AFP/Getty Images(MESA, Ariz.) -- The first words out of Mitt Romney's mouth at Wednesday night's Republican debate were a planned attack on Rick Santorum.
Time and time again on stage, Romney turned to his right to label Santorum a spender of government money who favored earmarks, not the conservative he has proclaimed himself to be throughout his campaign.
Romney's premeditated talking-point barrage reflected the stakes of the GOP primary. Once considered the inevitable nominee, Romney is facing the prospect of a troubled campaign should he lose a primary Tuesday in either Michigan or Arizona.
At one point during the debate that aired on CNN, Romney sought to use one of his biggest albatrosses with conservatives, his record on health care, against Santorum by accusing the resurgent candidate of being responsible for "ObamaCare" by endorsing a candidate who became a Democrat, Arlen Specter.
"So don't look at me," said Romney, whose health record in Massachusetts has been called a model for the federal program signed by President Obama. "Take a look in the mirror."
Santorum's defense was that he backed Specter because the Republican-turned-Democrat vowed to support President Bush's judicial nominees.
Romney and Santorum also volleyed insults during a tense exchange over earmarks.
It began as Santorum argued that while he was a senator he supported "good earmarks," such as essential military weapons, but that not all spending projects are appropriate.
However, he said, "as president, I would oppose earmarks."
"I didn't follow all of that," Romney countered.
Romney then defended his role as the head of the Olympics, in which he asked the federal government for money to cover transportation and security costs.
Romney conceded that he agreed with Santorum over giving the president line-item veto powers, but he insisted that they differed on their approaches to government spending.
"While I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the bridge to nowhere," Romney jabbed, referring to the infamous earmark that came to symbolize wasteful spending.
Ticking off some highlights from Santorum's record as a senator, Romney told the crowd in Arizona that the Pennsylvanian raised the debt ceiling "five different times" without insisting on cuts in spending to balance it, funded Planned Parenthood and voted to expand the Education Department.
"Senator, during your term in Congress, the years you've been there, government has doubled in size," Romney said. "In my view, we should not raise the debt ceiling again until we get compensating cuts in spending."
Santorum, sitting in the spotlight on the stage as the nominal front-runner, fought back by accusing Romney of saying he would also vote to raise the debt ceiling.
However, Santorum added, he regretted some of his own votes, including one in favor of the much-maligned No Child Left Behind education bill. He also accused Romney of wanting to raise taxes -- at least on the top one percent of Americans.
"I'm not going to adopt that rhetoric," Santorum said. "I'm going to represent 100 percent of Americans. We're not raising taxes on anybody."
Later, as he elaborated on his vote to approve of No Child Left Behind, some in attendance booed Santorum as he said his vote was "against the principles I believed," but that "when you're part of a team, sometimes you take one for the team for the leader, and I made a mistake."
"You know, politics is a team sport, folks," Santorum said, as if addressing his dissenters in the audience, risking that he might be perceived as a Washington insider. "I admit the mistake, and I will not make that mistake again."
Ron Paul jumped at the chance to deem Santorum a creature of Washington.
"He has to go along to get along, and that's the way the team plays," Paul said. "I don't accept that form of government....I think the obligation of all of us should be the oath of office....It shouldn't be the oath to the party."
Though the debate also featured a handful of questions about social issues, the candidates were more in agreement as they derided the Obama administration for what they said were attacks on religion, and they called for cultural matters to be addressed.
Santorum, who has drawn scrutiny for some of his comments about religion, birth control and women serving in the military, rose to a crescendo as he said that, as president, he would bring attention to the growing number of babies being born out of wedlock.
He suggested that issue is "bigger" than fixing the economy.
"We can't have limited government, lower taxes...cut spending," Santorum said. "No, everything's not going to be fine. There are bigger problems at stake in America. And someone's got to go out there. I will."
Romney, who said he agreed with Santorum over the need to address children born to unmarried parents, denied accusations that he forced Catholic hospitals to give morning-after pills to rape victims. He said as governor of Massachusetts, he made sure that the state's health care law included "provisions that make sure that something of that nature does not occur."
Along with each of the other candidates, Santorum was asked to again address the Pentagon's initiative to give women bigger roles in combat. Santorum, who drew criticism from liberals after saying that women fighting alongside men would raise "emotions," said that he still has "those concerns."
Romney, meanwhile, said that "women have the capacity to serve in our military" in most positions.
