Kris Humphries: Why He Won't Divorce Kim Kardashian















02/07/2013 at 07:00 PM EST



Despite Kim Kardashian's pressing for a divorce, Kris Humphries deeply believes their 72-day marriage should be annulled and he won't give up the fight, a source tells PEOPLE.

"Kris only wants an annulment," says the source close to Humphries. "He never wanted to be married more than once and he feels like she cheated him out of the chance to have a real, loving marriage."

The Brooklyn Nets forward is also not sympathetic to Kardashian's pleas to end the battle for the sake of the baby she's having with boyfriend Kanye West, adds the source.

"He feels that even if she's pregnant, she still has to deal with the mess she made," the source says. "He thinks their entire marriage was a fraud, and he's not going to just give up because of the situation."

Kardashian, who says she's due to deliver in early July, is asking a judge to start a divorce trial as soon as possible or at the very least to have their marriage legally dissolved while they litigate other issues.

"There was no fraud on my part," she says in papers filed last month in L.A. Superior Court. "I wish this issue to be tried immediately so that this false claim can be put to rest and I can move on with my life."

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Southern diet, fried foods, may raise stroke risk


Deep-fried foods may be causing trouble in the Deep South. People whose diets are heavy on them and sugary drinks like sweet tea and soda were more likely to suffer a stroke, a new study finds.


It's the first big look at diet and strokes, and researchers say it might help explain why blacks in the Southeast — the nation's "stroke belt" — suffer more of them.


Blacks were five times more likely than whites to have the Southern dietary pattern linked with the highest stroke risk. And blacks and whites who live in the South were more likely to eat this way than people in other parts of the country were. Diet might explain as much as two-thirds of the excess stroke risk seen in blacks versus whites, researchers concluded.


"We're talking about fried foods, french fries, hamburgers, processed meats, hot dogs," bacon, ham, liver, gizzards and sugary drinks, said the study's leader, Suzanne Judd of the University of Alabama in Birmingham.


People who ate about six meals a week featuring these sorts of foods had a 41 percent higher stroke risk than people who ate that way about once a month, researchers found.


In contrast, people whose diets were high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish had a 29 percent lower stroke risk.


"It's a very big difference," Judd said. "The message for people in the middle is there's a graded risk" — the likelihood of suffering a stroke rises in proportion to each Southern meal in a week.


Results were reported Thursday at an American Stroke Association conference in Honolulu.


The federally funded study was launched in 2002 to explore regional variations in stroke risks and reasons for them. More than 20,000 people 45 or older — half of them black — from all 48 mainland states filled out food surveys and were sorted into one of five diet styles:


Southern: Fried foods, processed meats (lunchmeat, jerky), red meat, eggs, sweet drinks and whole milk.


—Convenience: Mexican and Chinese food, pizza, pasta.


—Plant-based: Fruits, vegetables, juice, cereal, fish, poultry, yogurt, nuts and whole-grain bread.


—Sweets: Added fats, breads, chocolate, desserts, sweet breakfast foods.


—Alcohol: Beer, wine, liquor, green leafy vegetables, salad dressings, nuts and seeds, coffee.


"They're not mutually exclusive" — for example, hamburgers fall into both convenience and Southern diets, Judd said. Each person got a score for each diet, depending on how many meals leaned that way.


Over more than five years of follow-up, nearly 500 strokes occurred. Researchers saw clear patterns with the Southern and plant-based diets; the other three didn't seem to affect stroke risk.


There were 138 strokes among the 4,977 who ate the most Southern food, compared to 109 strokes among the 5,156 people eating the least of it.


There were 122 strokes among the 5,076 who ate the most plant-based meals, compared to 135 strokes among the 5,056 people who seldom ate that way.


The trends held up after researchers took into account other factors such as age, income, smoking, education, exercise and total calories consumed.


Fried foods tend to be eaten with lots of salt, which raises blood pressure — a known stroke risk factor, Judd said. And sweet drinks can contribute to diabetes, the disease that celebrity chef Paula Deen — the queen of Southern cuisine — revealed she had a year ago.


