Greuel faults DWP for bypassing bids on lobbying contracts

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power repeatedly bypassed its competitive bidding process when it awarded $480,000 in contracts to lobby Sacramento decision-makers, according to a report issued by City Controller Wendy Greuel.

DWP executives issued four no-bid contracts for state lobbying over the last two years, two of them to Mercury Public Affairs, a firm that includes former state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez as one of its partners. No public debate or vote by the utility's five-member Board of Commissioners was required under DWP contracting rules because each agreement was $150,000 or less.

Greuel, who is running for mayor in the March 5 election, said the city utility had "lax controls" over the lobbying contracts and failed to require that two of the firms prepare reports showing what they had accomplished. Mercury also was paid $50,000 for a month of work to help secure passage of legislation on power plant upgrades that had been withdrawn on the first day of the firm's contract, the report found.

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FOR THE RECORD:
DWP lobbyist: An article in the Jan. 3 LATExtra section about DWP lobbying practices said the agency had been paying $15,000 to its in-house lobbyist Cindy Montañez in 2009. The article should have specified that Montañez was being paid $15,000 per month.

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"DWP should have terminated" the contract, Greuel wrote.

The inquiry, which was conducted with help from the city Ethics Commission, was launched last year after Greuel's office received a tip alleging that the lobbying work was awarded in exchange for favors. But no evidence of "a 'pay to play' arrangement" was found, her report said.

Mercury received DWP lobbying contracts worth $50,000 in 2010 and $150,000 in 2011, both focused on state government. The firm also received a no-bid, nine-month contract worth $141,000 in 2010 for lobbying at the federal level, which was not examined in the controller's report.

The DWP said the no-bid contracts were reviewed and approved by the city's lawyers. The three lobbying firms helped shape costly state regulations dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and pollution of ocean plant life caused by coastal power plants, utility officials said.

"Their effective advocacy contributed to favorable outcomes that will save LADWP's customers in excess of a billion dollars," the DWP said in a statement.

Mercury Managing Director Roger Salazar said his firm provided strategy for dealing with water quality regulators, as well as state lawmakers. "The legislative process doesn't always end with the pulling of a bill," he added.

The DWP's hiring practices for outside lobbyists attracted scrutiny in 2009 after high-level officials proposed a contract worth up to $2.4 million with Conservation Strategy Group — a Sacramento-based firm that planned to use Mercury and a second company as subcontractors.

The deal would have included the involvement of Nuñez, author of the state's landmark 2006 climate change law. But it was scuttled after DWP commissioners raised questions about the cost. The agency already was paying $15,000 to its in-house lobbyist Cindy Montañez, a former Assembly member who is now a City Council candidate.

DWP officials subsequently began using simple purchase orders instead of competitive bidding procedures to hire lobbying firms. The utility awarded a one-year, $130,000 agreement to Weideman Group in 2010 and a one-year, $150,000 agreement with Conservation Strategy Group in 2011.

Mercury received its $150,000 contract in April 2011, during the same week that Nuñez contributed $3,000 to three of the mayor's legal defense funds and $1,000 to a separate officeholder account belonging to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The defense funds were set up to pay nearly $42,000 in ethics fines levied against Villaraigosa for accepting free tickets to sports and cultural events.

Salazar said there was no link between the contracts and the donations from Nuñez. "Any insinuation that they are connected is absurd and irresponsible," he said.

Last month, the DWP's five-member board awarded a Sacramento lobbying contract worth $1 million annually to KP Public Affairs. That vote was taken after a competitive search process.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

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Moktada al-Sadr Encourages Demonstrations in Iraq

BAGHDAD — A populist Shiite leader in Iraq, Moktada al-Sadr, expressed support on Tuesday for fresh protests against Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a fellow Shiite but his political opponent, saying that Mr. Maliki bears “full responsibility” for the unrest in the country.

As with many developments in Iraq, the timing and venue of Mr. Sadr’s comments to reporters were as notable as their meaning. He spoke in Najaf, one of the holiest cities of his Shiite sect, just as Iraq ended its bloodiest year since 2009, a reflection of unabated ethnic, sectarian and political tensions among the country’s Kurdish, Arab, Sunni and Shiite populations.

