Deficit Talks Stumble Over Down Payment

WASHINGTON — For all the growing angst over the state of negotiations to head off a fiscal crisis in January, the parties are farthest apart on a relatively small part of the overall deficit reduction program — the down payment.

President Obama and the House speaker, John A. Boehner, are in general agreement that the relevant Congressional committees must sit down next year and work out changes to the tax code and entitlement programs to save well more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

But before that work begins, both men want Congress to approve a first installment on deficit reduction in the coming weeks. The installment would replace the automatic spending cuts and tax increases that make up the “fiscal cliff,” while signaling Washington’s seriousness about getting its fiscal house in order. That is where the chasm lies in size and scope.

Mr. Obama says the down payment should be large and made up almost completely of tax increases on top incomes, partly because he and Congressional leaders last year agreed on some spending cuts over the next decade but have yet to agree on any tax increases.

Republicans have countered by arguing for a smaller down payment that must include immediate savings from Medicare and other social programs. Republicans, using almost mirror-image language, have said that they do not want to agree to specific tax increases and vague promises of future spending cuts.

Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chairman of the Budget Committee and part of a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators who devised the two-stage process, said: “I think there’s a lot of confusion between the initial down payment and the framework. That’s for sure.”

The two biggest areas of dispute are tax increases and the big government health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid. On the health programs, neither side believes Congress could meaningfully overhaul them in the four weeks that remain before the fiscal deadline.

“Entitlement reform is a big step, and it affects tens of millions of people,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, another architect of the two-stage framework. “It’s not just a matter of cutting spending in an appropriation. It’s changing policy. And that’s why I was reluctant to include it in the down-payment conversation. I want this to be a thoughtful effort on both sides that doesn’t jeopardize this program.”

But Republicans say that it is possible to make some initial changes to the programs in coming weeks. “There are simpler things that can be done,” said Senator Michael D. Crapo, Republican of Idaho and another Gang of Six member. “The real structural changes would come later.”

Mr. Crapo said Congress could agree on some additional cuts to health care providers and change the way inflation is calculated to slow not only automatic increases in Medicare and Social Security benefits, but also the annual rise in tax brackets.

Democrats instead argue that the down payment should consist of a combination of tax increases and cuts to programs outside Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, like farm programs. Mr. Obama has pushed for a return to the top tax rates under President Bill Clinton.

Republican leaders have said that they are willing to raise new tax revenues — albeit not as much as Democrats want — but Republicans want taxes to rise by closing loopholes and curbing tax deductions and credits.

If the two sides are able to come to an agreement on the down payment, it would also likely fix targets for larger savings in the tax code and entitlement programs. The White House and Congress would then spend much of the next year trying to hash out the specific policy changes needed to hit those targets.

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Slaying of 4 rocks Northridge neighborhood

Shane Grady was jolted awake early Sunday when he heard gunfire on Devonshire Street.

He said he dropped to the floor and looked out his window, but the slowing traffic blocked his view.

Then came the police sirens and helicopter flying so low, another neighbor said, that it was "shaking the rooftop."

Residents in the usually quiet Northridge neighborhood woke up to a shocking scene. Police said two men and two women were found shot dead outside a home in the 17400 block of Devonshire in the San Fernando Valley.

Investigators do not have a motive or suspects. City Councilman Mitchell Englander, who represents the area and is a reserve LAPD officer, said police believe the slayings weren't a random act.

Officers were dispatched to the home about 4:25 a.m., LAPD Capt. William Hayes said. A 911 caller reported hearing yelling and "a number of shots," Hayes said.

Three of the bodies were found face-down, and the victims appeared to have been shot at close range, Englander said.

Officers searched the property and neighborhood immediately after the shooting, LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith said, but no weapon was recovered.

The victims had not been identified Sunday evening. The female victims were in their 20s; one man was in his mid-30s and the other in his late 40s, Hayes said. Police believe at least some of the victims lived at the residence and may have been related.

