American Idol: Early Favorites Eliminated in Hollywood

TV Watch

American Idol

By Steve Helling

02/07/2013 at 10:30 PM EST

From left: Randy Jackson, Mariah Carey, Ryan Seacrest, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban

Michael Becker/FOX.

At the beginning of Thursday's American Idol, there were 43 men left in the competition. The next hour was a bloodbath, with many tears and a few tantrums – as well as some standout performances. Curtis Finch Jr., for example, performed a version of Christina Perri's "Jar Of Hearts" that was arguably the strongest of the evening. It may be the season's most overdone song, yet Finch successfully infused it with a rising gospel vibe.

Like every reality show, the contestants learned valuable life lessons as they fought to stay in the game. Here are five:

1. Never Let Them See You Sweat
Paul Jolley looked like he was going to throw up when he took the stage. "I'm so nervous," he said as he fought back tears. The judges watched quietly as he pulled himself together and gave a strong performance of Carrie Underwood's "Blown Away." He advanced, but not before Nicki Minaj criticized him for showing his nerves. "You walked out so defeated and that really irritated me," she said. "Just give us one minute of professionalism."

2. Be Funny and Unexpected
Admit it: It was kind of funny watching Gurpreet Singh Sarin nail "Georgia On My Mind." The judges liked him, perhaps because he doesn't fit any mold. Neither does Charlie Askew, who worked his quirky awkwardness into an intriguing version of Gotye's "Somebody that I Used To Know," complete with a spoken-word intro. "I am obsessed with you," Minaj said, prompting Askew to respond, "Baby, I could say the same thing." She ate it up.

3. Too Much of A Good Thing Can Be Lethal
Matheus Fernandes, one of the standouts from the Los Angeles auditions, was eliminated after a shaky rendition of Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger." The 4'9" contestant made one too many self-depreciating comments about his height, prompting Minaj to say, "Sometimes things can go from being inspiring to becoming you wanting a pity party." When Carey called him a "good person," his face said it all – Fernandes knew he wouldn't be advancing to the next round. In contrast, Lazaro Arbos said nary a word about his stutter, yet he advanced easily, despite an unspectacular rendition of Lady Gaga's "Edge of Glory."

4. If You Lose, Lose Gracefully
The night's "Sour Grapes Award" goes to Papa Peachez, who performed a karaoke-worthy version of Gaga's "Yoü and I." Minaj was unimpressed. "I'm so disappointed," she said. "I don't know why you chose that song." After he was eliminated, Peachez decided he didn't want to win American Idol, after all. "This isn't the competition for me," he said. "I just don't like singing other people's songs."

5. Big Risks Can Reap Big Rewards
Nick Boddington was eliminated in Las Vegas last season, so he came back determined to take some risks. He accompanied himself on the piano while singing Grace Potter's "Stars." It was a strong performance that the judges loved.

After the dust settled, 28 contestants remained. The judges corralled them onto the stage and announced that they would eliminate eight more male contestants next week, after the ladies' auditions.

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Southern diet, fried foods, may raise stroke risk

Deep-fried foods may be causing trouble in the Deep South. People whose diets are heavy on them and sugary drinks like sweet tea and soda were more likely to suffer a stroke, a new study finds.

It's the first big look at diet and strokes, and researchers say it might help explain why blacks in the Southeast — the nation's "stroke belt" — suffer more of them.

Blacks were five times more likely than whites to have the Southern dietary pattern linked with the highest stroke risk. And blacks and whites who live in the South were more likely to eat this way than people in other parts of the country were. Diet might explain as much as two-thirds of the excess stroke risk seen in blacks versus whites, researchers concluded.

"We're talking about fried foods, french fries, hamburgers, processed meats, hot dogs," bacon, ham, liver, gizzards and sugary drinks, said the study's leader, Suzanne Judd of the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

People who ate about six meals a week featuring these sorts of foods had a 41 percent higher stroke risk than people who ate that way about once a month, researchers found.

In contrast, people whose diets were high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish had a 29 percent lower stroke risk.

"It's a very big difference," Judd said. "The message for people in the middle is there's a graded risk" — the likelihood of suffering a stroke rises in proportion to each Southern meal in a week.

Results were reported Thursday at an American Stroke Association conference in Honolulu.

