Kendra Wilkinson Takes Kate Gosselin's Parenting Advice After Celebrity Wife Swap






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02/26/2013 at 05:00 PM EST







Kendra Wilkinson (left) and Kate Gosselin


Giulio Marcocchi/Startraks; Taylor Hill/Getty


When it comes to parenting, Kendra Wilkinson considers Kate Gosselin her mentor.

"If there's any person in this world I'm going to take motherly advice from, it's going to be Kate Gosselin," Wilkinson, 27, told PEOPLE on Friday. "She has eight kids and she knows what she's doing with them. When she told me advice, I listened. With most people, I'm just like, 'Whatever ... whatever, I'm not going to listen to you.' But she's the type I would take advice from."

The two moms connected while filming an episode of Celebrity Wife Swap, which airs Tuesday on ABC (8 p.m. ET). While Wilkinson stayed in Gosselin's Pennsylvania home with her eight kids, Gosselin, 37, ventured to L.A. to live with Wilkinson's hubby Hank Baskett and their 3-year-old son, Hank Baskett IV.

"It was very nerve-racking and I had a lot of anxiety on my end," Wilkinson said of the swap. But, she adds, "Hank's side of things was more the drama. Kate shines the light on things people don't really understand."

Gosselin, it seems, didn't appreciate the couple's more relaxed lifestyle.

"Hank stood up for me and had my back, because I don't think Kate really understands why a man like him is so domestic," the former Girls Next Door star explains. "Hank was like, 'Just chill, relax. These are our rules.' A woman gets to relax and be free. Kate freaked out because she's so used to working and structure and every minute is by the book. But that's not us, though. We're very laid back. We go with the flow."

Still, the reality stars bonded after being out of their respective comfort zones.

"We both got a taste of each other's lives," Wilkinson says of the former Kate Plus 8 star. "We got really close and really in-depth."

She even recommends the Wife Swap experience.

"People should do these swaps more often," she says. "Not just for show, but you really just find this appreciation for your neighbors through this."

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C. Everett Koop, 'rock star' surgeon general, dies


NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. C. Everett Koop has long been regarded as the nation's doctor— even though it has been nearly a quarter-century since he was surgeon general.


Koop, who died Monday at his home in Hanover, N.H., at age 96, was by far the best known and most influential person to carry that title. Koop, a 6-foot-1 evangelical Presbyterian with a biblical prophet's beard, donned a public health uniform in the early 1980s and became an enduring, science-based national spokesman on health issues.


He served for eight years during the Reagan administration and was a breed apart from his political bosses. He thundered about the evils of tobacco companies during a multiyear campaign to drive down smoking rates, and he became the government's spokesman on AIDS when it was still considered a "gay disease" by much of the public.


"He really changed the national conversation, and he showed real courage in pursuing the duties of his job," said Chris Collins, a vice president of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.


Even before that, he had been a leading figure in medicine. He was one of the first U.S. doctors to specialize in pediatric surgery at a time when children with complicated conditions were often simply written off as untreatable. In the 1950s, he drew national headlines for innovative surgeries such as separating conjoined twins.


His medical heroics are well noted, but he may be better remembered for transforming from a pariah in the eyes of the public health community into a remarkable servant who elevated the influence of the surgeon general — if only temporarily.


"He set the bar high for all who followed in his footsteps," said Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as surgeon general a decade later under President George W. Bush.


Koop's religious beliefs grew after the 1968 death of his son David in a mountain-climbing accident, and he became an outspoken opponent of abortion. His activism is what brought him to the attention of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who decided to nominate him for surgeon general in 1981. Though once a position with real power, surgeon generals had been stripped of most of their responsibilities in the 1960s.


By the time Koop got the job, the position was kind of a glorified health educator.


But Koop ran with it. One of his early steps involved the admiral's uniform that is bestowed to the surgeon general but that Koop's predecessors had worn only on ceremonial occasions. In his first year in the post, Koop stopped wearing his trademark bowties and suit jackets and instead began wearing the uniform, seeing it as a way to raise the visual prestige of the office.


In those military suits, he surprised the officials who had appointed him by setting aside his religious beliefs and feelings about abortion and instead waging a series of science-based public health crusades.