The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, drugmaker Amgen Inc. and General Mills Inc. funded the study.


"This study does strongly suggest that food does have an influence and people should be trying to avoid these kinds of fatty foods and high sugar content," said an independent expert, Dr. Brian Silver, a Brown University neurologist and stroke center director at Rhode Island Hospital.


"I don't mean to sound like an ogre. I know when I'm in New Orleans I certainly enjoy the food there. But you don't have to make a regular habit of eating all this stuff."


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


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A cop's nightmare









As the scope of Christopher Jordan Dorner's ambitions sank in Thursday, thousands of police hunted him and waited, on edge, as he seemed determined to hunt them.


At departments across the Southland, bulletproof vests and riot gear were strapped on, shotguns readied. Motorcycle cops rode inside the protective metal of squad cars. The joking morning chatter had been replaced by grim quiet.


Their adversary was a linebacker-sized ex-cop with a multitude of firearms, military training and a seemingly bottomless grudge born when the LAPD fired him in 2009. Before dawn Thursday, authorities said, Dorner had already struck twice – grazing an LAPD officer's head with a bullet in Corona, and firing on two Riverside officers, killing one and wounding another.








Photos: A tense manhunt amid tragic deaths


It was the third homicide police have attributed to Dorner, 33, a former U.S. Navy reservist who is also accused of killing the daughter of a retired LAPD captain and her fiance in Irvine.


Police across California and Nevada launched an unprecedented manhunt involving hundreds of officers from dozens of agencies.


In a Facebook manifesto police say Dorner wrote, he ranted against LAPD personnel who he said fired him unfairly. He threatened revenge, "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against police and their families, saying he would stalk them "where you work, live, eat, and sleep."


Photos: A fugitive's life on Facebook


Authorities took him at his word.


"Of course he knows what he's doing — we trained him," Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said. "It is extremely worrisome and scary, especially to the police officers involved."


Police are guarding at least 40 people mentioned in his screed. Security was tight at LAPD headquarters, with officers stationed around the perimeter. Beck himself was being escorted by extra officers.


Police are struggling to discern a pattern in Dorner's recent movements. A burly man matching his description tried to steal a boat about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Southwestern Yacht Club in Point Loma, tying up the elderly owner, threatening him with a gun and saying he wanted to flee to Mexico. The thief gave up when a rope got tangled in the propeller. Dorner's old LAPD badge was found a short distance from the boat.


Three hours later, 100 miles away near an offramp of Interstate 15 in Corona, a resident recognized Dorner's Nissan Titan pickup truck and flagged down LAPD officers who were en route to guarding one of his would-be targets, police said.


After a brief chase, Dorner opened fire with a rifle, grazing one officer in the head with a bullet that came within inches of killing him. Police returned fire, but the gunman escaped.


Minutes later in nearby Riverside, two city police officers were attacked as they sat in their marked patrol car at a red light at the corner of Magnolia and Arlington avenues, police said. Bullets penetrated the windshield and struck both officers in the chest, killing a 34-year-old veteran and wounding the 27-year-old officer he was training. That officer is expected to survive.


It was a "cowardly ambush," said Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz.Police across the Inland Empire converged on Riverside to help with the manhunt, and officers held rifles and shotguns as they stood guard outside the police station.


"My opinion of the suspect is unprintable," Diaz said. "The manifesto I think speaks for itself as evidence enough of a depraved and abandoned mind and heart."


The names of the officers who were shot have not been released. There is fear Dorner may come after them again, or their families. At schools near the shootings, some wary parents kept their children home. Other schools were closed.


As news of the shootings crackled across police radios before dawn, the hunt for Dorner's Nissan Titan pickup truck intensified.


About 5:20 a.m. in Torrance, two women were delivering the Los Angeles Times from their blue pickup when LAPD officers spotted the truck.





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Lashkar-e-Taiba Founder Takes Less Militant Tone in Pakistan


Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times


“I move about like an ordinary person — that’s my style,” said Mr. Saeed. “My fate is in the hands of God, not America.”