Romney did challenge Santorum on contraception, turning to the ex-senator as he recalled that he "saw a YouTube clip" of Santorum explaining why he voted for the Title X "family planning" program.
"You said this in a positive light," Romney charged.
Santorum was booed as he conceded that he did vote for bills including that provision, but he said he didn't support it.
"I've never supported it and, on an individual basis, voted against it," Santorum said.
But in 2006, Santorum said, he supported birth control because "it is not the taking of human life," and people should have the choice to "do whatever you want to do."
Ron Paul, who has made moves that helped Romney in recent days, joined the fight against Santorum, calling him a "fake" in the spirit of the Texas congressman's latest campaign ad portraying Santorum negatively.
"The record is so bad," Paul said.
Santorum rebutted Paul's criticism by citing a measure by The Weekly Standard, a conservative publication, that said he was the most fiscally conservative senator during the 12 years that he served.
Romney also faced a question about his conservative bona fides, an issue that he has confronted repeatedly during the campaign. As he addressed a gathering of conservative activists in Washington this month, Romney claimed he was "severely conservative," a label that some have questioned -- including Wednesday night's moderator, CNN's John King.
"Severe, strict," Romney said. "I was, without question, a conservative governor of my state."
Newt Gingrich, who got fewer questions than at previous debates, was an ally of Santorum's only rarely. As the two lead candidates debated earmarks, the former House speaker said that Romney was correct to ask the government for money to support the Olympics -- but that he was wrong to then criticize Santorum for being involved in the earmark process.
Romney, Gingrich said, shouldn't "claim that what you got wasn't what they got because what you got was right and what they got was wrong."
The debate was mostly serious, characterized by Romney and Santorum bickering in center stage over their conservative credentials. But in a rare moment of light questioning, the candidates were asked to describe themselves in one word.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Seven of Sarah Palin’s closest confidantes have yet to watch the HBO film Game Change, which portrays her 2008 vice presidential bid, but they said they have already seen enough.
On a conference call with reporters Wednesday, these current and former advisers to Palin unleashed a torrent of criticism at the movie, which will premiere on Mar. 10.
Palin’s former aide Jason Recher dismissed it as a “false narrative cobbled together by a group of people who simply weren’t there."
Randy Scheunemann, who tutored Palin on foreign policy matters during the campaign, said, “To call this movie fiction gives fiction a bad name.”
“Looking at the trailers alone gets my blood boiling,” Palin’s former spokeswoman Meg Stapleton noted.
The three were joined by the treasurer of Palin’s political action committee, Tim Crawford, Palin’s former lawyer Tom Van Flein, and aides Doug McMarlin and Andy Davis. Crawford, Recher, McMarlin and Davis all currently have paid consulting contracts with Sarah PAC.
None of the seven have screened the film, but based on what they have seen in a two-minute trailer and what they know of the book, Game Change, authored by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, each said the movie presents an inaccurate portrait of Palin.
They took particular umbrage with Steve Schmidt, an adviser to Sen. John McCain who served as one of Palin’s top handlers during the 2008 race and who has emerged as a public critic of former Alaska governor since then.
“He is abusive, he is abrasive, he is nothing short of a world-class bully,” Stapleton said, adding that he is “infamous for lining up and destroying.”
Pointing the finger of blame, Stapleton said the news media has an “insatiable desire to beat and beat and beat her” and added that a lesser person “would have hanged himself by now.”
Schmidt is played in the movie by actor Woody Harrelson, Palin by Julianne Moore and McCain by Ed Harris.
Stapleton savaged a clip in the movie trailer depicting Palin lying in a bathrobe in the fetal position surrounded by note cards. “That’s sinful,” she said.
Along with Schmidt, the seven supporters also aimed their fire at Nicolle Wallace, who served as a senior adviser to Palin in 2008, but has since turned on her.
“Steve and Nicolle are gifted communicators, but in the game of spin they’ll say anything,” said Davis, the political director for Sarah PAC.
Palin did not participate in the conference call, but in a recent Fox News interview she said she was “not concerned about an HBO movie based on a false narrative when there are so many other things to be concerned about.”
Most of the aides said they had not been contacted by the filmmakers or the authors of the book on which it is based.
“If the book was very misleading,” Scheunemann said, “the movie is going to be far worse.”
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- A collection of House Democrats are protesting silently against Proposition 8 Wednesday, participating in a photo shoot to draw attention to California’s state law banning same-sex marriage.
