Undercover detectives infiltrated the rings across San Diego County, then invited suspects to an undisclosed storefront. The suspects were videotaped selling agents illicit goods, including weapons, stolen cars, cocaine, methamphetamine, and military contraband, including bullet-proof vests, Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles, gas masks, and more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition and high-capacity magazines, said District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis.

Authorities said the eight-month investigation called Operation Perfect Storm led to a 64-count indictment. More than 90 witnesses testified at the grand jury, and the suspects were arraigned Thursday.

Charges include vehicle theft, gun possession and insurance fraud, among others.

Dumanis said the case yielded nine firearms and 92 stolen vehicles worth nearly $700,000.

The operation was conducted by the Regional Auto Theft Task Force, in cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The military was happy to help in the effort, said Chuck Warmuth, special agent in charge of the NCIS at the Marine Corps office at Camp Pendleton.

"NCIS is gratified we were able to use our federal resources in partnership with other area law enforcement agencies to help make our communities safer. Crime degrades the quality of life for every family," he said at a news conference.

No further details about the suspects were released.

"Reserve release has been boosting EPS and while it likely fades, the tank doesn't look empty yet," analysts led by John McDonald said in a note to clients.

Reserve release as a percentage of earnings is likely to fall from around 22 percent of EPS at the large- and mid-cap banks in 2012 to about 10 percent in 2013 and about 1 percent in 2014, they said.

However, with low interest rates, high liquidity, tightened underwriting and lackluster new lending, credit costs should be able to stay lower for longer, which would help fuel continued reserve releases, the analysts added.

Bernstein analysts also expect net charge off rates to fall below historical average over the intermediate term, as banks benefit from an improving economy, cleaner books, and improved underwriting standards.

Bank of America is likely to benefit the most from the combined impact of lower charge offs and reserve releases, which are expected to constitute about 56 percent of the lender's adjusted annualized first-quarter 2013 earnings. They would be about 55 percent for Synovus Financial Corpand about 52 percent for Citigroup, the brokerage added.

(Reporting By Neha Dimri in Bangalore; Editing by Maju Samuel)

Parker, 33, married his fiancee Alexandra Lenas in a ceremony at an inn in the costal retreat of Big Sur with 300 family and friends in attendance, his representative Matthew Hiltzik said in a statement.

Their daughter, Winter, who was born this year, was part of the ceremony.

Parker's fortune is estimated at $2 billion at Forbes.com.

In 2004, Parker joined Facebook where he became its first president. He left the company in 2005 and is now a managing partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund.

Actor Justin Timberlake played Parker as a hard-partying ladies man in a 2010 movie, "The Social Network," about the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, who was then a student at Harvard University. After the film came out, Parker dismissed the portrayal as fictional.

Aside from his time at Facebook, Parker is known for co-founding Napster in 1999 when he was 19 years-old.

Napster flummoxed music executives by allowing free peer-to-peer sharing of songs online. It was shut down by court order in 2001 over copyright infringement claims.

Parker is still involved in the online music industry, and was a backer of music subscription service Spotify.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Christopher Wilson)

And now, two new studies, out of the  and , could be confusing matters even more: After tracking children for five to seven years, the researchers found no developmental problems associated with women who drank up to six drinks in a weekno more than one drink a day, broken up over time.

Dont get me wrong, the link between binge drinkingwhich is defined as five drinks in a single bout of drinkingduring pregnancy and developmental delay in children is universally accepted as a bad idea. Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), in which a fetus is exposed to excessive alcohol, can cause stunted growth and is known to cause mental retardation. But while FAS is associated with heavy drinking during pregnancy, theres less data about low- and moderate-alcohol use. Thats because this is information thats hard to come byyou cant exactly randomly assign pregnant women to drink different amounts and then see how their kids turn out.

But this new research is starting to fill the gap. Which is not to say that light drinking during pregnancy is conclusively safe, and its definitely not an endorsement of it as a habit. Authors from one of these most recent studies made clear the possibility that their results could be due to other factors, and in all research there is potential for confounding factors. For example, the authors suggest that its possible that the different socioeconomic status (SES) between groups of women could play a role. More women who binge-drink during pregnancy are low-SES; and low-SES women are more likely to have riskier pregnancies, less prenatal care, and less-healthy infants than their high-SES counterparts. This is just one potential reason its so difficult to offer conclusive dataand clear advice for women to follow.

