Guidelines

Distancing himself from Republicans on housing issues, President Obama pitched a $5-billion to $10-billion plan to help a key segment of struggling homeowners — those still making monthly payments, but on underwater mortgages. Obama proposed Wednesday to help about 3.5 million people with good credit who are unable to refinance at historically low rates because their homes are worth less than their mortgages. He argued that those homeowners — and the country — couldn't afford to let the housing market bottom out, as many Republicans, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have advocated.

A bill that would allow self-driving cars on California's roads has passed the California Senate. The bill, SB1298, sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), establishes guidelines for "autonomous vehicles" to be tested and operated in California. The bill now goes to the Assembly for consideration next month. Tech giant Google Inc., Caltech and other organizations have been working to develop such vehicles, which use radar, video cameras and lasers to navigate roads and stay safe in traffic without human assistance.

If you think Bluetooth is a rare dental condition and an app is what you eat before the entree, you might not be a candidate for today's high-tech, whiz-bang smart phones. Instead, you might be happier with a mobile phone geared toward seniors. Those phones typically don't have Web-surfing capability, GPS maps and video games. Instead they have large buttons, oversized digital readouts and hearing-aid compatibility, along with a relatively simple calling plan. Although senior-friendly phones aren't new, their lower prices and variety are. A recent price skirmish among wireless companies means seniors can get an easy-to-use cellphone and cheap service to go with it, said Mac Haddow, senior fellow on public policy for the independent and nonprofit Alliance for Generational Equity.

Plenty of restaurants have been advertising their efforts to offer healthful choices, and it's possible to eat carefully just about anywhere. But researchers say nearly all the entrees they reviewed at 245 U.S. chains fail to meet federal guidelines. Think about it, and you can figure out some likely culprits: burgers with cheese, bacon and sauce; pastas with four cheeses and sausages; outsize servings of meat; salads covered in fatty, salty dressings. For a study published online in the journal Public Health Nutrition, researchers looked at the nutritional content of 30,923 menu items, including those from children's menus, from 245 brands of restaurants.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

So how many omega-3 fatty acids are enough — and how should you get them? That likely depends on your age and your specific health concerns. The United States does not yet have guidelines for DHA or EPA, and consensus among nutrition experts is elusive. But specialty groups, some governmental agencies and individual experts have started to take a stand. For healthy adults without major medical issues, the European Food Safety Agency recommends a daily dose of 250 milligrams of combined EPA and DHA, while the National Heart Foundation of Australia suggests 500 milligrams.

Guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s — the memory-stealing disease — have been updated for the first time in 27 years. The new guidelines recognize the disease as a continuum, not a single stage, according to a release Tuesday by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Assn. In 1984, Alzheimer’s was defined as having a single symptom — dementia — and the diagnosis was only confirmed at autopsy by the abnormal amounts of proteins forming plaques and tangles in the brain.

Essential tremor is the most common type of tremor disorder. The trembling of the hands, head or voice can be insignificant and require no treatment. But other people have severe symptoms and can benefit from medical intervention. New guidelines published Wednesday by the American Academy of Neurology should help doctors explain treatment options to their patients and spur more research into the condition, which affects an estimated 10 million Americans. The condition, which usually starts after age 40, can be treated with the high blood pressure drug propranolol and the seizure drug primidone.

The U.S. Department of Transportation doesn't want you tweeting on Twitter, poking on Facebook, or giving a "thumbs up" to new music on Pandora when you're behind the wheel -- unless your car is parked. And to that end, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced on Thursday the "first-ever federally proposed guidelines to encourage automobile manufacturers to limit the distraction risk for in-vehicle electronic devices. " Translated, LaHood and the Transportation Department are calling for an end to distractions caused by our in-car infotainment systems, which are increasingly relying on touch screens to operate and bringing navigation, music and even social networking apps into the cabin of our rides.

Guidelines limiting PSA screening for prostate cancer detection in older men are widely ignored, researchers said Tuesday, and physicians seem likely to continue to ignore them. Nearly half of all men age 75 and older receive the PSA test from doctors, despite a growing body of evidence that the tests do more harm than good, according to Dr. Scott E. Eggener of the University of Chicago Medical Center. The issue has been in the news lately with the report last week that 81-year-old Warren Buffett, the well-known entrepreneur, was diagnosed with stage 1 prostate cancer and would begin receiving radiation treatment for it. Because stage 1 prostate cancer is very slow-growing, an elderly man is more likely to die of some other cause before the tumor gets large enough to do any damage.

