Miss America is in a New York state of mind.
Mallory Hagan of New York City won the beauty pageant Saturday night after tap dancing to James Brown's "Get Up Off of That Thing" and answering a question about whether armed guards belong in grade schools by saying we should not fight violence with violence.
By capturing the crown, Hagan receives a $50,000 scholarship and a yearlong run as an advocate and role model.
Here, in images, is a look at some of the present and past winners:
With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.
There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.
“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.
Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.
While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.
There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.
In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.
“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”
There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.
In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.
As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.
According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.
Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.
Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.
The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.
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Each year manufacturers announce more than 1,000 recalls of dangerous products, including toys, cars, medicine and food. But because there's no definitive way to inform consumers, many people remain unaware of these recalls and may continue to use an unsafe product. Here are some steps to take to keep yourself informed:
After buying a product, mail in the product registration card or, if it's an option, register online or by phone. Note that although some manufacturers take advantage of the registration process by asking for such things as your income, age or buying habits, you only have to give your contact information and the brand and model number of the product.
Sign up for email alerts with the Consumer Product Safety Commission at http://www.cpsc.gov/cpsclist.aspx. You can choose to receive all alerts or use the category options to be notified only for recalls of children's, household, outdoor or sports products.
For recalls related to cars, motorcycles, tires and vehicle child restraints, sign up for email notification from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/subscriptions. You can select what products you want to monitor, including specific car models.
For food safety recalls, sign up for email alerts at http://www.foodsafety.gov/recalls/alerts, a website offered by the Department of Health and Human Services. The site also offers an app for smartphones and will feed recall notices to your Internet news reader.
For recalls of medical drugs and devices, go to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration website at http://www.fda.gov and select FDA Recall Email Alert. At the next page, you have several choices to be alerted to different kinds of recalls.
scott.wilson@latimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO — They were known simply as the San Francisco Twins.
At 5-foot-1 and about 100 pounds apiece, the fashion enthusiasts were an integral part of the city fabric for four decades. With matching furs, hats and high-end purses, they completed each other's sentences, posed for countless tourist snapshots and modeled for the likes of Reebok, Joe Boxer and IBM.
Now one is gone.
Vivian Brown, 85, who had Alzheimer's, died in her sleep Wednesday, leaving behind Marian, who was eight minutes younger. The illness, and news of the twins' financial distress, brought an outpouring of support from city residents in recent months.
Donations managed by Jewish Family and Children Services helped Vivian move into an elegant assisted living facility in Lower Pacific Heights and provided for a car service so Marian could visit "as much as she wanted to," Development Director Barbara Farber said. "The community really responded.…It's been a beautiful thing."
At a benefit concert for the twins in August, the Go-Go's Jane Wiedlin and other musicians honored Marian. Cash flowed in to cover her meals at Uncle Vito's Pizza on Nob Hill, long one of the ladies' regular haunts.
On Friday, fans offered collective condolences as they swallowed some bitter medicine: The sightings that brought joy to many — of the twins in leopard-print cowboy hats parading up and down Powell Street and window shopping at Union Square — are forever a thing of the past.
In saying goodbye to Vivian, the city has ushered out an era of style.
"All of that has gone, and that's true of all cities," said Ann Moller Caen, the widow of Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, who wrote often about the twins. "They've lost the elegant few."
Mayor Ed Lee echoed residents' grief in online postings throughout the day, saying that "San Francisco is heartbroken" over Vivian's passing and was "fortunate to have called her a true friend."
The twins, who were born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and held degrees in business administration, moved to San Francisco in 1973, prompted by Vivian's chronic bronchial condition. Once on the West Coast, Vivian became a legal secretary and Marian worked at a bank.
But fashion was their passion, and they cut a striking double image.
There were the fitted white suit jackets with pleated skirts, veiled hats and white fur coats; the red wool Ellen Tracy suits with black felt hats and black gloves.
"When you first came to the city and saw them, you might think it was a little joke. But it really wasn't," Caen said Friday. "They were very warm and very pleasant to everyone, and they just loved Herb. And he loved them."
Evelyn Adler recalled that her father, who sold shoes at the Emporium on San Francisco's Market Street in the 1970s, had regularly waited on "the girls," as he called them.
"They were always at the very height of sometimes ridiculous fashion," said Adler, 82. Her father, she said, had talked of how years of wearing pointy shoes left the twins with overlapping toes. (They later embraced lower heels that were "much more suited to their feet," Adler said.)
