Beds

Sofa beds and futons of eras past rarely earned much praise for style, let alone comfort. But as more consumers seek furniture that can do double duty, modern designers are rising to the challenge. By day, these pieces work as stylish seating in a family room, home office or bedroom of that son or daughter away at college. By night, each can transform niftily into a bed for holiday houseguests. For more examples, including a $499 BoConcept ottoman that transforms into a cool cot, look for an expanded photo gallery at latimes.

Hoping to reduce the number of infant deaths, Los Angeles County officials unveiled a campaign Wednesday to educate parents about how to safely put their babies to bed. Over the last four years, 278 babies in the county have died from suffocating while they were sleeping - more than all other accidental deaths of children under age 14, officials said. The deaths are more common among Latino and black babies, officials said. "Accidental suffocation poses the greatest risk for babies from 1 day to the age of 1," said Deanne Tilton Durfee, executive director of the county Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect.

IF it's been a year or two since you've shopped for a mattress, you're in for some surprises. That memory foam bed that once seemed so novel? It's now decidedly mainstream. Latex is the hot material of choice. And that's not all that's changed. Choices are multiplying -- especially on the luxury end -- and prices are too.

The nearly 3 in 10 white girls of high school age who use indoor tanning beds likely will soon come face-to-face with a new and stiffer warning aimed at young people eager to get that sun-kissed glow in a hurry: Don't. Faced with mounting evidence that indoor tanning greatly increases cancer risk among younger users, the Food & Drug Administration proposed Monday to require tanning booths and beds to carry a warning encouraging young people not to use the devices. Businesses that use devices and beds that use UV-A and UV-B rays to promote tanning currently are required to post signs warning consumers about health risks that come with their use. But the devices themselves are exempt from pre-market review.

Reservations for tent cabins along the High Sierra Trail in Sequoia National Park usually sell out in a few hours when the booking period opens in January. But this year spaces are still available in August and September for the six cabins at 7,800 feet because of a legal wrangle over the use of pack animals that delayed the camp's opening. Bearpaw High Sierra Camp , a park tradition for 80 years, is a treat for guests who hike in 11.5 miles and find beds, hot showers and home-cooked meals awaiting them amid a quiet Sierra meadow.

Faced with severe overcrowding and emergency room wait times that average 12 hours, Los Angeles County officials are considering adding 150 more beds to County/USC Medical Center. The county opened a new state-of-the-art hospital in 2008 to replace an aging general hospital tower. But even before the doors opened, officials worried that it wouldn't be big enough. The new hospital has 600 inpatient beds, 224 fewer than its predecessor. It didn't take long for the problem to become apparent.

About 900,000 cigarette lighters should be returned to the stores where they were bought because they lack safety devices to keep children from igniting them, the government said Thursday. The Consumer Product Safety Commission also said it is recalling 26,000 nylon hammocks and 31,400 wooden bunk beds because children could become trapped in them and possibly strangle. Young's Assn.

"Crackdown Demanded on Skid Row Camps" (Nov. 19) states that some agencies that provide services to the homeless denounced our plan, saying that "it was merely another attempt to sweep the streets of homeless people who have nowhere else to go." In fact, our plan specifically calls for an anti-street encampment ordinance in conjunction with providing a shelter bed for every person removed from an encampment. Another so-called homeless advocate stated that "most addicts and mentally ill are not service-resistant," they just don't want to abide by the rules at shelters.

The Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles will begin charging on a voluntary basis for some of its beds because of overwhelming demand triggered by the recession and recurring visits by some guests, shelter officials said Friday. In September, the homeless shelter will begin charging $7 a bed for up to 25 beds for men and 25 for women, said the Rev. Andy Bales, director of the mission at 545 S. San Pedro St. The shelter has 268 beds for men, and 208 for women. From the fees collected, $5 a day will be used to pay for programs the mission runs, and $2 will be set aside as savings for the guest, Bales said.

Recently overheard in a furniture store: She: "Now that we've bought such a beautiful chest of drawers, we should get a neat bed too." He: "What do you mean, 'neat bed'? A bed is a bed." She: "You know. A wooden frame. With a headboard or posts. Like grandmothers have." He: "We'll have to go to an antique store for one of those. I think the only kind of frame they make nowadays is that rickety metal thing on rollers." How wrong he was.

