Horse Meat in European Beef Raises Questions on U.S. Exposure

The alarm in Europe over the discovery of horse meat in beef products escalated again Monday, when the Swedish furniture giant Ikea withdrew an estimated 1,670 pounds of meatballs from sale in 14 European countries.

Ikea acted after authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in its meatballs. The company said it had made the decision even though its tests two weeks ago did not detect horse DNA.

Horse meat mixed with beef was first found last month in Ireland, then Britain, and has now expanded steadily across the Continent. The situation in Europe has created unease among American consumers over whether horse meat might also find its way into the food supply in the United States. Here are answers to commonly asked questions on the subject.

Has horse meat been found in any meatballs sold in Ikea stores in the United States?

Ikea says there is no horse meat in the meatballs it sells in the United States. The company issued a statement on Monday saying meatballs sold in its 38 stores in the United States were bought from an American supplier and contained beef and pork from animals raised in the United States and Canada.

“We do not tolerate any other ingredients than the ones stipulated in our recipes or specifications, secured through set standards, certifications and product analysis by accredited laboratories,” Ikea said in its statement.

Mona Liss, a spokeswoman for Ikea, said by e-mail that all of the businesses that supply meat to its meatball maker  issue letters guaranteeing that they will not misbrand or adulterate their products. “Additionally, as an abundance of caution, we are in the process of DNA-testing our meatballs,” Ms. Liss wrote. “Results should be concluded in 30 days.”

Does the United States import any beef from countries where horse meat has been found?

No. According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States imports no beef from any of the European countries involved in the scandal. Brian K. Mabry, a spokesman for the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said: “Following a decision by Congress in November 2011 to lift the ban on horse slaughter, two establishments, one located in New Mexico and one in Missouri, have applied for a grant of inspection exclusively for equine slaughter. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) is currently reviewing those applications.”

Has horse meat been found in ground meat products sold in the United States?

No. Meat products sold in the United States must pass Department of Agriculture inspections, whether produced domestically or imported. No government financing has been available for inspection of horse meat for human consumption in the United States since 2005, when the Humane Society of the United States got a rider forbidding financing for inspection of horse meat inserted in the annual appropriations bill for the Agriculture Department. Without inspection, such plants may not operate legally.

The rider was attached to every subsequent agriculture appropriations bill until 2011, when it was left out of an omnibus spending bill signed by President Obama on Nov. 18. The U.S.D.A.  has not committed any money for the inspection of horse meat.

“We’re real close to getting some processing plants up and running, but there are no inspectors because the U.S.D.A. is working on protocols,” said Dave Duquette, a horse trader in Oregon and president of United Horsemen, a small group that works to retrain and rehabilitate unwanted horses and advocates the slaughter of horses for meat. “We believe very strongly that the U.S.D.A. is going to bring inspectors online directly.”

Are horses slaughtered for meat for human consumption in the United States?

Not currently, although live horses from the United States are exported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. The lack of inspection effectively ended the slaughter of horse meat for human consumption in the United States; 2007 was the last year horses were slaughtered in the United States. At the time financing of inspections was banned, a Belgian company operated three horse meat processing plants — in Fort Worth and Kaufman, Tex., and DeKalb, Ill. — but exported the meat it produced in them.

Since 2011, efforts have been made to re-establish the processing of horse meat for human consumption in the United States. A small plant in Roswell, N.M., which used to process beef cattle into meat has been retooled to slaughter 20 to 25 horses a day. But legal challenges have prevented it from opening, Mr. Duquette said. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico opposes opening the plant and has asked the U.S.D.A. to block it.

Last month, the two houses of the Oklahoma Legislature passed separate bills to override a law against the slaughter of horses for meat but kept the law’s ban on consumption of such meat by state residents. California, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas prohibit horse slaughter for human consumption.

Is there a market for horse meat in the United States?

Mr. Duquette said horse meat was popular among several growing demographic groups in the United States, including Tongans, Mongolians and various Hispanic populations. He said he knew of at least 10 restaurants that wanted to buy horse meat. “People are very polarized on this issue,” he said. Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, disagreed, saying demand in the United States was limited. Italy is the largest consumer of horse meat, he said, followed by France and Belgium.

