American, US Airways approve merger

A long-anticipated merger of American Airlines and US Airways is expected to be announced Thursday after weeks of closed-door negotiations, according to people briefed on the deal. The transaction would create the nation's largest carrier and cap an era of consolidation in a troubled industry.

The marriage of American, based in Fort Worth, and its smaller competitor based in Tempe, Ariz., would form an airline valued at $11 billion. The union would be the latest in a string of mergers and acquisitions in an industry struggling to stay airborne amid fluctuating fuel costs, labor strife and economic turbulence.

The new airline would retain the name American, have its headquarters in Fort Worth and be the biggest carrier in eight of the nation's largest airports including Los Angeles, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The airline is expected to surpass its competitors in revenue, passengers served and fleet size. In the first few years, the merger could generate savings and increased revenue of up to $1.2 billion, according to Robert Herbst, an industry consultant.

Quiz: Test your knowledge about airport security

But critics say another airline merger would only hurt passengers.

With newly merged airlines eliminating overlapping service, fares are certain to rise and carriers will probably stop serving less-profitable markets, some critics argue. Since 2007, the average domestic airfare has increased 15%, according to federal statistics.

"You don't have to be an economics professor to understand that less competition in the market is going to result in consumers paying more, and airfares are certainly not immune from this simple fact," said Brandon M. Macsata, executive director of the Assn. for Airline Passenger Rights advocacy group.

But industry experts predict the merger of American and US Airways won't lead to significant fare increases because the two airlines rarely compete head to head, and because there are enough other airline competitors in the market.

"Out of all of the major airline mergers we've had in the last decade, this merger has the least amount of overlapping of flights and routes," Herbst said.

In fact, the airlines seem to complement each other in several ways.

US Airways now has a large presence in mid-size markets such as Charlotte, N.C., Philadelphia and Phoenix, while American Airlines dominates in some of the nation's largest airports, with more international destinations.

"American likes to be a presence in big markets, and US Airways likes to be No. 1 in small markets," said Seth Kaplan, a managing partner at Airline Weekly, a trade magazine.

The merger must still be approved by federal regulators, but industry experts don't expect opposition.

The deal would mark the latest in a series of mergers and acquisitions that has narrowed the industry to a handful of mega-airlines and several smaller, regional carriers.

In the last five years, Delta has merged with Northwest Airlines, United has merged with Continental and Southwest has acquired AirTran — resulting in a 10% drop in passenger capacity, according to a study by the International Air Transport Assn., an industry trade group.

The odds of a merger increased when American's parent company, AMR, filed for bankruptcy in November 2011. Many analysts and AMR creditors argued that American could compete against other big airlines only by joining forces with another carrier to reduce costs and expand its service area.

For months, US Airways pushed for the merger, with American's top executive initially resisting until it became clear that the carrier's unions and many of its creditors supported a deal.

Another thorny issue that may have delayed a merger announcement was deciding who would run the new company. Board members for the two airlines have reportedly agreed to name US Airways Chief Executive Doug Parker as CEO of the merged airline. AMR's chief executive, Thomas Horton, will be non-executive board chairman.

The ownership of the new airline will be split 72% for AMR creditors and 28% for US Airways shareholders.

One of the toughest parts about pushing through a merger — the integration of unions and their often conflicting contracts — has been already largely ironed out. The merger must still be approved by the Bankruptcy Court.

hugo.martin@latimes.com

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Christopher Dorner shootout: Body found in burned cabin

There were conflicting reports tonight about whether a body was located inside the burned-out cabin Tuesday night where Christopher Jordan Dorner was believed to have kept law enforcement authorities at bay.

Several sources told The Times and many other news organizations that a body was located in the rubble. But LAPD officials just said that the cabin is still too hot to search and no body has been found.

Another update is expected within the next hour from law enforcement officers near the scene, and officials said they might have an update clarifying the confusion.

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

As authorities moved into the cabin earlier Tuesday, they heard a single gunshot.

According to a law enforcement source, police had broken down windows, fired tear gas into the cabin and blasted over a loud speaker, urging Dorner to surrender. When they got no response, police deployed a vehicle to rip down the walls of the cabin "one by one, like peeling an onion," a law enforcement official said.

