Courtney Lopez: Gia Thinks Our Dog Is Having a Baby

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/22/2013 at 01:00 PM ET

Denise Truscello/Wireimage

Mario Lopez is a man of his word.

Following a December wedding, the EXTRA host declared he and wife Courtney would get to work expanding their family immediately — and he wasn’t kidding.

In January, the couple discovered they were indeed expecting.

“Mario and I are so excited to add to our family! I found out a month ago and surprised Mario with the good news at breakfast,” Courtney tells PEOPLE.

But the proud parents aren’t the only ones gearing up for a new addition. Big sister Gia Francesca, 2, already has babies on the brain.

“Gia kind of understands that there is a baby in my belly,” Courtney notes. “She also told me our dog Julio has a baby in his belly — so who knows!”

Despite a bumpy start — “I had a rough couple of weeks when I first found out,” she shares — the mom-to-be is feeling better and already sporting quite the blossoming belly. “I am showing so much faster this time around,” she says.

And with warmer weather on the way, Courtney will be swathing her bump in floor-length frocks — but plans on foregoing a few fashion ensembles from her past.

“I love being pregnant in the summer! I live in maxi dresses,” she says. “Looking back at my first pregnancy, there are certain things that I wore and I have no idea why. I looked horrible and I won’t do that again!”

Originally from Pittsburgh, the expectant mama is thrilled to have settled down with her growing family on the West Coast. Her only wish? That her children will one day enjoy a winter wonderland.

“I don’t miss the East Coast at all — especially the humidity,” she explains. “The one thing I do want my children to experience from an early age is snow. There is nothing like being a kid playing in the snow.”

– Anya Leon

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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.

Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.

"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."

Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.

The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.

Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.

FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.

Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.

FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer

Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.

Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.

Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.

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Councilman's preferred successor holds edge in Westside district

When Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl decided in October to retire and focus on battling cancer, he anointed Mike Bonin, his longtime chief of staff, as his preferred successor.

The March 5 primary election now seems Bonin's to lose.

Of four candidates seeking to represent Council District 11 — which includes Brentwood, Mar Vista, Venice and Westchester — Bonin has raised the most money ($380,000, including matching funds, more than four times the amount amassed by his nearest rival). The self-avowed "progressive activist" has also received hundreds of endorsements from politicians, business and labor leaders, environmental groups and residents.

"He's smart, he's a doer, and he's solution-oriented," said Austin Beutner, a conservative businessman and former mayoral hopeful who recently held a meet-and-greet event for Bonin in Pacific Palisades. "He's not an ideologue."

Bonin's three opponents — Frederick Sutton, 28, a part-time bartender and community activist; Tina Hess, 52, a prosecutor with the city attorney's office; and Odysseus Bostick, 36, a Westchester teacher and parent — all acknowledge the financial leader's sizable edge. But they say they're fed up with pothole-riddled streets, homeless encampments and out-of-control municipal expenditures. Bonin, they say, represents a politics-as-usual bureaucracy that has turned the City Council into what Sutton calls "a merry-go-round of lifetime politicians."

Having received $87,000 in donations and matching funds, Sutton sees his immediate goal as keeping Bonin from getting the simple majority of votes needed to seal victory in March. "Once you get into a runoff," Sutton said, "suddenly everything changes."

Bonin, 45, has unveiled plans to make Los Angeles more employer-friendly (extend the Internet tax exemption for Silicon Beach companies, support tax credits and reduce red tape for film operations) and to improve residents' access to City Hall through regular community meetings and technology ("Hikes with Mike" and "Mayberry meets the iPhone")

After receiving his bachelor's degree in U.S. history at Harvard University, Bonin worked as a newspaper reporter before entering politics. The Massachusetts native moved to the Los Angeles area in the early 1990s. He lives in Mar Vista with his partner, Sean Arian, a consultant.

A Gold's Gym regular who eats mostly raw foods, Bonin sports five tattoos, including a recycling symbol on his left shoulder that serves partly "as a symbol of getting sober and taking a life that had been trash and making it productive again." After long overdoing it on drugs and alcohol, Bonin said, he has been sober for 18 years.

The diverse Westside sector he seeks to represent is rife with vocal activists and hot-button issues: congestion, transit construction, an imbalance between jobs and housing, transients and the modernization of Los Angeles International Airport. Like Rosendahl, Bonin opposes separating the northern runways but is all for updating the airport.

Bonin said his 17 years in public service have prepared him.