Is horse meat safe to eat?

That is a matter of much debate between proponents and opponents of horse meat consumption. Mr. Duquette said that horse meat, some derived from American animals processed abroad, was eaten widely around the world without health problems. “It’s high in protein, low in fat and has a whole lot of omega 3s,” he said.

The Humane Society says that because horse meat is not consumed in the United States, the animals’ flesh is likely to contain residues of many drugs that are unsafe for humans to eat. The organization’s list of drugs given to horses runs to 29 pages.

“We’ve been warning the Europeans about this for years,” Mr. Pacelle said. “You have all these food safety standards in Europe — they do not import chicken carcasses from the U.S. because they are bathed in chlorine, and won’t take pork because of the use of ractopamine in our industry — but you’ve thrown out the book when it comes to importing horse meat from North America.”

The society has filed petitions with the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, arguing that they should test horse meat before allowing it to be marketed in the United States for humans to eat.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated how many pounds of meatballs Ikea was withdrawing from sale in 14 European countries. It is 1,670 pounds, not 1.67 billion pounds.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the last year that horses were slaughtered in the United States. It is 2007, not 2006.

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5 of top 15 teaching hospitals in Chicago area

By Peter Frost




Tribune reporter

11:27 a.m. CST, February 25, 2013

Five of the country's top 15 major teaching hospitals are in the Chicago area, according to an annual study released Monday that evaluates performance in 10 categories of publicly available data.

The study, conducted by Truven Health Analytics, the former health care business of Thomson Reuters, listed seven Chicagoland hospitals among the nation's top 100, including four owned by Advocate Health Care.

Researchers evaluated 2,922 acute-care hospitals using information from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including cost, patient satisfaction and quality measures, such as re-admission rates, patient safety, mortality and medical complications.  Hospitals do not apply or pay for inclusion on the list, which has been produced since 1993.

The seven Illinois hospitals that made the Top 100

• Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn


• Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago


• Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge


• Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove


• Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield


• NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston


• Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago

pfrost@tribune.com | Twitter: @peterfrost

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State lawmaker's bill seeks to limit use of drones to fight crime

SPRINGFIELD — As the Obama administration comes under fire for its use of unmanned drones in foreign lands, a state senator is pressing to have Illinois join the national debate on whether states should regulate drones to ensure the high-tech snooping isn't used to invade the privacy of ordinary citizens on U.S. soil.

Democratic Sen. Daniel Biss has introduced legislation that would require police to get a search warrant before using a drone to gather evidence. Along with banning the use of lethal and nonlethal weapons on the drones — except in emergencies — the proposal would require information a drone gathers to be destroyed unless it is part of an investigation.

Under the legislation, Illinois would step up to combat the issue of drones flying over U.S. airspace. President Barack Obama signed a Federal Aviation Administration mandate last year requesting the agency integrate unmanned aircraft into the national system.

With the possibility of drones becoming the latest aircraft traversing the skies, Biss said this is "the exact moment states should be looking into" unmanned aircraft legislation.

"We're heading into a world where technology surveillance is unreal," the Evanston lawmaker said.

More than 20 states are pursuing similar legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While some states are trying to regulate unmanned aircraft use, others are trying to impose moratoriums that ban them, Biss said.

Virginia lawmakers approved a two-year moratorium on the aircraft in the state last week to allow time for a study. The legislation awaits the governor's signature.

In Illinois, authorities in Cook and Champaign counties are considering the use of drones to combat crime.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is in the "exploratory stages" of looking into drone technology for future operations, spokesman Frank Bilecki said. If the county were to employ any drones, they would be "specifically for law enforcement use" and not to invade personal privacy, Bilecki said.

Dart's thinking is that drones would be cheaper to use and cost less taxpayer money than using helicopters for aerial operations, Bilecki said. A small, unmanned aircraft used for search and rescue can cost on average between $38,000 and $50,000, much less than in years past, said James Hill, president of AirCover Integrated Solutions, a California-based drone manufacturer.

