklopil, but in a German television interview on her 25th birthday last week said she had decided to reveal the truth because it had leaked out from police files.

The film, “3,096 Days” – based on Kampusch’s autobiography of the same name – soberly portrays her captivity in a windowless cellar less than 6 square metres (65 square feet) in area, often deprived of food for days at a time.

The emaciated Kampusch – who weighed just 38 kg (84 pounds) at one point in 2004 – keeps a diary written on toilet paper concealed in a box.

One entry reads: “At least 60 blows in the face. Ten to 15 nausea-inducing fist blows to the head. One strike with the fist with full weight to my right ear.”

The movie shows occasional moments that approach tenderness, such as when Priklopil presents her with a cake for her 18th birthday or buys her a dress as a gift – but then immediately goes on to chide her for not knowing how to waltz with him.

GREY AREAS

Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who plays the teenaged Kampusch, said she had tried to portray “the strength of someone’s soul, the ability of people to survive… but also the grey areas within a relationship that people don’t necessarily understand.”

The British actress said she had not met Kampusch during the making of the film or since. “It was a very isolated time, it was a bubble of time, and I wanted to keep that very focused,” she told journalists as she arrived for the Vienna premiere.

Kampusch herself attended the premiere, looking composed as she posed for pictures but declining to give interviews.

In an interview with Germany’s Bild Zeitung last week, she said: “Yes, I did recognize myself, although the reality was even worse. But one can’t really show that in the cinema, since it wasn’t supposed to be a horror film.”

The movie, made at the Constantin Film studios in Bavaria, Germany, also stars Amy Pidgeon as the 10-year-old Kampusch and Danish actor Thure Lindhardt as Priklopil.

“I focused mainly on playing the human being because… we have to remember it was a human being. Monsters do not exist, they’re only in cartoons,” Lindhart said.

“It became clear to me that it’s a story about survival, and it’s a story about surviving eight years of hell. If that story can be told then I can also play the bad guy.”

The director was German-American Sherry Hormann, who made her English-language debut with the 2009 move “Desert Flower”, an adaptation of the autobiography of Somali-born model and anti-female circumcision activist Waris Dirie.

“I’m a mother and I wonder at the strength of this child, and it was important for me to tell this story from a different perspective, to tell how this child using her own strength could survive this atrocious martyrdom,” Hormann said.

The Kampusch case was followed two years later by that of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian who held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

The crimes prompted soul-searching about the Austrian psyche, and questions as to how the authorities and neighbors could have let such crimes go undetected for so long.

The film goes on general release on Thursday.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, Editing by Paul Casciato)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/cellar-victim-kampusch-raped-starved-in-film-of-ordeal/
Link To Post : Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

First Lady Announces Public-Private Plan to Bolster Physical Education

CHICAGO — As part of her campaign to curb childhood obesity, Michelle Obama on Thursday announced an ambitious plan to increase physical education in the country’s public schools with the help of private companies.

Jeff Haynes/Reuters

Michelle Obama spoke in Chicago on Thursday about her plan to increase physical activity in schools.

Under the $70 million program, the first public-private partnership of its kind, schools will be able to apply for grants to assess and improve their health and physical education programs, with the goal of getting children to exercise an hour a day.

“This is an earth-shattering awesomely inspiring day,” Mrs. Obama said in an emotional speech announcing the program in her hometown. “I grew up just a few miles from where we are today, over on the South Side.” She said that even though “my family certainly wasn’t rich, our neighborhood was barely middle class,” back then “being active was a way of life.” She recalled doing double Dutch on jump-ropes and going to summer camp.

“Where would I have been without those activities that kept be busy and safe and off the streets?” she said.

The program is supported by Nike, which will provide $50 million over five years to help schools and communities set up programs and spaces to get children to exercise. Other groups, including the GENYOUth Foundation, ChildObesity180, Kaiser Permanente and the General Mills Foundation, will give a combined $20 million for grants, training and other resources to help develop exercise programs and other health programs in schools.

All the money will be offered through Let’s Move Active Schools, Mrs. Obama ‘s new initiative. It will be administered through the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation.

“This is a huge deal for me,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who appeared with Mrs. Obama. “When students have a chance to play and be active, they do better academically. This needs to become the norm.”