By the time they got to the last wall, authorities heard a single gunshot, the source said. Then flames began to spread through the structure, and gunshots, probably set off by the fire, were heard. 

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

As darkness descended on the mountainside, Dorner's body had not been found, authorities said. Police were planning to focus their search in the basement area, the source said.

Earlier Tuesday, a tall plume of smoke was rising as flames consumed the wood-paneled cabin. Hundreds of law enforcement personnel had swooped down on the site near Big Bear after the gun battles between Dorner and officers that broke out in the snow-covered mountains where the fugitive had been eluding a massive manhunt since his truck was found burning in the area late last week.

Law enforcement personnel in military-style gear and armed with high-powered weapons took up positions in the heavily forested area as the tense standoff progressed. 

One San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy died after he and another deputy were wounded in an exchange of gunfire outside the cabin in which hundreds of rounds were fired, sources told The Times. The deputy was airlifted to Loma Linda University Medical Center, where he died of his wounds.

The afternoon gun battle was part of a quickly changing situation that began after Dorner allegedly broke into a home, tied up a couple and held them hostage. He then stole a silver pickup truck, sources said.

Then Dorner was allegedly spotted by a state Fish and Wildlife officer in the pickup truck, sources said. A vehicle-to-vehicle shootout ensued. The officer's vehicle was peppered with multiple rounds, according to authorities.

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Beyonce joined by Oprah at documentary premiere

NEW YORK (AP) — Oprah Winfrey made a surprise appearance Tuesday night at the premiere of Beyonce's HBO documentary, 'Life is But a Dream,' posing with the star and speaking of the candor she showed in making it.

The film takes a no-holds-barred look at moments in the 31-year old singer's life, including her miscarriage, reports of faking her pregnancy, and firing her father as her manager.

While the revelations Beyonce makes about herself in the film are comparable to the results Winfrey usually gets from her tough style of interviewing, the talk show host gave kudos to the singer.

Winfrey said Beyonce did a "much better job" of telling her own story. "I wouldn't have been in the bedroom and in the closet and in the car and on vacation," she said.

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Well: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

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Gov. Brown, BofA chief offer no easy answers for housing woes

Millions of Californians remain stuck in the state's increasingly expensive rental markets, unable to buy homes as they deal with tight credit markets and damage to their finances from the Great Recession.

Sounds like a mess fit for two of the nation's most prominent turnaround specialists — California Gov. Jerry Brown, fresh off his state budget-balancing act, and Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Brian Moynihan, still engaged in resurrecting that institution from the mortgage meltdown.

But neither Brown nor Moynihan offered any easy answers Tuesday at a UC Berkeley summit on the future of residential housing.

Brown, the government man, said the free market needs to handle this one. Moynihan, the banker, said it will take maybe a decade before the housing finance system can wean itself from government life support.

Having accomplished his quixotic quest to raise taxes and balance the state budget, Brown seemed disinclined to tackle thorny housing issues. They are important, he said, but less so than dealing with public education and health.

"Essentially the housing market is banks, developers and individuals," Brown told the audience at a state office building in Oakland. "In this instance, I think the complexity is such that our efforts ought to be relatively restrained."

Moynihan — who has spent much of his tenure on problems stemming from Bank of America's takeover of failed Calabasas home lender Countrywide Financial Corp. — also offered little in the way of solutions.

Homeowners, he said, must again regard homes as a place to raise children rather than as an investment and ATM. His bank — which has retreated from many parts of the mortgage business — may offer some help as its recovery makes it able to extend more credit.

"I think we've got the balance a little too tight now, and we'll loosen it," said Moynihan, who joined Bank of America three years ago.

Meanwhile, Californians still struggle with the state's recovering housing market on a number of fronts. Prices are increasing — dramatically so in some areas — but that's driven in large part by an influx of cash buyers who are triggering bidding wars. That often leaves renters who wanted to buy at the bottom of the market unable to compete.

And, despite rising prices, many owners who bought during the housing bubble remained trapped paying mortgages totaling more than their homes are worth.

The mortgage market's almost total dependence on the federal government — the housing market's biggest problem — will probably take five to 10 years of work by a Congress that has shown little recent interest in addressing the issue, Moynihan said.