To gain traction at the Capitol, Biss potentially might have to overcome resistance from law enforcement leaders. To that end, Biss said he's talking with police chiefs, the Illinois State Police and other police agencies to iron out any wrinkles.

The American Civil Liberties Union thinks the time is ripe to look at drone regulations.

"Technology is changing," said Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the ACLU's Illinois chapter. "And the idea is we need to get ahead of the technology to be better prepared."

raguerrero2@tribune.com

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Shia LaBeouf and Alec Baldwin “Incompatible”? Actor tweets about exit From “Orphans”

(Please note that this story contains strong language in paragraphs 10 and 21.)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Shia LaBeouf is taking a cue from his former co-star Alec Baldwin and using Twitter to defend his actions – in this case his split from “Orphans” on Broadway.

The show, which begins previews in less than a month, was to be the “Transformers” star’s Great White Way debut. In a brief statement Wednesday, the actor’s departure was attributed to those pesky “creative differences.”

But LaBeouf, whose propensity to over-share has gotten him in trouble in the past, took to Twitter within hours of the announcement to post private emails from the show’s director Daniel Sullivan and co-stars Baldwin and Tom Sturridge.

He also mused about the role of theater in society and posted his audition video for the show (he’s twitchy, intense and, it must be said, pretty convincing as a criminal with a short fuse).

The correspondence does little to clarify the reasons for his abrupt exit, though his exchange with Sullivan hints at chemistry issues with Baldwin.

“I’m too old for disagreeable situations,” Sullivan writes. “You’re one hell of a great actor. Alec is who he is. You are who you are. You two are incompatible. I should have known it. This one will haunt me. You tried to warn me. You said you were a different breed. I didn’t get it.”

But an individual close to the production told TheWrap that the split had nothing to do with Baldwin; it was due to conflicts between the star and the show’s producers, Frederick Zollo and Robert Cole.

Spokespeople for the production did not respond to requests for comment.

In his emails, LaBeouf also demonstrates a flair for the dramatic that New York theater critics will be denied an opportunity to see in the flesh.

“My dad was a drug dealer,” LaBeouf writes. “He was a shit human. But he was a man. He taught me how to be a man. What I know of men Alec is.”

“A man owns up,” he adds. “That’s why Mark McGuire is not a man.”

If the message from Baldwin is to be believed, LaBeouf’s former cast-mate wishes him well.

After LaBeouf apologizes for creating a “disagreeable situation,” Baldwin assures him he doesn’t have an “unkind word to say about you.”

“I’ve been through this before,” Baldwin writes. “It’s been a while. And perhaps some of the particulars are different. But it comes down to the fact that what we all do now is critical. Perhaps especially for you. When the change comes, how do we handle it, whether it be good or bad? What do we learn?”

A spokesman for Baldwin declined to comment and a spokeswoman for LaBeouf did not respond to requests for comment.

Sturridge also is complimentary in his note to LaBeouf.

“I was stunned by the work you were doing, the performance you were giving,” he writes.”I think you lifted the play to a place higher than maybe it even deserved to be.”

This is not the first time that LaBeouf has gotten in trouble for running his mouth off in public. In the past he irritated Steven Spielberg by speaking ill of their collaboration on “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”; said Oliver Stone played too nice when they teamed up on “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps,” and once revealed that he hooked up with “Transformers” co-star Megan Fox when she was on a break from her husband Brian Austin Green.

His frank talk and propensity to criticize former collaborators has inspired at least one high-profile rebuke.

Harrison Ford told Details Magazine that he was displeased by his co-stars comments about the Indiana Jones sequel.

“I think I told him he was a f—ing idiot,” Ford said. “As an actor, I think it’s my obligation to support the film without making a complete ass of myself.”

On Wednesday and Thursday, LaBeouf also took the opportunity to share some colorful thoughts about acting, as well as some historical lessons of questionable veracity.

“Actors used to be buried with a stake through the heart,” he tweeted. “Those peoples performances so troubled on-lookers that they feared their ghosts.”