LAHORE, Pakistan — Ten million dollars does not seem to buy much in this bustling Pakistani city. That is the sum the United States is offering for help in convicting Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, perhaps the country’s best-known jihadi leader. Yet Mr. Saeed lives an open, and apparently fearless, life in a middle-class neighborhood here.




“I move about like an ordinary person — that’s my style,” said Mr. Saeed, a burly 64-year-old, reclining on a bolster as he ate a chicken supper. “My fate is in the hands of God, not America.”


Mr. Saeed is the founder, and is still widely believed to be the true leader, of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group that carried out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, in which more than 160 people, including six Americans, were killed. The United Nations has placed him on a terrorist list and imposed sanctions on his group. But few believe he will face trial any time soon in a country that maintains a perilous ambiguity toward jihadi militancy, casting a benign eye on some groups, even as it battles others that attack the state.


Mr. Saeed’s very public life seems more than just an act of mocking defiance against the Obama administration and its bounty, analysts say. As American troops prepare to leave Afghanistan next door, Lashkar is at a crossroads, and its fighters’ next move — whether to focus on fighting the West, disarm and enter the political process, or return to battle in Kashmir — will depend largely on Mr. Saeed.


At his Lahore compound — a fortified house, office and mosque — Mr. Saeed is shielded not only by his supporters, burly men wielding Kalashnikovs outside his door, but also by the Pakistani state. On a recent evening, police officers screened visitors at a checkpoint near his house, while other officers patrolled an adjoining park, watching by floodlight for intruders.


His security seemingly ensured, Mr. Saeed has over the past year addressed large public meetings and appeared on prime-time television, and is now even giving interviews to Western news media outlets he had previously eschewed.


He says that he wants to correct “misperceptions.” During an interview with The New York Times at his home last week, Mr. Saeed insisted that his name had been cleared by the Pakistani courts. “Why does the United States not respect our judicial system?” he asked.


Still, he says he has nothing against Americans, and warmly described a visit he made to the United States in 1994, during which he spoke at Islamic centers in Houston, Chicago and Boston. “At that time, I liked it,” he said with a wry smile.


During that stretch, his group was focused on attacking Indian soldiers in the disputed territory of Kashmir — the fight that led the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate to help establish Lashkar-e-Taiba in 1989. But that battle died down over the past decade, and Lashkar began projecting itself through its charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which runs a tightly organized network of hospitals and schools across Pakistan.


The Mumbai attacks propelled Lashkar-e-Taiba to notoriety. But since then, Mr. Saeed’s provocations toward India have been largely verbal. Last week he stirred anger there by suggesting that Bollywood’s highest-paid actor, Shah Rukh Khan, a Muslim, should move to Pakistan. In the interview, he said he prized talking over fighting in Kashmir.


“The militant struggle helped grab the world’s attention,” he said. “But now the political movement is stronger, and it should be at the forefront of the struggle.”


Pakistan analysts caution that Mr. Saeed’s new openness is no random occurrence, however. “This isn’t out of the blue,” said Shamila N. Chaudhry, a former Obama administration official and an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm. “These guys don’t start talking publicly just like that.”


What it amounts to, however, may depend on events across the border in Afghanistan, where his groups have been increasingly active in recent years. In public, Mr. Saeed has been a leading light in the Defense of Pakistan Council, a coalition of right-wing groups that lobbied against the reopening of NATO supply routes through Pakistan last year. More quietly, Lashkar fighters have joined the battle, attacking Western troops and Indian diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan, intelligence officials say.


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Leeza Gibbons: I Count My Blessings - Not My Stretch Marks















02/06/2013 at 07:30 PM EST



When TV personality Leeza Gibbons married Steven Fenton in 2011, she joked that she was finally embracing "my inner cougar" – on their first date he was 38 and she was 51.

Now approaching their two-year anniversary in April, Gibbons has given a little more thought to the dynamics of their relationship and concludes that "the term cougar has so much energy around it that doesn't really fit."

"We laugh about it all the time," Gibbons, now 55, tells PEOPLE. (Fenton is a longtime talent manager and former president of the Board of Education in Beverly Hills.) "I always joke that emotionally and with regard to maturity, he's much older than I am."