If you had a history of suffering from migraines and could prevent the debilitating headaches by swallowing a few pills, you'd do it - wouldn't you? Actually, odds are you wouldn't. Neurologists say that only about one-third of those who could benefit by migraine-preventing medication actually use it. Preventive treatment involves taking a seizure drug and a beta-blocker every day to reduce the frequency, severity and duration of migraines. Neurologists estimate that about 38% of people who suffer from migraines stand to benefit with such a regimen, and studies suggest that as many as half of migraines can be prevented with drugs, according to Dr. Stephen D. Silberstein, a neurologist at the Jefferson Headache Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan's parliament on Thursday approved guidelines that will frame a reset of the country's relations with the United States, paving the way to end a nearly five-month disruption in ties that began when errant U.S. airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border. The guidelines called for halting U.S. drone strikes on Pakistani territory but put no mechanism in place to enforce such a ban. Most Pakistanis see the air campaign as a blatant breach of their country's sovereignty.

Our 7-year-old daughter awoke screaming and could not be comforted or touched. We took her to the emergency room. Now our insurance company is denying the visit, saying that it wasn't medically necessary for her to be seen in the ER. Yet the emergency room physician considered a spinal tap to rule out meningitis. How could this visit not be necessary? The situation you describe certainly seems to qualify as an emergency, and you should fight to have your insurer pay for your daughter's ER visit.

Last week, the Senate voted on a proposal by New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez to end some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry. The Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act was a curiously skimpy bill that targeted only oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas. Even so, the proposal didn't pass. But that hasn't stopped President Obama from calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz.

The news media has been abuzz recently about the Motion Picture Assn. of America's decision to adopt an R rating for the film documentary"Bully,"and understandably so. School bullying has reached epidemic proportions, and with the rise in social media, bullying insidiously follows children from the schoolyard into their homes, their dorm rooms and their computers. A long list of Hollywood celebrities, sports stars, members of Congress and just plain folks denounced the MPAA for assigning the R rating to "Bully," and they called for a lowerPG-13rating instead.

Marketing unhealthful foods and beverages to children is off the charts, say some food and health advocacy groups, and they called on the Obama administration Thursday to support voluntary guidelines on how companies advertise to kids and how they formulate their products. To hammer their point home, a video titled "We're Not Buying It" was unveiled at a press conference Thursday that featured representatives from the Center for Science in the Public Interest , the Prevention Institute , Public Health Law & Policy , Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity , the Center for Digital Democracy and the Berkeley Media Studies Group . The video, which the panelists hope will go viral, highlights the tremendous and sometimes insidious marketing efforts directed to children, often at a pace parents can't control.

It's a good thing dietary guidelines aren't laws. If they were, just about all of us could be found guilty. Even if you load fruit onto your whole-grain cereal and pile greens on your sandwiches, chances are you're regularly falling short on one or more nutrients. Many people take multivitamins to fill in these gaps, but since everyone's different, how do you pick the right pill? You can't buy a multivitamin with your name on it, but you can buy one aimed at your gender.

For generations of women, it's been an ingrained medical ritual: Get a Pap test every year. Now two influential groups of medical experts say that having cervical cancer screening once a year is not necessary and, in fact, should be discouraged. Many women can wait as long as five years between screenings, the new guidelines say. The call for screening cutbacks, released Wednesday, is based on evolving knowledge accrued over the last decade about human papillomavirus, a common sexually transmitted disease that causes most cervical cancer, and the availability of an HPV test that shows whether a woman has been infected with the most common variants of the virus.

Troops serving in Afghanistan were advised never to touch the Koran, never to place anything on top of one, and to keep it off the floor and out of bathrooms. They were even told never to "talk badly" about it. But the do's and don'ts said nothing about burning the Muslim holy book, which is what happened last month as a cache of Korans was incinerated at Bagram air base, setting off riots across the country that killed more than 30 people and provoked attacks on U.S. forces. An investigation by NATO officials into the burnings found five U.S. troops responsible, but it concluded that the actions were not deliberate and were the result of a miscommunication.