Oh, and based on his messages with Rick Sordelet, the show’s fight director and a faculty member at Yale University’s drama school, an MFA may be in LaBeouf’s future…possibly one from a certain New Haven-based institute of higher learning.

In a message, Sordelet hails LaBeouf’s work ethic and says he has been in touch with the head of the school’s acting program about having him matriculate.

“It must have been difficult for others in the room to be schooled by someone who’s raw talent and enthusiasm out matched theirs,” Sordelet writes.

Sounds like somebody might be passing James Franco on the quad some day soon.

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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‘Bloodless’ Lung Transplants for Jehovah’s Witnesses

Eric Kayne for The New York Times

SHARING HOME AND FAITH A Houston couple hosted Gene and Rebecca Tomczak, center, in October so she could get care nearby.

HOUSTON — Last April, after being told that only a transplant could save her from a fatal lung condition, Rebecca S. Tomczak began calling some of the top-ranked hospitals in the country.

She started with Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, just hours from her home near Augusta, Ga. Then she tried Duke and the University of Arkansas and Johns Hopkins. Each advised Ms. Tomczak, then 69, to look somewhere else.

The reason: Ms. Tomczak, who was baptized at age 12 as a Jehovah’s Witness, insisted for religious reasons that her transplant be performed without a blood transfusion. The Witnesses believe that Scripture prohibits the transfusion of blood, even one’s own, at the risk of forfeiting eternal life.

Given the complexities of lung transplantation, in which transfusions are routine, some doctors felt the procedure posed unacceptable dangers. Others could not get past the ethics of it all. With more than 1,600 desperately ill people waiting for a donated lung, was it appropriate to give one to a woman who might needlessly sacrifice her life and the organ along with it?

By the time Ms. Tomczak found Dr. Scott A. Scheinin at The Methodist Hospital in Houston last spring, he had long since made peace with such quandaries. Like a number of physicians, he had become persuaded by a growing body of research that transfusions often pose unnecessary risks and should be avoided when possible, even in complicated cases.

By cherry-picking patients with low odds of complications, Dr. Scheinin felt he could operate almost as safely without blood as with it. The way he saw it, patients declined lifesaving therapies all the time, for all manner of reasons, and it was not his place to deny care just because those reasons were sometimes religious or unconventional.

“At the end of the day,” he had resolved, “if you agree to take care of these patients, you agree to do it on their terms.”

Ms. Tomczak’s case — the 11th so-called bloodless lung transplant attempted at Methodist over three years — would become the latest test of an innovative approach that was developed to accommodate the unique beliefs of the world’s eight million Jehovah’s Witnesses but may soon become standard practice for all surgical patients.

Unlike other patients, Ms. Tomczak would have no backstop. Explicit in her understanding with Dr. Scheinin was that if something went terribly wrong, he would allow her to bleed to death. He had watched Witness patients die before, with a lifesaving elixir at hand.

Ms. Tomczak had dismissed the prospect of a transplant for most of the two years she had struggled with sarcoidosis, a progressive condition of unknown cause that leads to scarring in the lungs. The illness forced her to quit a part-time job with Nielsen, the market research firm.

Then in April, on a trip to the South Carolina coast, she found that she was too breathless to join her frolicking grandchildren on the beach. Tethered to an oxygen tank, she watched from the boardwalk, growing sad and angry and then determined to reclaim her health.

“I wanted to be around and be a part of their lives,” Ms. Tomczak recalled, dabbing at tears.

She knew there was danger in refusing to take blood. But she thought the greater peril would come from offending God.

“I know,” she said, “that if I did anything that violates Jehovah’s law, I would not make it into the new system, where he’s going to make earth into a paradise. I know there are risks. But I think I am covered.”

Cutting Risks, and Costs

The approach Dr. Scheinin would use — originally called “bloodless medicine” but later re-branded as “patient blood management” — has been around for decades. His mentor at Methodist, Dr. Denton A. Cooley, the renowned cardiac pioneer, performed heart surgery on hundreds of Witnesses starting in the late 1950s. The first bloodless lung transplant, at Johns Hopkins, was in 1996.

