LOS ANGELES (AP) — Steven Spielberg has extended his domination at the Directors Guild of America Awards, earning a nomination Tuesday for his Civil War epic “Lincoln” to pad the record he already held to 11 film nominations from the guild.
Also nominated were past winners Kathryn Bigelow for her Osama bin Laden thriller “Zero Dark Thirty”; Tom Hooper for his musical “Les Miserables”; and Ang Lee for his lost-at-sea story “Life of Pi.”
Rounding out the Directors Guild lineup is first-time nominee Ben Affleck for his Iran hostage-crisis tale “Argo.”
The Directors Guild field is one of Hollywood’s most-accurate forecasts for who will be in the running at the Academy Awards, whose nominations come out Thursday. The winner at the Directors Guild almost always goes on to win the directing prize at the Oscars, too. Only six times in the 64-year history of the guild awards has the winner there failed to follow up with an Oscar.
Besides the record number of feature-film nominations, Spielberg also has won the Directors Guild prize a record three times, for “The Color Purple,” ”Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” along with directing Oscars for the latter two. He received the guild’s lifetime-achievement award in 2000.
Bigelow became the first woman ever to win the guild honor and the directing Oscar three years ago for “The Hurt Locker.” Hooper won the same prizes a year later for “The King’s Speech,” while Lee is a two-time guild winner for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain,” the latter also earning him the directing Oscar.
Affleck, who also stars in “Argo,” follows such actors-turned-filmmakers as Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson to earn a Directors Guild nomination.
Overlooked by the guild were past nominees Quentin Tarantino for his slave-revenge tale “Django Unchained” and David O. Russell for his oddball romance “Silver Linings Playbook.”
The film that receives the Directing Guild prize typically also goes on to win the best-picture Oscar, a prize Spielberg has earned only once, for “Schindler’s List.” No clear front-runner has emerged yet for the Feb. 24 Oscars, with “Lincoln,” ”Zero Dark Thirty” and “Les Miserables” all considered strong prospects to take home Hollywood’s highest honor.
Sunday’s Golden Globes will help sort out the Oscar picture, as will the various guild prizes that will be handed out in late January and February on the run-up to the Academy Awards.
Winners for the 65th annual Directors Guild awards will be announced at a Hollywood dinner Feb. 2, with Kelsey Grammer as host for the second year in a row.
Milos Forman, director of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus,” will receive the guild’s lifetime-achievement award.
___
Online:
http://www.dga.org
Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Title Post: Spielberg earns 11th Directors Guild nomination Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/spielberg-earns-11th-directors-guild-nomination/ Link To Post : Spielberg earns 11th Directors Guild nomination 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
WASHINGTON — National health spending climbed to $2.7 trillion in 2011, or an average of $8,700 for every person in the country, but as a share of the economy, it remained stable for the third consecutive year, the Obama administration said Monday.
The rate of increase in health spending, 3.9 percent in 2011, was the same as in 2009 and 2010 — the lowest annual rates recorded in the 52 years the government has been collecting such data.
Federal officials could not say for sure whether the low growth in health spending represented the start of a trend or reflected the continuing effects of the recession, which crimped the economy from December 2007 to June 2009.
Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said that “the statistics show how the Affordable Care Act is already making a difference,” saving money for consumers. But a report issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in her department, said that the law had so far had “no discernible impact” on overall health spending.
Although some provisions of the law have taken effect, the report said, “their influence on overall health spending through 2011 was minimal.”
The recession increased unemployment, reduced the number of people with private health insurance, lowered household income and assets and therefore tended to slow health spending, said Micah B. Hartman, a statistician at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In the report, federal officials said that total national spending on prescription drugs and doctors’ services grew faster in 2011 than in the year before, but that spending on hospital care grew more slowly.
Medicaid spending likewise grew less quickly in 2011 than in the prior year, as states struggled with budget problems. But Medicare spending grew more rapidly, because of an increase in “the volume and intensity” of doctors’ services and a one-time increase in Medicare payments to skilled nursing homes, said the report, published in the journal Health Affairs.