He first worked in city government as legislative deputy, district director and deputy chief of staff for former Councilwoman Ruth Galanter. He then became deputy chief of staff and district director for Rep. Jane Harman, who represented many 11th district neighborhoods before retiring from Congress. He has been Rosendahl's chief deputy since 2005.

Elected in 2005 and 2009, Rosendahl, 67, was favored to win a third and final term before being diagnosed with advanced cancer last summer.

Bonin said he has been inspired by his boss' spirit and resilience after months of grueling cancer treatments. "He's got the level of energy back that most of the staff finds exhausting to be around," Bonin told a group of elderly residents one recent afternoon.

Marcia Hanscom, a wetlands activist, said she endorsed Bonin after hearing his ideas for bringing government closer to the people and promoting nature in the city.

"He's got good values and instincts, and he also knows the inner workings of City Hall and its bureaucracy," she said in an email. "If he does as he says — getting and staying close to the constituents — he will not be so captured by City Hall as some think he is."

martha.groves@latimes.com

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.

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Embezzlement Scandal Threatens Spain’s Royal Family

Josep Lago/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Duke of Palma, a former Olympic handball player named Iñaki Urdangarin, is scheduled to testify on Saturday before an investigating judge over allegations that he embezzled millions of euros.

MADRID — The Web site of the Spanish royal family features pictures of the king, Juan Carlos I, in a blue sash, his bejeweled wife, Queen Sofía, and the couple’s three glamorous children. But most of the photographs of the dashing Duke of Palma, the king’s son-in-law, were scrubbed from the site last month.

The duke’s official biography was also banished from the site. And for more than a year, the royal family has barred the duke, a former Olympic handball player named Iñaki Urdangarin, from attending official family functions.

With a multitude of graft cases undermining Spaniards’ faith in just about every institution of government, an intensifying investigation aimed at Mr. Urdangarin has placed the palace under siege as well, and left the nation’s aging monarch and his aides struggling to quell the crisis.

Mr. Urdangarin, 45, who is married to the king’s youngest daughter, Cristina, 47, is scheduled to testify on Saturday before an investigating judge over allegations that he embezzled millions of euros after leveraging his blue-blood connections to gain inflated, no-bid contracts from regional politicians for his nonprofit sports foundation, Instituto Nóos.

The royal family has tried mightily to distance itself from the investigation. Officially, the palace has insisted that the king knew nothing about the foundation activities of Mr. Urdangarin, who has pledged to prove his innocence. It publicly maintains that Juan Carlos ordered his son-in-law to abandon the troubled foundation in 2006, a year before dubious financial dealings surfaced.

But last weekend, the duke’s former business partner, Diego Torres, who is also under investigation, told a judge that the duke made no move without palace approval, and he turned over nearly 200 e-mails to support his claim. Many of those e-mails have now surfaced in the Spanish news media. Others were provided to The New York Times by a person close to the legal process who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution.

The e-mails suggest that the palace was concerned about what was going on at the sports charity well before it has acknowledged, and began pressuring Mr. Urdangarin to leave it at a time when investigators now say he and his partner were involved in inflating contracts and moving money offshore. Despite the palace’s insistence that the king had little to do with his son-in-law, the e-mails show that the king was monitoring his affairs. They include boasts by Mr. Urdangarin about the king’s backing of sponsorships for events he was organizing.

The e-mails do not indicate any wrongdoing by the king. But they have brought the scandal to the palace doorstep, further tarnishing a monarchy that has come under scrutiny as Spaniards suffer through an economic downturn and as corruption cases — including envelopes of cash handed out to top politicians — stoke their resentment over the privileges and special connections that have insulated Spain’s elite from the same pain.

Meanwhile, the king and his courtiers have been working aggressively at damage control. Over the past 10 days, the king, his attendants and the Spanish intelligence service have been pressuring the suspected sources of leaks and approaching top newspaper executives to tone down coverage of the investigation, according to people with ties to the palace and some of Spain’s leading newspapers.

Top editors at leading newspapers like El País and ABC, a loyal supporter of the monarchy, have denied being pressured.

The e-mails obtained by The Times suggest that the worries over potential harm to the palace are not new. Some show the palace searching relentlessly for a way to steer Mr. Urdangarin away from the sports foundation, scouring for a new job for him through a blue-chip network of contacts in 2004, two years before it has publicly acknowledged.

As the hunt extended into 2005, the duke complained about mounting pressures to avoid conflicts of interest. “We have been suffering a permanent surge of press releases, not always precise concerning our professional and private lives,” he wrote in stilted English in an e-mail to an associate, Corinna Sayn-Wittgenstein.