He was arguably most effective on smoking. He issued a series of reports that detailed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and in speeches began calling for a smoke-free society by the year 2000. He didn't get his wish, but smoking rates did drop from 38 percent to 27 percent while he was in office — a huge decline.


Koop led other groundbreaking initiatives, but perhaps none is better remembered than his work on AIDS.


The disease was first identified in 1981, before Koop was officially in office, and it changed U.S. society. It destroyed the body's immune system and led to ghastly death, but initially was identified in gay men, and many people thought of it as something most heterosexuals didn't have to worry about.


U.S. scientists worked hard to identify the virus and work on ways to fight it, but the government's health education and policy efforts moved far more slowly. Reagan for years was silent on the issue. Following mounting criticism, Reagan in 1986 asked Koop to prepare a report on AIDS for the American public.


His report, released later that year, stressed that AIDS was a threat to all Americans and called for wider use of condoms and more comprehensive sex education, as early as the third grade. He went on to speak frankly about AIDS in an HBO special and engineered the mailing of an educational pamphlet on AIDS to more than 100 million U.S. households in 1988.


Koop personally opposed homosexuality and believed sex should be saved for marriage. But he insisted that Americans, especially young people, must not die because they were deprived of explicit information about how HIV was transmitted.


Koop's speeches and empathetic approach made him a hero to a wide swath of America, including public health workers, gay activists and journalists. Some called him a "scientific Bruce Springsteen." AIDS activists chanted "Koop, Koop" at his appearances and booed other officials.


"I was walking down the street with him one time" about five years ago, recalled Dr. George Wohlreich, director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a medical society with which Koop had longstanding ties. "People were yelling out, 'There goes Dr. Koop!' You'd have thought he was a rock star."


Koop angered conservatives by refusing to issue a report requested by the Reagan White House, saying he could not find enough scientific evidence to determine whether abortion has harmful psychological effects on women.


He got static from some staff at the White House for his actions, but Reagan himself never tried to silence Koop. At a congressional hearing in 2007, Koop spoke about political pressure on the surgeon general post. He said Reagan was pressed to fire him every day.


After his death was reported Monday, the tributes poured forth, including a statement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made smoking restrictions a hallmark of his tenure.


"The nation has lost a visionary public health leader today with the passing of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who was born and raised in Brooklyn," Bloomberg said. "Outspoken on the dangers of smoking, his leadership led to stronger warning labels on cigarettes and increased awareness about second-hand smoke, creating an environment that helped millions of Americans to stop smoking — and setting the stage for the dramatic changes in smoking laws that have occurred over the past decade."


Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health taught Koop what was known about AIDS during quiet after-hours talks in the early 1980s and became a close friend.


"A less strong person would have bent under the pressure," Fauci said. "He was driven by what's the right thing to do."


Carmona, a surgeon general years later, said Koop was a mentor who preached the importance of staying true to the science in speeches and reports — even when it made certain politicians uncomfortable.


"We remember him for the example he set for all of us," Carmona said.


Koop's nomination originally was met with staunch opposition. Women's groups and liberal politicians complained Reagan had selected him only because of his conservative views, especially his staunch opposition to abortion.


Foes noted that Koop traveled the country in 1979 and 1980 giving speeches that predicted a progression "from liberalized abortion to infanticide to passive euthanasia to active euthanasia, indeed to the very beginnings of the political climate that led to Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen."


But Koop, a devout Presbyterian, was confirmed as surgeon general after he told a Senate panel he would not use the post to promote his religious ideology. He kept his word and eventually won wide respect with his blend of old-fashioned values, pragmatism and empathy.


Koop was modest about his accomplishments, saying before leaving office in 1989, "My only influence was through moral suasion."


The office declined after that. Few of his successors had his speaking ability or stage presence. Fewer still were able to secure the support of key political bosses and overcome the meddling of everyone else. The office gradually lost prestige and visibility, and now has come to a point where most people can't name the current surgeon general. (It's Dr. Regina Benjamin.)


Even after leaving office, Koop continued to promote public health causes, from preventing childhood accidents to better training for doctors.


"I will use the written word, the spoken word and whatever I can in the electronic media to deliver health messages to this country as long as people will listen," he promised.


