Study questions kidney cancer treatment in elderly

In a stunning example of when treatment might be worse than the disease, a large review of Medicare records finds that older people with small kidney tumors were much less likely to die over the next five years if doctors monitored them instead of operating right away.

Even though nearly all of these tumors turned out to be cancer, they rarely proved fatal. And surgery roughly doubled patients' risk of developing heart problems or dying of other causes, doctors found.

After five years, 24 percent of those who had surgery had died, compared to only 13 percent of those who chose monitoring. Just 3 percent of people in each group died of kidney cancer.

The study only involved people 66 and older, but half of all kidney cancers occur in this age group. Younger people with longer life expectancies should still be offered surgery, doctors stressed.

The study also was observational — not an experiment where some people were given surgery and others were monitored, so it cannot prove which approach is best. Yet it offers a real-world look at how more than 7,000 Medicare patients with kidney tumors fared. Surgery is the standard treatment now.

"I think it should change care" and that older patients should be told "that they don't necessarily need to have the kidney tumor removed," said Dr. William Huang of New York University Langone Medical Center. "If the treatment doesn't improve cancer outcomes, then we should consider leaving them alone."

He led the study and will give results at a medical meeting in Orlando, Fla., later this week. The research was discussed Tuesday in a telephone news conference sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and two other cancer groups.

In the United States, about 65,000 new cases of kidney cancer and 13,700 deaths from the disease are expected this year. Two-thirds of cases are diagnosed at the local stage, when five-year survival is more than 90 percent.

However, most kidney tumors these days are found not because they cause symptoms, but are spotted by accident when people are having an X-ray or other imaging test for something else, like back trouble or chest pain.

Cancer experts increasingly question the need to treat certain slow-growing cancers that are not causing symptoms — prostate cancer in particular. Researchers wanted to know how life-threatening small kidney tumors were, especially in older people most likely to suffer complications from surgery.

They used federal cancer registries and Medicare records from 2000 to 2007 to find 8,317 people 66 and older with kidney tumors less than 1.5 inches wide.

Cancer was confirmed in 7,148 of them. About three-quarters of them had surgery and the rest chose to be monitored with periodic imaging tests.

After five years, 1,536 had died, including 191 of kidney cancer. For every 100 patients who chose monitoring, 11 more were alive at the five-year mark compared to the surgery group. Only 6 percent of those who chose monitoring eventually had surgery.

Furthermore, 27 percent of the surgery group but only 13 percent of the monitoring group developed a cardiovascular problem such as a heart attack, heart disease or stroke. These problems were more likely if doctors removed the entire kidney instead of just a part of it.

The results may help doctors persuade more patients to give monitoring a chance, said a cancer specialist with no role in the research, Dr. Bruce Roth of Washington University in St. Louis.

Some patients with any abnormality "can't sleep at night until something's done about it," he said. Doctors need to say, "We're not sticking our head in the sand, we're going to follow this" and can operate if it gets worse.

One of Huang's patients — 81-year-old Rhona Landorf, who lives in New York City — needed little persuasion.

"I was very happy not to have to be operated on," she said. "He said it's very slow growing and that having an operation would be worse for me than the cancer."

Landorf said her father had been a doctor, and she trusts her doctors' advice. Does she think about her tumor? "Not at all," she said.

___

Online:

Kidney cancer info: http://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/kidney-cancer

and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/kidney

Study: http://gucasym.org

___

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

Read More..

Deaths of endangered fish curtail water exports

In a step that has become more routine over the last decade, water exports to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California have been reduced to avoid killing endangered delta smelt.

State and federal water managers said Tuesday that early winter pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has been curtailed because too many of the native fish were dying at the delta's export pumps.

At this point it is difficult to say what effect the pumping cutbacks could have on water deliveries. December storms have left crucial Northern California reservoirs with slightly more water than usual for this time of year, although after a dry January, statewide snowpack is below normal for the date.