Englander said the property was an unlicensed boarding home, but had not been a problem location for police.

That was confirmed by neighbors, who said the rooms appeared to have been rented out to single men who primarily kept to themselves. Nothing stood out, they said, except for some occasional loud music.

Englander said that about a dozen people were believed to have been living in the four- or five-bedroom home in conditions he described as "deplorable." Mattresses and makeshift kitchens were scattered about the house, he said, and one room was accessible only by a window.

A woman who lived around the block said she heard loud music hours before the shootings. About 1:30 a.m., the woman said she heard the music and people yelling. She managed to go to sleep an hour later but said the noise hadn't stopped.

"I just figured it was a party that was out of control," the woman said.

Residents described the area as quiet, the kind of neighborhood where people know one another and walk to the nearby grocery store or the synagogue down the street from where the slayings occurred.

The LAPD's Devonshire Division station is a mile away.

"It's usually sleepy-time America," said Richard Rutherford, 58, who also was awakened by the gunfire.

Englander, who chairs the City Council's Public Safety Committee, said he was "shocked" by the incident.

"Typically you don't have these kinds of incidents in this type of community," he said.

The violent crime rate for Northridge falls in the middle of all Los Angeles neighborhoods, but homicide is rare in the community, according to LAPD data analyzed in The Times' Crime L.A. database. In the previous six months, Northridge had one homicide out of the 89 violent crimes reported.

Since 2007, and before Sunday's quadruple homicide, Northridge had 11 homicides, 10 of them south of Nordhoff Street. The location of Sunday's slayings is on the border with Granada Hills, which typically has a much lower violent-crime rate than Northridge.

Jeff Kaye, 62, remembered a few incidents in the 33 years he's lived in the neighborhood. There was a shooting a few years back, he said, and he once walked in on a robbery. But nothing like Sunday's shooting had occurred.

"It concerns you," he said. "You want to know what's going on."

A few onlookers stopped by as investigators prepared to bring the bodies out of the home, and some drivers shouted questions at news crews gathered at the scene. "What's going on?" one man yelled.

"How often in this neighborhood do you hear about four dead bodies?" Grady said.

kate.mather@latimes.com

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Senators urge Obama to release more water into Mississippi River

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sixteen U.S. senators have appealed to President Barack Obama to divert more water to the Mississippi River to prevent barge traffic from shutting down due to low water on the country’s inland waterway, a crucial route for goods bound for export.

Low water is a looming disaster, said the senators in a letter to Obama that was released on Friday.

The senators, from states along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, asked for emergency action to release more water from Missouri River reservoirs to feed the drought-sapped Mississippi River.

Water levels are forecast to reach near-historic lows by mid-December, and shippers say low water will make it impossible to move cargo. Grain exporters have already slashed by up to 50 percent the weight of cargo shipped by barges on the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Substantial curtailment of navigation will effectively sever the country’s inland waterway superhighway, imperil the shipment of critical cargo for domestic consumption and for export, threaten manufacturing industries and power generation, and risk thousands of related jobs in the Midwest,” wrote the senators.

Signing the letter were senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin of Iowa; Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill of Missouri; Mark Pryor and John Boozman of Arkansas; Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Mary Landrieu and David Vitter of Louisiana; Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker of Mississippi; Mark Kirk of Illinois; Lamar Alexander of Tennessee; Joe Manchin of West Virginia; and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been battling extreme low-water conditions on the Mississippi for months following the country’s worst drought in half a century.

(Reporting By Charles Abbott; editing by Jim Marshall)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.

Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.

If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.

DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.

“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”

Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)

The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.

“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.

The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.

In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”

Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.

Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.

He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.

“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.

There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.

UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”

The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.

“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.