The federally funded study was launched in 2002 to explore regional variations in stroke risks and reasons for them. More than 20,000 people 45 or older — half of them black — from all 48 mainland states filled out food surveys and were sorted into one of five diet styles:

—Southern: Fried foods, processed meats (lunchmeat, jerky), red meat, eggs, sweet drinks and whole milk.

—Convenience: Mexican and Chinese food, pizza, pasta.

—Plant-based: Fruits, vegetables, juice, cereal, fish, poultry, yogurt, nuts and whole-grain bread.

—Sweets: Added fats, breads, chocolate, desserts, sweet breakfast foods.

—Alcohol: Beer, wine, liquor, green leafy vegetables, salad dressings, nuts and seeds, coffee.

"They're not mutually exclusive" — for example, hamburgers fall into both convenience and Southern diets, Judd said. Each person got a score for each diet, depending on how many meals leaned that way.

Over more than five years of follow-up, nearly 500 strokes occurred. Researchers saw clear patterns with the Southern and plant-based diets; the other three didn't seem to affect stroke risk.

There were 138 strokes among the 4,977 who ate the most Southern food, compared to 109 strokes among the 5,156 people eating the least of it.

There were 122 strokes among the 5,076 who ate the most plant-based meals, compared to 135 strokes among the 5,056 people who seldom ate that way.

The trends held up after researchers took into account other factors such as age, income, smoking, education, exercise and total calories consumed.

Fried foods tend to be eaten with lots of salt, which raises blood pressure — a known stroke risk factor, Judd said. And sweet drinks can contribute to diabetes, the disease that celebrity chef Paula Deen — the queen of Southern cuisine — revealed she had a year ago.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, drugmaker Amgen Inc. and General Mills Inc. funded the study.

"This study does strongly suggest that food does have an influence and people should be trying to avoid these kinds of fatty foods and high sugar content," said an independent expert, Dr. Brian Silver, a Brown University neurologist and stroke center director at Rhode Island Hospital.

"I don't mean to sound like an ogre. I know when I'm in New Orleans I certainly enjoy the food there. But you don't have to make a regular habit of eating all this stuff."

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

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East L.A. murals come to life in school plays

In East Los Angeles, murals are as common and overlooked as clouds in the sky, but both take shape and significance when looked at through a different lens.

A group of students from Monterey Continuation High School learned this lesson recently by writing and performing one-act plays about the wall art in their neighborhood and the muralists who put them there.

About…Productions oversees the Young Theaterworks program at the school and encourages students to communicate through the arts.

"We're realizing there's a living history that the students don't know about," said Rose Portillo, associate director of About…Productions. She and artistic director Theresa Chavez arranged for the students to meet with muralists Barbara Carrasco and Yreina Cervantez, and with Wayne Healy and David Botello, founders of the East Los Streetscapers, a public art studio.

Students gathered information during a brief but intense interview with the muralists and, with the help of mentors, wrote the plays based on each of the artists and their work.

"These Walls Tell Stories" focuses on a group of artists who rose through the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and documented the history of their city, the barrio and its people by putting paintbrush to stucco. The murals brought to life in the plays are mainly in East L.A. but the artists' work has been featured across the country. Carrasco's rendition of union organizer Dolores Huerta is used on a Girl Scout badge.

Students gave life and personalities to the characters in Healy's mural "Ghosts of the Barrio." In the painting, men sit on the stoop of a house in East L.A. and, in the play, they are discussing the current gang culture.

"It's very humbling because we're still working with the community and the youth," Cervantez said. The professor of Chicana/Chicano art at Cal State Northridge said she liked the artistic license the students took with pieces of her story.

A prominent figure in her work — the jaguar — was used in the students' narrative as a type of fairy godmother, transporting the actress playing Cervantez through time to show the events that shaped her art and explain some of its mythology.

"I appreciate that they did this because some of my own students don't know their history," Cervantez said.

Those who wrote the plays admitted being unaware of the murals' symbolism.

"Before, I would pass by them without thinking. Now I stop and pay attention to what the murals are trying to say," said Jessica Miranda, 20, who is completing her credits at Monterey, an alternative school on the Garfield High School campus.

The program has opened the students' eyes to opportunities in a creative field, whether in theater or other art forms, Portillo said.