Proponents of a controversial proposal to change the way water supplies are conveyed through the delta immediately cited the export reductions, arguing that the cuts could have been avoided with the new system.

"This is all too familiar a story," said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources. "This conflict will continue to play out year after year until we make fundamental changes in the way we manage the delta."

State and federal water officials — along with the biggest urban water and irrigation districts in California — are advocating the construction of two massive tunnels that would carry supplies beneath the delta to southbound aqueducts from a new diversion point on the Sacramento River. That would mean less water is pumped directly from the south delta, avoiding harm to the smelt and, backers hope, the accompanying pumping restrictions.

Cowin said computer modeling shows an additional 700,000 acre-feet of water could have been sent south and to the Bay Area since Nov. 1 if the new diversion had been in place, enough to irrigate more than 200,000 acres or supply 1.4 million homes.

Opponents of that plan warn that taking large volumes of water from the Sacramento River could create problems for another fish, the endangered salmon that migrate up the river to their spawning grounds. Delta farmers also worry that with less fresh water flowing through the delta, their irrigation supplies could grow saltier, hurting crops.

State and federal officials also acknowledge that even with the tunnel system, they will not be able to guarantee a certain level of water deliveries to farms and cities south of the delta.

It was probably the big December storms that drew smelt in the direction of the pumps. The finger-sized fish likes muddy water. When winter rains flush runoff into the delta, the increased turbidity acts as a signal to the smelt to swim to the interior — closer to the pumps — as they prepare to spawn.

At the same time state officials were discussing the water cutbacks, Southern California environmentalists who oppose the $14-billion tunnel project announced an advertising campaign in which they portray the proposal as a costly boondoggle that would drive up water rates.

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

Read More..

Militant Threats Test Pentagon’s Role in Africa

Pool photo by

Gen. William E. Ward, left, departed as Africa Command leader under a cloud, succeeded by Gen. Carter F. Ham in 2011.

NIAMEY, Niger — Created five years ago to focus on training the armed forces of dozens of African nations and strengthening social, political and economic programs, the Pentagon’s Africa Command now finds itself on a more urgent mission: confronting a new generation of Islamist militants who are testing the United States’ resolve to fight terrorism without being drawn into a major conflict.

Some military and Congressional critics question whether the command is up to dealing with its dual mission, and some influential lawmakers warn that Africom, with its headquarters in Germany, is understaffed and poorly financed for challenges that include countering Al Qaeda’s fighters in Mali, Islamic extremists in Libya, drug traffickers in West Africa and armed rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The leader of the command, Gen. Carter F. Ham, must straddle the new and the old missions, as he demonstrated one day last month when he flew to the northern reaches of this largely desert nation to watch United States troops train Niger’s fledgling border corps in basic skills to help combat Al Qaeda’s branch in North and West Africa. Then, within hours, he was back here in the capital for an urgent secure phone call from Washington to weigh what kind of advanced military support or surveillance the Pentagon could provide a French-led operation to blunt an Islamist offensive in neighboring Mali.

“The command is searching to find the right balance between the press of current military operations and the vision of longer-term engagement, helping Africans develop greater capacity for themselves,” said Christopher W. Dell, a former United States ambassador to Angola and Zimbabwe, who is General Ham’s deputy for civil-military activities.

Africom has an annual budget of about $300 million and 2,000 employees worldwide — an operation that Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, calls “an ‘economy of force’ effort.” By comparison, the military’s Central Command, which oversees Afghanistan and the Middle East, has a yearly budget of about $800 million and 5,000 employees.

With no assigned forces in the region except for those at a base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, the command was caught napping last Sept. 11, critics contend, when it had no military forces poised to respond to the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. An independent review of the attack concluded that events had unfolded too quickly for any American forces to make a difference.

Still, controversy has dogged the command since its creation in 2008. Initial statements about its mission and scope of activity alarmed some African leaders and State Department officials, who feared that the Pentagon was trying to militarize diplomacy and development on the continent. These concerns led the command to set up its headquarters in Stuttgart.