The problem is twofold, Moynihan said. First, private investment must replace the government as the provider of prime mortgages, a role filled largely since the financial crisis by the bailed-out firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And the third leg propping up the mortgage business — the Federal Housing Administration's loan-insurance program — needs to resume its traditional role of helping first-time buyers obtain mortgages they can afford, Moynihan said. That role appears unlikely any time soon as the FHA, which has skirted insolvency, addresses its heavy losses by tightening its own lending policies.

Moynihan and Brown were a curious pair, two battered survivors discussing a third — California's housing market.

The governor reminded Moynihan that, as California's attorney general, Brown had filed a lawsuit accusing Countrywide of creating a foreclosure wave by deceptively marketing risky loans. The payments would ultimately "explode" on unsuspecting borrowers, he said.

The suit was filed in late June 2008, just before Bank of America shareholders voted to ratify the acquisition of Countrywide by Moynihan's predecessor, Ken Lewis. BofA later settled the suit by agreeing to provide as much as $8.7 billion in assistance to troubled borrowers — one in a seemingly never-ending series of mortgage-related settlements totaling tens of billions of dollars.

"We've put all that behind us, governor," Moynihan said. "I won't remember it if you don't."

California's housing ups and downs have mirrored the nation's but are far more exaggerated, noted Ken Rosen of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley, who also spoke at the housing summit. Propelled by government programs, homeownership rose nationally rose from 62% of householders in the 1960s to 69.2% during the housing boom, as lending standards grew ever looser.

The homeownership rate nationally has since fallen back to 65.5%, Rosen said. But in California, only 55.6% of households are homeowners, with even lower levels in urban areas: 48.8% in Los Angeles County, 42% in Oakland and 37% in San Francisco.

With home prices down 25% from their peak nationally and mortgage rates at record lows, "affordability is the best it's been in 50 years," Rosen said. "A lot of people on Wall Street say we should have a boom."

But much of the support for the California home-purchase market has been from cash-laden private investors, seeking bargain prices on homes they can rent out.

Many normal homeowners "can't get credit," Rosen said. "That's why we haven't had a boom in the for-sale market."

scott.reckard@latimes.com

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Pope Benedict faced worldwide challenges

In announcing his decision to resign the papacy, Benedict XVI said Monday that he no longer had the energy to confront the global challenges facing the massive Roman Catholic Church.

Those challenges have only multiplied during his eight-year reign, which he had pledged as a mission to return the troubled church to its traditional core, to "purify" worship and revitalize the faith.

If that meant church membership was to shrink, he often said, then that was the price to be paid. During Benedict's tenure, the church has continued to grow in parts of the world, especially in Africa and Asia, despite threats and competition from Islam or evangelical sectors. Yet numerous followers have also turned their backs on an institution they find, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, morally hypocritical and implicated in evil.

His primary focus has been Europe, although he made significant trips to Brazil, Mexico and Cuba — his last transatlantic voyage nearly a year ago and one that, according to one report, convinced him he was too old to continue on the throne of St. Peter. In Latin America especially, the Catholic Church has lost ground to Pentecostal and other Protestant groups.

From his first official Mass as pope, Benedict vowed to unify Catholics and close divisions. But his hard-line orthodoxy, while appealing to traditionalists, alienated others and drove wedges ever deeper.

Among a liberal generation — especially in the Americas, home to nearly half the world's Catholics — that was raised on the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, the church under Benedict often seemed far out of step with modern times.

"He catered to the concerns of the right and moved to bring in the far right" in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to heal those schisms, Jesuit Father Drew Christiansen, visiting scholar in the theology department of Boston College, said in a telephone interview.

"He showed no sensitivity to the so-called Vatican II Catholics … in terms of the internal affairs of the church: more participation, accountability of bishops and so forth. That was a major flaw."

Where the church has emerged especially strong under Benedict is in its intellectual discourse, elevated by a professorial pope who dedicated considerable time and energy to a series of highly regarded encyclicals and three books on the life of Jesus. He also encouraged more formality, reviving the old Latin Mass (although the Vatican had to adjust one prayer that called for the conversion of Jews).

