Obama to travel to Texas, other states to tout economic plans

Published May 05, 2013

Associated Press

The White House says President Barack Obama's trip to Austin, Texas, on Thursday will kick off a series of day trips aimed at highlighting his proposals on jobs and the economy.

While in Texas, Obama will visit a technical high school and meet with entrepreneurs. He'll also drop in on a tech company and talk with blue-collar workers.

The trip show Obama wants to keep Americans focused on his economic proposals even while Congress is busy with an immigration overhaul and confirmation for Obama's second-term Cabinet nominees.

The White House says Obama will travel every few weeks and will emphasize his State of the Union proposals to expand pre-kindergarten and raise the minimum wage.

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Google Mail and other services back after disruption, company says

Published April 17, 2013

Associated Press

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  A carpet at the entrance of Google France's new offices seen in 2011 before its inauguration by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Paris.AP Photo/Jacques Brinon

NEW YORK –  Google's mail and application services are unavailable to some users. The company says it's investigating the problems, but doesn't know their cause.

Google's apps status dashboard shows that its Mail, Drive file storage service and office-application services are "disrupted." Its administrator control panel, which lets companies manage their Google applications, is completely down.

The disruptions started affecting people worldwide around 8 a.m. Eastern time.

Google says it's "working hard to restore normal operation."

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'Enemy' food: NYC arena touts other team's cuisine

Published April 09, 2013

Associated Press

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If cheese steak is on the menu, the Philadelphia 76ers must be in town. Tex-Mex? Dallas Mavericks.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a restaurant at Brooklyn's Barclays Center is serving "enemy food." The menu is inspired by whatever team the hometown Nets are playing.

The 40/40 Club and Restaurant started the promotion in January.

Other Barclays Center vendors offer local specialties like the famous Junior's cheesecake.

But Barclays Center vice president of marketing Elisa Padilla says arena officials wanted to provide something different by offering a taste of the opposing team's city.

Some teams come from cities with an easily identifiable cuisine, like Memphis barbecue for the Grizzlies.

Other cities like Washington, D.C. are harder to peg.

The restaurant charges a set price of $60 a person.

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Alzheimer's, other dementias, most costly malady in US; tops cancer, heart disease, study says

Cancer and heart disease are bigger killers, but Alzheimer's is the most expensive malady in the U.S., costing families and society $157 billion to $215 billion a year, according to a new study that looked at this in unprecedented detail.

The biggest cost of Alzheimer's and other types of dementia isn't drugs or other medical treatments, but the care that's needed just to get mentally impaired people through daily life, the nonprofit RAND Corp.'s study found.

It also gives what experts say is the most reliable estimate for how many Americans have dementia — around 4.1 million. That's less than the widely cited 5.2 million estimate from the Alzheimer's Association, which comes from a study that included people with less severe impairment.

"The bottom line here is the same: Dementia is among the most costly diseases to society, and we need to address this if we're going to come to terms with the cost to the Medicare and Medicaid system," said Matthew Baumgart, senior director of public policy at the Alzheimer's Association.

Dementia's direct costs, from medicines to nursing homes, are $109 billion a year in 2010 dollars, the new RAND report found. That compares to $102 billion for heart disease and $77 billion for cancer. Informal care by family members and others pushes dementia's total even higher, depending on how that care and lost wages are valued.

"The informal care costs are substantially higher for dementia than for cancer or heart conditions," said Michael Hurd, a RAND economist who led the study. It was sponsored by the government's National Institute on Aging and will be published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia and the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Dementia also can result from a stroke or other diseases. It is rapidly growing in prevalence as the population ages. Current treatments only temporarily ease symptoms and don't slow the disease. Patients live four to eight years on average after an Alzheimer's diagnosis, but some live 20 years. By age 80, about 75 percent of people with Alzheimer's will be in a nursing home compared with only 4 percent of the general population, the Alzheimer's group says.

"Most people have understood the enormous toll in terms of human suffering and cost," but the new comparisons to heart disease and cancer may surprise some, said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the Institute on Aging.

"Alzheimer's disease has a burden that exceeds many of these other illnesses," especially because of how long people live with it and need care, he said.