Mr. Duncan said he hoped the initiative would spread to 50,000 schools over the next five years. Schools will be able to sign up at LetsMoveSchools.org, where they will be directed to training programs.

Mrs. Obama, who is on a three-city, two-day tour to promote her Let’s Move initiative to reduce childhood obesity, was joined in Chicago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, as well as the athletes Serena Williams, Gabrielle Douglas, Allyson Felix, Bo Jackson, Colin Kaepernick, Sarah Reinertsen, Ashton Eaton, Paul Rodriguez and Dominique Dawes, and the personal trainer Bob Harper. Ms. Williams said the program “has Serena written all over it.”

Mr. Duncan said that Mrs. Obama’s support would help bring a similar attention to exercise that she had to school lunches. “She brings voice, she brings power, she brings tremendous personal passion,'’ he said. “She speaks from experience.”

Read More..

DealBook: Icahn Gains 2 Seats on Herbalife’s Board

Herbalife said on Thursday that it planned to give two board seats to Carl C. Icahn, as the health supplements maker further binds itself to its most outspoken outside defender of late.

Herbalife will expand its board by two seats, giving both to the billionaire investor. As part of the agreement, Mr. Icahn will also have permission to raise his stake in the company to 25 percent, from its current 13.6 percent.

“We have a good rapport with the company,” Mr. Icahn said in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “We like them.”

Michael O. Johnson, Herbalife’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement: “We appreciate the Icahn Parties’ shared views on the inherent value of Herbalife’s operations, products and future prospects.”

Shares of Herbalife were up more than 5 percent in midafternoon trading on Thursday, at $39.67, after having been halted for the pending news.

The move comes two weeks after Mr. Icahn officially disclosed holding a stake in Herbalife and more than a month after the hedge fund manager sparred with a rival, William A. Ackman, on CNBC over the company. Mr. Ackman has taken a public bet against the nutritional supplements company, declaring it a pyramid scheme and arguing that it is in risk of being shut down by federal regulators.

During that confrontation, one that gripped Wall Street, Mr. Icahn allowed only that he believed Herbalife could be “the mother of all short squeezes.” That referred to the shares in a company rising substantially, hurting investors who, like Mr. Ackman, are betting that the price will go down.

In his interview with Bloomberg TV, Mr. Icahn continued to criticize Mr. Ackman’s tactics, arguing that the campaign is simply an attempt to smear the company and trash its stock price.

“Ackman has given us the opportunity to buy a company at a discounted price,” Mr. Icahn said.

Read More..

Race for L.A. city controller heats up

A previously low-profile race for Los Angeles city controller has begun to heat up as opponents of City Councilman Dennis Zine accuse him of "double dipping" the city's payroll and question why he is considering lucrative tax breaks for a Warner Center developer.

Zine, who for 12 years has represented a district in the southeast San Fernando Valley, is the better known of the major candidates competing to replace outgoing Controller Wendy Greuel.

The others are Cary Brazeman, a marketing executive, and lawyer Ron Galperin. Zine has raised $766,000 for his campaign, more than double that of Galperin, the next-highest fundraiser, and has the backing of several of the city's powerful labor unions.

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

He also has been endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and several of his council colleagues. Galperin is backed by the Service Employees International Union, one the city's largest labor groups, and Brazeman is supported by retired Rep. Diane Watson and several neighborhood council representatives.

With the primary ballot less than a week away, Brazeman and Galperin have turned up the heat on Zine, hoping to push the race beyond the March 5 vote. If no one wins more than 50% of the ballots cast, the top two vote-getters will face a runoff in the May general election.

In a recent debate, Zine's opponents criticized him for receiving a $100,000 annual pension for his 33 years with the Los Angeles Police Department and a nearly $180,000 council salary. Brazeman and Galperin called it an example of "double dipping" that should be eliminated.

That brought a forceful response from Zine, who shot back that he gives a big portion of his police pension check to charities.

"I am so tired of hearing 'double dipping,' " he said. "I worked 33 years on the streets of Los Angeles. I have given over $300,000 to nonprofits that need it.... That's what's happened with that pension."

In the same debate, Brazeman accused Zine of cozying up to a Warner Center developer by pushing for tax breaks on a project that already has been approved. The nearly 30-acre Village at Westfield Topanga project would add 1 million square feet of new shops, restaurants, office space and a hotel to a faded commercial district on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

"The councilman proposed to give developers at Warner Center tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks even though it's a highly successful project," he said. "He wants to give it away."