Ms. Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German princess through a former marriage, has described her role as an unpaid adviser and friend of the king, dismissing reports in the Spanish news media that they had a romantic relationship.

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Cirque Du Soleil Announces New Michael Jackson-Themed Show in Las Vegas

By Mark Gray

02/21/2013 at 09:15 PM EST

The logo

Courtesy Cirque du Soleil

The King of Pop will live in Vegas!

The long-rumored Cirque Du Soleil show based on the music of Michael Jackson was formally announced Thursday afternoon.

Premiering June 29 at Las Vegas's Mandalay Bay, the show, Michael Jackson ONE, will run 90 minutes and will feature more than 60 dancers and aerialists performing to Jackson's best known music.

Executives say the show will be different from the current Cirque Du Soleil show Immortal, which features Jackson's music.

Jackson friend and choreographer Jamie King said, "Everything [Jackson] does is with a childlike heart. For Michael, every day was fresh, every day was new, every day had to be bigger and better than the last one."

Tickets for the general public go on sale March 7.

Which Jackson song are you most excited to see performed in the show? Sound off in the comments below!

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APNewsBreak: Govs to hear Oregon health care plan

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber will brief other state leaders this weekend on his plan to lower Medicaid costs, touting an overhaul that President Barack Obama highlighted in his State of the Union address for its potential to lower the deficit even as health care expenses climb.

The Oregon Democrat leaves for Washington, D.C., on Friday to pitch his plan that changes the way doctors and hospitals are paid and improves health care coordination for low income residents so that treatable medical problems don't grow in severity or expense.

Kitzhaber says his goal is to win over a handful of other governors from each party.

"I think the politics have been dialed down a couple of notches, and now people are willing to sit down and talk about how we can solve the problem" of rising health care costs, Kitzhaber told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

Kitzhaber introduced the plan in 2011 in the face of a severe state budget deficit, and he's been talking for two years about expanding the initiative beyond his state. Now, it seems he's found people ready to listen.

Hospital executives from Alabama visited Oregon last month to learn about the effort. And the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday that it's giving Oregon a $45 million grant to help spread the changes beyond the Medicaid population and share information with other states, making it one of only six states to earn a State Innovation Model grant.

Kitzhaber will address his counterparts at a meeting of the National Governors Association. His talk isn't scheduled on the official agenda, but a spokeswoman confirmed that Kitzhaber is expected to present.

"The governors love what they call stealing from one another — taking the good ideas and the successes of their colleagues and trying to figure out how to apply that in their home state," said Matt Salo, director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors.

There's been "huge interest" among other states in Oregon's health overhaul, Salo said, not because the concepts are brand new, but because the state managed to avoid pitfalls that often block health system changes.

Kitzhaber persuaded state lawmakers to redesign the system of delivering and paying for health care under Medicaid, creating incentives for providers to coordinate patient care and prevent avoidable emergency room visits. He has long complained that the current financial incentives encourage volume over quality, driving costs up without making people healthier.

Obama, in his State of the Union address this month, suggested that changes such as Oregon's could be part of a long-term strategy to lower the federal debt by reigning in the growing cost of federally funded health care.

"We'll bring down costs by changing the way our government pays for Medicare, because our medical bills shouldn't be based on the number of tests ordered or days spent in the hospital — they should be based on the quality of care that our seniors receive," Obama said.

The Obama administration has invested in the program, putting up $1.9 billion to keep Oregon's Medicaid program afloat over the next five years while providers make the transition to new business models and incorporate new staff and technology.

In exchange, though, the state has agreed to lower per-capita health care cost inflation by 2 percentage points without affecting quality.

The Medicaid system is unique in each state, and Kitzhaber isn't suggesting that other states should adopt Oregon's specific approach, said Mike Bonetto, Kitzhaber's health care policy adviser. Rather, he wants governors to buy into the broad concept that the delivery system and payment models need to change.

That's not a new theory. But Oregon has shown that under the right circumstances massive changes to deeply entrenched business models can gain wide support.

What Oregon can't yet show is proof the idea is working — that it's lowering costs without squeezing on the quality or availability of care. The state is just finishing compiling baseline data that will be used as a basis of comparison.

One factor driving the Obama administration's interest in Oregon's success is the president's health care overhaul. Under the Affordable Care Act, millions more Americans will join the Medicaid rolls after Jan. 1, and the health care system will have to be able to absorb the influx of patients in a logistically and financially sustainable way.