The official position in the U.S., which comes from the National Institutes of Health, is strict and clear: Women who are pregnant or who are trying to get pregnant should avoid drinking any amount of alcohol. The only way to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome is to not drink alcohol during pregnancy. Thats true, just as abstinence is the only certain way to prevent and pregnancy. The position offered by the National Health Service in the U.K. is a bit more lenient: [To] minimise the risk to the baby, we recommend [that women] should not drink more than 1-2 units once or twice a week and should not get drunk.

This creates an interesting question: In the age of Big Datawith Millennials turning to Google for every question, no matter how smallwhat sort of messages should be sent about the relative safety of alcohol consumption during pregnancy? We could move toward more evidence-based advice, and tell women that not drinking is ideal but that a drink or two a week probably wont hurt their child. There might be concern that this would change the prevailing attitude about alcohol during pregnancy; there is still evidence that daily consumption can be bad for fetal development. Would women use looser guidelines as an excuse to drink more than is safe? Moreover, there are individual characteristics that studies like this cant account for; each person processes alcohol differently, so safe levels of consumption will vary.

The new research from abroad might be most reassuring to women who become pregnant accidentally and arent able to change their drinking habits until after they find out. After all, according to the , some 37 percent of pregnancies are unintended. At least with this research, women dont have to stress as much over having enjoyed happy hour a few times a week before they knew they were pregnant. The bottom line is that a majority of experts are still likely to tell you not to drink while pregnant, and its still definitely the safest course of action.

Do you think this new information should do anything to change the conversation about alcohol during pregnancy? Or should all women forgo all drinking during pregnancy to be safe?

LONDON (Reuters) - Erotic trilogy "Fifty Shades of Grey" helped drive print and e-book sales in Britain to record levels in 2012 with publishers hailing figures on Wednesday as proof that digital books are not killing the traditional market quite yet.

Print and e-book sales rose 4 percent to 3.3 billion pounds ($5 billion) after slipping 2 percent in 2011, top British trade organization The Publishers Association said, although printed book sales fell 1 percent and had dropped 5 percent in 2011.

Chief Executive Richard Mollet said the overall rise was driven by a 21-percent jump in fiction sales to 674 million pounds, fuelled by demand for E.L. James's trilogy, a sadomasochistic story of student and businessman Christian Grey.

The books, published by Bertelsmann-owned Random House, sold over 70 million copies globally and were lampooned by critics. They are set to be made into a film, and sparked other sales of a growing genre of fiction dubbed "mummy porn".

"You can see in the world around you the growth in e-readers," said Mollet, pointing to commuters engrossed in Amazon kindles, iPads and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

"But what is interesting is that the continued growth of digital books does not seem to be eating away (as much as expected) at physical sales."

Fiction sales buoyed the print market, which nevertheless dipped to 2.93 billion pounds, and helped to more than double e-book sales to 216 million, he said.

Digital books accounted for about 12 percent of 2012 sales, up from 8 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2010.

The global book industry that was estimated to be worth $121 billion in 2011 is forecast to grow to $172 billion by 2017, according to a report by market research firm Lucintel.

Mollet said digital sales, for e-books, audiobook downloads and online subscriptions, jumped 66 percent in 2012 to 411 million pounds with fiction sales up 149 percent.

Philip Jones, editor of industry magazine The Bookseller, said fiction was the trailblazer for the shift to digital and it was key to now watch how print sales were affected as more non-fiction and children's titles were sold in digital formats.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study based on pairs of Canadian twins suggests that genetics play a strong role in how long kids sleep at night, but their environment may be more important for afternoon naps.

Researchers compared sleep patterns for close to 500 sets of identical or fraternal twins. They found that especially as kids got older, environmental influences - which include when parents put kids in bed, for example - explained more and more of their napping differences.

"Even though the results do not explicitly state which are the environmental factors," said Sonia Brescianini, "researchers in the field think that familial habits at bed time, sleeping routines, and in general sleep hygiene measures are for sure a means of improving sleep in children."

Brescianini, a researcher with the Italian Twin Register at Rome's Istituto Superiore di Sanit who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health in an email that past research has also suggested a child's environment may be more important than genetics for daytime sleep habits.

The new study involved 983 individual children born in greater Montreal, Canada, from 1995 to 1998. Mothers were asked about each twin's daytime and nighttime sleep patterns at age 6, 18, 30 and 48 months.