But nearly 17 years later, the degree of difficulty for such procedures remains so high that Dr. Scheinin and his team are among the very few willing to attempt them.

In 2009, after analyzing Methodist’s own data, Dr. Scheinin became convinced that if he selected patients carefully, he could perform lung transplants without transfusions. Hospital administrators resisted at first, knowing that even small numbers of deaths could bring scrutiny from federal regulators.

“My job is to push risk away,” said Dr. A. Osama Gaber, the hospital’s director of transplantation, “so I wasn’t really excited about it. But the numbers were very convincing.”

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ComEd chief hopes to spark positive change

Every organization has its low point. For Commonwealth Edison, it was in summer 2011 when a storm left more than 850,000 people without power, some for days.

Customers flocked to the phones for information and were shocked to find that they were not only in the dark, but in the dark ages. They waited on hold for hours, only to hear the same message every 45 minutes. They couldn't find out when their power would be restored, what had caused the outage or how many other people were affected.

Residents raged about ComEd on Facebook and Twitter and to mayors, state representatives, and fire and police departments. Dealing with wires that blocked roadways, nursing homes without power and angry residents with spoiled groceries, these public officials turned back to ComEd — only to receive misinformation or no information at all.

For soon-to-be-instated CEO Anne Pramaggiore, it was a blaring wake-up call: Customers hated the utility.

"We heard our customers loud and clear that summer," Pramaggiore said. "Everything else in the world is instantaneous, and they don't understand why they have to sit and wait without power or information."

Fast-forward to today, and customers can text, call, look online, use an iPhone or Android app or communicate with a ComEd representative on Twitter or Facebook. In less than a year, the company's smartphone app has generated more than 1 million transactions and 59,000 downloads.

"We're on a mission to improve service to our customers," said Pramaggiore, 54.

The good news is that the company has nowhere to go but up. Since 1999, ComEd has consistently ranked among the worst utilities in the Midwest for customer satisfaction in surveys conducted by The American Customer Satisfaction Index and J.D. Power and Associates.

Two months ago, the company had zero pending complaints for the first time in its history after working its way out of backlog in "the thousands," according to Miguel Ortega, director of customer technology and support for ComEd.

"Anne gets it," he said. "I've been around for quite a while. I've been through a lot of CEOs. She has made it a priority to put the customer in every aspect of our business, which is a huge cultural change."

The shift comes at a time when ComEd's parent company, Exelon Corp., is squeezing its three regulated utilities for revenue. The money Exelon receives for producing its mostly nuclear-powered electricity is not what it once was because of increased competition from natural gas and wind.

As a regulated utility that is paid by customers to deliver electricity regardless of which supplier they choose, ComEd is in a position to provide a steady, predictable stream of income to its parent if it can garner support from the General Assembly to pass legislation that will benefit its bottom line. But to get there, Pramaggiore must convince legislators — the same ones who have spent years fielding complaints from constituents about ComEd's abysmal service — that the company can change.

Legislation related to funding the so-called smart grid, passed into law in 2011 as part of the Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act, is making its way through Springfield and is worth about $1 billion to ComEd.

Within four years, Pramaggiore wants the utility that customers love to hate to be the utility that customers actually like, a plan she has spent countless hours communicating to every employee in the company.

"Whether you'll love your utility, I don't know. It's not the kind of business you ultimately love," said David Kolata, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board consumer advocacy group, a frequent opponent of ComEd. "We are encouraged and do think generally that her heart is in the right place. She does want to transform the company. Will that play out? It's too early to tell."

Inspires trust

While Pramaggiore's lawyerlike ability to boil down complex regulatory issues is impressive, her power lies in her charm. Gracious and savvy, she laughs easily and often, winning over opponents with humility and a down-to-earth speaking style that inspires trust.

Gloria Castillo, a personal friend of Pramaggiore and president of Chicago United, said her ability to listen is one of her greatest assets.

"Anne is really one of the highest-ranking women in energy anywhere in the country, but you never get the feeling that she thinks about herself in a way that's different," she said. "She's so striking. She has a unique ability to be so present in a conversation."