The command’s first boss, Gen. William E. Ward, left two years ago under a cloud. Pentagon investigators later found that General Ward had lavishly overspent on official trips. He was ordered to repay the government $82,000 and was forced to retire as a lieutenant general, a one-rank demotion.

Enter General Ham, who turns 61 this week and is the rare Army officer to have risen from private to four-star commander in a 40-year career. He has led troops in northern Iraq, overseen military operations at the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and helped lead reviews into the Defense Department’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the fatal shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.

His combat mettle was tested almost immediately. Within days of assuming command in March 2011, General Ham was leading the initial phase of the Libya air campaign, for which he earned high marks from his civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the White House.

But the general, who will retire this spring, acknowledged in one of three interviews during his recent trip to Niger that the command’s ability to address the terrorist threat in Africa had been “mixed.”

His grades? “Pretty good” in Somalia, where the Shabab, Islamist militants, have been dealt several setbacks in the past year. “Less good” in Libya, Mali and other parts of North and West Africa, where the United States is hunting Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader who claimed responsibility for the attack on a gas field in Algeria last month. And lacking in Nigeria, where an Islamist extremist group, Boko Haram, poses a major threat.

“Frankly, the intelligence community has not focused a lot on this part of the world,” General Ham said. “But we are starting to, out of necessity.”

Read More..

It's a Girl for John Cho

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/11/2013 at 06:30 PM ET

Paul Drinkwater/NBC

Surprise: Actor John Cho is a dad again!

The Go On star and his wife welcomed a daughter recently, Cho’s rep confirms to PEOPLE exclusively.

Baby girl is the second child for the couple, who are also parents to a son. No further details are available.

Cho currently stars alongside Jason Bateman in Identity Thief and will reprise his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek Into Darkness in May.

He is also well known for his roles in American Pie and the Harold and Kumar films.

– Anya Leon with reporting by Julie Jordan

Read More..

Pope shows lifetime jobs aren't always for life

The world seems surprised that an 85-year-old globe-trotting pope who just started tweeting wants to resign, but should it be? Maybe what should be surprising is that more leaders his age do not, considering the toll aging takes on bodies and minds amid a culture of constant communication and change.

There may be more behind the story of why Pope Benedict XVI decided to leave a job normally held for life. But the pontiff made it about age. He said the job called for "both strength of mind and body" and said his was deteriorating. He spoke of "today's world, subject to so many rapid changes," implying a difficulty keeping up despite his recent debut on Twitter.

"This seemed to me a very brave, courageous decision," especially because older people often don't recognize their own decline, said Dr. Seth Landefeld, an expert on aging and chairman of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Age has driven many leaders from jobs that used to be for life — Supreme Court justices, monarchs and other heads of state. As lifetimes expand, the woes of old age are catching up with more in seats of power. Some are choosing to step down rather than suffer long declines and disabilities as the pope's last predecessor did.

Since 1955, only one U.S. Supreme Court justice — Chief Justice William Rehnquist — has died in office. Twenty-one others chose to retire, the most recent being John Paul Stevens, who stepped down in 2010 at age 90.

When Thurgood Marshall stepped down in 1991 at the age of 82, citing health reasons, the Supreme Court justice's answer was blunt: "What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and falling apart."

One in 5 U.S. senators is 70 or older, and some have retired rather than seek new terms, such as Hawaii's Daniel Akaka, who left office in January at age 88.

The Netherlands' Queen Beatrix, who just turned 75, recently said she will pass the crown to a son and put the country "in the hands of a new generation."

In Germany, where the pope was born, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 58, said the pope's decision that he was no longer fit for the job "earns my very highest respect."

"In our time of ever-lengthening life, many people will be able to understand how the pope as well has to deal with the burdens of aging," she told reporters in Berlin.