In 1996, he rapped Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole for suggesting that tobacco was not invariably addictive, saying Dole's comments "either exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge of nicotine addiction or his blind support of the tobacco industry."


He maintained his personal opposition to abortion. After he left office, he told medical students it violated their Hippocratic oath. In 2009, he wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urging that health care legislation include a provision to ensure doctors and medical students would not be forced to perform abortions. The letter briefly set off a security scare because it was hand delivered.


Koop served as chairman of the National Safe Kids Campaign and as an adviser to President Bill Clinton's health care reform plan.


Worried that medicine had lost old-fashioned caring and personal relationships between doctors and patients, Koop opened an institute at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to teach medical students basic values and ethics. He also was a part-owner of a short-lived venture, drkoop.com, to provide consumer health care information via the Internet.


Koop was the only son of a Manhattan banker and the nephew of a doctor. He said by age 5 he knew he wanted to be a surgeon and at age 13 he practiced his skills on neighborhood cats. He attended Dartmouth, where he received the nickname Chick, short for "chicken Koop." It stuck for life.


He received his medical degree at Cornell Medical College, choosing pediatric surgery because so few surgeons practiced it. In 1938, he married Elizabeth Flanagan, the daughter of a Connecticut doctor. They had four children. Koop's wife died in 2007, and he married Cora Hogue in 2010.


He was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He pioneered surgery on newborns and successfully separated three sets of conjoined twins. He won national acclaim by reconstructing the chest of a baby born with the heart outside the body.


Although raised as a Baptist, he was drawn to a Presbyterian church near the hospital, where he developed an abiding faith. He began praying at the bedside of his young patients — ignoring the snickers of some of his colleagues.


___


Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Wilson Ring in Montpelier, Vt.; Jeff McMillan in Philadelphia; and AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard in Washington.


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Wall Street rebounds on Bernanke comments, data

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rebounded from their worst decline since November on Tuesday after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke defended the Fed's bond-buying stimulus and sales of new homes hit a 4 1/2-year high.


The S&P 500 had climbed 6 percent for the year and came within reach of all-time highs before the minutes from the Fed's January meeting were released last Wednesday. Since then, the benchmark S&P 500 has fallen 1 percent.


Bernanke, in testimony on Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee, strongly defended the Fed's bond-buying stimulus program and quieted rumblings that the central bank may pull back from its stimulative policy measures, which were sparked by the release of the Fed minutes last week.


Bernanke's comments helped ease investors' concerns about a stalemate in Italy after a general election failed to give any party a parliamentary majority, posing the threat of prolonged instability and financial crisis in Europe, and sending the S&P 500 to its worst decline since November 7 in Monday's session.


Bernanke "certainly said everything the market needed to feel in order to get comfortable again," said Peter Kenny, managing director at Knight Capital in Jersey City, New Jersey.


"The fear is we were going to see a rollover, and the first shot over the bow was what we saw out of Italy yesterday with the elections," Kenny said. "When it came to U.S. markets, we saw some of that bleeding stop because our focus shifted from the Italian political circus to Ben Bernanke."


Gains in homebuilders and other consumer stocks, following strong economic data, lifted the S&P 500, and a 5.7 percent jump in Home Depot to $67.56 boosted the Dow industrials. The PHLX housing sector index <.hgx> rose 3.2 percent.


Economic reports that showed strength in housing and consumer confidence also supported stocks. U.S. home prices rose more than expected in December, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Consumer confidence rebounded in February, jumping more than expected, and new-home sales rose to their highest in 4-1/2 years in January.


However, the central bank chairman also urged lawmakers to avoid sharp spending cuts set to go into effect on Friday, which he warned could combine with earlier tax increases to create a "significant headwind" for the economic recovery.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 115.96 points, or 0.84 percent, to 13,900.13 at the close. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> rose 9.09 points, or 0.61 percent, to 1,496.94. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> advanced 13.40 points, or 0.43 percent, to close at 3,129.65.


Despite the bounce, the S&P 500 was unable to move back above 1,500, a closely watched level that was technical support until recently, but could now serve as a resistance point.


The CBOE Volatility Index <.vix> or the VIX, a barometer of investor anxiety, dropped 11.2 percent, a day after surging 34 percent, its biggest percentage jump since August 18, 2011.