The theme of starting over – "rebooting your life," as Gibbons calls it – runs through her new book, Take 2: Your Guide to Creating Happy Endings and New Beginnings.

She's had much to draw on from her own life: She's been divorced (this is her fourth marriage), had high-profile jobs at Entertainment Tonight, Extra and Leeza, and seen her kids grow older. She became an activist for family caregivers as her mother and grandmother both had Alzheimer's.

She writes about navigating change, basking in one's past, handling disappointments, "test-driving our dreams," learning how to say no and embracing the "Goddess Quotient" – how to be "a good girlfriend to yourself."

As for her own big new beginning, Gibbons remembers how just a couple of years ago she privately worried about the age difference.

"I did play out all those fears," she says. "I went through the list: I've got kids, there's a lot in my life that is big and complicated, he should be starting a young family. I went through all of it. I decided that I needed to count my blessings and not my stretch marks. I recognized that my work in the relationship was not to decide what he felt about it."

In the end, she says, "It was up to Steven to decide how to receive. He didn't need me to protect him from our age difference. Now two years later, there's so much respect and so much fun and so much faith in each other. We truly are our biggest supporters. That's really love"

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New whooping cough strain in US raises questions


NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers have discovered the first U.S. cases of whooping cough caused by a germ that may be resistant to the vaccine.


Health officials are looking into whether cases like the dozen found in Philadelphia might be one reason the nation just had its worst year for whooping cough in six decades. The new bug was previously reported in Japan, France and Finland.


"It's quite intriguing. It's the first time we've seen this here," said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


The U.S. cases are detailed in a brief report from the CDC and other researchers in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.


Whooping cough is a highly contagious disease that can strike people of any age but is most dangerous to children. It was once common, but cases in the U.S. dropped after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s.


An increase in illnesses in recent years has been partially blamed on a version of the vaccine used since the 1990s, which doesn't last as long. Last year, the CDC received reports of 41,880 cases, according to a preliminary count. That included 18 deaths.


The new study suggests that the new whooping cough strain may be why more people have been getting sick. Experts don't think it's more deadly, but the shots may not work as well against it.


In a small, soon-to-be published study, French researchers found the vaccine seemed to lower the risk of severe disease from the new strain in infants. But it didn't prevent illness completely, said Nicole Guiso of the Pasteur Institute, one of the researchers.


The new germ was first identified in France, where more extensive testing is routinely done for whooping cough. The strain now accounts for 14 percent of cases there, Guiso said.


In the United States, doctors usually rely on a rapid test to help make a diagnosis. The extra lab work isn't done often enough to give health officials a good idea how common the new type is here, experts said.


"We definitely need some more information about this before we can draw any conclusions," the CDC's Clark said.


The U.S. cases were found in the past two years in patients at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. One of the study's researchers works for a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which makes a version of the old whooping cough vaccine that is sold in other countries.


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JournaL: http://www.nejm.org


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Alan Jackson, whose bid for D.A.'s job failed, to leave office









Alan Jackson, a veteran Los Angeles County prosecutor whose bid to become district attorney ended in defeat in November, is leaving the district attorney's office to join a private, downtown firm that practices civil law.


Jackson, 47, said his last day in the office he sought to lead will be Feb. 15. He will pursue a career as a civil litigator with Palmer, Lombardi and Donohue, whose three partners were political supporters of his election campaign.


The move comes a month after Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, who beat him in the November runoff, reassigned Jackson from the prestigious major crimes division to a post where he is no longer in court but instead supervises prosecutors handling less high-profile cases. Jackson previously described the reassignment as a backward step for his career.





"There are more opportunities outside the office than inside at this point," Jackson said about his decision to leave.


Jackson, a deputy district attorney for 18 years, said the decision to leave was a difficult one. He said he plans to continue to play a role in the criminal justice system through his volunteer work with rehabilitation and education programs for youngsters, such as the San Gabriel Valley Conservation Corps.


Jackson was one of two prosecutors who won the conviction of famed music producer Phil Spector in 2009, marking the office's first victory in a celebrity murder trial in more than 40 years. He also won a conviction in the cold case murders of motor racing legend Mickey Thompson and his wife. In 2010, the county's bar association named him "prosecutor of the year."