Several times during the gathering, Mr. Sadr directed his remarks at Mr. Maliki, who has taken recent steps that suggested he was asserting greater control over many aspects of the government and that prompted fears he was cracking down on his political opponents. Mr. Sadr’s remarks could indicate that he is trying to test the political waters or possible support from the street before Iraq’s provincial elections, which are scheduled for the spring.

Mr. Sadr also tried to assert broader credibility for the anti-Maliki protests by comparing them to the movements that have swept many Arab countries in the past few years, calling for new government leaders and better representation.

“The Iraqi spring is coming,” Mr. Sadr said, in a tone that implied a warning to Mr. Maliki.

“We are with the demonstrators, and Parliament must be with them, not against them,” he said. “The legitimate demands of the demonstrators, by which people know what they want, should be met.”

Mr. Sadr was careful to appear moderate and to say he was speaking for all Iraqis in his remarks, which his media office distributed to journalists throughout the country. He said he supported the widespread demonstrations as long as they were peaceful and did not seek to create divisions, driving the last point home by adding that he was willing to go to Sunni-dominated Anbar Province to take part in protests.

Demonstrations against Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government erupted in Sunni areas last month in response to a raid by security forces on the office and home of the Sunni finance minister, Rafie al-Issawi. In one protest last week, tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims blocked Iraq’s main trade route to neighboring Syria and Jordan, Reuters reported.

Aside from reaction in the street, the raid had immediate political fallout. Mr. Issawi described it as a “pre-election blow” intended to weaken Mr. Maliki’s rivals. Leaders from the Sunni-dominated bloc, Iraqiya, threatened to pull out of the government and called for a no-confidence vote on Mr. Maliki.

Mr. Sadr’s voice has now added his voice to the discord that has left the country in disarray a full year after the withdrawal of American forces left seemingly intractable problems among political factions and ethnic groups.

Tensions between the Kurds in the north and the government in Baghdad, who were already at odds over sharing oil revenues, have risen as soldiers squared off with Kurdish militias after Mr. Maliki sought to consolidate his control over security in the north.

Further political uncertainty occurred at the end of 2012 when the Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, suffered a stroke and was flown to Germany for treatment.

Sunni Arab and Kurdish officials have accused Mr. Maliki of trying to monopolize power before. In September, Tariq al-Hashimi, the vice president of Iraq and a prominent Sunni Muslim, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in absentia on accusations that he oversaw death squads. Sunni supporters accused the Shiite-led government of trying to sideline them.

The discord has translated into bloodshed. While attacks have not been as frequent or widespread as they were during the height of the insurgency, Iraqis marked the end of 2012 with a grim milestone.

Iraq Body Count, a nonprofit group that tallies casualties, said Tuesday that civilian deaths from attacks in Iraq rose to at least 4,471 in 2012 from 4,136 in 2011, the first annual rise since 2009. Deaths during the final two weeks were still being tallied.

“Over all, 2012 has been more consistent with an entrenched conflict than with any transformation in the security situation for Iraqis in the first year since the formal withdrawal of U.S. troops,” the group said.

Yasir Ghazi reported from Baghdad, and Christine Hauser from New York.

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Scarlett Johannson Never Thinks About Marriage

By Andrea Billups

01/02/2013 at 12:55 PM EST

Scarlett Johansson says she won't be walking down the aisle again anytime soon simply because, she says, she "never" thinks of marriage.

In an interview with ELLE UK magazine in its February issue, Johansson says she married young the first time to now-ex-husband Ryan Reynolds, and right now, she's enjoying a committed relationship … minus the ring.

"It's really not important to me," Johansson, who's currently starring on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, told ELLE UK of marriage. "The only time I ever think about it is when people ask me, 'Would I get married again?' "

"I'm not having kids any time soon," she continued. "I'm in a nice relationship, I'm working a lot and, like I said, it's not important to me."

As for married life, the actress explained: "I got married when I was young and it was incredibly romantic and I liked being married, actually. But it is different. It's hard to put into words."

"To me," continued Johansson, "being in a functioning relationship doesn't mean you have to be married."

The actress, who stars in Hitchcock alongside Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Biel and Helen Mirren, is reportedly dating French journalist Romain Dauriac, 30. And apparently she enjoys the company of a man who is not in show business, calling relationships with actors "monotonous."

Johansson, however, says she likes her men on the artsy side.