The uncertainty caused by the Italian elections continued to weigh on stocks in Europe. The FTSEurofirst-300 index of top European shares <.fteu3> closed down 1.4 percent. The benchmark Italian index <.ftmib> tumbled 4.9 percent.


Home Depot gave the biggest boost to the Dow and provided one of the biggest lifts to the S&P 500 after the world's largest home improvement chain reported adjusted earnings and sales that beat expectations.


Macy's shares gained 2.8 percent to $39.59 after the department-store chain stated it expects full-year earnings to be above analysts' forecasts because of strong holiday sales.


Volume was active with about 7.08 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq, above the daily average of 6.48 billion.


Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a ratio of about 2 to 1, while on the Nasdaq, three stocks rose for every two that fell.


(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal; Editing by Jan Paschal)



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Immigrants Released Ahead of Automatic Budget Cuts





Federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from immigration detention centers around the country in a highly unusual effort that is intended to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said Tuesday.




The government has not dropped the deportation cases against the immigrants, however. The detainees have been freed on supervised release while their cases continue in court, officials said.


But the move angered some Republicans, including Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who said the releases were a political gambit by the Obama administration that undermined the continuing negotiations over comprehensive immigration reform and jeopardized public safety.


“It’s abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration,” said Mr. Goodlatte, who is running the House hearings on immigration reform. “By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the administration is needlessly endangering American lives.”


While administration officials did not explain how they selected detainees for release, they suggested that the population did not include immigrants who were the focus of the administration’s stated enforcement priorities, including those convicted of serious crimes.


“Priority for detention remains on serious criminal offenders and other individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety,” said Gillian M. Christensen, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security.


The releases, which began several days ago and continued on Tuesday, were intended “to make the best use of our limited detention resources in the current fiscal climate,” Ms. Christensen said. “As fiscal uncertainty remains over the continuing resolution and possible sequestration, ICE has reviewed its detained population to ensure detention levels stay within ICE’s current budget.”


The government-wide budget cuts, known as the sequester, are scheduled to take effect on Friday. Immigration officials declined to say whether they intended to make any further cutbacks in detention programs this week.


The agency, Ms. Christensen added, “is continuing to prosecute their cases in immigration court and, when ordered, will seek their removal from the country.”


Officials did not reveal precisely how many detainees were released or where the releases took place, but immigrants’ advocates around the country have been reporting that hundreds of detainees were freed in numerous locations, including Hudson County, N.J.; Polk County, Texas; Broward County, Fla.; and New Orleans; and from centers in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia and New York.


While immigration officials occasionally free detainees on supervised release, this mass release — so many in such a short span of time — appears to be unprecedented in recent memory, immigration advocates said.


Under supervised release, defendants in immigration cases have to adhere to a strict reporting schedule that might include attending appointments at their regional ICE office as well as electronic monitoring, immigration officials said.


Immigrants’ advocacy groups, citing the cost of detaining immigrants, have for years argued that the federal government should make greater use of practical and less expensive alternatives to detention for low-risk defendants being held on administrative charges.


The National Immigration Forum estimated last year that it cost the federal government between $122 and $164 per day to hold a detainee in its immigration system. In contrast, the organization said, alternative forms of detention could cost 30 cents to $14 per day per immigrant.


Advocacy groups applauded the releases but pressed the Obama administration to do more, including adhering more closely to its declared enforcement priorities like focusing on serious criminals and those who pose a threat to public safety, rather than immigrants accused of misdemeanors and administrative immigration violations.


“It shouldn’t take a manufactured crisis in Washington to prompt our immigration agencies to actually take steps towards using government resources wisely or keeping families together,” said Carolina Canizales, a leader of United We Dream, the nation’s largest organization of young illegal immigrants.


At a White House news briefing on Monday, Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary, seemed to hint at the move. “All I can say is, look, we’re doing our very best to minimize the impacts of sequester,” she told reporters. “But there’s only so much I can do. I’m supposed to have 34,000 detention beds for immigration. How do I pay for those?”


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Chinese smartphone makers Huawei, ZTE target top tier






BARCELONA (Reuters) – China’s Huawei, little known to consumers just a couple of years ago, is now leading the pack of smartphone makers chasing Apple and Samsung, with ZTE, another Chinese company, snapping at its heels.


