NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Fourteen kids were treated at one Colorado emergency room for accidentally ingesting marijuana after the drug became legal for medical use there in late 2009, according to a new study.

In comparison, no children seen for a possible accidental poisoning had pot in their system in the four years before the change in laws, researchers looking back at ER records found.

"These products are now commercially available and have high amounts of THC in them," said Dr. George Wang, who led the new study at Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver.

Medical marijuana is now legal in 18 states and Washington, D.C. Colorado dispensaries sell baked goods, candies and soft drinks made with pot for people with cancer, HIV and severe pain, for example.

Last year, Colorado and Washington State voted to make small amounts of the drug legal for recreational use, as well.

After seeing a couple of young children who got very sick from marijuana, Wang's team looked back at almost 1,400 ER records belonging to kids being treated for unintentional ingestions at Children's Hospital Colorado in 2005 through 2011.

Before October 2009, none of the 790 kids suspected of accidental poisoning tested positive for marijuana in their urine.

After the law changed, 14 out of 588 were found to have eaten or otherwise ingested the drug. Those kids were between 8 months and 12 years old, Wang and his colleagues reported in JAMA Pediatrics.

Eight of those children were admitted to the hospital, including two to the intensive care unit. Most showed up with lack of energy, but one also had low oxygen levels and another trouble breathing.

"The biggest thing we are concerned about is the level of sedation in these kids," Wang told Reuters Health.

"The things that we get scared of are, they get enough that they're so sleepy that it affects how they breathe, or they fall and hit their head."

COOKIES, BROWNIES

"The impact on children is different than it is in adults," said Dr. William Hurley, from the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Washington Poison Center in Seattle.

"Kids get significant depression of their central nervous system - their brain and their breathing centers - and they can end up having us breathe for them," Hurley, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study, told Reuters Health.

He and his colleagues have also seen a slight increase in kids' marijuana exposures since medical marijuana became legal in Washington.

Hurley said he worries about more ingestions in the future, because Washington has allowed cookies and brownies baked with pot as part of legalizing recreational marijuana.

"We know when we put those products into the environment, we're going to see kids exposed to them," he said.

Dr. Shan Yin, medical director of the Cincinnati Drug and Poison Information Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, said the new study can't prove legalizing medical marijuana led more kids to get into the drug.

But, he told Reuters Health, "It's not surprising to me either that with the advent of medical marijuana in Colorado, it would be more freely available in households and that kids could have more access to it."

Yin used to work with some of the authors, but wasn't involved in the new study.

Wang has been trying to get the latest bill on recreational marijuana use in Colorado to include a requirement of child-resistant packaging. In the meantime, he said people who use the drug for medical or recreational reasons should keep it out of reach of children.

"I think everyone can agree that we don't want our kids getting into it," he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/115I1Gu JAMA Pediatrics, online May 27, 2013.

Shares the government owns in Royal Bank of Scotland , also rescued during the financial crisis, will be sold at a later date, the paper said.

Osborne will announce the sale of the state's 39 percent stake in Lloyds, which could raise up to 17 billion pounds ($26 billion), during his annual policy speech to London's business community at Mansion House on June 19, the paper said.

The Treasury declined to comment on Sunday, and Lloyds said it was a matter for the government.

Osborne is under pressure over a widely unpopular austerity program aimed at cutting Britain's huge public deficit.

Offloading shares in Lloyds could be relatively straightforward, given they are trading above the price at which the government considers it would break even on the transaction.

A report by thinktank the Policy Exchange, due to be published on Monday, will support selling Lloyds shares, but via a different structure. It will recommend taxpayers are given shares, keeping any profits but with the original cost returned to the government when they sell them, sources familiar with the report said.

Any decision on both banks' future will also likely be influenced by a report from the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, expected to be published next week.

For RBS, the commission will put forward as one option dividing the lender into a 'good' and a 'bad' bank as a way of ring-fencing its toxic assets, political and industry sources said on Tuesday.

RBS has already undergone one massive restructuring since the government pumped in 45.8 billion pounds ($70 billion) in 2008 to keep it afloat, leaving taxpayers with an 81 percent stake.

UK Financial Investments, which manages the government's bank stakes, could not immediately be reached for comment.

($1 = 0.6436 British pounds)

(Reporting by Rosalba O'Brien and Matt Scuffham; Editing by John Stonestreet)

James Everett Dutschke, 41, who was arrested on April 27, pleaded not guilty to all five counts of a grand jury indictment, court records filed on Tuesday showed.

His trial has been set for July 29 and Dutschke faces a maximum penalty of life in prison for threatening the president and others by mail and "possessing a biological agent, toxin and delivery system for use as a weapon."

The indictment against Dutschke was filed last Friday as authorities, in separate cases in Washington state and Texas, were investigating two other batches of ricin-contaminated letters sent to Obama.