"For me, most importantly, I look for a partner who is creative," she explains. "I like people that have a colorful way of looking at things, that are inspiring and like art, music and film."

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Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."

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Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

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

Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

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Photographer following Justin Bieber Ferrari killed

Los Angeles police said the driver who hit a photographer after the paparazzo took photos of Justin Bieber's Ferrari is not likely to face charges.

The photographer died at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. A friend of the photographer told KCAL-TV Channel 9 that he was not a professional.

The incident took place on Sepulveda Boulevard near Getty Center Drive shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday. A friend of Bieber was driving the sports
car when it was pulled over on the 405 Freeway by the California Highway Patrol for a traffic stop, according to LAPD Sgt. Rudy Lopez.

A CHP officer directed the driver of Bieber's car off the freeway and onto Sepulveda.

The photographer arrived at the scene, got out of his car and crossed
Sepulveda to take photos. He was hit by a car as he went back across
the street to his own car, the sources said.

The sources said the photographer was not crossing in a crosswalk and the driver was fully cooperating with authorities.

The paparazzi have tracked the driving habits of Bieber, 18, and the
Los Angeles city attorney's office has been unsuccessful in its attempt
to use a novel state law to limit their pursuits.

Judge Thomas Rubinson ruled in November the state law did not
pass constitutional muster in a case against Paul Raef, a photographer
who sped on the 101 Freeway last year to capture Bieber receiving a
traffic citation.

Passed in 2010, the law punishes paparazzi driving dangerously to
obtain images they intend to sell. But Rubinson said the law violated
1st Amendment protections, potentially affecting wedding photographers
or those speeding to events where celebrities are present.

ALSO:

Son of Clippers owner Donald Sterling found dead in Malibu

'Feud' behind man's body found encased in concrete, police say

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Stampede at New Year’s Celebration Kills Dozens in Ivory Coast

Herve Sevi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

People injured in a stampede in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, were treated at the Cocody hospital on Tuesday.

At least 60 people were killed in Ivory Coast’s economic capital, Abidjan, as a New Year’s fireworks celebration turned into a deadly stampede early on Tuesday.

The crowd of thousands was leaving the sprawling stadium in the downtown Plateau neighborhood after the last fireworks had signaled the new year when panic struck. In the crush, dozens were trampled underfoot, officials in Abidjan said Tuesday.

Many were pushed into a small gully adjoining the Houphouët-Boigny stadium on the Boulevard de la République, in the heart of the city’s compact central business district, then crushed as the panicked crowd surged over them.

Children appeared to be among the injured and dead: the state television station, RTI, showed images of wounded children in one of the city’s hospitals, as well as pregnant women stretched on cots.

Ivorian officials Tuesday said that they were baffled as to what set off the stampede but that an investigation had been launched.

“The precise circumstances of this tragic occurrence are being looked into by the security services,” Ivory Coast’s interior minister, Hamed Bakayoko, said on RTI Tuesday. RTI showed rescue workers carrying bodies through the streets and ambulances lined up in the darkness.

Mr. Bakayoko told RTI that “the New Year’s Eve celebrations brought many onto the streets of Plateau. There were 50,000 people on the streets. They were going home, and there was a stampede.”

At the scene, witnesses said there were piles of abandoned shoes.

The head of the rescue services, Lt. Col. Issa Sakho, told an RTI reporter that the “flow of people created a great crush, and in the stampede there were people who were trampled, people who were suffocated.” More than 200 were wounded, officials said.

Careless police action could have incited the stampede, witnesses said. At the hospital in the city’s adjoining Cocody neighborhood, one of the wounded — a young man who declined to give his name — said that the police had tried to disperse the crowd as it was leaving the stadium. That action provoked a mass panic, the young man said, and the crowd surged forward.

The Ivorian police and security services, with a long record of brutality, are feared by the people of Abidjan, a sprawling city of some four million people. Arbitrary arrests, unpunished beatings, and impromptu traffic stops, often to extort money, are not uncommon in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

The police and security forces were the principal instruments in a campaign of repression that lasted months in 2010-2011 by the deposed former president, Laurent Gbagbo, who was ousted by rebel fighters and French forces after he failed to give up office after his electoral defeat. Some 3,000 people were killed in the civil war precipitated by Mr. Gbagbo’s refusal.