Lacey, a registered Democrat who had the backing of incumbent Steve Cooley, beat Jackson, a registered Republican, in the Nov. 6 runoff by 55% to 45%. The nonpartisan campaign grew testy at times, with Jackson running a television commercial in which he referred to conflicting testimony Lacey gave at employee grievance hearings and accused her of being "dishonest under oath to protect her boss," Cooley.


Lacey's spokeswoman, Jean Guccione, thanked Jackson for his "excellent trial work" and wished him well.


Jackson said he had no regrets about running for the office but has no immediate plans to seek election in the future. He said he wished Lacey the best in her new job and harbors no hard feelings toward her.


"I gave my best effort and it's time to look in a different direction, but I don't close any doors," he said. "It was an amazing honor to run for D.A."


jack.leonard@latimes.com





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The Lede Blog: North Korean Propaganda Video Imagines a Brighter World, Without Manhattan

Last Updated, 3:52 p.m. When aliens strike, the climate goes berserk, the Russians invade, an asteroid threatens the Earth, New York City is often the first place to be destroyed. Hollywood has long used the city’s skyline to demonstrate what destruction looks like in action movies and video games. It seems as if North Korea, in seeking to show how an assault on America would play out, also has Manhattan squarely in its cross hairs.

A new propaganda video, posted Sunday on a Web site and a YouTube channel that serve as outlets for North Korean state media, shows a computer-animated representation of Lower Manhattan in flames as bombs rain down.

A video posted on a North Korean YouTube channel this week features images of Manhattan in flames.

As a blogger for Kotaku reports, the attack on Manhattan is lifted straight from the video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3,” and unfolds as a sweeping instrumental version of “We Are the World” plays in the background.

The copy of the video on YouTube was removed on Tuesday afternoon, after a copyright complaint from Activision, the video-game maker.

The cartoonish propaganda clip is one of a slew of recent videos that have been released by North Korea to promote the country’s missile program. Although the video might make some observers laugh, the tension over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and missile program is deadly serious.

The United Nations Security Council voted on Jan. 22 to tighten sanctions against North Korea as punishment for a Dec. 12 rocket launch. In response, the North vowed to expand its nuclear program “both quantitatively and qualitatively” and conduct a third nuclear test at a “higher level.”

As our colleagues David Sanger and William Broad reported after December’s successful missile launch by North Korea, there is no evidence that the country currently has technology that can threaten the continental United States – much less New York.

Administration officials said that while the launching was successful — and advanced the North’s missile program — it was hardly a threat to the United States, despite a warning by Robert M. Gates in 2011, when he was secretary of defense, that the North would have a missile capable of reaching the United States by 2016.

The video begins with an image of a man in blue pajamas sleeping. He recounts a dream in words that appear on the screen. “I had a dream last night, a dream of soaring into space on board our Unha-9 rocket,” the man says.

Unha, Korean for galaxy, is the name of the North Korean rocket series. The latest one, launched in December, was the Unha-3. So the dreamer is imagining a future, more advanced version of the rocket. After first showing footage of a real rocket launch, the video shifts to animation.

“Our Kwangmyongsong-21 spacecraft got separated from the rocket and traveled through space,” he says.

Once again, the dream appears to show the advances North Korea hopes to make in the years to come. In December, the satellite launched by the North was rocket number 3. By the time the series reaches 21 in the man’s dream, the rocket looks like the American space shuttle. The animation at that point shows the spacecraft circling the globe in search of its target, the music from “We are the World” building as it moves closer to the United States.

“I see stars and the green Earth. I also see a unified Korea.” These words appear on screen as the video moves from animation back to real footage of people waving flags, in particular, a “Korea-is-one” flag. The video shows a unified, not divided, Korean Peninsula in blue, a symbol of Korean reunification.

Then the video shows an overhead image of New York draped in the American flag. “Meanwhile, I see black smoke rising somewhere in America,” the dreaming man says. “It appears that the headquarters of evil, which has had a habit of using force and unilateralism and committing wars of aggression, is going up in flames it itself has ignited.”