National health spending grew at roughly the same pace as the overall economy, without adjusting for inflation, so its share of the economy stayed the same, at 17.9 percent in 2011, where it has been since 2009. By contrast, health spending accounted for just 13.8 percent of the economy in 2000.
Health spending grew more than 5 percent each year from 1961 to 2007. It rose at double-digit rates in some years, including every year from 1966 to 1984 and from 1988 to 1990.
The report did not forecast the effects of the new health care law on future spending. Some provisions of the law, including subsidized insurance for millions of Americans, could increase spending, officials said. But the law also trims Medicare payments to many health care providers and authorizes experiments to slow the growth of health spending.
“The jury is still out whether all the innovations we’re testing will have much impact,” said Richard S. Foster, who supervised the preparation of the report as chief actuary of the Medicare agency. “I am optimistic. There’s a lot of potential. More and more health care providers understand that the future cannot be like the past, in which health spending almost always grew faster than the gross domestic product.”
Evidence of the new emphasis can be seen in a series of articles published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, now known as JAMA Internal Medicine, under the title “Less Is More.” The series highlights cases in which “the overuse of medical care may result in harm and in which less care is likely to result in better health.”
Total spending for doctors’ services rose 3.6 percent in 2011, to $436 billion, while spending for hospital care increased 4.3 percent, to $850.6 billion.
Spending on prescription drugs at retail stores reached $263 billion in 2011, up 2.9 percent from 2010, when growth was just four-tenths of 1 percent. The latest increase was still well below the average increase of 7.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2010.
Federal officials said the increase in 2011 resulted partly from rapid growth in prices for brand-name drugs.
Prices for specialty drugs, typically prescribed by medical specialists for chronic conditions, have increased at double-digit rates in recent years, the government said. In addition, spending on new brand-name drugs — those brought to market in the previous two years — more than doubled from 2010 to 2011, driven by an increase in the number of new medicines.
“In 2011,” the report said, “spending for private health insurance premiums increased 3.8 percent, as did spending for benefits. Out-of-pocket spending by consumers increased 2.8 percent in 2011, accelerating from 2.1 percent in 2010 but still slower than the average annual growth rate of 4.7 percent” from 2002 to 2008.
Stocks trading on Wall Street ticked lower on Tuesday as an earnings season that is expected to show sluggish corporate growth got under way.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 0.5 percent in afternoon trading, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 0.5 percent and the Nasdaq composite index fell 0.4 percent.
Over the next couple of weeks, reports on fourth-quarter profits are expected to come in above the previous quarter’s lackluster results, but analysts’ current estimates are down sharply from where they were in October. Quarterly earnings are expected to grow by 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.
German data showed industrial orders fell more than forecast in November because of a sharp drop in demand from abroad, reinforcing concerns that Europe’s largest economy may have contracted in the fourth quarter of 2012.
“I’m surprised futures are holding up, given the relative disappointment that German data showed, but I think all eyes are on the beginning of earnings season,” said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.
European shares ended mixed after the German report, with the DAX index in Frankfurt down 0.5 percent and the CAC 40 in Paris up slightly.
Monsanto shares rose 2.7 percent after the world’s largest seed company raised its earnings outlook for fiscal 2013 and posted strong first-quarter results.
Shares of the restaurant-chain operator Yum Brands fell 4.7 percent. On Monday, the company, which owns KFC, warned that sales in China, its largest market, shrank more than expected in the fourth quarter.
Vodafone shares rose 1.7 percent in London after its American partner in the joint venture Verizon Wireless said it would be “feasible” to buy out the British group.
Sears Holdings shares were 5.5 percent lower a day after the company said its chief executive would step down for family health reasons.
GameStop shares fell 5.8 percent after it reported sales for the holiday season and cut its guidance.
WASHINGTON -- Ten of the nation's largest mortgage servicers have agreed to an $8.5-billion settlement with federal regulators to end a review of foreclosure abuses.
The settlement, announced Monday, involved some of the biggest names in the financial industry, including Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc..
They agreed to pay a total of $3.3 billion to more than 3.8 million borrowers whose homes were in foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, according to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Borrowers could receive as much as $125,000, depending on the type of problems with their foreclosures.