By comparing sets of identical and fraternal twins, Dr. Jacques Montplaisir from the University of Montreal and his colleagues were able to determine how much of kids' sleep variation was due to genes - which are the same in identical twins - and how much to environmental factors.

For example, Brescianini explained, the more identical twins are similar and fraternal twins are not for a given trait such as sleep schedules, the more that trait is likely to be genetic. But if both types of twins resemble each other in similar ways, the trait is likely affected by a child's environment.

At three of the four time points, genetics accounted for between 47 and 58 percent of nighttime sleep duration. The majority of children slept 10 or 11 continuous hours at night.

The one age when environment seemed to play a strong role in overnight sleep was at 18 months. That suggests that age "might be an appropriate time of intervention in children with not satisfying sleep duration and quality," Brescianini said.

But genes never explained more than about one-third of daytime nap length, the researchers reported Monday in Pediatrics.

Family routines and other shared environmental influences, on the other hand, accounted for between 33 and 79 percent of whether or not twins were napping during the day, and for how long. That association became stronger as children got older and average nap length shortened.

The researchers said a similar study needs to be done using more exact tools to measure sleep, such as movement sensors or laboratory monitors.

In addition, it will be helpful to look at what family-related factors may affect daytime sleep, Montplaisir and his colleagues wrote.

"Good sleep duration and quality is very important for children's physical and mental health because sleeping behavior has been associated with obesity, poor school performance and other behavioral disorders," Brescianini said.

"In order to promptly intervene, more knowledge is needed on how sleeping behavior changes through childhood."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online May 27, 2013.

The NFL rewarded the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday with hosting rights for the 2016 championship game, slotting the 50th Super Bowl in the 49ers' high-tech Santa Clara stadium scheduled to open next year.

The league also voted at its spring meetings to give the 2017 game to Houston, which last hosted the big game in 2004.

"After losing a Super Bowl, it feels really good to win a Super Bowl," said 49ers CEO Jed York, whose team lost to Baltimore in the NFL title game in February. "We are so excited to be able to put on the 'Golden Super Bowl' in the Golden State."

The back-to-back, first-ballot votes also sent a message to South Florida that it needs to settle its squabble over renovations at the Miami Dolphins' stadium before it will get a chance to host its 11th Super Bowl.

"I can tell you that I think the stadium is a very import part of any of these proposals. The condition of the stadium is a factor," commissioner Roger Goodell said. "I think it's the stadium, at the end of the day. Their proposal was really quite exciting. I think owners would like to be in Miami. But it's competitive right now."

The 49ers are preparing to begin play in 2014 in what they are billing as the most technologically advanced stadium in the world the first cashless, ticketless venue in NFL championship history, with WiFi capability for 75,000 people. The 2016 Super Bowl will be the first in northern California since the 1985 game at Stanford Stadium.

When Goodell announced the 2016 decision, members of the San Francisco bid committee let out a roar of approval, then toasted each other with champagne. Asked what he believed swayed the owners to vote for San Francisco, York added: "It's the willpower of an entire area that gave an overwhelming push for us."

It was the first time in a decade that a Super Bowl was awarded on the first ballot. York said 25 percent of the proceeds from the game will be donated to fight poverty in the Bay Area.

"The Bay Area has been waiting for a (title) game since 1985. We have a stadium now," said Daniel Lurie, a leader of the San Francisco bid. "We are just thrilled and couldn't be happier about this."

Houston staged the 2004 Super Bowl, which is perhaps best known for Janet Jackson's halftime "wardrobe malfunction." That was just two years after Reliant Stadium opened.

"I think a lot of them just felt like, 'Hey, it's Houston's time,'" Texans owner Robert McNair said. "They knew we could do a good job. From 2004 to '17, that's 13 years. So I agree, I think it's Houston's time."

Miami has hosted 10 of them including the Jets' upset of the Colts in 1969 and is tied with New Orleans for the most. But South Florida got rejected twice after the Florida Legislature did not support financing to renovate Sun Life Stadium a likely backlash over the Marlins' new baseball stadium.

Multibillionaire Dolphins owner Stephen Ross contends $350 million in stadium improvements are badly needed, but he doesn't want to pay for them by himself. Nor does he want a scaled-down renovation of the 26-year-old facility.

"I suspect there's a couple of state reps down in Miami-Dade County where I live who are going to look at this and realize this was a huge mistake," South Florida bid committee chairman Rodney Barreto said. "We had the better bid. I could just look at the body language from the NFL staff. It's a shame. We may not see another Super Bowl for another 10 years."