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The Media Equation: John Huey, Editor in Chief of Time Inc., Prepares to Leave

In the decade I’ve covered John Huey, I’d never once been to his magisterial office on the 34th floor of the Time & Life building. It is large and imposing in a way its occupant is not, an unlikely landing spot for an old newspaper hack. On the wall is a photograph of William Faulkner, “the patron saint of all hard-drinking Southern writers,” as Mr. Huey, a native of Atlanta, describes him.

At the end of the year, Mr. Huey will vacate the office and leave his position as Time Inc.’s editor in chief. Martha Nelson, the editorial director of the company, will move in and become the first woman to hold the job.

Mr. Huey says he won’t miss the perch and I believe him, partly because the job now has brutal aspects. Besides, he is a reporter by nature, and seemed happy to be at-large whenever I saw him at events.

Mr. Huey, who had his start as a reporter at The Atlanta Constitution before heading to The Wall Street Journal and then Time Inc., is only the sixth editor in chief in the company’s history, a job that the writer Kurt Andersen once described as having “papal luster.” These days? Not so much.

“There’s been a fair amount of unpleasantness at that table,” Mr. Huey said, pointing to a big one in the corner. Rather than using it to plan magazine start-ups or acquisitions, he found himself going over lists of staff cuts necessitated by print’s collapse.

In his seven years as the top editor, the core magazines — like Time, Fortune, People and Money — have lost almost a third of their employees, and the future is no brighter. Overall revenue at Time Inc. fell 6 percent last quarter, to $838 million, although operating income increased 2 percent, thanks to the constant cost-cutting.

“Google sort of sucked all of the honey out of our business,” he said with a shrug, not complaining, just saying.

“When it was good, it was really good, but there were a lot of rough patches,” he said. “But I never wondered why I got into journalism during any of it. I still believe in the kind of storytelling we do here.”

But that confidence had limits. In the 11 years Mr. Huey helped run the editorial side of Time Inc. — first as editorial director, then as editor in chief — he commuted to his home and family in Charleston, S.C., on weekends, partly because he always felt he was on the cusp of being fired.

“There have been bullets flying since I got here, way back when I first came as a writer at Fortune,” he said, referring to his first job at the company, in 1988. “I came to work when it was just Time Inc., then it became part of Time Warner, and then it was Time Warner with Turner, and then it became AOL Time Warner and then just Time Warner again. I always figured my time might be up. Came close, but it never happened.”

As the editor of Fortune, Mr. Huey was a consummate magazine maker, turning out a product that was modern, knowing and highly decorated. A former naval intelligence officer, he displayed a remarkable understanding of how power operates in corporate America, which served him well as he navigated his way to the top of Time Inc.

“Media can be a very dangerous and political business — I am not an innocent in such matters, by the way — but I always had enough information to stay away from the more obvious hazards,” he said. “And we did O.K. We avoided major conflagrations, there were no $1 billion lawsuits, and no compromise in the journalism we were doing at our magazines.”

He had excellent relationships with Richard Parsons and Jeffrey Bewkes, the former and current chief executives of Time Warner, which came in handy, given that the leadership at Time Inc. became somewhat chaotic after the departure of Don Logan, the former chief executive of Time Inc. and a mentor of Mr. Huey.

Ann S. Moore, the chief executive when Mr. Huey became editor in chief in 2006, eliminated potential rivals and a lot of talent in the process. Jack Griffin replaced Ms. Moore in 2010 and quickly began remaking Time Inc. He grew tired of Mr. Huey’s resistance and took aim at him, according to executives at Time Warner, and was out after five months.

It fell to Mr. Huey, along with the company’s chief financial officer and its general counsel, to run the company until earlier this year, when Laura Lang, a newcomer to publishing, was selected as chief executive.

“It’s odd that a former newspaper guy ended up helping run the place, but it turned into a job for a ‘mudder,’ and I can run in the mud if I have to,” he said.

Approaching 65, he decided it was time to move on. He will not leave to a herald of trumpets, but he has had his wins: by some measure, Time and Money are the last players standing in their categories.