"This shows them that having a creative inclination can lead to a career," she said. "Some of the brightest artists are in continuation high schools because they don't function well in regular settings. Here, we can balance that out."

The exposure to history, art and culture is an invaluable gift to both the students and the muralists, Carrasco said. Her daughter is a playwright and remembers only having Shakespeare classics to perform in high school.

"This is something not everyone has. It's great that our story continues and that this can be shared with others in the future," said Carrasco, whose strong friendships with union organizers Cesar Chavez and Huerta were depicted in one of the student plays. Her battle with lymphoma and her family life were also main story lines, much to Carrasco's pleasant surprise.

"It really took me back," she told one of the students as she wiped a tear from her eye. "I was really fighting for my life for my daughter."

dalina.castellanos@latimes.com

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Hagel Wouldn’t Be First Enlisted Man as Pentagon Chief

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Four secretaries of defense served as enlisted men before being promoted. Chuck Hagel, left, would be the only Pentagon chief to have served his entire military career as an enlisted man.

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared at the White House on Jan. 7 that Chuck Hagel, his nominee to be secretary of defense, would be the “first person of enlisted rank” to run the Pentagon. The distinction, which Mr. Obama called “historic,” quickly made its way into news media reports around the globe, including in The New York Times.

The problem is that at least four other American defense secretaries — Melvin R. Laird, Elliot L. Richardson, Caspar W. Weinberger and William J. Perry — served part of their military careers as enlisted men.

According to the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Laird, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s first defense secretary, entered the Navy as an enlisted man before serving as a junior officer on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. Mr. Richardson, who served four months as Nixon’s second defense secretary, enlisted in the Army as a private in 1942. He was subsequently commissioned as an officer, and as a first lieutenant landed with the Fourth Infantry Division in Normandy on D-Day.

Mr. Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of defense, entered the Army as a private in 1941, was commissioned and served in the Pacific, and by the end of World War II was a captain on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence staff.

According to biographies on the Web site of Stanford University, Mr. Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1946 to 1947 and was in Japan during the American occupation after World War II. He later became an officer in the Army Reserves. Today, Mr. Perry is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.

Mr. Obama’s omission of the four other defense secretaries was first reported by Robert Burns of The Associated Press.

White House officials insisted that Mr. Obama was not in error. “President Obama was precise and accurate in referring to the fact that Senator Hagel would be the ‘first person of enlisted rank’ to go on to serve as secretary of defense, and that experience on the front lines is part of the reason why President Obama chose him,” said Marie Harf, a White House spokeswoman who is working on Mr. Hagel’s nomination.

As Ms. Harf explained it, the use of the formulation “first person of enlisted rank” was meant to signal that Mr. Hagel had remained enlisted throughout his entire military career and to separate him from the other men, who had retired as officers. Mr. Hagel, who was wounded twice in Vietnam, would be the first defense secretary to have served in combat while enlisted. To Mr. Obama that distinction, at least, is crucial.

“Chuck knows that war is not a distraction,” Mr. Obama said in nominating Mr. Hagel. “He understands that sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the dirt and mud, that’s something we do only when it’s absolutely necessary.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the World War II general for whom Caspar W. Weinberger served as an intelligence staff member. He was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not McArthur.

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American Idol: It's a Guys' Night in Hollywood

TV Watch

American Idol

By Jamie Bufalino

02/06/2013 at 11:00 PM EST

From left: Randy Jackson, Mariah Carey, Ryan Seacrest, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban

George Holz/FOX

Caution: Contains spoilers!

"It does feel a bit like The Hunger Games," said Keith Urban, ramping up the drama as American Idol kicked off the first day of Hollywood Week. Although producers didn't unleash any tracker jackers on the contestants, they did throw in a couple unexpected twists: This season the week started off as a guys-only competition (the girls arrive in Hollywood next week), and after surviving a round of sudden death solo sing-offs, contestants would then be put into groups from which they couldn't escape.

During the solo round, the standouts included two memorable contestants from the nationwide auditions. First up, Navy man Micah Johnson, who developed a speech impediment after suffering through a botched surgery to remove his tonsils. After a rousing rendition of Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets," Johnson was the first to get the green light to the next round.