Wednesday the NOH8 campaign released images of 10 members of the House of Representatives from its “NOH8 on the Hill” photo shoot; the campaign opposes California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, and supports the LGBT community with its stand against bullying and discrimination.
Four Democratic lawmakers from California -- Reps. Judy Chu, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee and Jackie Speier -- joined Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), William Keating (Mass.), Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), Niki Tsongas (Mass.), Jared Polis (Colo.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) in the cause.
“Equality before the law is an American value articulated in our Constitution and it’s at the heart of the NOH8 Campaign,” Polis, one of a handful of openly homosexual members of Congress, said. “With a focus on our nation’s value of freedom and an unflagging insistence on equality for all, we can look forward to a time when equal rights for all is a given.”
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling that California’s ban on same-sex marriage violates both the due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitution. That ruling, however, is pending further appeal.
The photo shoot, which occurred on Capitol Hill on Feb. 15, was open to any members of Congress willing to take a stand against the controversial law, although no Congressional Republicans participated.
Each member issued a statement explaining why they had the NOH8 logo applied to their face, along with a piece of silver duct tape covering up their mouths.
“Gay and lesbian Americans are part of the fabric that makes this country strong,” Blumenauer said. “The notion that we could ask these men and women to do everything from paying taxes to serving our country in uniform while denying them the right to marry is offensive to everything I believe in as a public servant. I won’t stop working for equal rights in Congress until they have been extended to every American.”
“These pictures speak volumes about the will of the American people to be treated the same, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation,” Chu stated.
Proposition 8 is the ballot initiative passed in 2008 to amend the California constitution and ban same-sex marriage. About 18,000 same-sex couples had already obtained marriage licenses in the state before voters approved the law.
STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images(ROME) -- Teams searching the crippled Costa Concordia cruise liner have found another eight bodies, more than a month after the ship capsized off the coast of Italy.
Italian officials had previously put the number of those killed at 32, though only 17 bodies had been recovered, according to the BBC.
The ship struck a patch of rocks on the night of Jan. 13, causing a large gash in the ship’s exterior. The vessel took on water as the ship’s passengers and crew raced to escape, some of them jumping in the water in hopes of swimming to shore.
The ship’s captain and a number of other crew members are currently being investigated for their respective roles in the disaster.
JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images(LONDON) -- For almost three weeks, Syria’s central city of Homs has been pounded by shelling from the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, leaving hundreds dead, according to opposition activists. Judging from a video clip posted online, one weapons analyst says Assad’s forces are using the biggest mortars in the world.
The video was first flagged in the Christian Science Monitor, which was told by a Human Rights Watch official that the regime forces are using the Russian-made 240mm “Tulip.” In the clip, two men are standing in rubble holding up the fanned tails of the exploded ordnance.
Peter Falstead of Jane’s Defence Weekly says the tail fins look, “very much like the tail fins from SM-240,” also known as the “Tulip Tree” developed by the Soviets in the 1970s. Today it is the largest mortar system used by any military in the world, and the Syrian army is believed to have up to 10 in service.
“If you wanted to strike at rebel-held positions in a built-up area to which you had no line of sight, and you had no regard whatsoever for the killing of innocent civilians, then I guess the SM-240 would be a weapon of choice,” Falstead told ABC News.
Few of the self-propelled SM-240s -- also known as the M-1975 -- remain in service, Jane’s says, due to its short range and slow firing (around one shell per minute). All-told, the system weighs 60,000 pounds, its range is between 2,600 and 5,900 feet, and it can fire shells weighing between 300 and 500 pounds.
By comparison, Falstead says the largest mortars used by the U.S. Army are 120mm, noting that they do have howitzers of a larger caliber.
JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images(BUENOS AIRES, Argentina) -- At least 49 people were killed and another 600 injured when a packed commuter train crashed into a retaining wall at the terminal in Argentina’s capital city at the height of rush hour Wednesday morning.
The crash at the Once train station in Buenos Aires happened around 8:30 a.m. local time when the train, carrying approximately 1,200 passengers, reportedly had braking problems and crashed into a barrier. The train is said to have been traveling from anywhere between 12 to 20 miles per hour at the time of the accident.
"There are people still trapped, people alive," Argentina’s transportation secretary J.P. Schiavi told reporters Wednesday, according to the BBC.
The first two cars -- and the passengers in them -- took the brunt of the crash. Traditionally, commuters pack the first few cars and move up as the train approaches its final stop, so as to get a head start in exiting the approaching station.