As a volunteer for Jewish Family Services, Adler recently shopped for a new wardrobe for Vivian — and was taken aback by the sight of the twins in separate outfits. About a quarter-century ago, the twins admitted to an interviewer that after a six-month attempt to dress differently in their 20s, they had abandoned the project forever. Even their lingerie matched.
They had their regular haunts, which Marian now frequents solo.
David Dubiner, owner of Uncle Vito's Pizza, said the sisters began coming in nearly two decades ago. They always sat at the table by the window, chatting with tourists for so long that their food had to be reheated.
Vivian often did more talking, Dubiner said, but Marian now holds court for two.
On Thursday evening, Marian arrived alone at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Union Square to "have a glass of champagne and toast her sister goodbye," said Tom Sweeney, chief doorman at the hotel who for the last 37 years watched the twins descend the four blocks from their Nob Hill apartment.
"They're quite the personalities of San Francisco," Sweeney said. "We'll definitely miss Vivian."
lee.romney@latimes.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — A "Death Star" won't be a part of the U.S. military's arsenal any time soon.
More than 34,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the Obama administration to build the "Star Wars" inspired super-weapon to spur job growth and bolster national defense.
But in a posting Friday on the White House website, Paul Shawcross, an administration adviser on science and space, says a Death Star would cost too much to build — an estimated $850 quadrillion — at a time the White House is working to reduce the federal budget.
Besides, Shawcross says, the Obama administration "does not support blowing up planets."
The U.S., Shawcross points out, is already involved in several out-of-this-world projects, including the International Space Station, which is currently orbiting Earth with a half-dozen astronauts.
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Online:
White House response to petition: http://tinyurl.com/asd565g
A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.
The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.
“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”
Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.
So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.
The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.
However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”
She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”
Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.
If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.
Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.
“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.
A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.
Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.
Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.
“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”
The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.
But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”
“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”
Investing has been a massive exercise in frustration for millions of Americans over the last decade or so.
Two market crashes in 12 years drove many people away from equities. Now key U.S. stock market indexes are at or near record highs again, after a strong 2012 rally that has spilled into 2013.
The average domestic stock mutual fund rose 15% last year, the third annual gain in four years. Meanwhile, the hunger for perceived safety has driven interest rates on bonds and other fixed-income securities to record lows. It's a backdrop that seems to cry out for a complex, headache-inducing game plan.
But in fact, the best strategy for many people may be just the opposite: Focus on the basics. Mainly, keep sight of the things you can control to reduce your mental stress and improve your odds of long-term success.
Here are four strategies for keeping it simple:
Keep it balanced. You say you can't decide how to build and maintain a diversified portfolio? Then don't bother. Let someone else do it for you. That's the beauty of "balanced" mutual funds — portfolios that always own a mix of stocks and bonds.
A balanced or "allocation" fund is the simple, elegant solution for people who know they want to be in financial markets for the long haul but don't have the time or interest to devote to closely managing their nest eggs.
The basic idea is that the stock portion of a balanced fund provides long-term growth while the less-volatile bond portion provides regular interest income and a buffer against any plunge in stock prices. A typical mix is 60% big-name stocks, 40% bonds, but the mix varies depending on whether a fund follows a conservative, moderate or aggressive strategy.
Here's how it works in practice: In the 10 years ended Dec. 31, the average moderate-mix balanced fund gained 6.4% a year, according to investment research firm Morningstar Inc. That was only modestly less than the 7.1% average annual gain in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index in that period.
But the balanced fund's return came with a lot less volatility, including much smaller losses than in the overall stock market in down years.
You could create a balanced portfolio of individual stock funds and bond funds on your own. But if your goal is to maintain a specific percentage of your portfolio in each type of asset, you'd need the discipline to "rebalance" each year by selling some portion of the funds that have done best and channeling that money into the funds that have performed worst.
"Buy low, sell high" always sounds easy, but psychologically it's very difficult. "What you're asking investors to do is really against their human intuition," said Fran Kinniry, a principal at Vanguard Group's investment strategy unit in Valley Forge, Pa.
A balanced fund makes that decision for you. And it keeps you in the stock market in periods when your instinct might be to flee — such as after the 2008 crash.
There are two types of balanced funds in most 401(k) retirement savings programs. One is the conventional balanced fund, including such hugely popular offerings as the Vanguard Wellington fund and American Balanced fund. These funds generally keep the stock-versus-bond ratios in a specific range, depending on where the manager believes there is better value.
