The Neediest Cases: Disabled Young Man and His Protective Mother Deal With Life’s Challenges

Though he would prefer to put his socks on without his mother’s help, Zaquan West, 25, does not have a choice.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Joann West is a constant caretaker for her son, Zaquan. Though Ms. West works as a receptionist, the family fell behind on rent.

For the past 100 years, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. To celebrate the 101st campaign, an article will appear daily through Jan. 25. Each profile will illustrate the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year donors contributed $7,003,854, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities.

2012-13 Campaign

Previously recorded:

$3,104,694

Recorded Thursday:

$137,451

*Total:

$3,242,145

Last year to date:

$2,862,836

*Includes $596,609 contributed to the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

The Youngest Donors

If your child or family is using creative techniques to raise money for this year’s campaign, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line on Facebook or talk to us on Twitter.

A genetic disorder has encumbered Mr. West all his life, but he has needed assistance with this particular task since only last year. In November 2011, he had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his left thigh that was as big as a football, but he was left less flexible.

“He doesn’t do well with disability, with the label,” his mother, Joann West, 55, said. “He doesn’t tell people that he has a disability. If they can’t see it, they just can’t see it.”

When her son was 13 months old, Ms. West learned he had neurofibromatosis, a disorder that causes tumors to grow on the nerves and, in some cases, to infringe on vital organs, or as was the case last year, to become malignant. It also creates large bumps on the skin known as nodules.

At ages 5 and 8, Zaquan had operations to remove neurofibromatosis clusters that were eating away at his left hip bone. The disease has left his left leg a few inches shorter than his right. After each operation, he had to relearn how to walk.

Because of his physical disability, he was placed in a special-education class at school and given the same homework every night, his mother said.

“I advocated for him,” Ms. West said. “I kept fighting, because he was no dummy. He was physically impaired, not mentally. I went out of my way to try to give him a better life. The system would have failed him more than it did if I hadn’t stepped in.” Her efforts led to his being moved from a special-education classroom to a regular one in second grade.

Ms. West, a single mother, acknowledges that her protective instincts made her a very controlling parent, and she did not allow Zaquan out of the house much, which limited his friendships.

“I was afraid for him,” she said. “The streets, they don’t care about your disability.”

When Mr. West entered high school, it was the first time he had truly been away from his mother’s watchful eyes. He began skipping class, often going to the park or wandering their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, neighborhood with truant friends. He eventually dropped out of school.

“It was just me being out on my own and making my own choices,” Mr. West recalled.

Though she did not agree with her son’s decisions, Ms. West said that his need to explore was in some ways a result of her actions. “At a point, I stepped back,” she said, “to allow him to do certain things on his own and do what he wanted to do.”

In 2007, a couple of years after he dropped out, Mr. West joined the Door, an organization focused on empowering young people to reach their potential. There, he obtained his high school equivalency diploma.

Today, Mr. West is job hunting so that he can help pay his and his mother’s expenses.

But paying the monthly bills has become a struggle, Ms. West said, in part because of a recent change in her budget. In August, after an increase in income, they stopped receiving $324 a month in food stamps. The additional income did not cover all their expenses, however, and Ms. West eventually fell behind in the rent on their apartment.

Ms. West, who has been employed in various administrative jobs, currently works as a receptionist for Howie the Harp Advocacy Center, an agency that provides employment help to people with psychiatric disabilities. Her annual salary is about $25,000 before taxes. Her son receives $646 in Social Security disability benefits. After the family’s food stamps were cut off, Mr. West applied individually, and he now receives $200 in food stamps each month.

With the addition of Mr. West’s disability benefits and food stamps, their net monthly income is $2,213. Their contribution for the Section 8-subsidized apartment Ms. West has lived in for the past 30 years is $969.

Knowing she was in need of help, Ms. West’s boss told her about the Community Service Society, one of the organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. And the society drew $1,598 from the fund to cover her debt.

Ms. West remains a constant caretaker for her independent-minded son, who, she says, has come to accept her help grudgingly. She says that even if they are not on speaking terms after a disagreement, she is there to lend him a hand.

Both are continuing to deal with the inevitable challenges: Mr. West is awaiting word from doctors on whether a new growth in his lungs is cancerous. But one of his greatest assets, given all that he has overcome, is that he is comfortable in his own skin.