In addition, the banks agreed to provide $5.2 billion in other assistance to those borrowers, including modifications to their mortgages or having judgments against them forgiven.
The other servicers participating in the settlement are Aurora Loan Services, MetLife Bank, PNC Financial Services, Sovereign Bank, SunTrust Banks and U.S. Bancorp. Four smaller servicers whose foreclosure practices have been under review did not sign on to Monday's settlement.
Under the original plan devised by the comptroller and the Federal Reserve in April 2011, 4.4 million Americans whose homes were in foreclosure proceedings in 2009 and 2010 could request a free review. Only about half a million have done so.
Regulators decided to stop the reviews in exchange for the cash payments and assistance.
Borrowers who requested reviews would get bigger cash payments. Those that did not would get a few hundred dollars. Those who requested reviews would get bigger payments.
"When we began the Independent Foreclosure Review, the OCC pledged to fix what was broken, identify who was harmed and compensate them for that injury," said Comptroller of the Currency Thomas J. Curry.
"While today's announcement represents a significant change in direction," he continued, "it meets those original objectives by ensuring that consumers are the ones who will benefit and that they will benefit more quickly and in a more direct manner."
Curry said that although regulators have "have learned a great deal from the reviews ... it has become clear that carrying the process through to its conclusion would divert money away from the impacted homeowners" and delay compensation to the borrowers.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), criticized the decision by regulators to reach a settlement with the mortgage servicers.
"I am deeply disappointed that the OCC and the Federal Reserve finalized this settlement and effectively terminated the Independent Foreclosure Review process before providing Congress answers to serious questions about how this settlement amount was determined, who these funds will go to, and what will happen to other families who were abused by these mortgage servicing companies, but have not yet had their cases reviewed," Cummings said.
He said he didn't know "know what the rush was to make this settlement without answering these key questions" and that he had "serious concerns that this settlement may allow banks to skirt what they owe and sweep past abuses under the rug without determining the full harm borrowers have suffered."
ALSO:
Investors bet BofA can begin to focus on expansion
$10-billion settlement of foreclosure abuse cases said to be near
Bank of America to pay Fannie Mae $10 billion in loan settlement
For videogames, 2013 will be the year of the hardware avalanche. It’ll happen all of a sudden and almost surely cause catastrophic, unpredictable change.
Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, PC hardware maker Nvidia announced its entry into the gaming console market with Shield. It’s based on Android and looks like a smartphone glued to an Xbox controller. Not only will it play Android games, it’ll stream PC games and features an HDMI out for TV display — making it a home console.
In addition to Shield, the upstart Ouya project is humming along, with game creators and hobbyists already tinkering with development kits. This Android-based game machine that was funded on Kickstarter is also slated to drop early this year. Additionally, Valve’s rumored Steam-based console is no longer just a rumor — last month, CEO Gabe Newell told Kotaku it will sell hardware starting in 2013, and PC Gamer added today a report that a Valve engineer recently corroborated this news and said that Valve’s living-room machine would run off Linux.
Meanwhile, the Wii U was just born and there’s every reason to believe that Microsoft and Sony will at least take the veils off, if not actually ship, their new gaming consoles this year. What these upstart devices, from the Steam box to the Shield, all have in common is that they are attempting to upset the console gaming paradigm of the $300 device and the $60 game. A Steam box would aim to bring all kinds of gaming price points to the living room, from free-to-play to full-priced, day-one, triple-A blockbusters (which can then have their prices slashed far below what Microsoft et al. are comfortable with). Ouya and Shield want to use the Android app store to sell cheap but good-looking 720p games on your TV.
I’ve noticed something a little dismaying about the coverage that tends to spring up whenever a new gaming device is introduced. Namely, pundits rush to produce stories about how it is a stupid idea that will never work. Here’s Gamasutra on Shield: “a confused mishmash of current trends.” Penny Arcade: “There is little evidence that mainstream gamers are interested in playing Android games on their television, or in lieu of their other portable gaming options.”
