Another surgery — while knee-deep in the insurance swamp

Andrew Fabella, are you out there?

Please report to post-op at Keck Hospital of USC early Monday morning.

I'm coming back to have the other knee done.

That's right, folks, I'm kicking off the new year by getting a partial right knee replacement because my medial cartilage is cottage cheese and I'm bone on bone, just like I was on the left knee. I need to be in top shape this year because I've got mayoral candidates to chase and a 9-year-old daughter who's already too much for me to handle on the tennis courts.

Last August, the surgery was a breeze, but I had a little surprise in post-op. A heart arrhythmia was a bigger problem than anyone knew, and my ticker went on strike for half a minute or so. Fabella, a nurse, saw me flat-line and started chest compressions, which brought me out of sudden cardiac arrest.

Some readers have questioned my sanity in going back for more, but I feel pretty good about it. As several doctors have pointed out, my knee problem may have saved my life, revealing a condition for which I now have a pacemaker.

Besides, I've heard from lots of readers who rave about the surgeon we share: Dr. Daniel Oakes. Same with my cardiologist, Dr. Leslie Saxon, who told me she'll drop by post-op to make sure I don't try any new tricks.

What I dread, more than surgery, is having to strap my leg into the continuous passive motion machine for six hours a day when I get home from the hospital. While you're flat on your back staring at the ceiling, the monotonous motion machine bends your leg, it straightens your leg. Bend. Straighten. Bend. Straighten.

Six hours of this.

The police should strap suspects into these things. They'll confess to anything.

The other thing I dread is the stream of medical mail that is guaranteed to land in my mailbox every few days, every last bit of it entirely indecipherable.

BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois keeps sending me things that say, "This is not a bill."

Then don't send it to me.

It's not as if anything in the correspondence makes sense. And then there's always the line that says, "Amount you may owe provider."

If they're not sure, how can I be?

I was notified by the insurance company last time that home physical therapy was not a covered expense. I'm guessing they'd rather have your knee lock up until your leg has to be amputated, ruling out any future billing for osteoarthritis.

I was looking for a number to call, so I could contest the decision, when I discovered on the last page of a six-page waste of paper that I "may be eligible" to receive my "adverse determination" in several languages. According to this document, I could be denied coverage in Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese or Navajo.

Sure, send one of each.

A Keck medical assistant told me to ignore the denial and get the physical therapy while the insurance company bean counters and medical administrators fought it out.

Can't they all just get along?

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China Says Reporter for The Times Was Not Expelled

BEIJING — Responding for the first time publicly to the case of a reporter for The New York Times who was forced to leave mainland China, the country’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday that he had not been expelled but that his visa application had simply been filed incorrectly.

Speaking at the Foreign Ministry’s daily news briefing, Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman, said foreign news organizations were to blame for the departure on Monday of Chris Buckley, a 45-year-old Australian who had been a correspondent for Reuters until September, when he rejoined The Times.

Ms. Hua said the ministry had not been properly informed of his changed status.

“So far, we have neither received any notice of resignation (from Reuters), nor has the press card, which was issued by the information department (of the Foreign Ministry), been returned by Chris Buckley,” Ms. Hua said, according to the Xinhua news agency. “So, we do not know who his real boss is now.”

When Mr. Buckley’s visa, which had been issued while he worked for Reuters, ran out on Dec. 31, he and his family were forced to fly to Hong Kong, despite repeated requests from The Times for a new visa to be issued.

Ms. Hua said Mr. Buckley had not been expelled.

“There has been no such thing as a rejection of a visa extension, and there is no such thing as Chris being expelled,” Ms. Hua said, according to The Associated Press.

On a related matter, The Times is also waiting for the visa of its new Beijing bureau chief, Philip P. Pan, to be issued. Mr. Pan first requested a visa last March. The English- and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times have been blocked in China since October, when it published an investigative article about the finances of the family of China’s premier, Wen Jiabao.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 4, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the job title of Philip P. Pan. He is the new Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times, not the China bureau chief.

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How BuzzFeed Is Betting on Hollywood, Long-Form Writing to Grow

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Last January, BuzzFeed, then an aggregator of memes and cat videos, secured a $ 15.5 million round of venture capital to beef up a craft that most traditional media was downsizing: journalism.

It hired dozens of reporters and editors, opened bureaus in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and became a must-read for political junkies during the 2012 presidential election.

On Thursday, the company took another step.

It added adding a fourth round of capital investment – this time worth $ 19.3 million. And it plans to expand in two major ways: literary, long-form journalism like the kind practiced by New York magazine and the New Yorker, and – with two former Los Angeles Times staffers newly on board – its Hollywood coverage.

BuzzFeed’s been on a roll. According to the privately held company‘s internal traffic numbers, the 8 million unique monthly visitors it drew in 2008 has swelled to 40 million, and revenue for 2012 may triple that of 2011, a spokeswoman for BuzzFeed told TheWrap.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Tom Gara reported that some analysts place the company’s valuation at $ 200 million and say that revenues may reach $ 40 million this year.

Most of BuzzFeed’s traffic currently comes from its odd mix of news and eccentricity on the homepage. Friday morning, spotlighted stories ranged from J.J. Abrams screening his new “Star Trek” for a dying fan and Sen. Tammy Baldwin talking about breaking the glass ceiling to: “How to Murder Your Friend’s Facebook Page” and “Here Are Some Elephants Eating Christmas Trees.”

But there’s no question things are changing.