Benedict "turned the church definitively toward the New Evangelization — the evangelical Catholicism of the future," papal biographer George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, said via email, referring to the promotion of Catholic teachings in the modern world.

But in a crisis that dogged Benedict's papacy, today's church continues to reel under its most serious scandal in centuries: the sexual abuse of parishioners, primarily children, by members of the clergy, and persistent efforts to conceal the truth.

Benedict, like most of the church leadership, failed to grasp the gravity of the problem and acted slowly to weed out and punish abusers. Recent revelations indicated that in the 1970s he protected at least one priest alleged to have assaulted a child, and as head of the office that enforces doctrine, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he would have been familiar with widespread allegations.

As pope, Benedict took a number of actions, including meeting with victims and ordering guidelines to hold priests accountable. But victims and their advocates contend that much more needs to be done and argue that the church has yet to adequately atone.

Many American Catholics were also dismayed by Benedict's decision to crack down on the organization that oversees the leading U.S. orders of nuns, which the Vatican accused of straying from orthodox doctrine, and to censure liberal female theologians.

"That has done so much to alienate women and harm the future of the church," Christiansen said.

Despite growth in Africa and Asia, the Vatican hierarchy remains dominated by Europeans who have kept a tight hold on major theological decisions. Europeans also dominate the College of Cardinals, all of whose members have been appointed by either Benedict or John Paul II, and are likely to have the greatest say in choosing Benedict's successor.

But the leadership under Benedict has not been impervious to the problems of the Third World. One encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, contained demands for economic reform to alleviate poverty, a stand that many Catholics found enormously progressive.

Still, the developing world was also the scene of some of Benedict's numerous gaffes that complicated the church's mission. In Brazil in 2007, he seemed to suggest that the Spanish conquest of indigenous populations was what they wanted all along; en route to Africa in 2009, he suggested that the use of condoms exacerbates the spread of AIDS. At one time or another, he managed to offend both Jews and Muslims — the latter with deadly consequence, including attacks on churches in Muslim areas and the slaying of an Italian nun in Somalia.

In an attempt to repair any lasting damage to the church's image, he apologized to both groups and, in 2006, made a historic trip to Turkey, where he prayed in a mosque.

The missteps and scandals — the most recent involving a butler who leaked secrets that exposed vicious backbiting and politicking within the Vatican — have often seemed a distraction to the church's work and to Benedict's legacy.

"He promoted the Gospel and taught us to reflect profoundly on theology and to better understand our faith," Father Raul Vera, bishop of the Mexican city of Saltillo, said in an interview. "Unfortunately, we are facing a world with tremendous challenges, and as we try to confront those ... we are left with a weakened church."

wilkinson@latimes.com

Wilkinson, now stationed in Mexico City, served as The Times' Rome bureau chief from 2003 to 2008, covering the last papal transition.

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'Identity Thief' grabs $34.6M to debut at No. 1

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy's "Identity Thief" has made off with the weekend box-office title with a $34.6 million debut.

The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Hollywood.com are:

1. "Identity Thief," Universal, $34,551,025, 3,141 locations, $11,000 average, $34,551,025, one week.

2. "Warm Bodies," Lionsgate, $11,356,090, 3,009 locations, $3,774 average, $36,481,172, two weeks.

3. "Side Effects," Open Road Films, $9,303,145, 2,605 locations, $3,571 average, $9,303,145, one week.

4. "Silver Linings Playbook," Weinstein Co., $6,425,271, 2,809 locations, $2,287 average, $89,519,510, 13 weeks.

5. "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters," Paramount, $5,753,165, 3,285 locations, $1,751 average, $43,836,018, three weeks.

6. "Mama," Universal, $4,229,665, 2,677 locations, $1,580 average, $63,951,810, four weeks.

7. "Zero Dark Thirty," Sony, $4,006,860, 2,562 locations, $1,564 average, $83,567,450, eight weeks.

8. "Argo," Warner Bros., $2,375,344, 1,405 locations, $1,691 average, $123,608,957, 18 weeks.

9. "Django Unchained," Weinstein Co., $2,303,495, 1,502 locations, $1,534 average, $154,516,627, seven weeks.

10. "Bullet to the Head," Warner Bros., $2,078,192, 2,404 locations, $864 average, $8,269,214, two weeks.