The other type is the target-date retirement fund. You pick a target-date fund based on your expected retirement year, and the portfolio is automatically adjusted over time to gradually lower its stock assets and raise its bond assets. The goal is to lower the portfolio's risk and volatility as you age.
Lately, some investors may be worried less about the stock portion of their balanced fund than the bond portion. With bond yields at or near historic lows, a jump in market interest rates could devalue bonds.
That may happen eventually. But calling the turn is no easy feat.
"Just because the level of interest rates is low doesn't tell you about the direction of rates," Kinniry said. "Japan has had low rates for 25 years."
And if stocks pull back soon, high-quality bonds would be a logical refuge.
Get on the right side of the tax man, and stay there. This is the true no-brainer. Shelter as much wealth as you can from current taxes, allowing your nest egg to compound over time.
California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris on Thursday called on Gov. Jerry Brown to restore funding to a prescription drug-monitoring program that health experts say is key to combating drug abuse and overdose deaths in the state.
Harris' appeal to restore funding to CURES, as it is known, follows an article in The Times last month that reported that the system, once heralded as an invaluable tool, had been severely undermined by budget cuts and was not being used to its full potential.
The CURES database contains detailed information on prescription narcotics, including the names of patients, the doctors prescribing the drugs and the pharmacies that dispense them. The system was designed to help physicians detect "doctor-shopping" patients who dupe multiple physicians into prescribing drugs such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax.
Harris' request followed Brown's unveiling of a proposed $97.7-billion budget, which projects a surplus — a feat that has been accomplished only one time in the last decade. With California's fiscal condition improving, Harris said it was up to the state to make sure the money was "spent wisely."
"This includes smart investments that benefit Californians, such as restoring funding for the state's prescription drug-monitoring program," she said in a statement.
Brown's office had no comment.
The governor's budget does increase Harris' Department of Justice general fund allocation by 4.5% to $174.3 million, but it does not earmark money for CURES. Harris could seek legislative authority to spend some of her budget on the program.
"We are going to have a discussion on the funding and where the money will come from," said Lynda Gledhill, a spokeswoman for Harris.
CURES is the nation's oldest and largest prescription drug-monitoring program and once served as a model for other states. Today, it has fallen behind similar programs elsewhere. CURES data could be used to monitor physicians whose prescribing puts patients at risk. But it is not.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommends that states use such data to keep tabs on doctors, and at least half a dozen states do so.
As part of spending cuts aimed at maintaining the state's solvency amid a deep recession, Brown gutted the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which ran CURES, in 2011, shortly after Harris succeeded him as attorney general. Harris kept the program alive with about $400,000 in revenue from the Medical Board of California and other licensing boards. But it is down to one employee and has no enforcement capacity.
State officials have estimated it would cost about $2.8 million to make CURES more accessible and easier to use, and $1.6 million more per year to keep it running. However, officials say the program — with little or no additional financial resources — could now be used to identify potentially rogue doctors.
Bob Pack, an Internet entrepreneur, has advocated using CURES more vigorously to track reckless physicians and pharmacies as well as doctor-shopping patients. He became active on the issue after a driver high on painkillers and alcohol struck and killed his two young children in the Bay Area suburb of Danville in 2003.
Pack, who helped design an online portal to give physicians and pharmacists immediate access to CURES, said he was happy to see Harris ask Brown to restore funds for the program.
"But that's only a request," he said. "No one knows if that's really going to happen. Meanwhile, doctors are continuing to over-prescribe and thousands of Californians are dying from prescription drug overdoses. I hope this … has some bite to it."
An aide to Harris said restoring the CURES program is a high priority.
"She's committed to fixing the database and making it as strong as possible," said Travis LeBlanc, special assistant attorney general. "When we have limited resources and in a budget crunch, we need to focus our resources and use it in smart, efficient ways, and [CURES] is one of those," he said.
lisa.girion@latimes.com
scott.glover@latimes.com
Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts contributed to this report.
HP Cloud Services is continuously working to increase efficiency in our datacenters, so we can pass these efforts along to our customers via enhanced enterprise-class service and/or lower prices. As a result, HP Cloud Services is starting the New Year by permanently lowering the prices on Linux instances of HP Cloud Compute by 12.5% and Object Storage by as much as 25%.
Furthermore, to celebrate our Compute service’s move to General Availability (GA), we are offering a time-limited 40% discount on all Windows and Linux instances until March 31st, 2013. We’re doing this to make it even easier for new and existing customers to try our new GA service and perform their initial integration work. You can read more about our differentiated, industry-leading SLA at “Under the Hood of HP Cloud Services SLAs” and about what we’re doing behind the scenes to actually deliver on and surpass our SLAs at “How HP Cloud Services Became Enterprise Class.”