Huawei, which sold 32 million smartphones in 2012, up 60 percent on 2011, unveiled its new flagship Ascend P2 smartphone in Barcelona, boasting a connection speed of 150 MB per second, the fastest on the market.






The company was third in smartphone sales in the final quarter of 2012, according to research firm IDC, with ZTE in fifth place and Sony sandwiched in between. Samsung and Apple, however, were far in front with half the market between them.


Wan Biao, chief executive of Huawei Device Co, said the Ascend P2′s faster download speeds would make a difference to customers using 4G networks in countries such as Japan.


The device also includes power-saving technology, developed using expertise from its networks business, which Biao said helped it stand out against other high-end phones running Google’s Android software.


“Our target is for Huawei to provide the best smartphones in the world, better than the iPhone, better than Samsung,” he said in an interview on Monday. “Our target is top three in market share.”


Huawei, which became established by selling unbranded phones to operators, said the Ascend P2 would be available from the second quarter priced at 399 euros, hundred of euros less than flagship devices from its rivals.


Biao said that the company was still establishing itself as a brand in the minds of consumers, so its phones did not attract high subsidies from network operators.


“Operators give a high subsidy to Samsung and Apple,” he said. “We have a very high quality product but the price we set is not as high as these two smartphones; we have to develop differentiated products.”


Analyst Carolina Milanesi at Gartner said the Ascend P2 was a notable step forward for the Chinese company, showing a focus on the most important aspects for consumers, such as speed, an impressive screen and longer battery life.


ZTE, which also developed its technology by making devices for others, is equally ambitious. On Monday, it said it expected to increase smartphone revenue by 30 percent this year.


“We at ZTE consider ourselves as not tier one yet, we see ourselves as tier two, comparable to HTC, Sony and Motorola,” He Shiyou, head of mobile services division, said in an interviewer via a translator. “We have to be as aggressive as possible.”


He said ZTE would reduce its product range to achieve larger sales of fewer models, and focus on the strongest markets for smartphones – the United States, China, Europe and Australia.


It previously took ZTE six months to catch up with the Samsung’s software and hardware specifications, he said, but now it only took a quarter. “We need to close that gap,” he said.


“By 2015, we are hoping to achieve the top three by market share, but in terms of branding image and also pricing segmentation, we want to reach the top five,” he said.


ZTE unveiled a 5.7 inch Grand Memo handset in Barcelona, firmly in the “phablet” screen dimensions that Samsung has popularized in its Note range, and the ZTE Open, a smartphone running on Mozilla’s Firefox OS open ecosystem.


(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)


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Camila McConaughey Debuts Fab Body 8 Weeks After Baby

Camila Alves McConaughey Body After Baby
Emiley Schweich/PR Photos; Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic


Camila McConaughey is the epitome of hot mama.


Over the weekend, the model, 31, made a triumphant return to the red carpet in not one, but two amazing outfits.


The new mom-of-three — son Livingston was born on Dec. 28 — debuted her gorgeous post-baby curves in a body-hugging black pantsuit at the QVC Red Carpet Style event Friday in Beverly Hills.


And on Saturday, she showed off a little leg in a coral embellished Escada gown paired with a white snakeskin clutch, blush platform pumps and H.Stern jewels while attending the Independent Spirit Awards with husband Matthew.


So is the busy mom willing to share her secrets with other expectant women?


“I’m writing things down because there’s so many things to know and products; [the] kind of stuff that you don’t find out until later,” she told PEOPLE.


Hmm, sounds like there’s an advice book in the works. But McConaughey remained mum on the topic. “I’m not saying that yet.”


One thing she was willing to divulge: there’s lots of laughter in her house due to the funny antics of older kids Levi, 4, and Vida, 3.


“They [make me laugh] every day.”


Shanelle Rein-Olowokere with reporting from Gabrielle Olya


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Mediterranean-style diets found to cut heart risks


Pour on the olive oil, preferably over fish and vegetables: One of the longest and most scientific tests of a Mediterranean diet suggests this style of eating can cut the chance of suffering heart-related problems, especially strokes, in older people at high risk of them.