Jupiterimages/Thinkstock(LOS ANGELES) -- The headlines of major newspapers and TV networks this week have been dominated by rising gas prices.
Drivers across the country have shared their stories on the cost -- with many already paying more than $4 a gallon at the pump. There have even been reports of gas prices rising at a rate of 10 to 15 cents in a matter of hours.
The swiftness at which those gas prices continue to climb was crystal clear Wednesday night during the broadcast of ABC News’ World News with Diane Sawyer.
As ABC News’ Cecilia Vega introduced her piece on high gas prices, the sign at the downtown Los Angeles gas station behind her showed the price of regular gas at $4.99 a gallon. However when the piece concluded nearly two minutes later the price of regular gas had jumped 10 cents to $5.09 a gallon.
Even Vega seemed truly surprised to see such a drastic change in such a short period of time, telling Sawyer that “it is almost too unbelievable to believe.”
“It went up 10 cents?” asked Sawyer, herself shocked at what just had occurred.
“Ten cents during that two minutes while we were on the air,” confirmed Vega.
Dynamic Graphics/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- A factory sits empty. It’s not in the Rust Belt, nor is it part of a manufacturing exodus that has cost the U.S. thousands of jobs. It is a factory in Shenzhen, China, and the American company that once employed Chinese workers is now packing up, coming home and bringing the jobs with them.
John Higgins, CEO of Neutex, an LED lighting company, said it will be cheaper to manufacture in Houston.
“I’ve gotten in fights, I’ve gotten in arguments with CEOs on planes telling me what an idiot I am for coming back,” Higgins told ABC News.
A decade ago, a factory worker in China made 58 cents an hour. Today, wages are more than $3.00 and there are predictions of $6.00 an hour by the year 2015. It may sound cheap, but some economists argue when you factor in productivity those wages add up. The Boston Consulting Group argues the American worker combined with technology in the U.S. makes the American worker more than three times as productive as the Chinese worker.
“When you factor in that the American worker is nearly four times as productive, that math quickly adds ups,” said Hal Sirkin, senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group.
Master Lock in Milwaukee, Wis., sent as many as 1,000 jobs overseas in the 1990s and just brought back the first 100. Nat Labs is doing the same; it’s now making dental molds in Florida instead of China and hopes to hire 300 people.
The story is true in Detroit too, where GalaxE.Solutions, a custom software development company, decided to move in, taking over an office building that had been vacant for nearly a decade.
Detroit, of course, is much closer to the company’s American clients than are the workers in Bangalore, India.
Even though a worker in Bangalore makes $20,000 a year and an American worker doing the same job makes between $40,000 and $60,000, CEO Tim Bryan said once other costs are factored in, the economics balance out.
“This work is coming back to the U.S. There’s no stopping it,” he said.
Tony Avelar/Bloomberg via Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Smartphones are becoming smarter by the day, and by 2016, there’ll be more of them on planet Earth than humans. Tech giant Cisco Systems estimates there will be 10 billion smartphones and tablets being used on Earth by 2016. The world population by that same year, according to the United Nations, will be 7.3 billion.
Some additional numbers from Cisco:
490 million -- Number of smartphones sold in 2011. 1.4 -- Number of mobile gadgets for every person on Earth in 2016. 50 -- The factor by which data traffic from smartphones will increase by 2016. 62 -- Factor by which data traffic from tablets will increase by 2016. 71 -- Percent of mobile traffic dedicated to watching videos on portable devices by 2016, a 25-fold increase from today. 130 -- Exabytes of worldwide data traffic in 2016. That's roughly the equivalent of 33 billion DVDs, 4.3 quadrillion mp3 files, or 813 quadrillion text messages.
Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic(NEW YORK) -- It's safe to say that Nicki Minaj probably doesn't have any monetary concerns right now, thanks to the success of her album Pink Friday, not to mention her deal with OPI nail polish. But is she spending her money wisely? Well, she confesses to Vogue magazine, that at one time, she was spending $50,000 a month ... on accessories.
"Guiseppe, Versace, YSL and Fendi shoes," Nicki confesses. "And I bought tons of Vuitton bags. When you’re a young girl from Queens, you’re going to stock up on those bags.” When it comes to clothes, though, Nicki isn't nearly so free with her cash. "If I can combine designer things with other things, I’m a happy camper," she says.