The fireworks celebration, sponsored by the government of the country’s president, Alassane Ouattara, was the second since Mr. Gbagbo’s ouster. It was intended as another sign that Ivory Coast, with its surging economic growth rate and renewed foreign investment, has emerged from years of political crisis, repression and civil war.

Social, ethnic and political tensions remain acute, however, with some observers warning that Mr. Ouattara has done too little to resolve problems left over from the Gbagbo years.

Loucoumane Coulibaly contributed reporting.

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No surprise: YouTube, Angry Birds, Instagram and Facebook among 2012′s top apps

Title Post: No surprise: YouTube, Angry Birds, Instagram and Facebook among 2012′s top apps
Rating:
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Jessica Simpson & Jennifer Hudson Show Off Weight Loss in New Ad

By Maggie Coughlan

01/01/2013 at 01:20 PM EST

Jennifer Hudson and Jessica Simpson

Courtesy of Weight Watchers

Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Hudson have a lot in common, specifically when it comes to balancing their careers with motherhood.

Now Simpson, 32, and Hudson, 31, have one more similarity to add to the list – they've both shed serious pounds thanks to Weight Watchers.

The spokeswomen for the weight loss company met when they shot their first joint advertisement – which will be available on PEOPLE.com on Wednesday – and discussed their lifelong struggles with their weight and body image.

Hudson says she figured she was "just born that way," while Simpson added that she was "always on some new life-stopping diet."

Simpson – who lost over 50 lbs. on the program – recently announced her pregnancy on Twitter.

But the mother to 7-month-old Maxwell Drew, "will not be following the [weight loss] program during the pregnancy while her weight and well-being are monitored by her obstetrician," Weight Watchers said in a statement.

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Clinton receiving blood thinners to dissolve clot

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to recover in a New York hospital where she's being treated for a blood clot in her head.

Her doctors say blood thinners are being used to dissolve the clot and they are confident she will make a full recovery. Clinton didn't suffer a stroke or neurological damage from the clot that formed after she suffered a concussion during a fainting spell at her home in early December, doctors said in a statement Monday.

Clinton, 65, was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday when the clot turned up on a follow-up exam on the concussion, Clinton spokesman Phillipe Reines said. The clot is located in the vein in the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear. She will be released once the medication dose for the blood thinners has been established, the doctors said.

In their statement, Dr. Lisa Bardack of the Mount Kisco Medical Group and Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi of George Washington University said Clinton was making excellent progress and was in good spirits.

Clinton's complication "certainly isn't the most common thing to happen after a concussion" and is one of the few types of blood clots in the skull or head that are treated with blood thinners, said Dr. Larry Goldstein, a neurologist who is director of Duke University's stroke center. He is not involved in Clinton's care.

The area where Clinton's clot developed is "a drainage channel, the equivalent of a big vein inside the skull. It's how the blood gets back to the heart," Goldstein said.

Blood thinners usually are enough to treat the clot and it should have no long-term consequences if her doctors are saying she has suffered no neurological damage from it, Goldstein said.

Clinton returned to the U.S. from a trip to Europe, then fell ill with a stomach virus in early December that left her severely dehydrated and forced her to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East. Until then, she had canceled only two scheduled overseas trips, one to Europe after breaking her elbow in June 2009 and one to Asia after the February 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Her condition worsened when she fainted, fell and suffered a concussion while at home alone in mid-December as she recovered from the virus.

This isn't the first time Clinton has suffered a blood clot. In 1998, midway through her husband's second term as president, Clinton was in New York fundraising for the midterm elections when a swollen right foot led her doctor to diagnose a clot in her knee requiring immediate treatment.

Clinton had planned to step down as secretary of state at the beginning of President Barack Obama's second term. Whether she will return to work before she resigns remains a question.

Democrats are privately if not publicly speculating: How might her illness affect a decision about running for president in 2016?

After decades in politics, Clinton says she plans to spend the next year resting. She has long insisted she had no intention of mounting a second campaign for the White House four years from now. But the door is not entirely closed, and she would almost certainly emerge as the Democrat to beat if she decided to give in to calls by Democratic fans and run again.

Her age — and thereby health — would probably be a factor under consideration, given that Clinton would be 69 when sworn in, if she were elected in 2016. That might become even more of an issue in the early jockeying for 2016 if what started as a bad stomach bug becomes a prolonged, public bout with more serious infirmity.