Mr. Huey installed a bureau in Detroit when the rest of the country was trying to forget about it, and he scrambled the jets so Time Inc. magazines had a presence in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

He also brokered a deal with Turner Broadcasting to set up CNN/Money, which used the editorial content and staff of Money and Fortune to create a highly profitable Web site that makes more money than both those magazines. He was, in the main, an anchor for a company that often needed one.

“John is a very funny, self-deprecating guy, and none of that gets in the way of him being a very serious person,” said Daniel Okrent, who worked with Mr. Huey for many years. “He preserved the editorial independence of the magazines at a time when it was hard to resist the constant economic pressure to do stories that would help advertising.”

Now Mr. Huey is packing his stuff to prepare for a fellowship at Harvard. “I’m looking forward to getting back closer to the keyboard than I have been,” he said. Before he goes, he will probably slip Merle Haggard’s “Big City” into the CD player, an album whose title track frequently kept him company in his corner office.

I’m tired of this dirty old city.

Entirely too much work and never enough play.

And I’m tired of these dirty old sidewalks.

Think I’ll walk off my steady job today.

Gesturing at the magazines on the table, Mr. Huey said: “We still make a great deal of money because consumers pay us money for the products that we give them.”

“But I can’t look anybody in the eye who is coming into the business and tell them that they are going to end up in an office like this,” he added, with a wave at its expanse. “But who is to say that anybody should live like this anyway?”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

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Downtown L.A. residents voting on streetcar project

Voting will conclude Monday in a special election on a streetcar proposal in downtown Los Angeles.

The proposal before downtown residents calls for an assessment district to be created to help finance the $125-million project. If it receives the two-thirds majority required to pass, planning would move forward, with completion scheduled in 2015.

Supporters of the streetcar say it would bring a fresh wave of economic development to downtown. Its proposed route covers 10 blocks of Broadway — where the city is working to revive old movie palaces and vacant office buildings — before veering over toward L.A. Live and then up through the financial district.

"This is really going to be the cherry on top for all the revitalization and transformation we're seeing," said City Councilman Jose Huizar, a key supporter of the streetcar. He cited estimates that the fixed-rail streetcar would bring $1 billion in development to downtown, including 2,600 new housing units and 675,000 square feet of new office space.

A group of business leaders and developers has been actively campaigning in support of the project in recent months, with a series of town hall meetings and special events.

Jon Blanchard, a member of the Los Angeles Streetcar Inc. board and lead developer of the Ace Hotel project on Broadway, said the streetcar would cater specifically to tourists and young residents downtown who prefer a car-free urban experience.

"Just for everyday purposes, it really kind of connects the city and makes it one," he said. "It makes it a lot easier for people that come down here and live down here to get around."

Some have criticized the voting process used for the project, saying it's unfair that only residents can vote while property owners would pay the assessment. The Los Angeles Downtown News also took the campaign to task in an editorial, claiming that officials were not upfront about the portion of total funding that would come from the tax assessments, versus the federal grants the project is expected to receive.

Still, there is no organized opposition to the project, and several streetcar backers said they were confident it would pass.

Ballots were due to be submitted by mail last week, but residents can still turn in their votes in person at City Hall on Monday.

sam.allen@latimes.com

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Geek Culture's 26 Most Awesome Female Ass-Kickers

Angelina Jolie extends her reputation as filmdom’s most compelling ass-kicker, Female Division, when Salt opens Friday. Midway through a summer freighted with testosterone, Jolie’s lithe Agent Salt is a potent reminder of the power of feminine fighters.

A minority presence in sci-fi and action realms even in 2010, women warriors remain the exception to the guy-centric rule in film, TV, videogames and comic books. But that’s changing, according to Action Flick Chick blogger Katrina Hill, who moderates the "Where Are the Action Chicks?" panel Friday at San Diego’s Comic-Con International.

