Arrest in child porn case could be the break investigator needs

She is about 13. A cigarette dangles between her fingers and a smattering of tattoos adorn her skin — three dots on her lower back and, on her ankle, something that looks as if it could be a butterfly, maybe a hummingbird. A blue heart-shaped sticker is pasted next to the outside corner of each eye.

Todd Hammer has been searching for the girl for two years now, with only a few dozen pixelated photos a decade old to go on.

The investigator knows every corner of the apartment she's in — the shuttered vertical blinds, white walls, dark Berber carpet, old-fashioned wall-mounted gas furnace. He has memorized the mundane details: a copy of the Yellow Pages, a language school flier, an old wall calendar from a Jewish religious supply store in Encino.

He studies the two adults in the photos: a man with a pot belly, widow's peak and graying around the chin, his face obscured by a black oval. A woman with an eyebrow piercing and a tattoo of a sleeping cat behind her shoulder.

The girl must be an adult now, but the crimes haven't stopped. Month after month, police across the country and on different sides of the planet discover that the photos of sex acts are in the hands of yet another child pornography collector — hundreds of them by now.

Finally, a long-awaited break. On Friday, authorities announced the arrest of the woman believed shown in the photos. She stands accused of distribution and production of child pornography.

Will the woman finally lead him to the girl?

The 'Jen Series'

The girl is a suspected victim of sexual abuse depicted in widely circulated child pornography images known as the "Jen Series," a set of forty-some photos first discovered by investigators in the Chicago area in 2007.

Hammer, a child exploitation investigator with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles, is the latest on the trail. Finding the girl would have a hand in prosecuting collectors of child pornography across the country, cases that could number in the hundreds.

Identifying the abused in child pornography cases took on a new importance for law enforcement in 2002. That's when the Supreme Court ruled that unless the target of sexual acts is proved to be a child — not a youthful-looking adult, not an adult digitally morphed to look underage — the material is not illegal and is protected under the Constitution as 1st Amendment speech.

It's a needle-in-the-haystack search for children who could be anywhere on the planet, a search in which anything from electric sockets unique to certain parts of the world or local programming flickering on a television screen can offer clues, and cadres of experts as unlikely as dermatologists, pediatricians and optometrists end up putting investigators on the right track.

In one New Jersey case, a botanist told investigators that plants in the background of a child pornography series were found only in a particular region of Thailand. The man in the photos was arrested in 2008 and admitted to production of child pornography and traveling to Thailand to have sex with boys.

No traces

At a small Jewish store in an Encino strip mall, a husband and wife who run the religious supply store tell Hammer they handed out only a few hundred of the calendars in the photos, and only to walk-in customers. That tells him he's searching the right area.

At the language school's Northridge campus, none of the officials recognize photos of the girl or the woman. The girl, who a forensic pediatrician said was probably between 11 and 14, was too young to have been a student.

From the sequence of dates visible in the calendar, Hammer theorizes the photos were probably taken in the spring of 2001. After digging through the Web, he manages to find on eBay the same copy of a Men's Health magazine on a table in the background of the photos. He sees the issue is from September 2000. That lends support to his time estimate.

Hammer pays a visit to the Mary Magdalene Project, a Van Nuys group that helps girls and women off the streets. No one recognizes the girl. He goes from school to school in the area, flipping though yearbooks from the right time period, looking for matches to the face now seared onto his brain.

He looks through logs of unidentified bodies at the county coroner. A long shot, he knows.

There are no traces of the girl.

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An Inquiry Into Tech Giants’ Tax Strategies Nears an End

Congressional investigators are wrapping up an inquiry into the accounting practices of Apple and other technology companies that allocate revenue and intellectual property offshore to lower the taxes they pay in the United States.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Congressional investigators, led by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, have been interested in the impact on the budget deficit of offshore tax strategies.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations inquiry now drawing to a close began more than a year ago and involves at least a half dozen technology companies, according to people with firsthand knowledge of it, who declined to be identified.