Experts on aging agreed.

"People's mental capacities in their 80s and 90s aren't what they were in their 40s and 50s. Their short-term memory is often not as good, their ability to think quickly on their feet, to execute decisions is often not as good," Landefeld said. Change is tougher to handle with age, and leaders like popes and presidents face "extraordinary demands that would tax anybody's physical and mental stamina."

Dr. Barbara Messinger-Rapport, geriatrics chief at the Cleveland Clinic, noted that half of people 85 and older in developed countries have some dementia, usually Alzheimer's. Even without such a disease, "it takes longer to make decisions, it takes longer to learn new things," she said.

But that's far from universal, said Dr. Thomas Perls, an expert on aging at Boston University and director of the New England Centenarians Study.

"Usually a man who is entirely healthy in his early 80s has demonstrated his survival prowess" and can live much longer, he said. People of privilege have better odds because they have access to good food and health care, and tend to lead clean lives.

"Even in the 1500s and 1600s there were popes in their 80s. It's remarkable. That would be today's centenarians," Perls said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain turned 71 while running for president in 2007. Had he won, he would have been the oldest person elected to a first term as president. Ronald Reagan was days away from turning 70 when he started his first term as president in 1981; he won re-election in 1984. Vice President Joe Biden just turned 70.

In the U.S. Senate, where seniority is rewarded and revered, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond didn't retire until age 100 in 2002. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia was the longest-serving senator when he died in office at 92 in 2010.

Now the oldest U.S. senator is 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. The oldest congressman is Ralph Hall of Texas who turns 90 in May.

The legendary Alan Greenspan was about to turn 80 when he retired as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006; he still works as a consultant.

Elsewhere around the world, Cuba's Fidel Castro — one of the world's longest serving heads of state — stepped down in 2006 at age 79 due to an intestinal illness that nearly killed him, handing power to his younger brother Raul. But the island is an example of aged leaders pushing on well into their dotage. Raul Castro now is 81 and his two top lieutenants are also octogenarians. Later this month, he is expected to be named to a new, five-year term as president.

Other leaders who are still working:

—England's Queen Elizabeth, 86.

—Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, 88.

—Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, emir of Kuwait, 83.

—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, 79.

__

Associated Press writers Paul Haven in Havana, Cuba; David Rising in Berlin; Seth Borenstein, Mark Sherman and Matt Yancey in Washington, and researcher Judy Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.

___

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

Read More..

Boy with rifle, guns threatened to kill 23 classmates, police say

A 12-year-old student in northern San Diego County has been admitted to a hospital for "evaluation and treatment" after being taken into custody on suspicion of sending an email threatening to kill a teacher and 23 students, the Sheriff's Department said.

Detectives served a search warrant Saturday night at the student's home and seized several computers and "numerous" rifles and handguns, the Sheriff's Department said. The student was taken into custody as the warrant was being served.

The student is suspected of sending a threatening email Friday night to an administrator at Twin Peaks Middle School in Poway, mentioning 3,000 rounds of ammunition and threatening to shoot to kill a teacher and 23 students.

"There is no evidence to suggest anyone else was involved in making the threats and it is believed to be an isolated incident," according to Sgt. Dave Ross.

A task force of detectives and computer specialists from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies had tracked the email to the student's home, the Sheriff's Department said.

The case will be turned over to the San Diego County district attorney's office for evaluation.

ALSO:

Dorner manhunt: Search resumes in Big Bear mountains

Dorner manhunt: Officers opened fire on mother, daughter

Dorner had history of complaints against fellow LAPD officers

--Tony Perry in San Diego

Read More..

Syrian War Closes In on the Heart of Damascus

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Fighters from the Free Syrian Army's Tahrir al Sham brigade look at a Syrian Army base in the Arabeen neighborhood of Damascus.