"Compare the original Predator to this summer’s Predators," she said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. "The original film was a complete boy’s club, with the only woman in the movie being a hostage. Today, Predators has a kick-ass chick mixed in as an equal amongst these other badass men. So there are steps being taken in the right direction. It just takes time."

The rise of the female fighter will be addressed at no fewer than three other female-dominated panels at this year’s Comic-Con (Thursday’s “Divas and Golden Lassoes: The LGBT Obsession with Super Heroines” and Friday’s “Girls Gone Genre: Movies, TV, Comics, Web” and “Women Who Kick Ass: A New Generation of Heroines,” which features Fringe’s Anna Torv and V’s Elizabeth Mitchell.)

Here’s a look at 26 sexy-fierce female ass-kickers who’ve relied on biceps and brains to periodically kick-start geek culture.

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Seth MacFarlane on “Family Guy” movie: “it’s just a matter of when”

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane wants to bring his beloved and controversial Fox show to the big screen, telling students at UCLA on Wednesday that a theatrical version of the show will definitely happen.

“It’s just a matter of when,” MacFarlane said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “It’s hard to do that while you have the series going on at the same time; I think that’s why it took ‘The Simpsons’ 20 seasons to figure out how to do it.”

“Family Guy,” which is in its 11th season, has made MacFarlane one of the most successful writers in television. A writer, director, voice actor and animator – not to mention singer-of-standards and this year’s Oscar host – MacFarlane created that show, as well Fox shows “American Dad” and “The Cleveland Show.”

He also had been working on a reboot of “The Flintstones,” but that appears to be shelved for now.

MacFarlane then transformed into one of the film industry’s hottest commodities this summer thanks to the breakout success of “Ted,” the Universal comedy that has set a new box-office record for an original, R-rated comedy.

While Universal has every intent of making another “Ted,” MacFarlane said he also has developed the ideas for a “Family Guy” film.

“We do know what the ‘Family Guy’ movie will be,” he told the students. Drawing another comparison to “The Simpsons Movie,” he said his one criticism of the cinematic version of that iconic show was that the plot would have worked on TV.

He claimed his “Family Guy” idea “would be impossible to do on TV.”

The Hollywood Reporter wrote last year that there is a deal in place for a ‘Family Guy” movie, but MacFarlane’s representatives did not respond to a request for more information about the rights to the movie or MacFarlane’s plans.

While MacFarlane still spends a good deal of his time working on television projects, the prospect of a “Family Guy” movie raises two questions: Does he have to make “Ted” first? Does Fox have the rights to the movie?

Neither Universal nor Fox have returned requests for comment.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Adderall, a Drug of Increased Focus for N.F.L. Players

The first time Anthony Becht heard about Adderall, he was in the Tampa Bay locker room in 2006. A teammate who had a prescription for the drug shook his pill bottle at Becht.

“ ‘You’ve got to get some of these,’ ” Becht recalled the player saying. “I was like, ‘What the heck is that?’ He definitely needed it. He said it just locks you in, hones you in. He said, ‘When I have to take them, my focus is just raised up to another level.’ ”

Becht said he did not give Adderall another thought until 2009, when he was playing in Arizona and his fellow tight end Ben Patrick was suspended for testing positive for amphetamines. The drug he took, Patrick said, was Adderall. Becht asked Patrick why he took it, and Patrick told Becht, and reporters, that he had needed to stay awake for a long drive.

Those two conversations gave Becht, now a free agent, an early glimpse at a problem that is confounding the N.F.L. this season. Players are taking Adderall, a medication widely prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, whether they need it or not, and are failing drug tests because of it. And that is almost certainly contributing to a most-troubling result: a record-setting year for N.F.L. drug suspensions.

According to N.F.L. figures, 21 suspensions were announced this calendar year because of failed tests for performance-enhancing drugs, including amphetamines like Adderall. That is a 75 percent increase over the 12 suspensions announced in 2011 and, with a month to go in 2012, it is the most in a year since suspensions for performance-enhancing drugs began in 1989.