Those people said the subcommittee had subpoenaed or otherwise asked the companies to explain methods they used to avoid domestic taxes. They said Apple had become a focus of the inquiry and was cooperating with the subcommittee, which is expected to issue wide-ranging recommendations that are likely to play a significant role in Congressional tax code negotiations.

Apple’s domestic tax bill has drawn the interest of corporate tax experts and policy makers because although the majority of Apple’s executives, product designers, marketers, employees, research and development operations and retail stores are in the United States, in the past Apple’s accountants have found legal ways to allocate about 70 percent of the company’s profits overseas, where tax rates are often much lower, according to corporate filings.

Apple, in a statement on Thursday, said the company was “one of the top corporate income taxpayers in the country, if not the largest.” The statement said the company “conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules.”

It is unclear how broadly Senate investigators are looking into the technology industry, if any laws are thought to have been broken and how many companies are involved. The subcommittee is also known to be looking at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and firms in such fields as biotechnology.

The subcommittee, which is overseen by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, has been interested in the impact on the budget deficit of offshore tax strategies. Representatives from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard testified at a subcommittee hearing on the subject in September. Both companies were criticized sharply by Senator Levin for using intellectual property accounting rules to allocate revenue to other nations to avoid paying taxes in the United States.

“This subcommittee has demonstrated in hearings and comprehensive reports how various schemes have helped shift income to offshore tax havens and avoid U.S. taxes,” Senator Levin said at that hearing. “The resulting loss of revenue is one significant cause of the budget deficit, and adds to the tax burden that ordinary Americans bear.”Apple has long been a pioneer in developing innovative tax strategies that lessen its domestic taxes. At the September hearing, Senator Levin said the investigation indicated that Apple had deferred taxes on over $35.4 billion in offshore income between 2009 and 2011.

Tech companies are able to easily shift “intellectual property, and the profit that goes along with it, to tax havens,” said a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan, who has studied the company. “Apple went out of its way to try and ensure that its tax savings didn’t attract too much public attention, because tax avoidance of that magnitude — even though it’s legal and permissible — isn’t in keeping with the image of a socially progressive company.”

In its statement, Apple said it paid “an enormous amount of taxes” to local, state and federal governments. “In fiscal 2012 we paid $6 billion in federal corporate incomes taxes, which is 1 out of every 40 dollars in corporate income taxes collected by the U.S. government,” it said.In the 1980s, Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies. More recently, Apple has moved revenue to states like Nevada and overseas nations where the company pays less, or in some cases no, taxes.

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes. However, technology companies are particularly well positioned to take advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill-suited to today’s digital economy.

Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft emerge from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software. At other times, products are digital, such as downloaded songs or movies. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers.

Although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most highly valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Dell — reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S.& P. companies’, according to a New York Times analysis. (Cash taxes may include payments for multiple years.)

Companies report their cash outlays for income taxes in their annual Form 10-K, but it is impossible from those numbers to determine precisely how much, in total, corporations pay to governments.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article included outdated information on Apple’s tax payments. The company paid $6 billion in federal corporate income taxes in fiscal year 2012; it did not pay $3.3 billion “last year.” (That was the amount of cash taxes the company paid in fiscal year 2011.)

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iPad still dominates tablet Web traffic; Microsoft Surface has smaller share than PlayBook

The iPad is still by far the most widely used tablet for surfing the Web in North America, but it can no longer claim to lord over 90% of all North American tablet traffic. Via AppleInsider, the latest numbers from mobile advertising firm Chitika show that the iPad accounted for roughly 79% of all mobile traffic in the last week of December, a dominant share that was nonetheless a seven percentage point drop from the previous week.

[More from BGR: Samsung confirms plan to begin inching away from Android]

In contrast, Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle Fire HD saw its traffic grow by three percentage points over the same period to account for 7.5% of all North American tablet traffic while Samsung’s (005930) Galaxy Tab models saw their share increase by nearly 1.5 percentage points to 4.39% of all North American tablet traffic.