The federal government will pay 100 percent of the costs for those additional patients in the first three years before scaling back to 90 percent in 2020 and beyond.

"There are a lot of governors who are facing the same challenges we're facing in Oregon," Kitzhaber said. "They recognize that the cost of health care is something they're going to have to get their arms around."

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Dorner's mentor cracked the case

It was nearing midnight when Terie Evans called police in Irvine with a hunch: An ex-Los Angeles police officer named Christopher Dorner might have killed a young Irvine woman and her fiance a few days earlier.

Evans, an LAPD sergeant who had trained Dorner, conceded that her theory was a long shot. But Dorner's name had suddenly surfaced the day before in a strange phone call. And she knew he had a connection to the woman who had been killed. It seemed too much to dismiss as a coincidence.

It wouldn't take long for Irvine detectives to realize just how valuable Evans' tip was.

Before dawn they were looking into Dorner. An investigator uncovered a rambling manifesto Dorner allegedly posted online, in which he expressed fury over his firing years earlier and laid out his plan to exact revenge by killing officers he blamed for his downfall and their family members.

The discovery sent Evans and about 50 other LAPD officers and their families either into hiding or under the protection of heavily armed guards as a massive manhunt for Dorner unfolded across Southern California.

For the eight days that Dorner eluded capture, Evans remained silent and laid low, while Irvine and Los Angeles police officials kept secret her role in identifying the suspect. Evans had been Dorner's training officer and was at the center of the incident that led to his dismissal from the force. Authorities worried it might enrage Dorner further if he knew she had once again played a lead role in determining his fate.

On Thursday, Evans spoke to The Times about what happened, and police confirmed her account. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said he believes Evans' actions saved lives, helping detectives identify Dorner before he carried out more surprise attacks.

It began for Evans on Monday, Feb. 4 — the day after the bodies of Monica Quan and Keith Lawrence had been found riddled with bullets in their car. Evans, 47, received a message that an officer from a small department south of San Diego was trying to reach her. When she returned the call, the officer told her that he had found pieces of a large-sized police uniform, some ammunition and other items discarded in a dumpster that appeared to belong to an LAPD officer with the last name Dorner. Evans' name and other items were written in a small notebook found with the other things. The officer asked: Did Evans know this guy Dorner?

She did know him. Several years earlier, Evans and Dorner, a rookie cop, had been partners. The pairing had ended badly when Dorner accused Evans of kicking a handcuffed man .

Evans denied the allegations and an investigation cleared the 18-year veteran of wrongdoing. LAPD officials went on to fire Dorner after concluding he had fabricated the story.

"Just hearing his name was enough to make me feel sick," Evans said.

Evans hadn't been able to shake the uneasy feeling when she went to work the following evening. Before beginning her night shift, she stopped in the police station's parking lot to talk with some other officers. The conversation turned to the Irvine killings. Evans had heard about the case, but knew no details. The dead woman, one of the officers said, was the daughter of Randy Quan, a former LAPD captain-turned-lawyer who represented LAPD officers in disciplinary hearings when they ran afoul of the department.

The hair on the back of Evans' neck stood up. Another wave of the shakiness she had felt on the phone washed over her. She struggled to make sense of her thoughts. Quan. Dorner. The belongings in the dumpster.

Through her night shift, a "nagging, sinking feeling" dogged her. "I have to call Irvine PD," she recalled thinking.

"In my mind, it felt like such a long shot," Evans said. "But my gut feeling made it a lot stronger than that. I just knew. Something told me that there was some kind of a connection."

Evans called the Irvine Police Department and told a supervisor her theory: Quan had represented Dorner at his termination proceedings. What if Dorner had killed Quan's daughter and her fiance as part of a vendetta and then tossed his belongings in the dumpster before escaping across the border to Mexico?

About 1 a.m., an Irvine detective called back and Evans repeated her suspicions. A few hours later, her shift ended and Evans went home to sleep. When she awoke, a message from another Irvine detective, left early that morning, was waiting for her. Investigators were pursuing her lead and were on their way to San Diego to examine Dorner's belongings.

"At that point, I was absolutely sick," Evans said. "I thought, 'Oh my god, it really is him.' I knew no one knew where he was … I thought, 'What am I going to do?' At the time Mr. Dorner was terminated, I had a very uneasy feeling. I knew he was very upset and I had concerns that at some point he may try to contact me. So, this was just validating the bad feeling I carried with me for years. I was scared to death."