At least seven of the players suspended this year have been linked in news media reports to Adderall or have publicly blamed the drug, which acts as a strong stimulant in those without A.D.H.D. The most recent examples were Tampa Bay cornerback Eric Wright and New England defensive lineman Jermaine Cunningham last week.

The N.F.L. is forbidden under the terms of the drug-testing agreement with the players union from announcing what substance players have tested positive for — the urine test does not distinguish among types of amphetamines — and there is some suspicion that at least a few players may claim they took Adderall instead of admitting to steroid use, which carries a far greater stigma. But Adolpho Birch, who oversees drug testing as the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for law and labor, said last week that failed tests for amphetamines were up this year, although he did not provide any specifics. The increase in Adderall use probably accounts for a large part of the overall increase in failed tests.

“If nothing else it probably reflects an uptick in the use of amphetamine and amphetamine-related substances throughout society,” Birch said. “It’s not a secret that it’s a societal trend, and I think we’re starting to see some of the effects of that trend throughout our league.”

Amphetamines have long been used by athletes to provide a boost — think of the stories of “greenies” in baseball clubhouses decades ago. That Adderall use and abuse has made its way to the N.F.L. surprises few, because A.D.H.D. diagnoses and the use of medication to control it have sharply increased in recent years.

According to Dr. Lenard Adler, who runs the adult A.D.H.D. program at New York University Langone Medical Center, 4.4 percent of adults in the general population have the disorder, of which an estimated two-thirds are men. Birch said the number of exemptions the N.F.L. has granted for players who need treatment for A.D.H.D. is “almost certainly fewer” than 4.4 percent of those in the league.

The rates of those with the disorder fall as people get older; it is far more prevalent in children and adolescents. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using input from parents, found that as of 2007, about 9.5 percent or 5.4 million children from ages 4 to 17 had A.D.H.D. at some point. That was an increase of 22 percent from 2003. Boys (13.2 percent) were more likely to have the disorder than girls (5.6 percent).

Of children who currently have A.D.H.D., 66.3 percent are receiving medication, with boys 2.8 times more likely to receive medication. Those 11 to 17 years old are more likely to receive medication than younger children.

But Adderall, categorized by the Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule II controlled substance because it is particularly addictive, is also used by college students and even some high school students to provide extra energy and concentration for studying or as a party drug to ward off fatigue.

Dr. Leah Lagos, a New York sports psychologist who has worked with college and professional athletes, said she had seen patients who have used Adderall. She said she believed the rise in its use by professional athletes mimicked the use by college students. Just a few years ago, she said, it was estimated that 1 in 10 college students was abusing stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin. That estimate, Lagos said, has almost doubled.

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Student scores may be used in LAUSD teacher ratings

After months of tense negotiations, leaders of the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union have tentatively agreed to use student test scores to evaluate instructors for the first time, officials announced Friday.

Under the breakthrough agreement, the nation's second-largest school district would join Chicago and a growing number of other cities in using test scores as one measure of how much teachers help their students progress academically in a year.

Alarm over low student performance, especially in impoverished and minority communities, has prompted the Obama administration and others to press school districts nationwide to craft better ways to identify struggling teachers for improvement.

The Los Angeles pact proposes to do that using a unique mix of individual and schoolwide testing data — including state standardized test scores, high school exit exams and district assessments, along with rates of attendance, graduation and suspensions.

But the tentative agreement leaves unanswered the most controversial question: how much to count student test scores in measuring teacher effectiveness. The school district and the union agreed only that the test scores would not be "sole, primary or controlling factors" in a teacher's final evaluation.

"It is crystal clear that what we're doing is historic and very positive," said L.A. Supt. John Deasy, who has fought to use student test scores in teacher performance reviews since taking the district's helm nearly two years ago. "This will help develop the skills of the teaching profession and hold us accountable for student achievement."