For the new study, researchers started with about 11,000 people in a long-running government health survey of a nationally representative sample of the population. They gave 856 of these people extensive tests to determine how many had dementia, and projected that to the larger group to determine a prevalence rate — nearly 15 percent of people over age 70.

Using Medicare and other records, they tallied the cost of purchased care — nursing homes, medicines, other treatments — including out-of-pocket expenses for dementia in 2010. Next, they subtracted spending for other health conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes or depression so they could isolate the true cost of dementia alone.

"This is an important difference" from other studies that could not determine how much health care cost was attributable just to dementia, said Dr. Kenneth Langa, a University of Michigan researcher who helped lead the work.

Even with that adjustment, dementia topped heart disease and cancer in cost, according to data on spending for those conditions from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Finally, researchers factored in unpaid care using two different ways to estimate its value — foregone wages for caregivers and what the care would have cost if bought from a provider such as a home health aide. That gave a total annual cost of $41,000 to $56,000 per year for each dementia case, depending on which valuation method was used.

"They did a very careful job," and the new estimate that dementia affects about 4.1 million Americans seems the most solidly based than any before, Hodes said. The government doesn't have an official estimate but more recently has been saying "up to 5 million" cases, he said.

The most worrisome part of the report is the trend it portends, with an aging population and fewer younger people "able to take on the informal caregiving role," Hodes said. "The best hope to change this apparent future is to find a way to intervene" and prevent Alzheimer's or change its course once it develops, he said.

___

Online:

Alzheimer's information: http://www.Alzheimers.gov

National Institute on Aging: http://www.nia.nih.gov

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Sheriff says Ga. toddler killed by 7 dogs in yard as mother, other adults were inside house

ELLABELL, Ga. –  A toddler who slipped outside through a doggie door was mauled to death by her family's seven dogs in the backyard while the attack went unnoticed by child's mother and other relatives inside their home, a southeast Georgia sheriff said Thursday.

Bryan County Sheriff Clyde Smith said the child's grandmother told investigators she was lying in bed when she heard the pit bulls and pit bull mixes barking, and she looked outside her window to see them dragging the girl. Smith said she began yelling, "They're killing Monica!"

It was too late. Monica Renee Laminack, who would have turned 2 years old June 1, was dead by the time an ambulance arrived Wednesday evening. Animal control officers used drugs to euthanize the dogs at the home on a rural road in tiny Ellabell, about 30 miles west of Savannah. Deputies found the girl's shoes, diaper and shredded clothing scattered across the fenced-in yard, Smith said.

"They had dragged the child all over the yard and chewed her and chewed her," Smith said. "They tore her clothes all up."

The toddler lived in a modest, two-story house tucked away from the main road. The sheriff said four generations of the same family shared the home, including the child's 18-year-old mother, grandparents and two uncles who are still young boys.

The girl's grandmother, Michelle McIntyre, sat weeping on the tailgate of a pickup outside the home Thursday. Summer Laminack, the child's mother, sat next to her staring silently at the ground.

"She's in shock," Barbara Brauda, a friend who was visiting the family, told The Associated Press before a man approached and asked a reporter to leave the property. "She hasn't been doing a whole lot of crying because she's still numb."

The sheriff said at least three adult relatives were inside the home when the dogs killed the girl outside. No criminal charges had been filed Thursday. Smith said he expects charges will be brought after he's had a chance to discuss the case with the district attorney and the girl's family has been given time to hold her funeral.

"I can see child neglect at the very minimum," Smith said.

Relatives told investigators the dogs that mauled the child were essentially family pets — a mother dog and six offspring from a litter she had about 16 months ago, the sheriff said.

The dogs had their own doggie doors that let them come in and out of the house as they pleased. The family told deputies the dogs had never attacked a person, though one of them might have killed a cat, Smith said. He said relatives insisted the toddler would play with the dogs and even "use them as pillows while watching TV."

Smith said the dogs looked healthy and well-fed, and investigators found no signs they were being used as fighting dogs by their owners.

"They said they have never been aggressive to other people," he said. "Why they got started I have no idea."