“I’m just always going to be me,” he said, “so why deal with somebody else?”

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3 innovations from Chicago science scene

Julian Gordon and Prasanthi Gandhi pose for a photograph amid various air-purifying devices in their lab at Inspirotec, 2201 W. Campbell Park Dr., Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012, in Chicago. The duo created the company that plans to develop and market an all-in-one air collector-detector, which will allow consumers to find out what allergens and pathogens might be in the air around them. (John J. Kim / December 14, 2012)

By Melissa Harris

11:15 p.m. CST, December 14, 2012

Internet-centered technology has advanced to the point that smartphone apps and e-commerce sites seemingly sprout overnight. Indeed, many can be built inexpensively from off-the-shelf software in weeks. Scientific breakthroughs, however, often require decades of research and millions of dollars. At the end of every year, I feature three teams of Chicago innovators whose ideas won’t hit the big-time soon but have the potential to improve, even save, our lives a decade from now.

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Alvarez fires back at '60 Minutes'

After days of scathing reviews of her "60 Minutes" interview on false confessions, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez fired off a letter to the venerable news program calling its Sunday report "one-sided and extremely misleading" and vowing to set the record straight.

The segment titled "Chicago: The False Confession Capital" featured two infamous Chicago-area cases in which teenage boys allegedly confessed to brutal murders but were later exonerated when DNA excluded them as the killers.

In her letter, addressed to CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager, Alvarez called the story "an offensive display" and accused reporter Byron Pitts of using only snippets of a 6-month-old interview to distort her record and make it appear she was still trying to prosecute the cases.

"Had I known that this story would completely distort my position and intentionally omit critical facts, I would never have agreed to your interview," Alvarez wrote.

One particularly damaging portion of the interview involved the Dixmoor Five case in which five men were convicted as teens of the 1991 rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl whose body was found on a path. DNA linked a serial rapist to the crime and undermined confessions from the teens. They were cleared in 2011 after spending years in prison.

Alvarez explained in the interview that one possible explanation for the DNA was necrophilia — that the rapist had sex with the girl after she'd already been killed.

That answer — which was roundly mocked in blogs and news critiques — was misconstrued, Alvarez said in the letter. She wrote that the necrophilia theory was used at trial years before she had any involvement in the case.

"I have never advanced that theory or argument, but simply responded, when asked by Mr. Pitts, that we can't say with certainty what had occurred," Alvarez wrote. "This story was not designed to inform, it was designed to undermine me and mislead the public."

Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for Alvarez, said the reaction to the piece has been vitriolic. "She's gotten hate mail, things you couldn't even publish," Daly said.

CBS News representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment.

jmeisner@tribune.com

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Sweet and Lowe: How a captivating Twitter feed sealed Rob Lowe’s comeback

By Virginia Heffernan

@RobLowe follows 135 people on Twitter. Among them is not @HilaryASwank, the Oscar-winning ex-wife of his brother, @ichadlowe.

@RobLowe does, however, follow @ikimlowe, the new wife of his brother, who helpfully identifies herself on the site as “wife of @ichadlowe.” Would @HilaryASwank, a formidable actor who does not use Twitter very often, have consented to live in her lesser-known husband’s Twitter shadow? Perhaps not. Perhaps that’s why they div—

But what am I doing? This is where Twitter can lead a person: to deranged, speculative pointless nosiness. To mindlessly customizing a version of Us Weekly magazine by reading between the Twitter lines of who follows whom, who tags whom, who seeks whose attention with tags and hashtags.

So forget that. I’m just going to keep following @RobLowe. His Twitter feed is one for the ages, and he’s on a tear, having just hit half a million followers. And I swear I follow Rob Lowe for the epigrams and jokes—why else?—though, yes, I once had a poster of the matinee idol from “St. Elmo’s Fire” on my wall. (But only because I learned that science had proven that he and Jaclyn Smith were the most perfectly symmetrical, beautiful humans ever to exist—and who ever would exist. It was a duty of citizenship in the human race to have a poster!)