Indeed, Pramaggiore, a soccer mom who fits in at a Paul McCartney concert as easily as in a contentious hearing in Springfield, is disarming in her remarkable ability to appear unremarkable. She described her childhood in Dayton, Ohio, as a "quiet, suburban upbringing with good schools," with a father who was a civil engineer and a mom who was president of the local PTO.

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2 hurt, 19 arrested in melee near Ford City Mall

Two people suffered minor injuries and police arrested 19 teenagers during a disturbance involving crowds of young people Saturday at Ford City Mall on the Southwest Side, authorities said.

About 4:45 p.m., a large group of disruptive teens ran yelling through the mall, which is located at 7601 S. Cicero Ave., according to a mall official.

Officials closed the mall minutes later, but the chaotic scene continued outside, where police found between 100 and 200 people damaging vehicles in the shopping center's parking lot, according to a police report.

Two people were taken to hospitals, according to Chicago Fire Department Chief Joe Roccasalva, a department spokesman.

A CTA bus driver suffered minor injuries and was taken to Holy Cross Hospital, said Roccasalva, who added he did not know what happened to him.
 
A “kid’’ was also hurt, and that person was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, also in good condition, Roccasalva said.

About 50 police squad cars assigned to multiple South Side districts, including Chicago Lawn, Englewood and Deering, and a helicopter responded to the scene, police said.

Traffic came to a standstill as teenagers jumped on cars, both parked and moving, according to a police report obtained by the Tribune. Many of those involved ignored orders to disperse, and police arrested 19 people between the ages of 13 and 17, according to police.

The teenagers all face minor misdemeanor charges.

Officers did their best to control the disturbance, "trying to get everyone out of there safely," Chicago Police Department News Affairs Officer Veejay Zala said.

During the disturbance the CTA had to reroute the No. 79 buses, which travel on 79th Street, as well as other buses in the immediate area.

Earlier in the afternoon, members of the teen band Mindless Behavior had appeared at the mall food court from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. to promote their new release, "All Around the World," said John Sarama, the mall's senior general manager.

The band's autograph signing drew approximately 1,000 parents and children, primarily mothers and girls between the ages of 6 and 13, Sarama said.

About 45 minutes after the band left, the chaos began, Sarama said.

"A group of older youths came into the mall with the intent of causing havoc and chaos and were running through the mall, screaming, yelling and so forth," he said.

Security staff contacted the police department, and mall officials closed the mall about 5 p.m., Sarama said.

The mall did not sustain any property damage apart from a single broken planter, and it will reopen Sunday at 11 a.m. as usual, Sarama said.

In the meantime, mall officials are at a loss as they try to understand what happened.

"Ford City is a family-oriented mall," he said. "We have not had an incident like this [in the past], and I’m still in a little bit of a state of shock actually.

"What would make these youths comes here to try and cause this kind of commotion and trouble?" he continued. "I don’t know. But they did have a plan in mind."

Tribune reporter Adam Sege contributed.

rsobol@tribune.com

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“Scary Spice” Mel B joins “America’s Got Talent” panel

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former Spice Girl Mel B will join the judging panel on summer TV talent show “America‘s Got Talent,” broadcaster NBC said on Thursday.

The 37-year-old Briton, known by the nickname Scary Spice when she was part of the chart-topping 1990s British girl band, will replace Sharon Osbourne who quit the series in a dispute with NBC over their decision to drop her son Jack from another reality show.

Mel B, whose full name is Melanie Brown, will join “shock jock” Howard Stern, who has agreed to return for his second season, and comedian Howie Mandel.

“This exciting addition of the dynamic Mel B to our lineup of judges promises that fans will see a strong, talented and opinionated woman match up against our equally outspoken judges Howard Stern and Howie Mandel,” NBC president of alternative programming Paul Telegdy said in a statement.

Mel B said she was thrilled to join the talent show, adding in a statement, “It’s so exciting to be bringing some Girl Power to the panel!”

The singer recently finished a two-season stint as a judge on singing contest “The X Factor,” which like “America’s Got Talent” was created by British entrepreneur Simon Cowell.