[More from BGR: ‘iPhone 5S’ to reportedly launch by June with multiple color options and two different display sizes]

Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface was practically a non-factor in Chitika’s measurements, accounting for 0.4% of North American tablet traffic — even less than RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry PlayBook.

This article was originally published by BGR

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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George Lucas Engaged to Mellody Hobson

01/03/2013 at 07:35 PM EST

George Lucas and Mellody Hobson

Mike Coppola/Getty

George Lucas is following the Force – right down the aisle.

The Star Wars director, 68, is engaged to DreamWorks animation chairman Mellody Hobson, a rep for Lucasfilm confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.

Hobson, 43, has been dating Lucas since 2006. This will be her first marriage and Lucas's second; he previously was married to film editor Marcia Lou Griffin. The exes adopted a daughter Amanda before their 1983 divorce. Lucas went on to adopt two more children.

Lucas's fiancée is also a contributor to Good Morning America's financial segments and has received many honors, including a 2002 listing as one of Esquire's "Best and Brightest" in America.

Lucas has made headlines of his own, recently donating to an education foundation much of the $4 billion from his sale of Lucasfilm to Disney.

According to THR, Lucas said at the time, "As I start a new chapter in my life, it is gratifying that I have the opportunity to devote more time and resources to philanthropy."

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CDC: 1 in 24 admit nodding off while driving

NEW YORK (AP) — This could give you nightmares: 1 in 24 U.S. adults say they recently fell asleep while driving.

And health officials behind the study think the number is probably higher. That's because some people don't realize it when they nod off for a second or two behind the wheel.

"If I'm on the road, I'd be a little worried about the other drivers," said the study's lead author, Anne Wheaton of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the CDC study released Thursday, about 4 percent of U.S. adults said they nodded off or fell asleep at least once while driving in the previous month. Some earlier studies reached a similar conclusion, but the CDC telephone survey of 147,000 adults was far larger. It was conducted in 19 states and the District of Columbia in 2009 and 2010.

CDC researchers found drowsy driving was more common in men, people ages 25 to 34, those who averaged less than six hours of sleep each night, and — for some unexplained reason — Texans.

Wheaton said it's possible the Texas survey sample included larger numbers of sleep-deprived young adults or apnea-suffering overweight people.

Most of the CDC findings are not surprising to those who study this problem.

"A lot of people are getting insufficient sleep," said Dr. Gregory Belenky, director of Washington State University's Sleep and Performance Research Center in Spokane.

The government estimates that about 3 percent of fatal traffic crashes involve drowsy drivers, but other estimates have put that number as high as 33 percent.

Warning signs of drowsy driving: Feeling very tired, not remembering the last mile or two, or drifting onto rumble strips on the side of the road. That signals a driver should get off the road and rest, Wheaton said.

Even a brief moment nodding off can be extremely dangerous, she noted. At 60 mph, a single second translates to speeding along for 88 feet — the length of two school buses.

To prevent drowsy driving, health officials recommend getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night, treating any sleep disorders and not drinking alcohol before getting behind the wheel.

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Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr

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Greuel faults DWP for bypassing bids on lobbying contracts

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power repeatedly bypassed its competitive bidding process when it awarded $480,000 in contracts to lobby Sacramento decision-makers, according to a report issued by City Controller Wendy Greuel.

DWP executives issued four no-bid contracts for state lobbying over the last two years, two of them to Mercury Public Affairs, a firm that includes former state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez as one of its partners. No public debate or vote by the utility's five-member Board of Commissioners was required under DWP contracting rules because each agreement was $150,000 or less.

Greuel, who is running for mayor in the March 5 election, said the city utility had "lax controls" over the lobbying contracts and failed to require that two of the firms prepare reports showing what they had accomplished. Mercury also was paid $50,000 for a month of work to help secure passage of legislation on power plant upgrades that had been withdrawn on the first day of the firm's contract, the report found.