The study lasted five years and involved about 7,500 people in Spain. Those who ate Mediterranean-style with lots of olive oil or nuts had a 30 percent lower risk of major cardiovascular problems compared to those who were told to follow a low-fat diet but who in reality, didn't cut fat very much. Mediterranean meant lots of fruit, fish, chicken, beans, tomato sauce, salads, and wine and little baked goods and pastries.


Mediterranean diets have long been touted as heart-healthy, but that's based on observational studies that can't prove the point. The new research is much stronger because people were assigned diets to follow for a long time and carefully monitored. Doctors even did lab tests to verify that the Mediterranean diet folks were consuming more olive oil or nuts as recommended.


Most of these people were taking medicines for high cholesterol and blood pressure, and researchers did not alter those proven treatments, said one study leader, Dr. Ramon Estruch of Hospital Clinic in Barcelona.


But as a first step to prevent heart problems, "we think diet is better than a drug" because it has few if any side effects, Estruch said. "Diet works."


Results were published online Monday by the New England Journal of Medicine and were discussed at a nutrition conference in Loma Linda, Calif.


People in the study were not given rigid menus or calorie goals because weight loss was not the aim. That could be why they found the "diets" easy to stick with — only about 7 percent dropped out within two years. There were twice as many dropouts in the low-fat group than among those eating Mediterranean-style.


Researchers also provided the nuts and olive oil, so it didn't cost participants anything to use these relatively pricey ingredients. The type of oil may have mattered — they used extra-virgin olive oil, which is minimally processed and richer than regular or light olive oil in the chemicals and nutrients that earlier studies have suggested are beneficial.


The study involved people ages 55 to 80, just over half of them women. All were free of heart disease at the start but were at high risk for it because of health problems — half had diabetes and most were overweight and had high cholesterol and blood pressure.


They were assigned to one of three groups: Two followed a Mediterranean diet supplemented with either extra-virgin olive oil (4 tablespoons a day) or with walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds (a fistful a day). The third group was urged to eat a low-fat diet heavy on bread, potatoes, pasta, rice, fruits, vegetables and fish and light on baked goods, nuts, oils and red meat.


Independent monitors stopped the study after nearly five years when they saw fewer problems in the two groups on Mediterranean diets.


Doctors tracked a composite of heart attacks, strokes or heart-related deaths. There were 96 of these in the Mediterranean-olive oil group, 83 in the Mediterranean-nut group and 109 in the low-fat group.


Looked at individually, stroke was the only problem where type of diet made a big difference. Diet had no effect on death rates overall.


The Mediterranean diet proved better even though its followers ate about 200 calories more per day than the low-fat group did. The study leaders now are analyzing how each of the diets affected weight gain or loss and body mass index.


The Spanish government's health research agency initiated and paid for the study, and foods were supplied by olive oil and nut producers in Spain and the California Walnut Commission. Many of the authors have extensive financial ties to food, wine and other industry groups but said the sponsors had no role in designing the study or analyzing and reporting its results.


Rachel Johnson, a University of Vermont professor who heads the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, said the study is very strong because of the lab tests to verify oil and nut consumption and because researchers tracked actual heart attacks, strokes and deaths — not just changes in risk factors such as high cholesterol.


"At the end of the day, what we care about is whether or not disease develops," she said. "It's an important study."


Rena Wing, a weight-loss expert at Brown University, noted that researchers provided the oil and nuts, and said "it's not clear if people could get the same results from self-designed Mediterranean diets" — or if Americans would stick to them more than Europeans who are used to such foods.


Dr. George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., said he would give the study "a positive — even glowing — comment" and called it "the best and certainly one of the largest prospective dietary trials ever done."


"The data are sufficiently strong to convince me to move my dietary pattern closer to the Mediterranean Diet that they outline," he added.


Another independent expert also praised the study as evidence diet can lower heart risks.


"The risk reduction is close to that achieved with statins," cholesterol-lowering drugs, said Dr. Robert Eckel, a diet and heart disease expert at the University of Colorado.


"But this study was not carried out or intended to compare diet to statins or blood pressure medicines," he warned. "I don't think people should think now they can quit taking their medicines."


___


Online:


Journal: http://www.nejm.org


___


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


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Wall Street trips and falls on cloudy Italian election

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks on Monday suffered their biggest drop since November after a strong showing in Italian elections by groups opposed to the country's economic reforms triggered worry that Europe's debt problems could once again destabilize the global economy.