DAMASCUS, Syria — Unkempt government soldiers, some appearing drunk, have been deployed near a rebel-held railway station in the southern reaches of this tense capital. Office workers on 29th of May Street, in the heart of the city, tell of huddling at their desks, trapped inside for hours by gun battles that sound alarmingly close.

Soldiers have swept through city neighborhoods, making arrests ahead of a threatened rebel advance downtown, even as opposition fighters edge past the city limits, carrying mortars and shelling security buildings. Fighter jets that pounded the suburbs for months have begun to strike Jobar, an outlying neighborhood of Damascus proper, creating the disturbing spectacle of a government’s bombing its own capital.

On Sunday, the government sent tanks there to battle rebels for control of a key ring road.

In this war of murky battlefield reports, it is hard to know whether the rebels’ recent forays past some of the capital’s circle of defenses — in an operation that they have, perhaps immodestly, named the “Battle of Armageddon” — will lead to more lasting gains than earlier offensives did. But travels along the city’s battlefronts in recent days made clear that new lines, psychological as much as geographical, had been crossed.

“I didn’t see my family for more than a year,” a government soldier from a distant province said in a rare outpouring of candor. He was checking drivers’ identifications near the railway station at a checkpoint where hundreds of soldiers arrived last week with tanks and other armored vehicles.

“I am tired and haven’t slept well for a week,” he said, confiding in a traveler who happened to be from his hometown. “I have one wish — to see my family and have a long, long sleep. Then I don’t care if I die.”

For months, this ancient city has been hunched in a defensive crouch as fighting raged in suburbs that curve around the city’s south and east. On the western edge of the city, the palace of the embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, sits on a steep, well-defended ridge.

In between, Damascus, with its walled Old City, grand diagonal avenues and crowded working-class districts, has remained the eye of the storm. People keep going to work, even as electric service grows sporadic and groceries dwindle, even as the road to the airport is often cut off by fighting outside the city, and even as smoke from artillery and airstrikes in suburbs becomes a regular feature on the horizon.

But after rebels took the railway station 10 days ago in a city district called Qadam and attacked Abassiyeen Square on an approach to the city center on Wednesday, a new level of alarm and disorder has suffused the city. Rebels have pushed farther into the capital than at any point since July, when they briefly held part of a southern neighborhood.

Near the Qadam railway station last week, many of the government soldiers, their hair and beards untrimmed, wore disheveled or dirty uniforms and smelled as if they had not had showers in a long time. Some soldiers and security officers even appeared drunk, walking unsteadily with their weapons askew — a shocking sight in Syria, where regimented security forces and smartly uniformed officers have long been presented as a symbol of national pride.

The deployment appeared aimed at stopping the rebels from advancing past Qadam, either across the city’s ring road and toward the downtown or to suburbs to the east to close a gap in the opposition’s front line.

But even stationed here in Damascus, the heart of the government’s power, the soldier at the checkpoint — who was steady on his feet — said he felt vulnerable.

“It is very scary to spend a night and you expect to be shot or slaughtered at any moment,” he said. “We spend our nights counting the minutes until daytime.”

The government has hit back hard, striking Qadam with artillery and airstrikes. It has also made pre-emptive arrests in Midan, the neighboring district, closer to downtown, where rebels gained a temporary foothold in July and which they said was their next target.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, Lebanon.

Read More..

Adele: These Days, I'm Only Singing Lullabies

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/10/2013 at 09:31 PM ET

Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Adele may have started her day off at dawn, but the early morning wake up call came courtesy of her son — not her glam squad.

“I’ve been up since 6 a.m. so I’m quite tired, but it’s nice,” Adele, who won best pop solo performance for her hit, “Set Fire to the Rain,” told reporters backstage at the Grammy Awards Sunday.

“I haven’t been as stressed out,” she said. “In life you have to prioritize what you stress about and worry about when you have a child.”

And just as her primping for the big show took a backseat to baby boy — reportedly named Angelo — Adele admits any upcoming albums are coming along at a much more slower pace than usual.