City records show that less than a month after the development was approved in February 2012, Zine asked the council for a study looking at possible "economic development incentives" that could be given to Westfield in return for speeding up street and landscaping enhancements to the project's exterior.

The motion's language notes that similar tax breaks have been awarded to large projects in the Hollywood and downtown areas, and that "similar public investment in the Valley has been lacking." Westfield is paying for the $200,000 study.

Zine defended his decision before the debate audience, saying if the study finds that the city will not benefit, no tax breaks will be awarded. "If there's nothing there, then they get nothing," Zine said.

The controller serves as a public watchdog over the city's $7.3-billion annual operation, auditing the general fund, 500 special fund accounts and the performance of city departments. Those audits often produce recommendations for reducing waste, fraud and abuse.

But the mayor and the council are not obligated to adopt those recommendations, and as a result the job is part accountant, part scolder in chief. All the candidates say they will use their elective position not only to perform audits but also to turn them into action.

Their challenge during the campaign has been explaining how they will do that.

Zine, 65, says his City Hall experience has taught him how to get things done by working with his colleagues. He won't be afraid to publicly criticize department managers, he said, but thinks collaboration works better than being combative.

"You can rant and rave and people won't work with you," he said. "Or you can sit down and talk it out, and you can accomplish things."

Galperin, 49, considers himself a policy wonk who relishes digging into the details to come up with ways to become more efficient with limited dollars and to find ways to raise revenue using the city's sprawling assets. For instance, the city owns two asphalt plants that could expand production and sell some of its material to raise money to fix potholes, he said.

He's served on two city commissions, including one that found millions of dollars in savings by detailing ways to be more efficient. Zine is positioning himself as a "tough guy for tough times," but the controller should be more than that, Galperin said.

"What we really need is some thoughtfulness and some smarts and some effectiveness," he said. "Just getting up there and saying we need to be tough is not going to accomplish what needs to be done."

Brazeman, 46, started his own marketing and public relations firm in West Los Angeles a decade ago and became active in city politics over his discontent with a development project near his home. He has pushed the council to change several initiatives over the last five years, including changes to the financing of the Farmers Field stadium proposal that will save taxpayer dollars, he said.

As controller, he would pick and choose his battles, and, Brazeman said, be "the right combination of constructive, abrasive and assertive."

catherine.saillant@latimes.com

Read More..

The Friendster Autopsy: How a Social Network Dies

What kills a social network? A group of internet archeologists have picked over the digital bones of Friendster — the pioneering social networking site that drowned in Facebook’s wake — and we now have a clearer picture of its epic collapse.

Friendster was once the hottest thing in social networking. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006. That said, it trudged along for a few more years, helped by a relatively strong following in southeast Asia. Then, around 2009, a site redesign crushed it.

It ended up being a kind of “controlled demolition,” with weakly connected chains of friends quickly disintegrating, says David Garcia, a professor with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the authors of a recent paper analyzing Friendster’s demise.

Just before Friendster relaunched itself as a gaming site in 2011, the Internet Archive crawled the dead network, grabbing a snapshot. Garcia and his fellow researchers used that snapshot of that controlled demolition as the basis for their research, which they describe as both a work of internet archeology and an autopsy.

What they found was that by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.

“First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the core users, and thus unraveling,” Garcia told us during an online chat.

You can see the hollowing out of Friendster in this diagram:

The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not only have a lot of friends, but they have “resilience and social influence,” Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole Friendster thing fell apart.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the data, it’s that it takes more than a lot of users to build a viable social network. They need to have strong connections too. So Facebook should be looking at the types of connections it users have and encourage them to connect to other strongly connected users, Garcia says.

In other words, strong networks are made up of strongly-linked people, not of stragglers.

Here’s the Onion, predicting this story from a few years back:

HT The Physics arXiv Blog

Read More..

Personal Health: Too Many Pills in Pregnancy

The thalidomide disaster of the early 1960s left thousands of babies with deformed limbs because their mothers innocently took a sleeping pill thought to be safe during pregnancy,

In its well-publicized wake, countless pregnant women avoided all medications, fearing that any drug they took could jeopardize their babies’ development.