The decline marks the biggest percentage drop for the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 Index since November7, and drove the S&P down to its lowest close since January 18. The CBOE Volatility Index <.vix> or VIX, Wall Street's favorite barometer of fear, surged 34 percent, its biggest jump since August 18, 2011.


Selling accelerated late in the trading session after the S&P 500 fell below the 1,500 level, which has acted as a significant support point. Monday marked the S&P's first close under 1,500 since February 4.


Italy's center-left coalition holds a slim lead over former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's center-right bloc in the election for the lower house of parliament, three TV projections indicated. But any government must also command a majority in the Senate, a race that is decided by region.


The resulting gridlock in parliament could lead to new elections and cast into doubt Italy's ability to pay down its debt.


"Europe hasn't gone away as an issue, it is going to hang around, and it is rearing its ugly head today," said Stephen Massocca, managing director of Wedbush Morgan in San Francisco.


"If someone gets elected who is simply not going to play by the rules, what are they going to do? It puts them in a real quandary here because their financial support, their monetary support is all stipulated by the fact that these austerity programs are going to be in place."


Earlier polls pointing to a center-left victory boosted stocks in Milan and other European markets, and also helped lift the S&P 500 to a session high of 1,525.84 on optimism that Italy would continue down its austerity path.


After a strong start to the year, equities have retreated more recently. The S&P 500's slight fall last week was its first weekly drop after a seven-week string of gains.


In Monday's volatile session, banks and other financial stocks were among the worst performers on worries about the sector's exposure to Italy's massive debt. The KBW Bank Index <.bkx> fell 2.7 percent.


The CBOE Volatility Index <.vix> ended at 18.99, up 34.02 percent.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> dropped 216.40 points, or 1.55 percent, to 13,784.17 at the close. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> lost 27.75 points, or 1.83 percent, to 1,487.85. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> fell 45.57 points, or 1.44 percent, to 3,116.25.


Although the overall market lost ground on Monday, there were a few bright spots.


Barnes & Noble Inc shares shot up 11.5 percent to $15.06 after the bookseller's chairman offered to buy its declining retail business.


Amgen Inc shares climbed 3.1 percent to $89.55, after rival Affymax issued a voluntary recall of its only drug, an anemia treatment that competes with Amgen's top-selling red blood cell booster, Epogen. Affymax shares lost 85.4 percent to $2.42.


The FTSEurofirst-300 index of top European shares <.fteu3> edged up 0.04 percent and Italy's main FTSE MIB <.ftmib> ended up 0.7 percent after earlier gaining nearly 4 percent.


Political uncertainty on the home front, though, is also on Wall Street's mind.


U.S. equities will face a test with the looming debate over so-called sequestration - U.S. government budget cuts that will take effect starting on Friday if lawmakers fail to reach an agreement over spending and taxes. The White House issued warnings about the harm the cuts are likely to inflict on the economy if enacted.


"Sitting out there is the one-thousand-pound gorilla - the sequester issue - and certainly nothing is happening there," said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Group in Bedford Hills, New York.


Lowe's Companies Inc lost 4.8 percent to $35.86 after the home improvement retailer posted fourth-quarter earnings.


With 83 percent of the S&P 500 companies having reported results so far, 69 percent beat profit expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 6 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.


Volume was active with about 7.27 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq, above the daily average of 6.46 billion.


Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq by a ratio of about 4 to 1.


(Editing by Kenneth Barry, Nick Zieminski and Jan Paschal)



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Lens Blog: The Largely Unknown Photography of Lola Álvarez Bravo

The year 2007 was a pretty good one for rediscovering long-forgotten images in Mexico. Most people already know about Robert Capa’s Mexican suitcase, a trove of his work from the Spanish Civil War. But that same year an unknown archive of vintage prints by Mexico’s greatest photographers was also discovered, left behind in the longtime home of Lola Álvarez Bravo.

The find, known as the Gonzalez-Rendon archive, had prints and original photomontages by Lola, as well as some beautifully printed images by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to whom she had been married for several years. The find also included work by some of Lola’s students who had gone on to become noted photographers, Mariana Yampolsky and Raul Conde, among them.