Not long after “St. Elmo’s Fire,” @RobLowe, the record reflects, had a speedy fall after an early-adopter DIY sex tape (1988! Paris Hilton’s was not ’til 2003!). As Lowe’s first-rate autobiography reports, this was part of a bigger personal unraveling into promiscuity and dissipation on an NBA/Lohan scale. Eventually Lowe found deliverance in sobriety (which he names as one of his interests on Twitter) and the love of a good woman, @Sheryl_Lowe (business) or @Sheryllowe61 (personal).

Lowe also evidently found something in Twitter. As his career has done more than rebound—it has fully realized itself, with his comic-stilted-earnest-inimitable performances on “The West Wing,” “Brothers & Sisters” and, now, “Parks and Recreation”—he has built a sturdy and complementary Twitter feed.

Lowe’s Twitter presence seals his comeback. It is freewheeling, wide-ranging and among his best work. The onetime incorrigible gadfly, who might have died outside the Viper Room like River Phoenix or been left howling at the moon like Charlie Sheen, now knows who he is, has a gift for observational humor and lives his life with something that looks like joy.

Lowe recently retweeted this observation from the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson:

More:

Another Lowe tweet:

Which of us–especially those of us who were born in the 1960s–doesn’t feel like saying that aloud every year?

And speaking of Lowe’s vintage, it’s appealing that he’s not afraid to use our generation’s corny locutions on young-skewing Twitter. As he put it recently:

The merciless “pumped” kills me. Do people never leave the slang (or bands?) of their 20s? Lowe is big on “dude,” too.

At the same time, Lowe seems to enjoy aging:

He wrote this last month, referring to Chris Traeger, his character on “Parks and Recreation,” who exercises without cease, gunning for eternal life. In Traeger’s intense specificity—his needs in beverages, for example, are so idiosyncratic as to require paragraphs of instructions—he is a perfect new-sitcom archetype. One thing he is not is cool.

And neither is Lowe cool in his Twitter feed. Often he is sending out blessings to his followers or his family, or reveling in mere existence, with the hashtag #LoveLife. Lowe’s autobiography makes clear that the Handsome Man, a cultural slot in which he found himself early on, invites way too much resentment if he doesn’t start spoofing himself with gusto. It’s imperative he find the joke in life, and the dignity in himself, or he’ll yield to prettiness and silliness, as well as drugs and sex tapes.

Look on that @RobLowe Twitter feed, and learn from it, ye handsome millennials!

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Tolkien class at Wis. university proves popular

MILWAUKEE (AP) — The vast collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts initially sold senior Joe Kirchoff on Marquette University, so when the school offered its first course devoted exclusively to the English author, Kirchoff wanted in. The only problem: It was full and he wasn’t on the literature track.

Undaunted, the 22-year-old political science and history major lobbied the English department and others starting last spring and through the summer and “kind of just made myself a problem,” he said. His persistence paid off.

“It’s a fantastic course,” said Kirchoff, a Chicago native. “It’s a great way to look at something that’s such a creative work of genius in such a way you really come to understand the man behind it.”

He and the 31 other students can now boast of their authority about the author who influenced much of today’s high fantasy writing. The course was taught for the first time this fall as part of the university’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of “The Hobbit” being published. And class wrapped up just before the film, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” was released Friday.

The class, which filled up fast with mostly seniors who had first dibs, looked at Tolkien as a whole, not just the popular “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.” Students took their final exam this week, and the course was so well received, Marquette is considering more in the future.

“It’s the best class I’ve had in 27 years here … for student preparation, interest and enthusiasm,” said English professor Tim Machan. “And I can throw out any topic and they will have read the material and they want to talk about the material.”

Marquette is one of the main repositories of Tolkien’s drafts, drawings and other writings — more than 11,000 pages. It has the manuscripts for “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” as well as his lesser-known “Farmer Giles of Ham” and his children’s book “Mr. Bliss.” Marquette was the first institution to ask Tolkien for the manuscripts in 1956 and paid him about $ 5,000. He died in 1973.

Other significant collections are at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England and Wheaton College in Illinois.

Though Tolkien classes aren’t unusual nationwide, Marquette students had the added bonus of being able to visit Tolkien’s revisions, notes, detailed calendars, maps and watercolors on site at the school’s archive. And they got a lesson from the school’s archivist Bill Fliss.

“One of the things we wanted to impress upon the students was the fact that Tolkien was a fanatical reviser,” said Fliss said. “He never really did anything once and was finished with it.”