I was terrified in December 1968 when, during the first weeks of my pregnancy, I developed double pneumonia and was treated with antibiotics and codeine. Before swallowing a single dose, I called my obstetrician, who told me to take what was prescribed, “reassuring” me that if I died of pneumonia I wouldn’t have a baby at all.

In the decades that followed, pregnancy-related hazards were linked to many medicinal substances: prescription and over-the-counter drugs and herbal remedies, as well as abused drugs and even some vitamins.

Now, however, the latest findings about drug use during pregnancy have ignited new concerns among experts who monitor the effects of medications on the developing fetus and pregnancy itself.

During the last 30 years, use of prescription drugs during the first trimester of pregnancy, when fetal organs are forming, has grown by more than 60 percent.

About 90 percent of pregnant women take at least one medication, and 70 percent take at least one prescription drug, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since the late 1970s, the proportion of pregnant women taking four or more medications has more than doubled.

Nearly one woman in 10 takes an herbal remedy during the first trimester.

A growing number of pregnant women, naïvely assuming safety, self-medicate with over-the-counter drugs that were once sold only by prescription.

While many commonly taken medications are considered safe for unborn babies, the Food and Drug Administration estimates that 10 percent or more of birth defects result from medications taken during pregnancy. “We seem to have forgotten as a society that drugs pose risks,” Dr. Allen A. Mitchell, professor of epidemiology and pediatrics at Boston University Schools of Public Health and Medicine, said in an interview. “Many over-the-counter drugs were grandfathered in with no studies of their possible effects during pregnancy.”

Medical progress has contributed to the rising use of medications during pregnancy, Dr. Mitchell said. Various conditions, like depression, are now recognized as diseases that warrant treatment; drugs have been developed to treat conditions for which no treatment was previously available, and some conditions, like Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, have become more prevalent.

Misled by the Web

Now a new concern has surfaced: Bypassing their doctors, more and more women are using the Internet to determine whether the medication they are taking or are about to take is safe for an unborn baby.

A study, published online last month in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, of so-called “safe lists for medications in pregnancy” found at 25 Web sites revealed glaring inconsistencies and sometimes false reassurances or alarms based on “inadequate evidence.”

The report was prepared by Cheryl S. Broussard of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with co-authors from Emory, Georgia State University, the University of British Columbia and the Food and Drug Administration.

“Among medications approved for use in the U.S.A. from 2000 to 2010, over 79% had no published human data on which to assess teratogenic risk (potential to cause birth defects), and 98% had insufficient published data to characterize such risk,” the authors wrote.

But that did not stop the 25 Web sites from characterizing 245 medications as “safe” for use by pregnant women, which “might encourage use of medications during pregnancy even when they are not necessary,” the authors suggested.

Furthermore, the information found online was sometimes contradictory. “Twenty-two of the products listed as safe by one or more sites were stated not to be safe by one or more of the other sites,” the study found.

The question of timing was often ignored. A drug that could interfere with fetal organ development might be safe to take later in pregnancy. Or one (for example, ibuprofen) that is safe early in pregnancy could become a hazard later if it raises the risk of excessive bleeding or premature delivery.

Fewer than half the sites advised taking medication only when necessary, and only 13 sites encouraged pregnant women to consult their doctors before stopping or starting a medication.

Doctors, too, are often poorly informed about pregnancy-related hazards of various medications, the authors noted. One woman I know was advised to wean off an antidepressant before she became pregnant, but another was told to continue taking the same drug throughout her pregnancy.

“In many instances the best bet is for mom to stay on her medication,” said Dr. Siobhan M. Dolan, an obstetrician and geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She said that if a woman is depressed during pregnancy, her risk of postpartum depression is greater and she may have difficulty bonding with her baby.

Dr. Dolan, who is author, with Alice Lesch Kelly, of the March of Dimes’ newest book, “Healthy Mom Healthy Baby,” emphasized the importance of weighing benefits and risks in deciding whether to take medication during pregnancy and which drugs to take.

“In anticipation of pregnancy, a woman taking more than one drug to treat her condition should try to get down to a single agent,” Dr. Dolan said in an interview. “Of the various medications available to treat a condition, is there a best choice — one least likely to cause a problem for either the baby or the mother?”