11. "Top Gun" in 3-D, Paramount, $1,965,737, 300 locations, $6,552 average, $1,965,737, one week.

12. "Lincoln," Disney, $1,873,537, 1,517 locations, $1,235 average, $173,621,006, 14 weeks.

13. "Parker," FilmDistrict, $1,867,411, 2,004 locations, $932 average, $15,848,064, three weeks.

14. "Life of Pi," Fox, $1,745,744, 924 locations, $1,889 average, $108,530,249, 12 weeks.

15. "Les Miserables," Universal, $1,555,550, 1,447 locations, $1,075 average, $143,983,705, seven weeks.

16. "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," Warner Bros., $1,468,374, 1,001 locations, $1,467 average, $298,333,426, nine weeks.

17. "Parental Guidance," Fox, $1,071,766, 1,219 locations, $879 average, $74,344,256, seven weeks.

18. "Wreck-It Ralph," Disney, $1,065,817, 757 locations, $1,408 average, $184,414,532, 15 weeks.

19. "The Impossible," Summit, $957,594, 739 locations, $1,296 average, $16,668,338, eight weeks.

20. "Quartet," Weinstein Co., $940,930, 244 locations, $3,856 average, $5,000,417, five weeks.

___

Online:

http://www.hollywood.com

___

Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.

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Bloomberg Lauds Companies for Cutting Salt Content

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in the midst of a long-running campaign to change the eating habits of New Yorkers and consumers across the country, declared a victory against salt on Monday, as 21 companies, from Kraft and Goya to FreshDirect, said they had met the first stage in reductions in salt content in foods.

After focusing on reducing trans fats and smoking, Mr. Bloomberg turned his attention to salt in 2010, announcing that about 30 companies had signed up to reduce salt in foods by 25 percent within five years, as a way of lowering consumers’ blood pressure and saving lives lost to heart attack and stroke.

“These companies have a huge presence on our shelves and in our diets,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall as he announced the results, surrounded by a half-dozen executives of food companies.

The first stage focused on the low-hanging fruit — salsa, dips, bacon, ketchup, barbecue sauce, cold cuts, processed cheese, salad dressing, canned beans and pizza — foods whose salt content is so high that reducing it up to a point probably would not be noticed by many consumers.

Mr. Bloomberg called them “some of America’s most beloved and iconic foods,” suggesting that the cuts might have a disproportionately salutary effect. But Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said he did not know how much salt the results so far had removed from the average person’s diet.

One side effect of the salt reduction drive is that food companies are looking for salt substitutes to make food taste better.

The main way to do that is to add potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride, said Russ Moroz, vice president for research at Kraft Foods. But because potassium tends to have a bitter, mineral taste, other ingredients have to be added. He said these were proprietary secrets, and he declined to name them.

Potassium is good, Dr. Farley said, because it lowers blood pressure and most people do not get enough of it. It is removed from fruits and vegetable during processing, he said. Mr. Bloomberg said he thought fears of additives were overdone.

But a salt industry scientist said Monday that too much potassium could be bad for the kidneys, and that the “cocktail of chemical constituents” added to balance the bitterness and enhance the salty taste could present unknown risks, as those ingredients were undisclosed.

“They do it with one eye on the lab and the other eye on the label,” said Morton Satin, vice president for science and research at the Salt Institute, a trade association. “They make sure it’s below the level that the F.D.A. requires for it to be on the label.”

Mr. Satin said that the link between high blood pressure and salt was just “a theory,” and that reducing salt too much could have harmful effects, like iodine deficiency in children, a cause of mental retardation, and diabetes.

Some companies said reducing salt proved to be a popular marketing tool. Goya reported that it had reduced salt in its regular canned beans by 5 or 6 percent, without any drop in sales. “We tasted them, and you really wouldn’t notice the difference,” Joseph Perez, senior vice president of Goya Foods, said Monday.

Mr. Bloomberg said it might surprise many people to know that bread and rolls were the “biggest contributor” to salt in the diet. Eating a muffin, he said, could be worse than eating a small bag of Lays potato chips.

Bread makers are hard to spot on the list of companies that have pledged to reduce salt, perhaps, Mr. Satin said, because it is more difficult to make bread without salt. However, some companies, like Au Bon Pain, have reduced salt in some baked goods.