Chrissy Wabiszewski, a senior English major, described Tolkien’s manuscripts as art.

“When you get down and look at just his script and his artwork in general, it all kind of flows together in this really beautiful, like, cumulative form,” Wabiszewski said. “It’s cool. It is just really cool to have it here.”

The class also looked at Tolkien’s poetry, academic articles and translations of medieval poems; talked about the importance of his writers’ group, the Inklings; and explored what it meant to be a writer at that time.

“We’ve … tried to think about continuities that ran through everything he did,” Machan said. His students were also required to go to three lectures that were part of Marquette’s commemoration.

“The Hobbit,” a tale of homebody Bilbo Baggins’ journey, is set in Tolkien’s fictional realm of Middle-earth and takes place 60 years before “The Lord of the Rings.” The movie released Friday is the first of the trilogy, with “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” set for release on Dec. 13, 2013, and a third film to come out in the summer of 2014.

Most of the students were just finishing elementary school when the first “Lord of the Rings” film was released 11 years ago.

Kirchoff said he started reading “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” when he was in fourth grade, before the movies came out. He said the movies have introduced others to Tolkien’s ideas, making his love for Tolkien’s fantasy worlds more socially acceptable.

“The movies were fantastic enough and engaging enough to coexist in my mind with the literature I really do love,” he said.

Wabiszewski said it’s clear her classmates weren’t just taking the class as a filler.

“I definitely expected the enthusiasm from everybody but just the knowledge that everybody brought into the class, it’s cool,” she said. “We really have a smart group of people in that class who have a lot to offer.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: Hospital Alarms Fail to Prevent Injury, Study Finds

When it comes to protecting older people from falls, it can take a long time to figure out what helps and sometimes an even longer time to take action against things that were supposed to help but don’t.

A case in point: the so-called safety rails on hospital and nursing home beds. Their hazards, as The New Old Age reported more than two years ago, are well documented. They are intended to keep sick, drugged or confused people from climbing or falling out of bed. What they actually do is make falls more dangerous; they also trap patients between the rails and the mattress until they asphyxiate, causing hundreds of deaths annually.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is finally investigating these hazards, with findings due soon.

Alarms — sensors that alert aides or nurses when someone at risk of falling attempts to get out of bed or up from a chair or toilet — sound better, right? Lots of health care facilities thought so.

Use of these alarms has increased “over the past 10 or 15 years as the problems of physical restraints and bed rails became better known,” said Ronald Shorr, who directs geriatric research at the V.A. Medical Center in Gainesville, Fla. “This was the next wave in fall prevention.”

The trouble is, hospital bed alarms don’t appear to reduce falls, according to the study that Dr. Shorr just published in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

Lots of patients, of all ages, fall in hospitals, and about a quarter of those falls cause injuries. They also cost hospitals money, because Medicare will no longer reimburse facilities for treating injuries from falls that in theory shouldn’t have happened.

Though there aren’t statistics on the number of systems, it is rare these days to find a large hospital that doesn’t use alarms, in some cases built right into the beds.

Yet “their efficacy hadn’t been established,” Dr. Shorr told me in an interview. The few studies that reported reduced falls from alarms were small, lacked control groups, or didn’t continue for very long. Dr. Shorr and his colleagues set out to remedy those shortcomings.

Over 18 months, they documented falls among patients in 16 medical and surgical units, with a combined 349 beds, at Methodist Healthcare-University Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Half those units were randomly designated “usual care.” In the other eight, the “intervention” units, Dr. Shorr and study coordinator Michelle Chandler held repeated education sessions to explain the alarms — in this case, flexible pads made by Bed-Ex and widely-used — and demonstrate their use in beds and on chairs and commode seats.

Ms. Chandler visited the intervention units daily — the staff started calling her “Mrs. Falls” — and even brought fresh alarm pads and help set them up to encourage their use.

The intervention worked, in that those units used the alarms far more often. But when the researchers tallied up the falls among the 27,672 patients (half of them over age 63) in these units — controlling for many variables, including not only demographic factors but staffing levels and psychotropic drug regimens — they found the alarms had no significant effect.

Patients in the units that used alarms more heavily fell just as often as patients in the control units that used alarms much less frequently. (The numbers: 5.62 falls per 1,000 patient-days, a measure of how many people spent how long in the hospital, versus 4.56 falls in the control units, not a statistically significant difference.)