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FOR THE RECORD:
DWP lobbyist: An article in the Jan. 3 LATExtra section about DWP lobbying practices said the agency had been paying $15,000 to its in-house lobbyist Cindy Montañez in 2009. The article should have specified that Montañez was being paid $15,000 per month.

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"DWP should have terminated" the contract, Greuel wrote.

The inquiry, which was conducted with help from the city Ethics Commission, was launched last year after Greuel's office received a tip alleging that the lobbying work was awarded in exchange for favors. But no evidence of "a 'pay to play' arrangement" was found, her report said.

Mercury received DWP lobbying contracts worth $50,000 in 2010 and $150,000 in 2011, both focused on state government. The firm also received a no-bid, nine-month contract worth $141,000 in 2010 for lobbying at the federal level, which was not examined in the controller's report.

The DWP said the no-bid contracts were reviewed and approved by the city's lawyers. The three lobbying firms helped shape costly state regulations dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and pollution of ocean plant life caused by coastal power plants, utility officials said.

"Their effective advocacy contributed to favorable outcomes that will save LADWP's customers in excess of a billion dollars," the DWP said in a statement.

Mercury Managing Director Roger Salazar said his firm provided strategy for dealing with water quality regulators, as well as state lawmakers. "The legislative process doesn't always end with the pulling of a bill," he added.

The DWP's hiring practices for outside lobbyists attracted scrutiny in 2009 after high-level officials proposed a contract worth up to $2.4 million with Conservation Strategy Group — a Sacramento-based firm that planned to use Mercury and a second company as subcontractors.

The deal would have included the involvement of Nuñez, author of the state's landmark 2006 climate change law. But it was scuttled after DWP commissioners raised questions about the cost. The agency already was paying $15,000 to its in-house lobbyist Cindy Montañez, a former Assembly member who is now a City Council candidate.

DWP officials subsequently began using simple purchase orders instead of competitive bidding procedures to hire lobbying firms. The utility awarded a one-year, $130,000 agreement to Weideman Group in 2010 and a one-year, $150,000 agreement with Conservation Strategy Group in 2011.

Mercury received its $150,000 contract in April 2011, during the same week that Nuñez contributed $3,000 to three of the mayor's legal defense funds and $1,000 to a separate officeholder account belonging to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The defense funds were set up to pay nearly $42,000 in ethics fines levied against Villaraigosa for accepting free tickets to sports and cultural events.

Salazar said there was no link between the contracts and the donations from Nuñez. "Any insinuation that they are connected is absurd and irresponsible," he said.

Last month, the DWP's five-member board awarded a Sacramento lobbying contract worth $1 million annually to KP Public Affairs. That vote was taken after a competitive search process.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

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Mubarak Dictated Response to Protests in Cairo, Report Says

Ben Curtis/Associated Press

In January 2011, a protester was injured during clashes with security forces in Cairo.

CAIRO — Sitting in his palace in early 2011, as protests against him consumed Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak watched live video feeds of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and the brutal response by his security forces, who used clubs, tear gas and live ammunition against civilians, according to a commission investigating deaths during the 18-day revolt and its aftermath.

The video was delivered on an encrypted channel to Mr. Mubarak and other top officials, along with detailed security reports. Facing the most severe challenge to his rule in three decades, and just days after protests had forced Tunisia’s autocratic president to flee his country, Mr. Mubarak authorized the use of any means to stop the demonstrations, his interior minister, Habib el-Adly, told the commission’s investigators.

“Mubarak knew everything, big and small,” Mr. Adly said, according to a commission member, Ali al-Gineidy. The group’s report, which was delivered on Wednesday to Mr. Mubarak’s successor, President Mohamed Morsi, has not been released to the public, but in recent days members have spoken about its findings.

The picture of Mr. Mubarak, 84, that has started to emerge from their comments — as a zealous watcher of the protests and the orchestrator of the crackdown — seems to contradict accounts by lawyers for the deposed president that he did not authorize the repression or know about the deaths. His court appearances after his ouster — in which he lay on a stretcher, wearing pajamas and sunglasses — and frequent reports of his ill health have reinforced his image as a detached, somewhat feeble leader.