What do you mean, a forest? All I see are these trees! While analyzing the individual merits and flaws of this device or that device can certainly be useful and fun, I think the big picture is getting lost: Everything about living-room gaming is going to change. More and more consumers will be buying their games on open platforms, all but a handful of the biggest games will be playable on these open platforms and they will cost significantly less money than we are paying for them now. The fate of each individual hardware device does not change this; if Ouya goes out of business tomorrow it does not mean that this is not still going to happen.
Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter sent out a note about the state of the traditional console gaming market this morning that included this remark: “We believe that the next generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony will be multimedia devices, and believe that the added features and functionality will allow sales to grow by 10-20% over their current generation offerings, provided pricing is comparable.”
I can’t get my head around how this scenario happens. Microsoft and Sony have sold, roughly, a combined 150 million consoles this generation with effectively zero competition — if you wanted to play the biggest and best games you needed an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. But the next consoles will be released into a vastly different market, one in which Valve plans to sell you a cheap off-the-shelf Linux box that plugs into your TV and plays — I mean, have you looked at all the games on Steam these days?
Fun side note: As game development veteran Ben Cousins pointed out this morning in a Kotaku story, Sony’s and Microsoft’s likely rewards for selling those 150 million consoles have been billions of dollars of losses. By his reckoning, Nintendo is the only company that’s made one thin freaking dime off the game console business in the last decade.
Anyway, there is now a ridiculous amount of competition for gamers’ attentions that simply didn’t exist before. Another prescient Kotaku story: Steven Totilo pointing out that you, yes you, may already own a next-generation gaming console. If all the big games you want to play are released on the PC you already own and are playable with a controller on a TV, what’s the justification for laying out more cash on a new console?
So how is it again that Sony and Microsoft are going to sell more consoles this cycle, when there are so many emerging alternatives?
As I said in my recent piece on the death of the game console, these machines are going to have to be ready for radical change and bring something truly new and innovative to the table. So it’s entirely possible that Microsoft and Sony could really surprise us at E3 with a radical transformation of what an Xbox or a PlayStation can be.
Meanwhile, each new device that competes directly with them takes a stab at pulling the rug out from underneath the big players. It doesn’t matter to us which Android-based device, if any, actually succeeds in the marketplace, because the idea of marrying the Android app store to televisions is the key, not the individual box that does it. Ouya can have a piece, Nvidia can have a piece, and many other makers can release Android-based game devices. Game developers will just support them all in the way they can support a wide variety of slightly different telephones.
It may turn out that getting in on the ground floor, establishing oneself as a maker of Android-based television gaming hardware in the early days, might be significantly more important than getting the hardware right the first time.
There’s also 2013′s elephant in the room, Apple. In contrast to Valve’s direct statements about its plans for a living-room device, Apple still hasn’t said anything at all about the product that some people in the industry are dead sure will arrive in 2013. It’s Apple TV — that is to say, a new version of its line of set-top boxes that brings the App Store to the television. If it’s difficult to imagine an Ouya or Nvidia device stealing sales from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, what about Apple?
It’ll be difficult to predict which of these platforms (iOS? Android? Steam? Something as yet unimagined?) will dominate the television. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. But the idea they all embody — open development environments, prices set by developers, download-only delivery — will certainly take over television gaming just as it ate the lunch of handheld games. It is unstoppable.
Ouya knows that, and Nvidia knows that, and that’s why they’re showing off these products. Expect more of them this year. This is the year it all changes.
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — David Letterman says he sees a psychiatrist once a week, part of his attempt to be the person he once believed he was.
The late-night talk show host gave an extraordinary interview to Oprah Winfrey in which he talked about his feuds with her and Jay Leno, and his own effort to make amends for the affairs that became public three years ago when a man tried to extort him.
The interview aired Sunday night on Winfrey’s OWN network after it was done in November.
The CBS host says his wife has forgiven him for his transgressions and his life is more joyful than ever, but he hasn’t necessarily forgiven himself.
Letterman also called his late-night rival Leno the funniest guy he’s ever known.
Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Title Post: Letterman says he sees psychiatrist weekly Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/letterman-says-he-sees-psychiatrist-weekly/ Link To Post : Letterman says he sees psychiatrist weekly 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
Survivors Lucinda Marker and John Tull at home a decade after having the plague.