About 1:30 p.m., Evans said she was on her way to watch her teenage son play soccer when her phone rang again. They had discovered the manifesto. "I was told my family and I were not safe."

After making sure her son was with his father — a retired cop — Evans drove around aimlessly, fearing that Dorner could be waiting for her at her home or police station. Within 20 minutes, she recalled, someone from the LAPD called to make plans for protecting her and her family.

Police say Dorner killed two officers as well as the Irvine couple, and injured three more officers in gun battles, before apparently killing himself last week in the basement of a Big Bear cabin as authorities closed in on him.

Evans has not yet returned to her home. She and police officials said Evans has continued to receive threats. In addition, someone tried to break in to her home, police said.

"I honestly don't think my life will ever be normal the way it was before. This was such an extraordinary circumstance, I don't know if I'm ever going to feel safe in my home again," Evans said. "Years from now, my family could potentially still be at risk."

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Times staff writers Christopher Goffard, Kurt Streeter and Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.

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Egypts Floods Smuggling Tunnels to Gaza With Sewage

Hatem Moussa/Associated Press

A Palestinian clearing a tunnel of sewage in Rafah, between Egypt and the southern Gaza Strip.

GAZA —The Egyptian military is resorting to a pungent new tactic to shut down the smuggling tunnels connecting Sinai and Gaza: flooding them with sewage. Along with the stink, the approach is raising new questions about relations between Egypt’s new Islamist leaders and their ideological allies in Hamas who control the Gaza Strip.

“Awful,” said Abu Mutair Shalouf, 35, a Palestinian smuggler on the Gaza side, watching workers haul buckets of sewage-soaked soil from the shaft of a tunnel flooded by the Egyptian military 15 days ago. “I don’t know why they did this.”

Advisers to the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, say the answer is simple: they are determined to shut the tunnels to block the destabilizing flow of weapons and militants into Sinai from Gaza — a vow Mr. Morsi made with evident passion in an interview five months ago.

And the more muted response from Hamas, a militant offshoot of the Brotherhood, is the strongest indication yet that its leaders are now pinning their hopes on their ideological allies in Cairo, even if at the moment they appear to be harming the interests of the citizens of Gaza. The tunnels remain a vital source of certain imports to Gaza and smuggling-tax revenue for Hamas, and when the former president, Hosni Mubarak, used far less effective methods to close the tunnels, Hamas screamed of betrayal.

After the sewage flooding, several Hamas officials instead emphasized Egypt’s right to protect its borders as it chose. “Egypt is a state of sovereignty and we do not impose on it anything,” said Salah al-Bardawil, a Hamas official in Gaza. “We address the Egyptian side about the issue and hope they will understand us and our needs,” he added. “We trust the Egyptian leadership that they will not leave the Palestinian people alone.”

Analysts offer many theories about the timing. At a moment of political and economic difficulties, with a financial aid package stalled in the United States Congress, Egypt’s Islamist-led government “is showing itself once more as a valuable ally,” speculated Yasser el-Shimy, Egypt analyst at the International Crisis Group. “It can do something like this, which, perhaps, promotes strategic interests.”

Or perhaps, Mr. Shimy said, Mr. Morsi’s government aimed to remind Israel that it, and not Egypt, still bore responsibility for Gaza’s poverty and problems. Or perhaps the Egyptian military was sending some domestic message of its own, either to the Brotherhood or other domestic constituents, about the generals’ independence from the Islamists.

Concern in Cairo about the tunnels spiked last August, when 16 Egyptian soldiers died in a militant attack on a military outpost in Sinai. The Egyptian government believes the attackers came through the tunnels.

Then, after Egypt helped broker a truce between Hamas and Israel to end a week of fighting in Gaza last November, Israel eased restrictions on imports over the border. Most notably, it began allowing in more construction material previously considered to have a potential military use, though Palestinians say the Israelis still block steel and other materials.

Essam el-Hadded, Mr. Morsi’s national security adviser, suggested this week that the loosened restrictions at the border crossing might have encouraged the crackdown on tunnels. “Now we can say that the borders are open to a good extent — it could still be improved — and the needs of the Gazan people are allowed in,” Mr. Hadded told Reuters.

Under Mr. Mubarak, Palestinians said, the Egyptians sometimes flooded tunnels with gas, which was easily remedied by pumping in air.

But around the beginning of February the Egyptian military began for the first time to use waste water instead, eventually flooding about two dozen of the 200-odd tunnels. (The Egyptian authorities say there are 225; Palestinians say 250.)