“I’ve been having lots of meetings and I’ve been out of the loop really,” the new mom, who arrived in Los Angeles before the Golden Globes, explains. “I’ve been singing my baby nursery rhymes so I don’t really know what’s cool and what’s not.”

– Anya Leon with reporting by Melody Chiu

Read More..

After early start, worst of flu season may be over

NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.

The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.

The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.

For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.

Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.

"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.

In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.

Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications

But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.

So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.

Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.

The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.

According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.

Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

___

Online:

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

Read More..

Venice program gives the homeless a place to keep belongings

Bone-chilling fog swirled along Venice Beach one recent afternoon when Robert and Nani Valencia and Ana Maria Reyes stopped by the long, metal storage container beside the sand.

After they showed IDs and claim checks, a volunteer wheeled out two blue recycling bins in which the three recent arrivals from Texas had stashed their suitcases. They pulled out toiletries, sweaters and blankets and stuffed them into reusable grocery bags.

"It makes us feel a lot better to store our things here," said Nani Valencia, 37. "When you have all your [suitcases] with you, people treat you like you have rabies."

With bags in hand, she, her husband and his 64-year-old mother joined dozens of others waiting for a bus to take them to a shelter. The three would rest, eat dinner and have a shower that night at the West Los Angeles National Guard Armory on Federal Avenue; most of their meager possessions would remain locked up at the beach.

In the wake of court rulings that bar cities from randomly seizing and destroying homeless people's property, communities such as Venice are seeking long-term storage options to keep their streets and alleys clean.

"We're not going to let [homeless people] keep items on the beach anymore," said Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who represents Venice. "We're going to bag and tag [them]. We want to make it inconvenient but within the law."

Contributing to the problem was a rule governing use of the city's Westside winter shelter.

Homeless individuals who choose to sleep at the shelter are allowed to take with them only the items they can carry on their laps. And some were reluctant to leave their possessions for fear they would be stolen or seized. That meant many of the shelter's 160 beds went unused.

Rosendahl and a local social services agency — Venice Community Housing Corp. — launched a pilot program late last month called Check-in Storage. The initiative allows individuals to store personal belongings in the container for a week at a time and retrieve them between 3 and 5 p.m. daily. (The program is slated to end March 1, when the shelter closes.)

To publicize the service, volunteers and social service agencies distributed bright orange fliers: "If your stuff will fit into a big trash can," they read, "bring it to our storage container." The flier noted that the program would not accept medicine, identification, weapons or "anything illegal."

The storage option, said Steve Clare, executive director of Venice Community Housing, is modeled on successful programs in downtown L.A.'s skid row and cities including San Francisco, San Diego and Costa Mesa.

In September, a federal appeals court ruled in a lawsuit filed against the city of Los Angeles that seizing and destroying property left temporarily unattended on public sidewalks was unconstitutional. Personal possessions may be removed only if the items pose an immediate threat to public safety or health or constitute criminal evidence, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found.

Even then, the city must notify owners where they can pick up their property.

On the afternoon the Valencias and Reyes retrieved some items, about half of the 25 bins were in use. Also there for safekeeping was a Schwinn bicycle. Its owner, Love Sha Un of Nigeria, came by to check on his $215 purchase and thank the volunteers. Without the storage option, he said, "it might have gone missing."

Not everyone is pleased with the program.

Mark Ryavec, a Venice resident who lobbied against overnight parking by RV dwellers, said the city should have sought a permit from the California Coastal Commission before plopping a storage container at the beach. Marc Saltzberg, vice president of the Venice Neighborhood Council, said the program was implemented without a public process that would have enabled residents and other interested parties to weigh in.

Rosendahl said he hoped to notify street denizens of a new location by the end of February and have a new program up and running by March. He said he was working with the Los Angeles city attorney's office to ensure that any seizures of items would be done legally.

martha.groves@latimes.com

Read More..