Members of United Teachers Los Angeles, however, still need to ratify the agreement. Many teachers have long opposed using test scores in their evaluations, saying test scores are unreliable measures of teacher ability.

The union characterized the agreement as a "limited" response to a Dec. 4 court-ordered deadline to show that test scores are being used in evaluations and said negotiations were continuing for future academic years. The deadline was imposed by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant, who ruled this year that state law requires L.A. Unified to use test scores in teacher performance reviews.

In a statement, the teachers union also emphasized that the agreement rejected the use of the district's method of measuring student academic progress for individual instructors. That measure, called Academic Growth Over Time, uses a mathematical formula to estimate how much a teacher helps students' performance, based on state test scores and controlling for such outside factors as income and race. Under the agreement, however, schoolwide scores using this method, also known as a value-added system, will be used.

For individual teachers, the agreement proposes to use raw state standardized test score data. Warren Fletcher, teachers union president, said that data give teachers more useful information about student performance on specific skills.

Critics of using test scores in teacher reviews praised Los Angeles' proposed new system, saying it uses a wide array of data to determine a teacher's effect on student learning.

Deasy said he will be developing guidelines for administrators on how to use the mix of data in teacher reviews and has said in the past that test scores should not count for more than 25% of the final rating.

"This is a complex agreement and possibly the most sophisticated evaluation agreement that I have seen," said Diane Ravitch, an educational historian and vocal critic of the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. "It assures that test scores will not be overused, will not be assigned an arbitrary and inappropriate weight, will not be the sole or primary determinant of a teacher's evaluation."

Teacher Brent Smiley at Lawrence Middle School in Chatsworth said: "I will vote yes. I have no doubt that my union leaders negotiated the best they could, given the adverse set of circumstances they faced."

Labor-relations expert Charles Kerchner called the agreement "a shotgun wedding," but added, "I think it's unabashed good news."

He said it's notable that value-added measures and test scores have been accepted in some form by the teachers union.

"UTLA has moved beyond a strategy of just saying no to a strategy of trying to craft a useful agreement," said Kerchner, a professor at Claremont Graduate University.

The district is currently developing a new evaluation system that uses Academic Growth Over Time — along with a more rigorous classroom observation process, student and parent feedback and a teacher's contributions to the school community. The new observations were tested last year on a voluntary basis with about 450 teachers and 320 administrators; this year, every principal and one volunteer teacher at each of the district's 1,200 schools are expected to be trained.

The teachers union has filed an unfair labor charge against the district, arguing that the system is being unilaterally imposed without required negotiations.

Some teachers who have participated in the new observation process say it offers more specific guidance on how they can improve. Other educators — teachers and administrators alike — complain that it is too time-consuming.

The tentative agreement, acknowledging the extra time the new evaluations would take, would extend the time between evaluations from two to as long as five years for teachers with 10 or more years of experience.

Bill Lucia of EdVoice, the Sacramento-based educational advocacy group that brought the lawsuit, said he was "cautiously optimistic."

But he expressed dismay that the union did not reach agreement a few weeks earlier, which he said would have given L.A. Unified a shot at a $40-million federal grant. The district applied for the Race to the Top grant without the required teacher union support and was eliminated from the competition this week.

Negotiations over the tentative pact, however, nearly fell apart. Earlier this week, the union pulled away from the deal on the table, L.A. Unified officials said. And the district discussed holding a Monday emergency school-board meeting to craft a formal response to the court order in anticipation that no deal would be reached. The options included adopting an evaluation system without the union's consent.

Some members of the Board of Education, who also will need to approve the pact, praised the agreement for taking student growth and achievement into account but gauging this growth through multiple measures. Steve Zimmer said that, just as important, this milestone was achieved through negotiation.

School board President Monica Garcia praised the tentative deal as "absolutely, by all accounts, better than what we have today."

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

howard.blume@latimes.com

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