NBC said nationwide auditions for the new season of “America’s Got Talent” will start on March 4 in New Orleans.

The network is seeking to turn around a fall in audiences last year when the finale in September was watched by a record low of under 11 million viewers, according to ratings data.

The show remained the top-rated summer series among adults aged 18-49, the demographic most coveted by advertisers.

NBC attributed the overall 2012 audience decline partly to an earlier start that pitted “Got Talent” against end-of-season original programming in May and the start of new TV shows in September.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White and Jill Serjeant; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The Texas Tribune: Advocates Seek Mental Health Changes, Including Power to Detain

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

The Sherman grave of Andre Thomas’s victims.

SHERMAN — A worried call from his daughter’s boyfriend sent Paul Boren rushing to her apartment on the morning of March 27, 2004. He drove the eight blocks to her apartment, peering into his neighbors’ yards, searching for Andre Thomas, Laura Boren’s estranged husband.

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

For more articles on mental health and criminal justice in Texas, as well as a timeline of the Andre Thomas case: texastribune.org

Matt Rainwaters for Texas Monthly

Laura Boren

He drove past the brightly colored slides, swings and bouncy plastic animals in Fairview Park across the street from the apartment where Ms. Boren, 20, and her two children lived. He pulled into a parking spot below and immediately saw that her door was broken. As his heart raced, Mr. Boren, a white-haired giant of a man, bounded up the stairwell, calling out for his daughter.

He found her on the white carpet, smeared with blood, a gaping hole in her chest. Beside her left leg, a one-dollar bill was folded lengthwise, the radiating eye of the pyramid facing up. Mr. Boren knew she was gone.

In a panic, he rushed past the stuffed animals, dolls and plastic toys strewn along the hallway to the bedroom shared by his two grandchildren. The body of 13-month-old Leyha Hughes lay on the floor next to a blood-spattered doll nearly as big as she was.

Andre Boren, 4, lay on his back in his white children’s bed just above Leyha. He looked as if he could have been sleeping — a moment away from revealing the toothy grin that typically spread from one of his round cheeks to the other — except for the massive chest wound that matched the ones his father, Andre Thomas (the boy was also known as Andre Jr.), had inflicted on his mother and his half-sister as he tried to remove their hearts.

“You just can’t believe that it’s real,” said Sherry Boren, Laura Boren’s mother. “You’re hoping that it’s not, that it’s a dream or something, that you’re going to wake up at any minute.”

Mr. Thomas, who confessed to the murders of his wife, their son and her daughter by another man, was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death at age 21. While awaiting trial in 2004, he gouged out one of his eyes, and in 2008 on death row, he removed the other and ate it.

At least twice in the three weeks before the crime, Mr. Thomas had sought mental health treatment, babbling illogically and threatening to commit suicide. On two occasions, staff members at the medical facilities were so worried that his psychosis made him a threat to himself or others that they sought emergency detention warrants for him.

Despite talk of suicide and bizarre biblical delusions, he was not detained for treatment. Mr. Thomas later told the police that he was convinced that Ms. Boren was the wicked Jezebel from the Bible, that his own son was the Antichrist and that Leyha was involved in an evil conspiracy with them.

He was on a mission from God, he said, to free their hearts of demons.

Hospitals do not have legal authority to detain people who voluntarily enter their facilities in search of mental health care but then decide to leave. It is one of many holes in the state’s nearly 30-year-old mental health code that advocates, police officers and judges say lawmakers need to fix. In a report last year, Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit advocacy organization, called on lawmakers to replace the existing code with one that reflects contemporary mental health needs.

“It was last fully revised in 1985, and clearly the mental health system has changed drastically since then,” said Susan Stone, a lawyer and psychiatrist who led the two-year Texas Appleseed project to study and recommend reforms to the code. Lawmakers have said that although the code may need to be revamped, it will not happen in this year’s legislative session. Such an undertaking requires legislative studies that have not been conducted. But advocates are urging legislators to make a few critical changes that they say could prevent tragedies, including giving hospitals the right to detain someone who is having a mental health crisis.