The first thing CEO Jonah Peretti did with his 2012 investment cash was hire Ben Smith, a Politico veteran, as the site’s first editor-in-chief. Smith then kicked off a hiring spree of reporters and got to work. Already BuzzFeed is beginning to break stories and get quoted by aggregators.

McKay Coppins, the site’s political editor, embedded with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign. John Stanton, a veteran reporter in Washington, was named BuzzFeed’s first D.C. bureau chief. Michael Hastings, the dogged journalist whose Rolling Stone exposé of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s private disagreements with President Obama over Afghanistan led to his resignation, joined the team.

Then, less than a year into its political foray, the site hired former Spin magazine chief Steve Kandell to make the push for longform journalism.

It began with an experiment – a 7,118-word post from last October titled “Can You Die From a Nightmare?” that garnered more than 115,000 hits. Another in October titled “Making Mitt: The Myth of George Romney” drew nearly 130,000 views. This convinced Smith and his team that literary journalism had a niche in the viral news market.

Despite the internet school of thought that briefer is better, Kandell said he has no plans to restrict stories’ word counts.

“If someone has a story that has to be 10,000 words, I don’t know why that couldn’t be,” Kandell said.

“I don’t think people necessarily have a certain fatigue level when it gets to a certain length and people start trailing out.”

Kandell says he plans in the coming months to start publishing at least one long-form story a week and may even start packaging and selling the stories as Amazon Kindle singles or as audiobooks.

Kandell assembled a “Best of 2012″ post for his nascent section of the site. The stories ranged from the tale of BuzzFeed’s own political editor Coppins, a Mormon, watching attitudes toward his and Romney’s religion change throughout the campaign to an inside look at the “Dark World of Online Sugar Daddies.”

Plans are to cover more foreign policy and national security issues from a Washington-centered perspective – and to add Hollywood into the mix. The only hands-off topic, apparently, will be international news.

“We’ve played around with ways to make world news more sharable, just like every editor at every publication,” he said, noting that readers liked a roundup of Instagram photos of the civil war in Syria. “It’s really hard, it’s not something we want to jump into without really knowing what we’re doing.”

As for Hollywood, BuzzFeed hired Richard Rushfield, former entertainment editor of LATimes.com, and ex-Times television editor Kate Aurthur, also a former Daily Beast staffer, to jump-start its bureau.

Smith said he plans to forge a presence in Los Angeles second only to its flagship New York bureau. A Hollywood vertical is expected to launch on January 7.

To that end, the site is entering a crowded space – one dominated by publications like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Vulture and the Times – but Rushfield said he plans to cover entertainment through BuzzFeed’s social-web lens: If it’s irresistibly share-worthy, it’s publishable.

“We have a unique position, despite how crowded the beat is,” Rushfield told TheWrap, adding that they won’t be competing with trades over stories concerning studio executives and casting deals. “One of our advantages is that we are not going to be going after every single story that the trades are – we have more room to take the things that we think can be interesting. What BuzzFeed is about is writing news that will be of interest to the social web.”

Now the trick is to make all these editorial investments worthwhile financially.

Revenue growth from its advertising model has been climbing, chief operating officer Jon Steinberg told TheWrap.

Forgoing the usual banners and display ads, BuzzFeed offers its clients “branded content.” For example, Scope mouthwash sponsored a “listicle” on the most “courageous” mustaches.

To that end, the advertising team, which is made up of 20 people that report to Steinberg, works with brands from General Electric to Virgin Mobile to devise sharable pieces of content.

The ratio of advertorial to editorial content on the homepage is usually about one to every six or so stories,” he said.

Those branded-content headlines garner 10-20 times the click-through rates of blinking banner and display ads, Steinberg told TheWrap.

“You compare those ads in the 1950s to modern advertising, you realize how broken modern advertising is,” Steinberg said. “Most publishers and media companies say you can’t make money on modern advertising.”

But – though he declined to reveal exact numbers, as BuzzFeed is a private company – the model helped to increase revenue last year and has allowed the publication to focus solely on its advertising stream.

He said the company has no immediate plans to enter the conference business popular with online publications including the Business Insider, AllThingsD and TheWrap.

“This is our Google ad words,” Steinberg said of the innovative advertising tool that Google pioneered in the mid-2000s. “If we were Apple, this would be our manufacturing of great hardware products.”

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Courteney Cox: I'll 'Show My Boobs' on the New Season of Cougar Town

TV Watch

01/04/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Courteney Cox is taking the term "boob tube" literally.

The Cougar Town star, 48, whose show moves from ABC to TBS on Jan. 8, eagerly anticipates more um, revealing scenes once the program makes its way to the cable network.

"You will not see one scene that I don't show my boobs," Cox joked to reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association winter tour, according to Access Hollywood.

"You know what? I'm getting older, so I've decided at this point I'm taking less focus [on] the face, and focusing here," she added, pointing to her chest. "By the time I'm much older, I will just be absolutely nude. I think it's [going to] work for me, I hope."

The show's executive producer, Bill Lawrence, backed up Cox's comments. "There is one difference [with the show going to cable]," he said Friday. "I think I'm allowed to say … Courteney did declare this the year of her cleavage."

Still, the star isn't exactly baring it all. Although there is an episode themed "naked day" for Cox's character Jules and her on-camera hubby Grayson (Josh Hopkins), there will be no actual nudity on the show.

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FDA proposes sweeping new food safety rules

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed the most sweeping food safety rules in decades, requiring farmers and food companies to be more vigilant in the wake of deadly outbreaks in peanuts, cantaloupe and leafy greens.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

The FDA's proposed rules would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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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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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.

__

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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