Though overshadowed by her more famous partner, who had resisted her foray into photography, Lola ranks among Mexico’s most celebrated photographers, having done portraits of fellow artists and intellectuals as well as work among the indigenous and poor, whom she portrayed with a sense of compassion and social criticism. Her images provide a window in what she — a working photographer and teacher most of her life — valued as an artistic statement.

“It’s what an art historian dreams about, finding the missing pieces,” said James Oles, a lecturer at Wellesley College who was among the first to inspect the images in Mexico. “The material fleshes out some aspects of her work, giving us original titles and dates that radically change the meaning and interpretation of a work of art. And the original photomontages give an idea how she created them.”

Born Dolores Concepcion Martinez in 1903, she grew up in a wealthy family, although she had to move in with relatives when her father died. She first met Manuel in her youth, marrying him in 1925. As an accountant, he was sent to work in Oaxaca, where the couple began to take pictures, Mr. Oles wrote in his recently published book, “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era.”

The area’s poverty struck her, and it elicited a compassion in her work that was different from her husband’s more complex images.

“Lola was maybe a little more natural,” Mr. Oles said. “She was interested in more candid and less intrusive images. She was certainly more interested in people than things.”

The couple separated in 1934, divorcing in 1949. Throughout, she kept his name and did not remarry. She supported herself as a photographer working for government agencies, as well as teaching, where she influenced many.

“I think Lola was a remarkable photographer, especially given all the challenges she faced,” said Elizabeth Ferrer, who published “Lola Álvarez Bravo” with Aperture. “There were women artists, though women were not supposed to be working in the street but in the studio. But the kind of photography done at the time involved a greater public interface, and the fact that she did that showed her incredible strength and desire to photograph the world around her.”

Although she found her own path apart from her more famous husband — she was more gregarious, enjoying the company of artists, writers and intellectuals — work and circumstance worked against her. It was not until the 1980s, Mr. Oles said, that her work as an artist came to the fore.

Mr. Oles visited her in the early 1990s, around the time when the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona acquired an archive of her work. Lola was moved by her son to another apartment, and she died in 1993.

Fourteen years later, Mr. Oles got a call from a museum in Mexico City. Relatives of one of Lola’s friends, who had purchased her old apartment, had been safeguarding several boxes that had been left behind. One of them had taken the time to preserve and order the prints.

“She didn’t sell anything or have it framed in her apartment, but just organized it,” Mr. Oles said. “When I went there, it was amazing. It showed what had been separated at some time by Lola, and God knows when or why, there were a lot of her own photos. Many were by students of hers as well as a group of extraordinary vintage photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.”

Her photos — including some vintage prints that were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1943 — shed new light on her work. In some cases, original titles gave new meaning to old images. One shot of an indigenous woman seated against a wrought-iron fence that had long been titled “By the Fault of Others” turned out to have “Death Penalty” (Slide 6) as its original title.

“That changes how we interpret this photo of this woman who looks trapped by this grille,” Mr. Oles said. “You can go into the archive of any major photographer and find images they never printed and exhibit them after their death without knowing what they mean. Finding this material tells us these are the photos she chose which she thought were the key images that she was interested in during that era.”

While her photomontages are well known, the archive has the originals, which she made by gluing together cut-out images she would later photograph for the final montage.

“In Mexico, photomontage was mainly a strategy of media and advertising, not an artistic project,” Mr. Oles said. “What Lola was trying to do was elevate it to the realm of high art and view it as equivalent to muralism. The multiple perspectives of photomontage and the fragmented images resolved into a whole are what a muralist like Diego Rivera does when he shows multiple perspectives of a factory and resolving them together. Lola understood that.”

Among the greatest finds in the archive are works by her students. Even in death, though, Lola’s own images prove to affect a current generation. Mr. Oles said her photos of prostitutes, titled “Triptych of the Martyrs,” has a powerful element of feminist criticism.

“Their faces are obscured with wound-like shadows,” he said. “There is this undercurrent of social critique. Whenever my students see those pictures, they are moved sometimes to the point of tears. I don’t think any of Manuel Álvarez Bravos’s photos move them to tears.”


The exhibit “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era” will be on view at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson from March 30 through June 23.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

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Microsoft to reportedly unveil next Xbox at April event









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