From the time Mr. Thomas was 10, he had told friends he heard demons in his head instructing him to do bad things. The cacophony drove him to attempt suicide repeatedly as an adolescent, according to court records. He drank and abused drugs to try to quiet the noise.

bgrissom@texastribune.org

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Promise, peril seen for crowd-funding investors

Crowd funding is widely seen as a revolutionary idea.

A 2012 federal law known as the JOBS Act opens the door to allowing small, privately owned businesses to market ownership stakes in their ventures to people over the Internet.

Companies will be able to sell up to $1 million in equity a year to ordinary investors without having to register the offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission or state regulators.

Before the average person can use crowd funding to stake a claim in a startup, the SEC still must draft rules that the Obama administration hopes will result in U.S. businesses growing and adding jobs. At the same time, the securities cop needs to include safeguards that protect less sophisticated individual investors drawn to inherently risky startups.

That's why equity crowd funding under JOBS, or Jumpstart our Business Startups, has some longtime regulators and securities lawyers squirming.

"It can be an invitation for fraudsters to steal money," Matthew Brown, a Katten Muchin Rosenman lawyer, said last month at a CFA Society of Chicago event at 1871, a center for digital startups in Chicago.

But Brown also noted that equity crowd funding also democratizes small-business financing, a process that historically has given access mostly to wealthier — or, as they're known in high-finance circles, "accredited" — investors.

"The world has changed dramatically, and who's to say who is smarter than anyone else?" Brown added.

Many existing crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter don't sell equity stakes in businesses to average investors. Rather, they give consumers the chance to donate money to an enterprise or to get an early or discounted crack at a new product. Since Kickstarter's launch in April 2009, more than $450 million has been pledged by more than 3 million people funding more than 35,000 projects, the New York-based company's website says.

Their acceptance suggests that consumers are willing to engage with companies on a deeper level. As such, enabling unaccredited consumers to invest in companies in small increments online has promise and could become part of the fundraising "ecosystem," says one Chicago entrepreneur.

Abe's Market, a Chicago-based e-commerce site selling natural and organic products from more than 1,000 suppliers, said it would consider crowd funding under the JOBS Act, saying it and its vendors have "die-hard fans" and "a core group of customers" who might like to invest in their vision.

Last month, Abe's raised $5 million from Carmel Ventures, Index Ventures, Beringea and Accel Partners, a Groupon backer. New backers include OurCrowd, a crowd-funding site for accredited investors.

"If you can get passionate people to invest in your business, you're not just gaining investors, you're gaining evangelists," Abe's Chief Executive Richard Demb said. "The challenge for any consumer brand is: How do you find not just customers, but the right customers who are going to tell their friends?"

But there would also be potential headaches for companies raising equity financing through crowd funding, he said.

"You have to make sure that expectations would be set fairly, that no one is putting their life savings into the investment, and that they don't also come back and become a challenge to manage as the business grows," Demb said. "You don't want someone who invested $250 to come back and say, 'I don't think we should expand to the West Coast.'"

Safeguards for average investors exist in the JOBS Act. They include capping nonaccredited individuals' crowd-funding investments at $2,000, or 5 percent of annual income or net worth of less than $100,000, whichever is greater.

Snapclass, launched a few weeks ago at 1871, provides software enabling businesses to provide training online. Co-founder Scott Mandel, who has financed the company himself, doesn't expect to take advantage of equity crowd funding in the future and instead would seek, say, venture capital funding.

"Not all checks are the same," said Mandel, previously a trader and professional poker player. "I'd want someone who could add more than just the cash, such as connections and experience and help with things that I'm not an expert in."

One of 1871's fastest-growing startups is MarkITx. It recently raised $1.2 million from wealthy individuals in its first fundraising round, has seven employees and is looking to add sales jobs. It's an online exchange for businesses wanting to buy and sell used information technology equipment, from iPads to Oracle servers.

"For us, it wouldn't be the sole way to raise money, but it definitely is a viable vehicle to look at raising money," MarkITx partner Marc Brooks said of equity crowd funding under the JOBS Act.

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