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With release of '42,' don't forget baseball's other black pioneers

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  FILE: From left, Brooklyn Dodgers baseball players John Jorgensen, Pee Wee Reese, Ed Stanky and Jackie Robinson pose at Ebbets Field in New York on April 15, 1947.AP

In a few days, the new baseball season and a new baseball-centered film arrive. The film, “42,” takes its title from the uniform number of Jackie Robinson and documents his travails and celebrates his achievements as he left the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues in 1947 to become a Brooklyn Dodger and the first black major leaguer.

I have long held the old Negro League ballplayers in special regard for keeping our game alive during the long years when players of color were denied the opportunity to play in the major leagues. Some superb players played only in the Negro Leagues, including Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston and others.

But some were young enough when the gates fell to have been able to play in the majors. To my good fortune, three former major league stars who had begun as Negro League players -- Larry Doby, Joe Black and Ernie Banks -- became good friends of mine, as did “Slick” Surratt, who played only in the Negro Leagues, and they had much to tell of their experiences in segregated America.

I wanted to share their stories, so some 20 years ago these four – only the ebullient Banks survives -- accompanied me as we visited several colleges to talk to kids about their baseball lives and especially about the significance of the Negro Leagues.

The number of surviving alumni of the Negro Leagues is now tiny. But many of their stories have been preserved. I did extended interviews of many former Negro League players, and the tapes of those interviews are available at the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y.

In those interviews and in the talks that my traveling companions gave at the colleges we visited, it became clear to me these men took their baseball seriously and played with pride at the highest level permitted to them.

Surratt told me the players were paid at essentially the level of high school teachers in the black community, yet a symbol of pride they wore coats and ties when the travelled. Their busses may have been fully depreciated but their dress signaled their self- respect.

The baseball played in those leagues was of a high caliber, and the players were skilled professionals. Yet there were other dimensions to their lives.

I once asked Slick why the players played so hard and to win. He smiled wryly at me and then asked if I wanted the baseball answer or the real reason. I asked for both.

“Well,” he said, “we played hard because we never knew whether there was some young kid named Willie Mays who might be there to try out for the team after the game, and we were afraid of losing our jobs. And then there is the real reason.”

He paused for effect.

“You see the winning team got the best girls.”

Remember, his name was “Slick.”

At one college we visited, after Larry Doby had explained the problems of not being able to eat at the best -- but white only -- restaurants in Southern towns, a young black student challenged him: “Why did you accept that? Why didn’t you just insist on being served? Why were you so laid back?”

Larry was patient and gentle: “Young man, let me explain something to you. If we had been difficult or ornery, one of two things would have happened and maybe both. We surely would have been arrested, and we might have been killed. You understand?”

The student had little familiarity with the Jim Crow era, and as a result, the impact on students of the dignified and elegant black ball players was dramatic.

Wherever we went the kids thronged around the players to hear directly of experiences none of them would ever share and few of them could imagine. The simple eloquence, however, of the players made our visits to the colleges some of the most memorable times of my life. The players explained and the kids recognized how much Rosa Parks had endured and helped to change on that bus in Birmingham.

I will look for the new film on Jackie with interest. I hope the filmmakers have avoided the temptation to add gloss to his story. The simple but piercing facts ought to be sufficient.

As I listened to Larry Doby during those college visits, I recall being so moved as he spoke of the loneliness, fear and doubt he experienced in his first days in the major leagues. Softly, he emphasized the loving support of his wife and of the vital strength he drew from Bill Veeck, the owner of the Cleveland Indians who had brought him to the team as the first black in the American League.

That was the experience Jackie shared. One hopes this film captures what these young players had to accept as this nation suffered through our own form of Apartheid. Think of what black baseball players have meant to our game since 1947, when Jackie first played as a Brooklyn Dodger. Think then of what we would have missed had the color line survived another 10 or 20 years.

I trust this new film will serve as the reminder of the magnificent gift Jackie and Larry and all the other black pioneers gave us.

Fay Vincent is a former CEO of Columbia Pictures Industries and from 1989-92 served as the Commissioner of Baseball.

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