Ross said South Florida "won't stop trying" to get one.

Next Feb. 2, the game goes outdoors in a cold-weather site for the first time, at MetLife Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands. If that gamble pays off for the NFL, look for other cities in similar climates Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver to bid for future Super Bowls.

The 2015 game will be played in the Phoenix area.

Earlier Tuesday, owners approved a $200 million loan for stadium construction in Atlanta. The multipurpose stadium could cost as much as $1 billion, with team owner Arthur Blank committed to funding most of it. Blank called the decision by the team owners an "important milestone" in moving the project forward. The owners also approved financing for renovations of stadiums in Charlotte and Philadelphia.

Speaking with reporters after the votes, Goodell also said:

The draft will be held between May 8 and May 17 next year because the venue, Radio City Music Hall, is hosting an Easter show in April. He expects the draft will remain in May, with other adjustments to the NFL's calendar, including the dates for the combine and the opening of free agency, to be discussed with the players' union.

A third international game in upcoming seasons could be added now that both games for 2013 in London have sold out.

The Pro Bowl could be moved from Hawaii back to mainland cities after the 2014 game, but will still be held on the Sunday one week before the Super Bowl.

Expanding the playoffs, and cutting two games off the preseason, still are being discussed. A reduced preseason could happen with either the current 16-game regular season or with an 18-game schedule.

___

AP Pro Football Writer Barry Wilner contributed to this report.

PARIS (Reuters) - The colorful boss of Totalis unlikely to be felled by demands he stand trial over alleged bribes to Iran as Christophe de Margerie enters a crucial phase of his high-stakes turnaround plan for the oil firm, with no clear successors.

De Margerie, nicknamed "Big Moustache" inside the company which appointed him chief executive six years ago, is deep into an exploration plan to drill more wells in difficult-to-reach African and North Sea frontiers in order that Total meet future output goals - and investors want him to stay and make it work.

"They're much more concerned in terms of what the company can do in terms of production, capital expenditures, cashflow," said Iain Reid, an analyst with Jefferies in London and best-rated analyst for Total on Thomson Reuters StarMine.

"(The cases) have been a wrinkle obviously, but all oil companies have legacy legal issues somewhere around the world."

The Iran case came to a head on Wednesday when Total agreed to pay $398 million to settle U.S. criminal and civil allegations that it paid bribes to win oil and gas contracts to Iran. Now a French prosecutor is recommending de Margerie himself go to trial.

But the oil industry has been plagued by corruption accusations for decades and one fund manager who owns Total shares said it was no exception: "This sort of thing seems to be commonplace in the oil industry. I have heard no discussion in the investor community about (de Margerie) stepping down."

Instead, investors are more concerned about how close de Margerie is to fixing Total's undervalued share price.

Currently trading at 39.7 euros, Total's stock is valued at 7.8 times 12-month forward earnings, a 7 percent discount on BPand Shelland close to a 20 percent discount on average to its global peers.

Total regularly missed its oil and gas production targets in the past but analysts say de Margerie is now setting more realistic aims. The big one now is the company's 2017 output capacity goal of about 3 million barrels of oil equivalent a day.

"Total used to be worse than peers setting pretty ambitious targets and then failing to meet them. To de Margerie's credit, in the last three years or so, the targets are more realistic," said Iain Pyle, analyst at Bernstein in London.

"The new strategy is starting to pay off. It's something that takes a long period of time. When you increase investment in high-risk high-return exploration, you don't expect returns from it for a while, it could be 10 years," Pyle said.

SUCCESSION HEADACHE

De Margerie, a graduate of a regular French business school, cuts an unusual figure in a company dominated by alumni from elite French colleges and has sought to take the company away from a conservative investment culture.

Industry insiders and some of de Margerie's supporters say the Total boss's larger-than-life personality - and his address book - would be very hard to replace.

He counts among business acquaintances both Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, who sought his advice in attracting investment to the country, and Russia's Vladimir Putin who retained Total in the huge Shtokman gas project in the Arctic at a time when other Western companies like BPwere being shown the door.

"He's the only big guy out there. I don't know and was never told about who could be next," said a source at Gazprom, partner with Total in a number of projects, including the controversial South Pars field in Iran, to which the bribery case is related.