Joining him soon after was Cuban-American Lazaro Arbos, a 21-year-old ice cream scooper from Naples, Fla., who speaks with a severe stutter but sings with ease. Although Arbos admitted to being both "scared" and "petrified," he quickly won the judges over – Nicki Minaj made her fingers into a heart-shape while he sang – with his take on the Robbie Williams hit, "Angels."

When it came time to form groups of four, the Idol producers threw a few more curveballs – such as pairing a couple of country crooners with two flamboyant (think glitter and faux fur) dudes Ryan Seacrest described as the show's "resident divas."

The result: a quartet that dubbed themselves Country Queen, which delivered a train wreck of a performance. Still, somehow three of the four made it through.

Meanwhile, Arbos's group experience also proved to be a bit of a disaster – which some of his cohorts blamed on his inability to quickly learn the lyrics and melody to the Beach Boys hit "Wouldn't It Be Nice." Although his main nemesis got the boot, a tearful Arbos got the chance to sing another day.

The day of auditions came to a close with what was possibly the most heartbreaking Idol exit ever. New York City subway singer Frankie Ford got a case of the jitters before going on stage, then proceeded to screw up the lyrics and sing off key – leaving the judges no choice but to pull the plug on his dreams. Before walking off into the night, a sobbing Ford stared into the camera and said, "I swear to God I'm coming back next year and I'm going to win."

There will be more solos Thursday (8 p.m. ET), as the judges have to whittle the 43 men left in the competition down to 20 lucky fellas.

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New whooping cough strain in US raises questions

NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers have discovered the first U.S. cases of whooping cough caused by a germ that may be resistant to the vaccine.

Health officials are looking into whether cases like the dozen found in Philadelphia might be one reason the nation just had its worst year for whooping cough in six decades. The new bug was previously reported in Japan, France and Finland.

"It's quite intriguing. It's the first time we've seen this here," said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. cases are detailed in a brief report from the CDC and other researchers in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Whooping cough is a highly contagious disease that can strike people of any age but is most dangerous to children. It was once common, but cases in the U.S. dropped after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s.

An increase in illnesses in recent years has been partially blamed on a version of the vaccine used since the 1990s, which doesn't last as long. Last year, the CDC received reports of 41,880 cases, according to a preliminary count. That included 18 deaths.

The new study suggests that the new whooping cough strain may be why more people have been getting sick. Experts don't think it's more deadly, but the shots may not work as well against it.

In a small, soon-to-be published study, French researchers found the vaccine seemed to lower the risk of severe disease from the new strain in infants. But it didn't prevent illness completely, said Nicole Guiso of the Pasteur Institute, one of the researchers.

The new germ was first identified in France, where more extensive testing is routinely done for whooping cough. The strain now accounts for 14 percent of cases there, Guiso said.

In the United States, doctors usually rely on a rapid test to help make a diagnosis. The extra lab work isn't done often enough to give health officials a good idea how common the new type is here, experts said.

"We definitely need some more information about this before we can draw any conclusions," the CDC's Clark said.

The U.S. cases were found in the past two years in patients at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. One of the study's researchers works for a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which makes a version of the old whooping cough vaccine that is sold in other countries.

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JournaL: http://www.nejm.org

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Edison rejected safety fixes at San Onofre, Sen. Boxer says

Southern California Edison was aware of problems with replacement steam generators at its San Onofre nuclear power plant but chose not to make fixes, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer charged Wednesday.

Boxer cited a leaked report from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the manufacturer of the steam generators, obtained by her office. It is the first indication from government officials that Edison and Mitsubishi knew the system had problems before it was even installed.

The nuclear plant, a prime supplier of power in Southern California, has been off line for more than a year after a small amount of radioactive steam leaked from the plant's tubing.

The report indicates that Edison and Mitsubishi "were aware of serious problems with the design of San Onofre nuclear power plant's replacement steam generators before they were installed" and "rejected enhanced safety modifications and avoided triggering a more rigorous license amendment and safety review process," Boxer and U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

According to their letter, the Mitsubishi report indicated that some safety modifications were rejected because they carried "unacceptable consequences," and that decision contributed to the plant's problems.

The letter quoted the report speaking about "difficulties associated with the potential changes," including "the possibility that making them could impede the ability to justify the [replacement steam generator] design" without triggering a lengthy license amendment process.