There were no fewer injuries in the more-alarmed units, nor any less use of physical restraints.

There were likely higher costs, though. A Bed-Ex monitor and cables cost about $350 at the time, and each disposable sensor pad cost $23.

Why didn’t the alarms help? Dr. Shorr hypothesized that the staff developed what he called alarm fatigue. “How many times a week do you hear a car alarm go off?” he asked. “You become desensitized.”

But it is also possible, he said, that when the alarms sounded and the nurses scampered, “the patients who weren’t alarmed fell more often.”

My own 2 cents: If an alarm sounds when someone stirs, is any hospital or nursing home so well-staffed that someone can materialize within seconds? Does a staff become less vigilant when patients have alarms and are presumed – wrongly, it seems – to be safer?

Nursing homes also frequently use alarms, and while this hospital data might not apply in another setting, Dr. Shorr said his findings made him skeptical about their effectiveness there, too.

So we probably shouldn’t feel reassured about our elders’ safety when they are in a hospital, alarms or no alarms. Even younger people, recovering from surgery and feeling the effects of anesthesia or sedatives, can and do fall.

“The more eyes on your loved one, the better,” said Dr. Shorr. “And it’s best if they’re your eyes.”

---

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Push for minimum wage hike intensifies

NEW YORK — Before the recession, Amie Crawford was an interior designer, earning $50,000 a year patterning baths and cabinets for architectural firms.

Now, she's a "team member" at the Protein Bar in Chicago, where she makes $8.50 an hour, slightly more than minimum wage. It was the only job she could find after months of looking. Crawford, now 56, says she needed to take the job to stop the hemorrhaging of her retirement accounts.

In her spare time, Crawford works with a Chicago group called Action Now, which is staging protests to raise the minimum wage in a state where it hasn't been raised since 2006.

"Thousands of workers in Chicago, let alone in the rest of the country, deserve to have a livable wage, and I truly believe that when someone is given a livable wage, that is going to bolster growth in communities," she said.

If it seems that workers such as Crawford are more prevalent these days, protesting outside stores including Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Wendy's to call for higher wages, it may be because there are more workers in these jobs than there were a few years ago.

Quiz: How much do you know about the 'fiscal cliff'?

Of the 1.9 million jobs created during the recovery, 43% of them have been in the low-wage industries of retail, food services and employment services, whose workforces include temporary employees who often work part time and without benefits or health insurance, according to a study by Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project in New York.

At the same time, many workers such as Crawford who have been displaced from their jobs are experiencing significant earnings losses after getting a new job. About one-third of the 3 million workers displaced from their jobs from 2009 to 2011 and then reemployed said their earnings had dropped 20% or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"What these protests are signaling are that working families are at breaking point after three decades of rising inequality and stagnant wages," Bernhardt said.

The rise of low-paying jobs in the recovery, experts said, has cut the spending power of workers who once worked in middle-class occupations. Construction workers who made $30 an hour, for example, during the housing boom may now find themselves working on a temporary basis.

"You see workers trading down their living standards," said Joseph Brusuelas, a senior economist for Bloomberg who studies the U.S. economy.

Now, Brusuelas said, there's an oversupply of workers and they're willing to take any job in a sluggish economy, even if they're overqualified. That includes temporary jobs without benefits, and minimum wage positions such as the one Crawford took.

Although the 2012 election might have brought the idea of income inequality to the forefront of voters' minds, efforts to increase wages for these workers are sputtering in an era of austerity when businesses say they are barely hiring, much less paying workers more.

The New Jersey state legislature handed Gov. Chris Christie a bill to raise the state's minimum wage to $8.50 an hour from the federal minimum of $7.25 this month, but he hasn't signed it and has signaled he might not. An earlier effort in New Jersey to tie the minimum wage to the consumer price index was vetoed by the governor.

Democratic lawmakers in Illinois are also trying to push a bill that would increase the minimum wage — an earlier effort this year failed. The Legislature last voted to raise its minimum wage in 2006, before the recession, and the governor agreed.

"A higher minimum wage means a person has to pay more for each worker," said Ted Dabrowski, vice president of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute, which opposes raising the minimum wage. "Companies have a few choices — increase prices, reduce the number of people they hire, cut employee hours or reduce benefits. When employees become too expensive, they have no choice but to reduce the number of workers."

The Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., however, says there is little indication from economic research that increases in the minimum wage lead to lower employment, and, because higher wages mean workers have more money to spend, employment can actually increase.

A bill to raise the federal minimum wage was introduced to the U.S. Senate by Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) in July and referred to committee, where it has sat ever since.

"Business lobbyists are aware of the campaign and are aggressively working to stop it," said Madeline Talbott, the former lead organizer of Chicago's Action Now. "We've had a hard time getting our legislature to approve it."

But Talbott and other advocates say that the protests that have spread throughout Illinois and the country in recent weeks might force the issue to its head.

"You saw it happening 18 months ago when Occupy started — workers are now realizing that they have rights too in the workplace," said Camille Rivera, executive director of United NY, one of the groups working to raise the minimum wage in New York. "It's a good time for us to be fighting these issues, when companies are making millions of dollars in profits."

The protests are bringing out people who might not usually participate, including Marcus Rose, 33. Rose, who has worked the grill at a Wendy's for 21/2 months, was marching outside that Wendy's in Brooklyn recently on a day of protests, responding as organizers shouted lines such as "Wendy's, Wendy's, can't you see, $7.25 is not for me."

"If you don't stand up for nothing, you can't fall for anything," he said.

Talbott, the Action Now organizer, says that people such as Rose may make a difference in whether lawmakers at the state and national level will listen to the protests. The Obama victory energized the working class to believe that they could fight against big-money interests and win, she said.

"It comes down to the traditional situation — whether the power is in the hands of organized money or of organized people," she said. "The organized money side tends to win, but it doesn't have to win. The more people you are, the more chance you have against money."

alana.semuels@latimes.com

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

Semuels reported from New York and Lopez from Los Angeles

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Quinn, Emanuel assail court's concealed carry decision

Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday indicated he would like to see assault weapons banned in Illinois as lawmakers this spring revise state law to allow some form of concealed carry to comply with a court ruling that tossed aside a long-standing ban on allowing people to carry weapons.

Meanwhile, at City Hall, Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted Tuesday's federal appellate court decision as "wrongheaded" as he offered legal help to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan as she weighs an appeal.

Judges gave the General Assembly six months to make changes, and the Democratic governor suggested the new rules will have to restrict who can get a permit to carry a gun.

"We have to have reasonable limitations so people who have clear situations where they should not be carrying a gun, for example, those with mental health challenges, those who have records of domestic violence, we cannot have those sorts of people eligible to carry weapons, loaded weapons, on their person in public places" Quinn said.

National Rifle Association lobbyist Todd Vandermyde said the governor is "being very pragmatic in his approach" on concealed carry. Though Vandermyde expected gun rights groups to hold firm on a variety of points, he said his group wanted to "work for a reasonable solution and policy on right to carry."

Quinn also pressed for an assault weapons ban, saying Illinois residents "overwhelmingly support that."

"I want to say today, and I'll say every day, we need to ban assault weapons in our state of Illinois. We aren't going to have people marching along Michigan Avenue, or any other avenue in the state of Illinois, with military-style assault weapons, weapons that are designed to kill people."

An assault weapons ban has been elusive in Springfield because of geographical differences of opinion. Opponents point to the fact that Chicago had a gun ban for decades, even as criminals obtained guns and shot people.

For his part, Emanuel noted his efforts while working for former President Bill Clinton to require background checks for gun buyers and ban semi-automatic assault weapons.

"We fought against the National Rifle Association. They had not been beaten in 30 years in the United States Congress, and we beat 'em," Emanuel said.

"I think this opinion by the 7th Circuit Court is also wrongheaded," he added.

Emanuel said he has offered to make city Law and Police department resources available to the Illinois attorney general. Meanwhile, the city is reviewing its gun registration ordinance to see if it needs modification in light of the court ruling.

Tribune reporter Ray Long contributed.

mcgarcia@tribune.com

hdardick@tribune.com

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“The Voice” finale taps Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, Bruno Mars and the Killers

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The season finale of “The Voice” has enlisted some high-profile talent to help send the show’s third cycle off with a bang.

Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, Bruno Mars and The Killers have been tapped to perform on the two-hour extravaganza, which will culminate with the crowning of a new champion, NBC said Wednesday.