It was November 2002, little more than a year after planes had been flown into the World Trade Center and anthrax mailings had killed five Americans. New York City was still in a state of high alert for suspected terrorists.
Suddenly all eyes were on a middle-aged married couple from Santa Fe, N.M., on a brief vacation to New York, who had the remarkably ill luck to come down with the city’s first case of bubonic plague in more than a century. Television news trucks surrounded Beth Israel Medical Center North, where they had dragged themselves after being stricken in their hotel room with rampaging fevers, headaches, extreme exhaustion and mysterious balloonlike swellings.
It took just over a day for public health officials to dispel fears about bioterrorism; there had been no unusual rise in the number of very high fevers that could have suggested an attack.
It turned out that the couple, Lucinda Marker and John Tull, had been bitten by fleas infected with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. Their home state, New Mexico, accounts for more than half of the average seven cases of plague in the country every year. (In 2012, just one case was reported in the state.)
“It was an absolute fluke,” Ms. Marker, now 57, said during a recent visit to New York. “Just rotten luck.”
Like most people who contract the disease and are quickly treated with antibiotics, she recovered in a few days. But 10 years later, her husband is still badly scarred.
In the days after they were bitten, Mr. Tull, a burly, athletic lawyer — a former prosecutor who volunteered with search-and-rescue teams — developed septicemic plague, as the infection spread throughout his body.
His temperature rose to 104.4, his blood pressure plummeted to 78/50. His kidneys were failing, and so much clotted blood collected in his hands and feet that they turned black.
Mr. Tull was put into a medically induced coma. When he was brought out of it, nearly three months later, he found out that both his legs had been amputated below the knee to drain the deadly infection. The surgery that saved his life radically changed it, but did not dampen his resilient spirit.
Even before he was released from the hospital to begin a long rehabilitation, he vowed he would once again be hiking on the rustic trails above his home.
Today Mr. Tull, 63, drives his own car, sometimes takes over the controls of a private plane, and goes on an annual trout-fishing trip to Colorado with friends. But he has not been able to hike that trail.
“That is one of the things I miss most,” Mr. Tull, now retired and receiving a disability pension, said in a telephone interview from his home. “Every single hour of every single day, the plague affects our lives, but about the only time I really get angry these days is when, because of my physical condition, there is something I want to do but can’t.”
He has appeared in several television documentaries, speaking to medical researchers around the world and dealing with a posse of journalists as his very private ordeal has been played out in public.
“Basically Lucinda and I surrendered our privacy to the press and the people who make documentaries,” Mr. Tull said. “But you know what? That didn’t bother us a bit. Lucinda had been an actress and I had been a trial lawyer. We were used to it.”
Ms. Marker, who has started to write about their ordeal, says that after 10 years she is coming to terms with it emotionally and psychologically. Yet many aspects of their case still puzzle medical experts.
In particular, no one knows why she was so easily cured while he nearly died.
Bubonic plague is transmitted by fleas that feed off pack rats, ground squirrels and prairie dogs in the mountains of New Mexico and several other states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease probably came to the United States around 1900, in Asian rats that escaped from ships in the port of San Francisco.
Initially, plague was restricted to cities. The worst outbreak came in 1907, after the San Francisco earthquake. Vermin control programs prevented further outbreaks, but fleas hitched onto other animals in the wild.
Dr. Paul Ettestad, public health veterinarian for the New Mexico Department of Health, said prairie dogs became an “amplification host,” carrying the disease to their burrows and spreading it throughout their territory. Today, the easternmost limit of the plague roughly corresponds to the 100th meridian, which passes through central Texas. Known as the plague line, is it also the extent of the prairie dog population.
DETROIT (AP) — A government safety agency wants electric and hybrid vehicles to make more noise when traveling at low speeds so pedestrians can hear them coming.
The cars and trucks, which are far quieter than conventional gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles, don't make enough noise at low speeds to warn walkers, bicyclists and the visually impaired, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Monday in a statement.