Not that Democrats are willing to talk openly about the political implications of a long illness, choosing to keep any discussions about her condition behind closed doors. Publicly, Democrats reject the notion that a blood clot could hinder her political prospects.

"Some of those concerns could be borderline sexist," said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who worked for Clinton when she was a senator. "Dick Cheney had significant heart problems when he was vice president, and people joked about it. He took the time he needed to get better, and it wasn't a problem."

It isn't uncommon for presidential candidates' health — and age — to be an issue. Both in 2000 and 2008, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had to rebut concerns he was too old to be commander in chief or that his skin cancer could resurface.

Beyond talk of future politics, Clinton's three-week absence from the State Department has raised eyebrows among some conservative commentators who questioned the seriousness of her ailment after she canceled planned Dec. 20 testimony before Congress on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton had been due to discuss with lawmakers a scathing report she had commissioned on the attack. It found serious failures of leadership and management in two State Department bureaus were to blame for insufficient security at the facility. Clinton took responsibility for the incident before the report was released, but she was not blamed. Four officials cited in the report have either resigned or been reassigned.

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Ruling over bumper-car injury supports amusement park

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court, protecting providers of risky recreational activities from lawsuits, decided Monday that bumper car riders may not sue amusement parks over injuries stemming from the inherent nature of the attraction.

The 6-1 decision may be cited to curb liability for a wide variety of activities — such as jet skiing, ice skating and even participating in a fitness class, lawyers in the case said.

"This is a victory for anyone who likes fun and risk activities," said Jeffrey M. Lenkov, an attorney for Great America, which won the case.

But Mark D. Rosenberg, who represented a woman injured in a bumper car at the Bay Area amusement park, said the decision was bad for consumers.

"Patrons are less safe today than they were yesterday," Rosenberg said.

The ruling came in a lawsuit by Smriti Nalwa, who fractured her wrist in 2005 while riding in a bumper car with her 9-year-old son and being involved in a head-on collision. Rosenberg said Great America had told ride operators not to allow head-on collisions, but failed to ask patrons to avoid them.

The court said Nalwa's injury was caused by a collision with another bumper car, a normal part of the ride. To reduce all risk of injury, the ride would have to be scrapped or completely reconfigured, the court said.

"A small degree of risk inevitably accompanies the thrill of speeding through curves and loops, defying gravity or, in bumper cars, engaging in the mock violence of low-speed collisions," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote for the majority. "Those who voluntarily join in these activities also voluntarily take on their minor inherent risks."

Monday's decision extended a legal doctrine that has limited liability for risky sports, such as football, to now include recreational activities.

"Where the doctrine applies to a recreational activity," Werdegar wrote, "operators, instructors and participants …owe other participants only the duty not to act so as to increase the risk of injury over that inherent in the activity."

Amusement parks will continue to be required to use the utmost care on thrill rides such as roller coasters, where riders surrender control to the operator. But on attractions where riders have some control, the parks can be held liable only if their conduct unreasonably raised the dangers.

"Low-speed collisions between the padded, independently operated cars are inherent in — are the whole point of — a bumper car ride," Werdegar wrote.

Parks that fail to provide routine safety measures such as seat belts, adequate bumpers and speed controls might be held liable for an injury, but operators should not be expected to restrict where a bumper car is bumped, the court said.

The justices noted that the state inspected the Great America rides annually, and the maintenance and safety staff checked on the bumper cars the day Nalwa broke her wrist. The ride was functioning normally.

Reports showed that bumper car riders at the park suffered 55 injuries — including bruises, cuts, scrapes and strains — in 2004 and 2005, but Nalwa's injury was the only fracture. Nalwa said her wrist snapped when she tried to brace herself by putting her hand on the dashboard.

Rosenberg said the injury stemmed from the head-on collision. He said the company had configured bumper rides in other parks to avoid such collisions and made the Santa Clara ride uni-directional after the lawsuit was filed.

Justice Joyce L. Kennard dissented, complaining that the decision would saddle trial judges "with the unenviable task of determining the risks of harm that are inherent in a particular recreational activity."

"Whether the plaintiff knowingly assumed the risk of injury no longer matters," Kennard said.

maura.dolan@latimes.com

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