She cautioned against sharing medications prescribed for someone else and assuming that a remedy labeled “natural” or “herbal” is safe. Virtually none have been tested for safety in pregnancy.

Among medications a woman should be certain to avoid, in some cases starting three months before becoming pregnant, are isotretinoin (Accutane and others) for acne; valproic acid for seizure disorders; lithium for bipolar disorder; tetracycline for infections, and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin receptor antagonists for hypertension, Dr. Dolan said.

“Many medications that are not recommended during pregnancy can be replaced with low-risk alternatives,” she wrote.

Dr. Broussard, who did the “safe lists” study, said in an interview, “We’ve heard about women seeing medications on these lists and deciding on their own that it’s O.K. to take them. “Women who are pregnant or even thinking about getting pregnant should talk directly to their doctors before taking anything. They should be sure they’re taking only what’s necessary for their health condition.”

A reliable online resource for both women and their doctors, Dr. Mitchell said, are fact sheets prepared by OTIS, the Organization of Teratology Information Specialists, which are continually updated as new facts become available: http://www.otispregnancy.org.

Read More..

Shell Suspends Arctic Drilling for 2013

WASHINGTON — Royal Dutch Shell, after a series of costly and embarrassing accidents in its efforts to drill exploratory wells off the north coast of Alaska last year, announced on Wednesday that it would not return to the Arctic in 2013.

The company’s two drill ships suffered serious accidents as they were leaving drilling sites in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas last fall and winter and are being sent to Asia for repairs. Shell acknowledged in a statement that the ships would not be fixed in time to drill during the short summer window this year.

“Our decision to pause in 2013 will give us time to ensure the readiness of all our equipment and people,” said Marvin E. Odum, president of Shell Oil Company.

He said Arctic offshore drilling was a long-term project that the company would continue to pursue.

The Interior Department, the Coast Guard and the Justice Department are reviewing Shell’s operations, which have included groundings, environmental and safety violations, weather delays, the collapse of its spill-containment equipment and other failures.

The setbacks come after Shell has invested more than $4.5 billion in leases and equipment and spent several years on an intensive lobbying campaign to persuade federal officials that it could drill safely in the unforgiving waters of the Arctic Ocean. Shell now acknowledges that the venture has been much more difficult than it anticipated.

Shell had planned to drill as many as 10 wells in 2012 but was able to start only two. Federal regulators barred the company from drilling into oil-bearing formations because it did not have adequate spill prevention and cleanup equipment available.

“This is not a surprise, as Shell has had numerous serious problems in getting to and from the Arctic, as well as problems operating in the Arctic,” said Lois N. Epstein, Arctic program director for the Wilderness Society and a member of the Interior Department panel reviewing Shell’s operations. “Shell’s managers have not been straight with the American public, and possibly even with its own investors, on how difficult its Arctic Ocean operations have been this past year.”

Both ships involved in the drilling, the Noble Discoverer and the Kulluk, suffered serious accidents while moving to or from the oil fields. In addition, Coast Guard inspectors found numerous violations on the Discoverer and have referred the matter to federal prosecutors for investigation.

Shell executives said the Kulluk had sustained damage to its hull when it was grounded in a fierce storm on tiny Sitkalidak Island in late December. Seawater also caused electrical damage.

They said the propulsion systems on the Noble Discoverer required maintenance and might need to be replaced for the ship to be seaworthy and pass Coast Guard inspections.

The Noble Discoverer dragged its anchor last July and nearly ran aground on the Alaska coast, and four months later it was damaged by an explosion and fire while in port in the Aleutian Islands.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, a strong proponent of Arctic oil exploration, said the delay would ensure that drilling could proceed safely in the future.

“This pause — and it is only a pause in a multiyear drilling program that will ultimately provide great benefits both to the state of Alaska and the nation as a whole — is necessary for Shell to repair its ships and make the necessary updates to its exploration plans that will ensure a safe return to exploration soon,” Ms. Murkowski said in a statement.

Michael LeVine, senior Pacific counsel for the environmental advocacy group Oceana, said that Shell and the federal authorities who permitted it to begin drilling needed to think carefully about whether it would ever be safe to resume.

“The decisions to allow Shell to operate in the Arctic Ocean clearly were premature,” Mr. LeVine wrote in an e-mail. “The company is not prepared and has absolutely no one but itself to blame for its failures.”

Read More..