It’s worth noting that we also recently moved HP Cloud Block Storage to public beta and added several major new features, including bootable persistent volumes and enhancements in volume backup to object storage, as detailed here. HP Cloud Block Storage is being discounted by 50% while in public beta, so now is the perfect time to give it a test drive if you haven’t already!
You can sign up now to start exploring our enterprise-class cloud. For ongoing news about our new services, pricing and special offers, follow us on Twitter @hpcloud, subscribe to this blog, and follow our Facebook page.
Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is drawing an A-list of performers for his inaugural festivities, including a massive gala expected to draw more than 35,000 revelers.
Katy Perry, Smokey Robinson, Usher, Alicia Keys and Brad Paisley are among the stars planning to sing at Obama's inaugural galas Jan. 21 and a children's concert on Jan. 19. Also signed up are Marc Anthony, Stevie Wonder, John Legend and the cast of "Glee."
The concert and the two official inaugural balls are being held at the Washington Convention Center over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend when Obama begins his second term. The performers join top talent already announced for Obama's signing ceremony Jan. 21 on the West Front of the Capitol, including Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson and James Taylor.
Other event performers include pop-rap foursome Far East Movement, Grammy-nominated pop-rock trio fun., R&B boy band Mindless Behavior, rapper Nick Cannon and youth gospel choir Soul Children of Chicago. Inaugural organizers aren't saying yet which performances will be at which convention center event.
While Obama has cut the number of inaugural balls lower than any president since Dwight Eisenhower was first sworn into office in 1953, the two celebrations will be elaborate. The larger of the events, simply called The Inaugural Ball, is expected to draw more than 35,000 in a reflection of the quadrennial demand in Washington to toast the president in person on such a historic day.
The Inaugural Ball is being held across all 700,000 square feet of the Washington Convention Center's five exhibit halls, which four years ago held six separate balls.
The second event is the Commander In Chief's Ball, a tradition started by President George W. Bush to honor the military. Doubling in size from four years ago to about 4,000, it's being held on the third-floor ballroom of the convention hall a mile from the White House. Tickets are free for invitees, including active-duty and reserve troops, Medal of Honor recipients and wounded warriors.
Demand has been high for entry to the two official affairs. Inaugural planners offered a limited number of tickets to The Inaugural Ball for sale at $60, and they sold out quickly Sunday night when Ticketmaster accidentally sent out an email ahead of time announcing they were available. Inaugural organizers are trying to stop a swift scalping business for the tickets, which have been cropping up for sale online.
That's even though city officials are predicting a drop in attendance to 600,000 to 800,000 for the inauguration this year compared with 2009, when a record 1.8 million crowded onto the National Mall to see the first black president sworn into office.
Those who can't get into the convention hall with the Obamas can still carouse into the night at several unofficial balls across Washington. And members of the president's staff will get their own chance to celebrate with the president, with a staff ball planned for the day after the inauguration. Last year, the private affair was reportedly quite a bash, according to one attendee, with rap star Jay-Z singing a riff on one of his hit songs, "99 Problems but George Bush Ain't One," to the delight of the throngs of young staffers who worked so hard to turn the White House Democratic.
More tickets to The Inaugural Ball will be on sale, but not to the general public. They will go to campaign volunteers, community leaders, elected officials and other invitees, as well as donors being asked to contribute up to $250,000 individually or $1 million from corporations to pay for the festivities. Invitees will be sent an email in the next few days with personalized Ticketmaster account information they can use to purchase up to two tickets.
The Inaugural Ball's halls extend across two floors, so the president and first lady plan to spin on the dance floor of each level. At the Commander In Chief's Ball, the president and first lady plan to continue the tradition of dancing with members of the military.
Inaugural planners said the cut in the number of balls was to reflect tough economic times and minimize the burden on law enforcement, other security personnel and Washington residents. But could it also be an effort to give the president some relief from having to dance to the same song over and over again all across town on an already exhausting day?
President George W. Bush didn't hide his annoyance after his second inaugural at having to repeatedly sashay around to a musical medley that included "I Could Have Danced All Night." Could have, but did not: He and first lady Laura Bush danced for a cumulative total of just 8 minutes, 54 seconds across 10 galas.
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AP music writer Mesfin Fekadu contributed to this report.
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Online:
Presidential Inaugural Committee: http://www.2013pic.org
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