The plant has suffered from unusual wearing of hundreds of steam generator tubes carrying radioactive water.

Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — which owns a 20% share in the plant — spent a combined $771 million replacing the steam generators, which ratepayers are now repaying.

Edison has proposed restarting one of the units at partial power, which the company contends would alleviate the conditions that led the tubes to vibrate excessively and rub against one another and support structures. The NRC is expected to make a decision on the proposal in late April or May.

"All design decisions for the ... steam generators were made in accordance with well-established and accepted industry standards and practices, along with our own and third-party operating data and experience," Mitsubishi said in a statement.

The company said it was cooperating with the NRC investigation into San Onofre's problems.

Edison said it too was cooperating with the NRC's review process and that the company "takes very seriously all allegations raised by the letter."

The utility giant did not respond to the specific allegations raised by the lawmakers.

Neither the NRC nor the lawmakers released the Mitsubishi report. NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said the agency had not made it public because it contained proprietary information.

A public NRC document references an Oct. 12, 2012, report with the same name as the one cited by Boxer and Markey, but does not describe its contents.

Dricks said in a statement: "We have received the letter from Sen. Boxer and Congressman Markey and will respond in the normal course of business. As an independent safety agency, we will review all available information in making a judgment as to whether the plant would meet our safety standards if restart were permitted."

The environmental group Friends of the Earth has alleged that Southern California Edison sidestepped a full NRC review of design changes in the new steam generators that the organization says led to the tube wear. Edison denies that, and the two parties are debating the issue in an NRC proceeding separate from the agency's review of the restart plan.

Friends of the Earth energy and climate director Damon Moglen said he had not seen the Mitsubishi report, but based on the Boxer letter "it seems that Edison did know that there were serious problems with the design" and chose not to fix them.

"It seems to really underpin the arguments that we were making all along," he said.

Edison and Mitsubishi officials, along with consultants who worked on the investigation into San Onofre's issues, were scheduled to brief the five NRC commissioners Thursday.

The meeting, which was scheduled prior to Boxer's letter, will be the first time since the plant's shutdown that the full commission will have the opportunity to question Edison directly.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

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Tsunami Fear After Quake Off Solomons

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Residents of the South Pacific from island chains to Australia were alerted to the possibility of a damaging tsunami on Wednesday after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake off the Solomon Islands, according to scientists and news reports from the area, but the warnings were called off a few hours later.

Ednal Palmer, the chief reporter of the newspaper The Solomon Star in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, said in a telephone interview that reports from Lata, the capital of Temotu Province, were sketchy but indicated that a wave had apparently struck three villages.

“We have heard that a wave 103 centimeters high” — nearly three and a half feet — “has hit Lata, swamping the town, and five people are still missing at the moment,” Mr. Palmer said.

Lata, where the quake struck, is in Temotu Province, where the population is around 30,000. It is a three-hour flight from Honiara, which was not damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami.

Mr. Palmer said Honiara residents were not concerned about the tsunami. “Most of us are getting ready for tonight’s UB40 concert,” he said.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said on its Web site, “Sea level readings indicate a tsunami was generated.” The earthquake struck around 11 a.m. local time in the Santa Cruz Islands, part of the Solomon chain. There were conflicting reports as to the depth of the quake.

The center said the tsunami warning was limited to the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, New Caledonia, Kosrae, Fiji, Kiribati, and Wallis and Futuna.

A lesser alert, a tsunami watch, was declared for American Samoa, Australia, Guam, the Northern Marianas, New Zealand and eastern Indonesia.

The earthquake was not only powerful but also shallow, giving it significant potential to cause damage, said Barry Hirshorn, a geophysicist with the National Weather Service in Hawaii. Moreover, it was a thrust earthquake, he said, meaning that the sea floor moved up or down, not sideways, contributing to the potential for a dangerous tsunami.

But after the earthquake, as scientists watched to see how far a tsunami might spread, there were few early indications of a major threat beyond the immediate area, Mr. Hirshorn said. A water rise of about three feet had been observed close to the quake, he said, still high enough to be potentially damaging but probably not big enough to threaten distant shores.

In New Zealand, thousands of people were at the beach, swimming in the sea on a glorious summer afternoon on Waitangi Day, a national holiday — quite oblivious to the potential for a tsunami. Tsunami sirens were set off late in the afternoon there, and people in coastal areas were being told to stay off beaches and out of the sea, rivers and estuaries.