Mr. Shalouf, 35, who imported mainly gravel, said that before removing the buckets of dirt he had pumped out the water. Now he plans to lay down sand and sawdust and reinforce the ceiling. Repairs could take three weeks.

Palestinians say that so far the flooding has hurt individual livelihoods but not the total volume of goods moving below ground. On Wednesday, about two cargo trucks per minute were pulling out of the main smuggling zone inside Gaza, laden with cement, gravel, canned food, citrus and vegetables. Hamas customs officers kept a record of each truck and load.

Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Mayy El-Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Baby Girl on the Way for Big Brother's Britney Haynes

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/20/2013 at 08:45 PM ET

Britney Haynes is expecting a little houseguest of her own!

“Halfway there and it’s definitely a GIRL!! She arrives in July; couldn’t be happier,” the Big Brother star Tweeted Wednesday.

Along with her tweet, Haynes, 25, posted a photo of herself holding sonogram photos of her baby girl.

The outspoken player competed as a houseguest on season 12 of the CBS reality show where she placed fourth before returning as a “coach” and eventually a player during season 14, where she placed eighth.

During season 14, Haynes often discussed missing her husband — high school sweetheart Nathan ‘Ryan’ Godwin, whom she married in between seasons in March 2012 — and expressed her desire to become a mother to fellow coach and new mom Janelle Pierzina, who’s currently expecting her second child in August.

Courtesy Britney Haynes

– Patrick Gomez

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Scientists use 3-D printing to help grow an ear

WASHINGTON (AP) — Printing out body parts? Cornell University researchers showed it's possible by creating a replacement ear using a 3-D printer and injections of living cells.

The work reported Wednesday is a first step toward one day growing customized new ears for children born with malformed ones, or people who lose one to accident or disease.

It's part of the hot field of tissue regeneration, trying to regrow all kinds of body parts. Scientists hope using 3-D printing technology might offer a speedier method with more lifelike results.

If it pans out, "this enables us to rapidly customize implants for whoever needs them," said Cornell biomedical engineer Lawrence Bonassar, who co-authored the research published online in the journal PLoS One.

This first-step work crafted a human-shaped ear that grew with cartilage from a cow, easier to obtain than human cartilage, especially the uniquely flexible kind that makes up ears. Study co-author Dr. Jason Spector of Weill Cornell Medical Center is working on the next step — how to cultivate enough of a child's remaining ear cartilage in the lab to grow an entirely new ear that could be implanted in the right spot.

Wednesday's report is "a nice advancement," said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, who wasn't involved in the new research.

Three-dimensional printers, which gradually layer materials to form shapes, are widely used in manufacturing. For medicine, Atala said the ear work is part of broader research that shows "the technology now is at the point where we can in fact print these 3-dimensional structures and they do become functional over time."

Today, people who need a new ear often turn to prosthetics that require a rod to fasten to the head. For children, doctors sometimes fashion a new ear from the stiffer cartilage surrounding ribs, but it's a big operation. Spector said the end result seldom looks completely natural. Hence the quest to use a patient's own cells to grow a replacement ear.

The Cornell team started with a 3-D camera that rapidly rotates around a child's head for a picture of the existing ear to match. It beams the ear's geometry into a computer, without the mess of a traditional mold or the radiation if CT scans were used to measure ear anatomy.

"Kids aren't afraid of it," said Bonassar, who used his then-5-year-old twin daughters' healthy ears as models.

From that image, the 3-D printer produced a soft mold of the ear. Bonassar injected it with a special collagen gel that's full of cow cells that produce cartilage — forming a scaffolding. Over the next few weeks, cartilage grew to replace the collagen. At three months, it appeared to be a flexible and workable outer ear, the study concluded.

Now Bonassar's team can do the process even faster by using the living cells in that collagen gel as the printer's "ink." The 3-D technology directly layers the gel into just the right ear shape for cartilage to cover, without having to make a mold first.

The next step is to use a patient's own cells in the 3-D printing process. Spector, a reconstructive surgeon, is focusing on children born without a fully developed external ear, a condition called microtia. They have some ear cartilage-producing cells in that tissue, just not enough. So he's experimenting with ways to boost those cells in the lab, "so we can grow enough of them from that patient to make an ear," he explained.

That hurdle aside, cartilage may be the tissue most amenable to growing with the help of 3-D printing technology, he said. That's because cartilage doesn't need blood vessels growing inside it to survive.

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