Another fund manager at a UK-based company invested in Total said it had attempted to raise the succession issue with the company because it currently lacked clarity.

"We wanted them to communicate to investors very clearly how the board is thinking about de Margerie's succession. Not because we feel he should retire at this stage but just because as part of a good governance procedure we would like to have some visibility into board planning around this issue."

Philippe Boisseau, head of Total's new energy division and Patrick Pouyanne, who was tasked with the sensitive mission of reducing the group's exposure to unprofitable European refining sectors, are seen as credible long-term possibilities.

But both are seen to lack vital contacts at a time when Western oil majors are increasingly threatened by rivals from emerging markets such as China and Russia.

"With all the changes in the oil world, nobody could replace him today," said a close adviser to de Margerie. "There must be only about seven or eight leaders in the world with an address book like his and none at Total. His successors are not ready."

(Additional reporting by Sinead Cruise, Dmitry Zhdannikov and Claire Milhench in London; Editing by Sophie Walker)

A tenant heard the baby's sounds in the public restroom of a residential building in Zhejiang province in eastern China on Saturday and notified authorities, according to the state-run news site Zhejiang News. A video of the two-hour rescue that followed was broadcast widely on Chinese news programs and websites late Monday and Tuesday.

The child named Baby No. 59 from the number of his hospital incubator was reported safe in a nearby hospital, and news of the rescue prompted an outpouring from strangers who came to the hospital with diapers, baby clothes, powdered milk and offers to adopt the child.

Police are treating the case as an attempted homicide, and are looking for the mother and anyone else involved in the incident.

The landlord of the building in Pujiang county told Zhejiang News that it was unlikely the birth took place in the toilet room because there was no evidence of blood and she was not aware of any recent pregnancies among her tenants.

The baby was stuck in the L-joint of pipe with a diameter of about 10 centimeters (3 inches).

The video shows rescuers sawing out a section of the pipe along a ceiling that apparently was just below the restroom. The rescuers then rushed that section of pipe to a hospital, were firefighters and medics alternately used pliers and saws to rip apart the L-joint and free the baby.

Despites the offers to adopt Baby No. 59, a doctor at the hospital said the boy would be handed over to social services if his parents do not claim him, Zhejiang News said.

___

Online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHW_fn2W9HQ

* Bill could see English introduced as teaching language

* Opponents fear French language under threat

By Nicholas Vinocur

PARIS (Reuters) - Defenders of the French language are furious at plans to introduce courses taught in English at public universities, arguing that France must protect itself against linguistic encroachment or risk losing its cultural identity.

Parliament started to debate the issue on Tuesday as part of a bill on a broader reform of higher education, but all attention has focused on an article that would abolish a 19-year ban on English as a teaching language at public universities.

President Francois Hollande's Socialist government backs the change, which it says would help to attract foreign students and help French graduates compete in a global economy as the country struggles to regain competitiveness.

More French students fearing dismal job prospects at home, where youth unemployment is nearly 25 percent, are studying and working abroad, notably in London, which has become the city with the sixth largest French population in the world.

However, opponents of the law, who include professors, lawmakers and the French language oversight body Academie Francaise, say "la francophonie" must be defended and that the change would be a betrayal of other French-speaking nations.

"If France gives other Francophone countries the wrong signal by leading an assault against the language, that would be a very, very regrettable thing indeed," said Claude Hagege, a linguist at the College de France state research centre.

France has long defended its culture at home and abroad, most recently in a debate over a trade deal between Europe and the United States, which Hollande says must respect a French tradition of subsidizing everything from art to cinema.

In 1994, the so-called "Loi Toubon" made the use of French mandatory in all TV broadcasts, meaning all foreign-language programs are dubbed, while radio stations must play at least 40 percent of French music for most of the day.

Seeking to promote a French world view, former president Jacques Chirac launched the France24 international news network, which now hosts 24-hour channels in French, English and Arabic, while Hollande started a Ministry for Francophone Affairs.

Business leaders decry France's low ranking for English proficiency - it placed 23rd in a 2012 global ranking published by education company Education First - even though the use of English has grown, notably in academic circles.

Higher Education Minister Genevieve Fioraso said offering English would boost the appeal of French universities at a time when they are falling further behind in international rankings.

In a 2011-2012 survey by Britain's Times newspaper, the highest-ranked French university is in 59th position. Private business schools where English is taught rank higher.

(Editing by Brian Love and Raissa Kasolowsky)