The New Zealand Herald reported Wednesday afternoon on its Web site that tsunami sirens in Suva, the capital of Fiji, had been warning people to stay inside or go to higher ground.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on its Web site on Wednesday that the Solomon Islands’ National Disaster Management Office had advised those living in low-lying areas, especially on Makira and Malaita, to move to higher ground.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the chief reporter of The Solomon Star. He is Ednal Palmer, not Edmal.

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Kim Kardashian's Pregnancy Is No Reason to Speed Divorce, says Kris Humphries

By Mike Fleeman

02/05/2013 at 09:20 PM EST

Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian

Seth Browarnik/StarTraks

Kim Kardashian's baby is not even born yet and already is being drawn into mama's divorce.

Kardashian, carrying boyfriend Kanye West's child, has bristled at what she sees as stall tactics by estranged husband Kris Humphries to close the legal books on their 72-day marriage.

But Humphries's lawyer Marshall W. Waller writes that "what is really going on here is that an 'urgency' in the form of an apparently unplanned pregnancy" is being used by Kardashian as "an opportunity to gain a litigation advantage (to) prematurely set this matter for trial."

He adds parenthetically that the pregnancy is "something (Humphries) had nothing to do with."

Waller explains his reasoning for calling the pregnancy as unplanned: "Indeed, why would (she) plan to get pregnant in the midst of divorce proceedings?"

Kardashian, herself, recently addressed the timing.

"God brings you things at a time when you least expect it," she said last month. "I'm such a planner and this was just meant to be. What am I going to? Wait years to get a divorce? I'd love one. It's a process."

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Critics seek to delay NYC sugary drinks size limit

NEW YORK (AP) — Opponents are pressing to delay enforcement of the city's novel plan to crack down on supersized, sugary drinks, saying businesses shouldn't have to spend millions of dollars to comply until a court rules on whether the measure is legal.

With the rule set to take effect March 12, beverage industry, restaurant and other business groups have asked a judge to put it on hold at least until there's a ruling on their lawsuit seeking to block it altogether. The measure would bar many eateries from selling high-sugar drinks in cups or containers bigger than 16 ounces.

"It would be a tremendous waste of expense, time, and effort for our members to incur all of the harm and costs associated with the ban if this court decides that the ban is illegal," Chong Sik Le, president of the New York Korean-American Grocers Association, said in court papers filed Friday.

City lawyers are fighting the lawsuit and oppose postponing the restriction, which the city Board of Health approved in September. They said Tuesday they expect to prevail.

"The obesity epidemic kills nearly 6,000 New Yorkers each year. We see no reason to delay the Board of Health's reasonable and legal actions to combat this major, growing problem," Mark Muschenheim, a city attorney, said in a statement.

Another city lawyer, Thomas Merrill, has said officials believe businesses have had enough time to get ready for the new rule. He has noted that the city doesn't plan to seek fines until June.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials see the first-of-its-kind limit as a coup for public health. The city's obesity rate is rising, and studies have linked sugary drinks to weight gain, they note.

"This is the biggest step a city has taken to curb obesity," Bloomberg said when the measure passed.

Soda makers and other critics view the rule as an unwarranted intrusion into people's dietary choices and an unfair, uneven burden on business. The restriction won't apply at supermarkets and many convenience stores because the city doesn't regulate them.

While the dispute plays out in court, "the impacted businesses would like some more certainty on when and how they might need to adjust operations," American Beverage Industry spokesman Christopher Gindlesperger said Tuesday.

Those adjustments are expected to cost the association's members about $600,000 in labeling and other expenses for bottles, Vice President Mike Redman said in court papers. Reconfiguring "16-ounce" cups that are actually made slightly bigger, to leave room at the top, is expected to take cup manufacturers three months to a year and cost them anywhere from more than $100,000 to several millions of dollars, Foodservice Packaging Institute President Lynn Dyer said in court documents.

Movie theaters, meanwhile, are concerned because beverages account for more than 20 percent of their overall profits and about 98 percent of soda sales are in containers greater than 16 ounces, according to Robert Sunshine, executive director of the National Association of Theatre Owners of New York State.

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Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

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