Gov. Jerry Brown's "ugly" proposal to federal judges to partially ease prison crowding by leasing empty jail beds in the state drew dismay from advocates on both sides of the criminal justice debate and a forecast of "dubious prospects" from a legislative leader who objects to the cost. "I strongly believe any additional taxpayer dollars ought to go into smart strategies to keep people from committing crimes once they're out," said state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento)

Gov. Jerry Brown is pursuing a prison contract in California, too small to meet federal orders to reduce crowding, but enough to help Brown end the shipment of inmates to for-profit prisons out of state. According to bid documents, California offers to pay no more than $63 a day, on top of facility costs, to house up to 1,225 additional inmates in what the state calls "modified community" prisons. California currently has 600 inmates in one such private prison, paying more than $13 million a year to the GEO Group Inc . Bids for the new facilities are due May 28. At one point, California housed more than 5,600 inmates in 13 small "community" prisons built for state prisoners by local governments or by private prison operators.

CARLSBAD, Calif. - The Legoland Hotel, which opened April 5, got plenty of little things wrong in its first weeks. But its designers got one thing enormously right, and that will make this place a screaming success: kid-centricity. "The dragon is made out of Legos!" my daughter, Grace, who is about to turn 9, said as we approached the hotel entrance a week after the opening. Inside the lobby, Grace; my wife, Mary Frances; and I found a faux fountain, a play pit full of little plastic bricks and dozens of deeply absorbed children who were collaborating on a rainbow-hued monolith, constructing pretend weapons, hollering, whispering, running, jumping and dragging their parents from one discovery to the next.

WEST, Texas - At the Veterans of Foreign Wars post just a few blocks past City Hall here, the donated mattresses form a stack that nearly touches the ceiling. Rows of folding tables are piled high with clothes, and the porch out back has enough water bottles to hydrate an army. That's just Saturday's haul. And the first thing visitors hear when they step inside: "You hungry?" PHOTOS: Texas explosion The smoky scent of barbecue wafted through the room, as did the smell of meatloaf fresh off the grill.

A Sacramento County woman was arrested this week after an infant found dead under a bed. The woman, identified as 24-year-old Courtney Addington, was examined in January by personnel at Mercy General Hospital for excessive bleeding. Although hospital staff said she showed signs of recently giving birth, Addington reportedly denied those claims, officials said. The hospital contacted Sacramento County sheriff's deputies, who stopped by Addington's home later that night.

Bed bugs have re-emerged as an urban blight in the past several years, forcing people out of homes, resisting chemical pesticides and evading other removal tactics. But researchers are building bug-catchers inspired by an age-old folk remedy to this “ancient scourge”: kidney bean leaves. Their experiments, described in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, tested the home-grown solution and even made synthetic leaves that could help scientists devise an easy, environmentally friendly method of trapping bugs before they establish a full invasion.

"Stand By Your Beds, Boys," a farce at the Richmond Shepard Theatre, builds considerable momentum in the first act but sags in the second. The third act restores some of the energy, but the play never completely recovers. The narrative hinges on three concealments. A pro football player tries to hide his gay relationship with a British teacher from his mother, while the teacher seeks to persuade a weaselly immigration official that he's marrying an American.

A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for 6-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens. Woolworths said staff administering the website selling the beds were not aware of the connection to "Lolita," the 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, about a man who becomes sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl.

You would think that people who were diagnosed with melanoma -- the most deadly form of skin cancer -- would be meticulously careful about using sunscreen, avoiding tanning salons and generally protecting their skin. You would be wrong, researchers said Monday. Melanoma tumors develop in the skin cells that make melanin, the brown pigment that protects skin from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. It is the least common type of skin cancer, but it can be the most dangerous.

Chris Brown has chilled out enough to discuss his assault on Rihanna reasonably with someone on morning television. Brown infamously lost it with Robin Roberts on "Good Morning America" when she asked a series of questions about Rihanna in March 2011, storming offstage after the interview and then going on to bust up a dressing room. His "Today" interview Monday with Matt Lauer was definitely more copacetic. PROFILE:  Chris Brown has new album, new image "For me, I've been humbled by the whole experience," Brown said, reflecting on how he was different now than before.