The grand jury indictment includes one count charging Dutschke with having made it appear that another man, Paul Kevin Curtis, had mailed the letters to Obama, a U.S. senator and a Mississippi judge.

Curtis, an Elvis impersonator, had already alleged that Dutschke attempted to frame him as part of a long-running feud.

Dutschke has been held without bail since his arrest. He waived his right to appear at an arraignment set for Thursday in court filing on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Tom Brown; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

[More from BGR: ]

In the U.S. market in April, WhatsApp racked up $355,000 from Apples App Store and just $41,000 from Google Play. The size of the gap is pretty stunning. But so is the fact that WhatsApp may be grossing less than half a million per month in the biggest app market in the world. This would be just 2% of what certain leading game app vendors are grossing in America on a monthly basis; a good reason for WhatsApp to think long and hard about a game module clip-on.

[More from BGR: ]

But the contrast to major European markets is the real jaw-dropped here. WhatsApp made $290,000 in Germany from Google Play and just $207,000 from the App Store. Who knew that the German app market generates as much revenue for the leading messaging app as the United States? And who knew that Google had already passed Apple in Europes largest smartphone market when it comes to WhatsApp sales? In Spain, the situation is even more drastic; WhatsApp gets nearly 90% of its revenue from Google Play.

One takeaway here is that app vendors may have to think about prioritizing Google Play as a platform in many European markets, even though iOS still reigns supreme in markets like the U.S. and the U.K. The size of the German market is pretty eye-popping; for certain kinds of applications its not clear that America is the biggest or the best market to target for initial rollouts.

This article was

Their deal is the latest example of growing collaboration between entertainment companies in the world's two biggest movie markets.

Legendary, which also made "Inception" and "The Dark Knight," said its Chinese venture, Legendary East, signed an agreement with the Chinese company's unit, China Film Co., on Thursday in Beijing. The deal calls for the companies to fund development and production of multiple films over three years.

Their first collaborations will be announced in the coming months. Legendary said each is planned as a US-China co-production. That means they can get around China's import restrictions that limit the number of foreign movies shown on the country's 12,000 screens to 34 each year.

The companies said they plan to produce movies for global audiences that will be "tentpole-scale" in other words, the big-budget, highly promoted productions that earn enough box-office revenue to support the whole studio, in the same way that a tentpole holds up a tent.

No specific details were released.

In a statement, China Film Co. Chairman Han Sanping said the partnership will allow the companies to "make films that are more appealing to filmgoers, creating new genres that, through the magic of film, bring greater variety to audiences around the world."

Faced with stagnant box-office growth at home, Hollywood studios are keen to break into China, now the world's second-biggest film market. Box-office receipts in China totaled $2.7 billion last year and pushed the country's movie market past previous second-biggest, Japan, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Legendary East was set up in 2011 with the aim of making one or two "major, event-style films" starting in 2013. But the company had remained quiet since then and a plan to raise $220.5 through a deal with a Hong Kong construction company was scuppered by rocky financial markets.

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Online:

Legendary Entertainment: http://www.legendary.com

Michael Adebowale, 22, was charged late Wednesday by counterterrorism officers and will appear in court on Thursday, police said. He is one of two main suspects in the killing of Lee Rigby, 25, who was struck by a car and stabbed to death last week near his barracks in southeast London's Woolwich district.

Gruesome images that emerged after the attack showed two men wielding bloody knives and meat cleavers. Both men were shot and wounded by police.

Suspect Michael Adebolajo, 28, remains hospitalized in stable condition. Adebowale was discharged from a hospital Tuesday and taken into custody. Adebowale also was charged with a firearms offense related to possessing a 9.4 mm revolver with the intent "to cause persons to believe that unlawful violence would be used," police said in a statement announcing the charges.

The charges, coming just hours after police said Rigby's autopsy showed he died from "multiple incised wounds," shed further light on the frenzied attack.

Witnesses reported seeing the soldier struck by a car, then set upon by two men wielding long knives and cleavers. Adebolajo, bloodied and clutching a cleaver, was seen in a video boasting about the attack and railing against the government.

The attack has raised questions about whether Britain's intelligence services could have done more to prevent Rigby's murder. British officials said the two main suspects had been known to them for some time as part of previous investigations.

Kenyan police have said they believed Adebolajo, a British citizen, had earlier associated with a radical Kenyan Muslim cleric who tried to help him join an al-Qaida-linked rebel group in neighboring Somalia.

Police said an inquest on Rigby's death will open Friday. In Britain, inquests are conducted to establish the circumstances surrounding unexpected or violent deaths.

Ten people have been arrested in the case, including the two main suspects. Two were released and several others have been set free on bail pending further inquiries.