The proposed rule would require the cars to make additional noise at speeds under 18 miles per hour. NHTSA says the cars make enough noise to be heard at higher speeds.
Automakers would be able to pick the sounds that the cars make from a range of choices. Similar vehicles would have to make the same sounds. And the government says pedestrians must be able to hear the sounds over background noises.
The public has 60 days to comment on the proposed rule. The agency will use public input to craft a final rule.
NHTSA estimates that the new noise would prevent 2,800 pedestrian and cyclist injuries during the life of each model year of electric and hybrid vans, trucks and cars.
The rule is required by the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act that was passed by Congress in 2010.
LA JOLLA — There's a political stink rising in this seaside community, blown ashore from the rocks of La Jolla Cove, where myriad seabirds and marine mammals roost, rest and leave behind what animals leave behind.
The offal accumulation is offending noses at trendy restaurants, tourist haunts, and expensive condos perched on some of the most pricey real estate in the country. But finding a solution to the olfactory assault has proved elusive.
Environmental regulations have thwarted proposals to cleanse the rocks with a non-toxic, biodegradable solution. Even a low-tech idea to scrub the rocks with brooms may need official approval.
The state-protected cove area falls under the permitting jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission and San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Since wildlife is involved, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also have authority.
The normally low-key Sherri Lightner, who represents La Jolla on the San Diego City Council, has challenged — some say dared — Gov. Jerry Brown to tour the cove area in high stink season.
"Everybody is pointing fingers, and nobody is doing anything," said a La Jolla resident who strolled the sidewalk along the community's famed corniche on New Year's Day, tissue to her nose to battle the smell.
A San Diego park ranger assigned to the La Jolla beaches takes a more philosophic approach toward the excretory matter. "It's a natural process," said ranger Richard Belesky. "But would I want to buy a multimillion-dollar condo with the stink nearby? I don't think so."
The difficulty of reconciling the habits of sea creatures and the needs of humankind is not new to La Jolla. South of the La Jolla Cove is the Children's Pool where harbor seals lounge on the beach.
For two decades a legal and political dispute has raged between people who say the seals should be removed because they are blocking access to the water and those who say the seals should be allowed to stay, particularly during pupping season. Signs warn bathers that seal excrement has resulted in a high bacteria count that can cause disease.
At the La Jolla Cove, the droppings began to pile up after restrictions were put in place to keep people from climbing down the delicate bluffs to the rocks below. The birds and mammals suddenly had no reason to scatter.
The La Jolla Village Merchants Assn. gathered more than 1,000 signatures demanding an immediate solution. But immediate is not in the governmental lexicon when it comes to issues involving the ocean and wildlife.
To wash down the rocks would require a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. The city, probably the full City Council, would need to endorse a specific wash-down proposal — but that, according to Lightner's staff, would mean submitting the issue to an application process that could take at least two years, given the backlog at the water board.
And even if the water board approved the application, the issue would then proceed to the Coastal Commission, an agency not known for its speed.
In hopes of finding a faster, if more limited, solution, city officials are considering arming Park and Recreation Department employees with brooms to scrub down the rocks. They assure that steps will be taken to ensure that no runoff reaches the ocean and no birds or mammals are hurt.
Talks are planned with regional, state and federal agency staff members to see if such a limited approach could be taken without a full-tilt application process. A radio talk-show host has shown the way, taking his own broom to the cove.
Meanwhile, restaurateurs say the smell continues to discourage patrons. Some tourists complain that it mars their vacations. Shirley Towlson, a bookkeeper who arrived in La Jolla from Phoenix, was shocked at the smell along the promenade and outside her hotel.
"I thought La Jolla meant 'The Jewel,' '' she said. "This smells more like 'The Toilet.' "
Other tourists find the smell but a small downer amid the other joys of La Jolla as a seaside place of visual beauty, fine dining and chic shopping.
"It smells like fish," said Mark Bain, a general contractor from Sacramento, enjoying a New Year's week idyll. "It happens."
He said the smell is not nearly as noxious as when dead fish line the banks of the Sacramento River. "Now, that's really bad," he said.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Which is just another way of say that we never got out of the loony gas building after all.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