In June, a court convicted Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Adly of being accessories to murder, but absolved them of more direct responsibility for the uprising’s casualties.

More than 800 people died during the uprising, and dozens more were killed during Egypt’s chaotic, military-led transition to civilian leadership. Only a few police officers are serving prison time in the killings, and hundreds of other officials have been acquitted. Human rights advocates hope the commission’s 700-page report will be a step toward breaking a culture of impunity that the revolt failed to crack. Even now, civilians are tortured by the security forces which the current Islamist government has taken no steps to reform.

Mr. Morsi appointed the 16-member commission in July, soon after he took office. The panel also investigated the deaths of protesters during the military-led transition period and found that soldiers had fired live ammunition at demonstrators, despite denials by military leaders.

In a telephone interview, Mohsin al-Bahnasi, a commission member, said enough evidence had been collected to convict members of the armed forces, although human rights advocates say that is unlikely because civilian courts have no power to try them.

In recent weeks, Mr. Morsi has called for top officials, including Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Adly, to be retried in the killings. On Wednesday, his office released a statement saying the public prosecutor would evaluate the commission’s findings.

Mr. Gineidy, who quit the commission before it submitted its report, praised its investigation but said its work had been jeopardized by Egypt’s judiciary, which has been unwilling to confront the security forces.

Mr. Gineidy said Mr. Morsi would have to “establish revolutionary courts or special circuits” to try perpetrators because many sitting judges, appointed by Mr. Mubarak, were still loyal to the old government.

The commission looked at evidence including Interior Ministry documents like weapons discharge reports and service orders that detailed security deployments, said Mr. Bahnasi, who gave a detailed interview about the report on Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

The commission recorded an interview with Mr. Adly in prison and spoke with officials with the Information Ministry, who told it about Mr. Mubarak’s video feeds.

The commission collected evidence that showed the authorities discussed covering up killings, including by quickly burying the bodies of victims. Interior Ministry documents showed that officers used machine guns and birdshot against the protesters.

Mr. Bahnasi said the commission also gathered evidence on the government’s widespread use of plainclothes thugs, who were commanded by senior officials of Mr. Mubarak’s political party and the Interior Ministry.

The government, Mr. Adly said, gave the thugs money and broken marble to attack the protesters.

On the rooftop of a hotel in Tahrir Square, military officers videotaped the protests, Mr. Gineidy said. The information minister arranged for the feeds to be piped to Mr. Mubarak and other officials. The government “recorded everything until the day he stepped down,” Mr. Bahnasi said on Al Jazeera.

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Jennie Garth Wants to Date a Man with 'Positive Energy'

01/02/2013 at 07:10 PM EST

When it comes to her current love life, Jennie Garth has a new mantra.

"I'm learning to date again," the actress, who split from husband Peter Facinelli in March 2012, tells Health in its January issue, "[and] looks aren't important to me anymore. ... I like positive energy."

The actress, who dropped 30 lbs. last year, plans to keep her health a priority in 2013.

"Every day, I just renew my healthy choices," she says. "I feel really good about myself now, and I don't want to do anything to change that."

That means avoiding trendy diets or weight-loss gimmicks.

"My biggest regret is putting my body through fad diets: Atkins, cleanses, the hCG diet," Garth, 40, says. "I lost like 18 lbs., but it came right back. The worst was fasting with colonics for three or four days. It was the most horrifying experience ever."

In addition to her body, Garth says she's trying to maintain a positive outlook, even when times are tough.

"When I'm in excruciating pain, like with what I've been through with my breakup and that grief and loss that's just immobilizing, it helps to remember that it only lasts for 13 to 15 minutes, max," she tells Health. "And then it's over."

"Your mind is ready to go to something else," Garth continues. "You might come back to it, but it helps to just know that that pain is not going to last forever."

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Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."

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Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

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Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor's race

Working a recent breakfast gathering of business owners in Northridge last week, Los Angeles mayoral contender Eric Garcetti introduced himself in Hindi when a Sikh businessman approached.