On an irreverent note, Mr. Bloomberg said that he loved Subway sandwiches and would eat his favorite, the Italian B.M.T. — it includes salami, pepperoni and ham — regardless of the salt content, but that he was glad that it now contained 27 percent less.

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Toy makers play up classics and creativity

NEW YORK — A digital Barbie vanity mirror that allows makeup experimentation without the mess. Customizable figurines mounted on spinning tops that battle in a portable arena. New Play Doh Plus that's fluffier and more malleable.

The hippest new toys showcased at the American International Toy Fair this week are interactive, adaptable and, often, more than a bit familiar.

"We're reinventing older brands so that kids can rediscover them as if they were new," said John Frascotti, chief marketing officer for Hasbro Inc., at the show in New York City. "A 5-year-old doesn't know or care that a toy has actually been around for decades."

More than 31,000 attendees — including 1,000 exhibitors — are congregating at the annual event, which is considered to be the start of a yearlong scramble to identify, market and occasionally copy the products expected to dominate the Christmas shopping season.

This year the hunt feels even more urgent. The U.S. toy industry had a lackluster 2012, with revenue falling slightly from the year before to $16.5 billion. Sales dropped even further compared with 2008, when they totaled $21.6 billion, according to research firm NPD Group.

Manufacturers, distributors, importers and buyers crowd the 366,000 square feet of space in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center to display more than 150,000 products, including action figures, educational activities, bicycles, puppets, video and board games. The fair, the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, began Sunday and lasts through Wednesday.

Toy analysts are already taking bets on likely trends.

One major buzzword? Construction playthings, and not just in the form of boys' building blocks.

Build-your-own robots and action figures and do-it-yourself doll backdrops helped the building sets sector grow 19.7% last year — the largest revenue gain of any toy category, according to NPD. Analysts expect another boost in 2013.

Parents want toys that their children can create themselves and customize instead of the "watch me" products that attempt to entertain kids with the push of a button, said Jim Silver, editor in chief of TimetoPlayMag.com.

"Especially with the economy the way it is, they're looking for toys that offer value through rebuilding, that kids can play with over and over again," he said.

Hasbro showed off Transformers Construct-Bots, which kids can build out from a robot frame foundation using armor, weapons and accessory parts. The company's new Iron Man Assemblers action figures can be compiled using a variety of arm, torso, leg and other body parts into hundreds of combinations.

Hot Wheels, owned by El Segundo company Mattel Inc., will soon enable children to construct their own track sets and create unique toy cars with special molds and accessory stickers.

"We live in a world of youth empowerment, where kids are used to an environment that they can control," Hasbro's Frascotti said. "They can already go to an iPad and design whatever they want, so why can't they do that in an analog world too?"

Toys that cross gender barriers are also gaining traction.

At the New York show, Hasbro debuted a silver-and-black version of its usually pink-and-purple Easy-Bake oven. The company, which was recently petitioned by tens of thousands of people for a boy-friendly Easy-Bake, said it has worked for more than a year on a more gender-neutral version of its 50-year-old cooking toy.

Last year, Zing Toys debuted a pink-and-purple bow-and-arrow set called the Air Huntress. At the show, Hasbro demonstrated its Nerf Rebelle Heartbreaker archery toy, a product packaged with darts covered in funky feminine patterns.

Lego used its small blocks to create life-sized models of girls in soccer uniforms and karate belts to exhibit its female-focused Lego Friends line. Spin Master adopted technology from its popular AirHogs flying toys in its new Flutterbye Fairy, a winged doll that launches off a charger modeled after a jewelry box and follows hand motions to stay aloft.

Mega Bloks stacked a pile of Barbie Build 'n Style play set suites — including blocks made up like kitchens or bedrooms — in a corner of its booth. The girl-centric construction product line launched in December and also includes pool party, fashion boutique and pet shop options along with figurines with interchangeable hair.

The market also is headed toward an "abundance" of old-school products featuring nostalgic, vintage or classic elements — "like the equivalent of bell bottoms or neon colors for toys," said Adrienne Appell, an analyst with fair organizer Toy Industry Assn.

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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

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