An additional special guest will be named at a later date, the network added.

Rihanna will perform her song “Diamonds,” while “American Idol” alum Clarkson – who has served as a guest mentor on the show, as well as hosting the rival singing competition “Duets” – is set to sing “Catch My Breath.”

The Killers, meanwhile, will play their single “Runaways,” and Mars will debut the song “When I Was Your Man” from his sophomore album “Unorthodox Jukebox,” which was released Tuesday.

The season finale of “The Voice” will air live on December 18 at 8 p.m.

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Another Look at a Drink Ingredient, Brominated Vegetable Oil

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Sarah Kavanagh, 15, of Hattiesburg, Miss., started an online petition asking PepsiCo to change Gatorade’s formula.

Sarah Kavanagh and her little brother were looking forward to the bottles of Gatorade they had put in the refrigerator after playing outdoors one hot, humid afternoon last month in Hattiesburg, Miss.

But before she took a sip, Sarah, a dedicated vegetarian, did what she often does and checked the label to make sure no animal products were in the drink. One ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, caught her eye.

“I knew it probably wasn’t from an animal because it had vegetable in the name, but I still wanted to know what it was, so I Googled it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “A page popped up with a long list of possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones. I didn’t expect that.”

She threw the product away and started a petition on Change.org, a nonprofit Web site, that has almost 200,000 signatures. Ms. Kavanagh, 15, hopes her campaign will persuade PepsiCo, Gatorade’s maker, to consider changing the drink’s formulation.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, noted that brominated vegetable oil had been deemed safe for consumption by federal regulators. “As standard practice, we constantly evaluate our formulas and ingredients to ensure they comply with federal regulations and meet the high quality standards our consumers and athletes expect — from functionality to great taste,” he said in an e-mail.

In fact, about 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain brominated vegetable oil, including Mountain Dew, also made by PepsiCo; Powerade, Fanta Orange and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

The ingredient is added often to citrus drinks to help keep the fruit flavoring evenly distributed; without it, the flavoring would separate.

Use of the substance in the United States has been debated for more than three decades, so Ms. Kavanagh’s campaign most likely is quixotic. But the European Union has long banned the substance from foods, requiring use of other ingredients. Japan recently moved to do the same.

“B.V.O. is banned other places in the world, so these companies already have a replacement for it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “I don’t see why they don’t just make the switch.” To that, companies say the switch would be too costly.

The renewed debate, which has brought attention to the arcane world of additive regulation, comes as consumers show increasing interest in food ingredients and have new tools to learn about them. Walmart’s app, for instance, allows access to lists of ingredients in foods in its stores.

Brominated vegetable oil contains bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants, used in things like upholstered furniture and children’s products. Research has found brominate flame retardants building up in the body and breast milk, and animal and some human studies have linked them to neurological impairment, reduced fertility, changes in thyroid hormones and puberty at an earlier age.

Limited studies of the effects of brominated vegetable oil in animals and in humans found buildups of bromine in fatty tissues. Rats that ingested large quantities of the substance in their diets developed heart lesions.

Its use in foods dates to the 1930s, well before Congress amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to add regulation of new food additives to the responsibilities of the Food and Drug Administration. But Congress exempted two groups of additives, those already sanctioned by the F.D.A. or the Department of Agriculture, or those experts deemed “generally recognized as safe.”

The second exemption created what Tom Neltner, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ food additives project, a three-year investigation into how food additives are regulated, calls “the loophole that swallowed the law.” A company can create a new additive, publish safety data about it on its Web site and pay a law firm or consulting firm to vet it to establish it as “generally recognized as safe” — without ever notifying the F.D.A., Mr. Neltner said.

About 10,000 chemicals are allowed to be added to foods, about 3,000 of which have never been reviewed for safety by the F.D.A., according to Pew’s research. Of those, about 1,000 never come before the F.D.A. unless someone has a problem with them; they are declared safe by a company and its handpicked advisers.

“I worked on the industrial and consumer products side of things in the past, and if you take a new chemical and put it into, say, a tennis racket, you have to notify the E.P.A. before you put it in,” Mr. Neltner said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. “But if you put it into food and can document it as recognized as safe by someone expert, you don’t have to tell the F.D.A.”

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