Nicki says that unlike some stars, she doesn't plan to live high on the hog and not give anything back. She tells Vogue that she has plans to start "an enormous foundation to nurture girls," adding, "They hang on my every word, so I tell them, go to school, be ambitious. The worst position is to be financially dependent on the man." And even though Nicki tells Vogue that she sometimes imagines being a stay-at-home wife, cooking dinner for her husband in a "bikini and high heels," she says that in real life, "I could never be that girl!"
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(MONTGOMERY, Ohio) -- Daniel von Bargen, perhaps best known as Mr. Kruger on Seinfeld, was hospitalized this week after shooting himself in the head in a botched suicide attempt.
The Montgomery, Ohio, resident shot himself in the temple with a Colt .38 gun on Monday. He called Hamilton County 911 after his attempt failed.
According to the call, Von Bargen shot himself to avoid going to the hospital. After the dispatcher asked if the shooting was accidental, von Bargen responded, "No, I was supposed to go to the hospital today, didn’t want to … well, I shot myself.” Von Bargen is a diabetic and was supposed to have two of his toes amputated that day.
The harrowing call was caught on tape. Hear the call:
One can hear Von Bargen painfully describing what happened to the dispatcher.
“Yes, I shot myself in the head and, uhh, I need help,” he said.
Unable to open his eyes or move to open his door, he was able to stay on the phone until police and fire officials arrived at his home five minutes after he called 911. Apparently worried that Von Bargen may have other weapons around, police can be heard yelling at Von Bargen to stay still and keep his hands where they could see them.
According to Montgomery Police Srgt. Greg Vondenbenken, Von Bargen was “seriously injured.” They took him to Bethesda North Hospital, where Vondenbenken says that his condition is improving.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images(LOS ANGELES) -- Lindsay Lohan's future is looking brighter. A day after news broke she'd be playing Elizabeth Taylor in a Lifetime movie, a Los Angeles judge said the actress is sailing through probation with flying colors.
"You're in the home stretch," Judge Stephanie Sautner told a beaming Lohan in court Wednesday morning. "You seem to be getting your life back on track and that's what we all hoped for."
Sautner explained as long as Lohan keeps her nose clean, and completes 14 more days of community service and five therapy sessions by the next progress hearing March 29, her formal probation on DUI charges will be considered successfully completed. Her probation on a theft case will require her only to "obey all laws," Sautner said.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- When Richard Kaminski had an unusual mole removed from his cheek in 1998, he thought it was the end of his experience with melanoma.
But more than 10 years later, Kaminski developed a cough that didn't go away. Medical tests confirmed the diagnosis: metastatic melanoma that had spread to his lungs.
Melanoma is a form of skin cancer that kills 85 percent of its victims within five years if it has spread. It is responsible for about 9,000 deaths in the United States a year, according to the American Cancer Society.
Kaminski was floored. "I had this awful thing working in my lungs," he said.
Doctors treated Kaminski with a drug typically used against this form of cancer, but without success. It was only when his oncologist put him in touch with Dr. Anna Pavlick at New York University, who enrolled him in a clinical trial of a medication called vemurafenib, that he began to turn the corner on the deadly illness.
Before treatment, Kaminski recalled, "I had great difficulty breathing. I couldn't put sentences together because I couldn't get a deep breath. I had pain in my chest." Three weeks after beginning the drug, "A lot of that was greatly diminished," he said.
Within three months, Kaminski's symptoms disappeared. Scans showed his tumors starting to regress. By the end of 2010, the tumors were gone.
Kaminski, now 65, is understandably thankful.
"In two weeks, I will be two years on this drug," he said. "It was a lifeline."
On Wednesday, the results of the clinical trial in which Kaminski was enrolled appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the study conducted at 13 centers in the U.S. and Australia, researchers followed 132 patients with Kaminski's type of melanoma who had failed to respond to standard treatment. In about half of them, vemurafenib shrunk their tumors. For another third of the patients, the tumors showed no progression once the drug regimen had kicked in. Dr. Lynn Schuchter at the University of Pennsylvania, another of the study's authors, called these numbers "unprecedented."
"I've treated patients [with melanoma] for almost 25 years and never seen a drug with this kind of activity," Schuchter said. "It's so much better than the therapies that have been available to us before."
Also impressive was the improvement in survival; patients on the drug lived, on average, for an additional 15.9 months after treatment began, compared with the six to 10 months typically seen with the disease. A larger trial, also published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the drug brought about improved survival at six months. But the authors of the new study were able to follow some of their patients much longer -- for more than a year after they'd started treatment.