At this point in the video, the computer-animated scene copied from “Call of Duty” show Lower Manhattan in flames.

“Just imagine riding in a Korean spaceship. One day, my dream will come true,” the narrator says. “No matter how hard the imperialists try to isolate and stifle us, they will not stop our people’s path toward our final victory of achieving a unified, strong and prosperous Korea.”

Robert Mackey contributed reporting.

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Kim Kardashian's Pregnancy Is No Reason to Speed Divorce, says Kris Humphries















02/05/2013 at 09:20 PM EST







Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian


Seth Browarnik/StarTraks


Kim Kardashian's baby is not even born yet and already is being drawn into mama's divorce.

Kardashian, carrying boyfriend Kanye West's child, has bristled at what she sees as stall tactics by estranged husband Kris Humphries to close the legal books on their 72-day marriage.

But Humphries's lawyer Marshall W. Waller writes that "what is really going on here is that an 'urgency' in the form of an apparently unplanned pregnancy" is being used by Kardashian as "an opportunity to gain a litigation advantage (to) prematurely set this matter for trial."

He adds parenthetically that the pregnancy is "something (Humphries) had nothing to do with."

Waller explains his reasoning for calling the pregnancy as unplanned: "Indeed, why would (she) plan to get pregnant in the midst of divorce proceedings?"

Kardashian, herself, recently addressed the timing.

"God brings you things at a time when you least expect it," she said last month. "I'm such a planner and this was just meant to be. What am I going to? Wait years to get a divorce? I'd love one. It's a process."

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Critics seek to delay NYC sugary drinks size limit


NEW YORK (AP) — Opponents are pressing to delay enforcement of the city's novel plan to crack down on supersized, sugary drinks, saying businesses shouldn't have to spend millions of dollars to comply until a court rules on whether the measure is legal.


With the rule set to take effect March 12, beverage industry, restaurant and other business groups have asked a judge to put it on hold at least until there's a ruling on their lawsuit seeking to block it altogether. The measure would bar many eateries from selling high-sugar drinks in cups or containers bigger than 16 ounces.


"It would be a tremendous waste of expense, time, and effort for our members to incur all of the harm and costs associated with the ban if this court decides that the ban is illegal," Chong Sik Le, president of the New York Korean-American Grocers Association, said in court papers filed Friday.


City lawyers are fighting the lawsuit and oppose postponing the restriction, which the city Board of Health approved in September. They said Tuesday they expect to prevail.


"The obesity epidemic kills nearly 6,000 New Yorkers each year. We see no reason to delay the Board of Health's reasonable and legal actions to combat this major, growing problem," Mark Muschenheim, a city attorney, said in a statement.


Another city lawyer, Thomas Merrill, has said officials believe businesses have had enough time to get ready for the new rule. He has noted that the city doesn't plan to seek fines until June.


Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials see the first-of-its-kind limit as a coup for public health. The city's obesity rate is rising, and studies have linked sugary drinks to weight gain, they note.


"This is the biggest step a city has taken to curb obesity," Bloomberg said when the measure passed.


Soda makers and other critics view the rule as an unwarranted intrusion into people's dietary choices and an unfair, uneven burden on business. The restriction won't apply at supermarkets and many convenience stores because the city doesn't regulate them.


While the dispute plays out in court, "the impacted businesses would like some more certainty on when and how they might need to adjust operations," American Beverage Industry spokesman Christopher Gindlesperger said Tuesday.


Those adjustments are expected to cost the association's members about $600,000 in labeling and other expenses for bottles, Vice President Mike Redman said in court papers. Reconfiguring "16-ounce" cups that are actually made slightly bigger, to leave room at the top, is expected to take cup manufacturers three months to a year and cost them anywhere from more than $100,000 to several millions of dollars, Foodservice Packaging Institute President Lynn Dyer said in court documents.


Movie theaters, meanwhile, are concerned because beverages account for more than 20 percent of their overall profits and about 98 percent of soda sales are in containers greater than 16 ounces, according to Robert Sunshine, executive director of the National Association of Theatre Owners of New York State.


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Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz


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