A few hours later, Garcetti donned a colorful Peruvian headpiece with ear flaps as he spoke Spanish with immigrants on the steps of City Hall, part of a show of solidarity for designating a stretch of Hollywood's Vine Street as "Peru Village."

After lunch, Garcetti joined rabbis at a City Hall menorah lighting. Wearing a yarmulke, the Hollywood-area councilman sang Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Spanish. "Toda la familia," Garcetti said as the group huddled for a photo.

A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city's diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry ("I have an Italian last name, and I'm half Mexican and half Jewish," he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections.

But as the campaign begins to capture public attention, a big question is whether Garcetti can re-create the surge of Latino support that helped secure Villaraigosa's historic election eight years ago as the first Latino mayor of modern Los Angeles.

Garcetti, whose district includes Silver Lake and Echo Park, is counting on strong support citywide from Latinos and liberals, buttressed by scattered support from other groups. Weaving a multiethnic tapestry of voters will be crucial to offsetting his opponents' strengths, such as San Fernando Valley white voters who tend to turn out heavily in local elections and might favor City Controller Wendy Greuel, who previously represented the area on the City Council.

It's no small challenge. Greuel and City Councilwoman Jan Perry of South Los Angeles each aspire to be the first woman elected mayor of Los Angeles, another historical marker that could spark — to Garcetti's detriment — the kind of enthusiasm that carried Villaraigosa into office.

Also, some of the city's most prominent Latino political leaders have shunned Garcetti's candidacy in the March 5 mayoral primary, deciding to close ranks behind Greuel.

Villaraigosa has stayed neutral, but Greuel has won the backing of L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, an iconic figure in Latino politics who broke barriers as the first Latina elected to the state Legislature, City Council and Board of Supervisors.

Also backing Greuel are Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers, and state Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D-Los Angeles).

When he announced his support for Greuel, Pérez, a cousin of Villaraigosa, appeared to challenge Garcetti's bid to assume a leadership position among the city's nearly 2 million Latinos.

"There isn't a Latino candidate running for mayor that I know of," he told KPCC  public radio.

After Garcetti called Pérez to complain, the Assembly speaker apologized, saying he misunderstood Garcetti's ethnic heritage.

Garcetti has Mexican roots through his father, former Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti. Eric's grandfather, Salvador Garcetti, was born in Mexico and grew up in Boyle Heights. Salvador was brought to the United States as a baby after his father, Massimo Garcetti, a judge who had emigrated from Italy, was hanged during the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, Garcetti says. Eric's grandmother, Juanita Iberri, one of 19 children in a family that migrated from Sonora, Mexico, was born in Arizona.

On his mother's side, Garcetti is a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. They too settled in Boyle Heights in the early 20th century. Garcetti's maternal grandfather, Harry Roth, turned the family's Los Angeles clothing business, Louis Roth & Co., into a major national brand of high-end suits for men.

Eric Garcetti and seven relatives now oversee the Roth Family Foundation. On its website, it has reported giving $5.9 million in grants since 2000 to hundreds of organizations, among them the PUENTE Learning Center, Planned Parenthood LA and the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

Garcetti, 41, was raised in Encino and attended a public elementary school at UCLA. From 7th to 12th grade, he went to Harvard, then a private boys' school in Studio City. The family moved to Brentwood when he was a senior.

"Weekends involved bowls of menudo at my grandparents' and bagels at my cousins' house," Garcetti said in an interview. "I think if you're Latino, you're very comfortable with the idea of mestizo, being mixed. So I kind of joke that I'm mestizo doble, double mixed."

At Columbia University, Garcetti earned a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's in international affairs. He studied the Eritrean Revolution as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, a stint that led to travels around the world.

"Having studied international relations, having taught it, having visited, I think, 80 countries in my life, having lived on a number of continents, in some ways prepared me to be mayor of this town, where over 200 languages are spoken, 140 countries are represented," Garcetti said.

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