For patients like Kaminski who fail standard treatment, the new drug offers hope. Unlike many other cancer drugs, vemurafenib was just as effective in patients who had failed a previous treatment as it was in patients who had received the drug right off the bat -- a rare finding when it comes to cancer treatments.
The drug is not without its limits. In targeted therapy, cancer cells can mutate slightly and stop being a target, a process called resistance. In this study, cancer tended to recur in patients after about seven months of treatment. Dr. Kelly McMasters, chairwoman of surgery at the University of Louisville who treats melanoma patients, points out, "It can cause the tumors to shrink, but they will recur on average in about six months."
That being said, McMasters said, "In some patients...vemurafenib offers the hope to shrink the tumors enough to allow [surgical removal]."
So far, resistance hasn't been an issue for Richard Kaminski. Two years into treatment, he continues to enjoy a relatively normal life. He loves to garden, although he does have to take precautions out in the sun since one of the side effects of the medication is sun sensitivity.
FDA/iStockphoto/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- A U.S. Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committee Wednesday recommended approval of the weight loss drug Qnexa, a treatment many hope will help millions of Americans who struggle with obesity.
In voting 20-2 for approval, the committee said Wednesday that Qnexa’s weight-loss benefits for the chronically obese outweighed the risks of birth defects and cardiovascular problems that have been associated with the drug. An FDA advisory panel recommended against approval in 2010 over concerns about the drug’s side effects, and the FDA rejected it shortly after that. Vivus, the drug’s manufacturer, recently submitted additional research.
The committee Wednesday recommended that the manufacturer take a number of steps to prevent the drug from causing birth defects like cleft palate, including a possible warning label targeted toward women of childbearing years.
The FDA has considered numerous anti-obesity drugs in the past 20 years, but most have failed to meet the agency’s standards for safety and effectiveness. But so far, data on Qnexa suggests that the drug is the most effective in helping patients shed up to 10 percent of their body weight. Those changes, along with diet and exercise modifications, could go a long way toward alleviating some of the health problems associated with obesity, such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
Critics say the risk of potentially dangerous side effects of Qnexa, which include increased heart rate, heart attacks and arrhythmias, are too great to make the drug available to millions of people, especially because long-term effects of the drug are still largely unknown.
“Public health cannot tolerate another diet drug approved that has not been accepted for cardiovascular risk especially in light of the suggested findings of Qnexa,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the health research group at Public Citizen, an advocacy group.
Obesity currently plagues one-third of Americans and has been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes and a range of other chronic, expensive health problems. Doctors and dietitians routinely recommend changes in diet and exercise as the safest and most effective way to shed pounds. But some acknowledge that these strategies just don’t work for a large number of obese patients. Bariatric surgery, though largely successful in producing weight loss, is not a viable option for many people.
Dr. Melina Jampolis, an obesity specialist in San Francisco, said the current options for treating obesity are “frustratingly limited,” and said it would be helpful if patients had additional tools to aid their weight loss.
“I think that combination therapy is essential as there are numerous individual and overlapping mechanisms that make weight loss difficult,” she said. “So the more of them that you can address with medication therapy when necessary, the more effective a regimen will be.”
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.) -- A California plastic surgeon is keeping it in the family by performing multiple cosmetic procedures on his own young daughters.
Dr. Michael Niccole, founder of the CosmetiCare Plastic Surgery Center in Newport Beach, Calif., gave his daughter Brittani, now 22, breast implants when she was 18. Brittani also had a rhinoplasty. Niccole performed surgery on his daughter Charm, now also 22, when she was 10 to turn her “outtie” belly button into an “innie.”
Dr. Niccole said he has performed surgery on other family members as well and felt comfortable operating on his daughters, both of whom are adopted.
“Who would give them the time -- that extra little look during surgery more than I would?” the surgeon said.
Brittani told 20/20 she wanted breast augmentation surgery to “build my self-esteem.”
“I didn’t have large breasts when I was younger, and all my friends did…I felt very self-conscious about it,” she said.
Both Brittani and Charm also receive regular injections of Botox to prevent wrinkles and undergo other cosmetic procedures.
Though critics say women Brittani and Charm's age have no business undergoing cosmetic procedures, Dr. Niccole defends his work on his daughters as “maintenance.”
“I’m not changing their looks in any means. They want maintenance,” he said. "They don’t want to get old. They want to stay young.”