One of the men arrested for questioning in the case released a statement through his lawyer Wednesday proclaiming his innocence. Hayden Allen, 21, said he wanted to send his condolences to Rigby's family.

"My family are wholly uninvolved," said Allen, who has not been charged and is free on bail. "I ask that the police continue to investigate and that my family be allowed without harassment to continue their lives."

Rigby's murder has raised racial enmities in many parts of England, with far-right groups mobilizing to protest. The English Defense League, a right-wing group with strong anti-Islam leanings, has held a series of protests, while Muslim community organizations have reported a surge in attacks and harassment.

One mosque in the northern England town of Grimsby was firebombed, and the word "ISLAM" was daubed in big red letters across the Royal Air Force Bomber Command memorial in London's Green Park, near Buckingham Palace.

Two people have been charged in the arson attack. It was unclear who was responsible for the graffiti.

Hackers have also posted a purported list of English Defense League leaders and supporters online. The list was at least partially genuine, according to English Defense League supporter Glen Warren, 32, whose name and phone number were among those posted.

Amid the unrest, British prison officers have been warned to be on the lookout after a hostage drama blamed on extremist Muslim inmates, British newspapers reported Wednesday.

An email to high-security prisons and young offenders' institutes warned that Sunday's incident at Full Sutton detention facility in the northern England region of Yorkshire was linked to religious extremism and warned of an increased risk of attacks at other institutions, according to several British papers, including The Yorkshire Post and The Times.

"Three Muslim prisoners took an officer hostage in an office. Their demands indicated they supported radical Islamist extremism," the letter was quoted as saying. "All staff are reminded to remain vigilant to the increased risk of potential attacks on prison officers inspired by these and last Wednesday's events."

The hostage-takers' demands have not been disclosed. Britain's Ministry of Justice declined to comment on the email.

___

Associated Press writer Raphael Satter contributed to this report.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey launched construction on Wednesday of a third bridge linking its European and Asian shores, the latest in a slew of multi-billion dollar projects that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan sees as embodying its emergence as a major power.

Erdogan, who has led a decade-long transformation of a once crisis-prone economy into Europe's fastest growing, has prioritized the building frenzy as the nation's infrastructure struggles to keep up with its growth.

With an eye to an election cycle ending in parliamentary polls in 2015, Erdogan called on the Turkish, Italian and Korean firms involved to complete the Istanbul bridge within two years.

"This is how we are building a powerful Turkey," he told a crowd of several thousand people, some waving Turkish flags, who gathered at a construction site on the shores of the Bosphorus strait to the north of Europe's largest city.

"For the seven hills of Istanbul, we have seven grand projects, one is this bridge, a third necklace over the Bosphorus," he said of the $3 billion project, set to be the world's widest and longest combined road and rail bridge.

A huge 150 billion lira ($80 billion) is being invested in projects including a third Istanbul airport, billed to be one of the world's biggest, as well as rail and road tunnels under the Bosphorus, a high-speed train line to the capital Ankara and a shipping canal designed to rival Panama or Suez.

The bridge is meant to ease congestion in the city of 14 million people. Its population was less than 2.5 million when the first Bosphorus Bridge was opened to traffic in 1973.

With the population forecast to hit 17 million and the number of vehicles seen rising to 4.4 million from 3 million within a decade, the government is under pressure to act fast.

Environmental groups have said the highway and airport projects will cause significant damage, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of trees and harming natural water basins, accusations rejected by Erdogan.

OTTOMAN LEGACY

Wednesday's ceremony, timed to coincide with the 560th anniversary of Istanbul's conquest by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, harked back frequently to the Ottoman Empire, which crumbled to be replaced by modern Turkey 90 years ago.

Such references have become commonplace under Erdogan's rule as the country regains prominence across the Middle East, encouraging critics of the authoritarian prime minister to accuse him of behaving like a modern-day sultan.

Hundreds of military officers have been jailed on charges of plotting a coup against Erdogan; others including academics, journalists and politicians are facing trial on similar accusations.

Barred from running for prime minister again, Erdogan is widely expected to bid for a newly empowered presidency in an election next year, cementing his status as Turkey's most significant leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern secular republic.

Erdogan frequently embraces Istanbul's imperial past, when the Ottoman Empire sprawled across three continents.

"In all the lands where they were present, the Ottomans left behind creations which conquered the people's hearts. Just like our ancestors we are continuing to write history and leave behind creations," he said.

An Ottoman military band banged drums and smashed cymbals while Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul and their wives said a Muslim prayer before launching the project near the village of Garipce on the European side of the city.

The bridge will be named Yavuz Sultan Selim, commonly known in English as Selim the Grim, whose 16th century reign brought huge expansion in the Ottoman Empire and dominance across the Middle East.

($1 = 1.8580 Turkish liras)

(Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Alison Williams)