Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXIV No. 443

By Thomas H. Maugh II and Maria Cone

The first study to follow lead-exposed children from before birth into adulthood has shown that even relatively low levels of lead permanently damage the brain and are linked to higher numbers of arrests, particularly for violent crime.

Previous studies linking lead to such problems have used indirect measures of lead and criminality, and critics have argued that socioeconomic and other factors may be responsible for the observed effects.

But by measuring blood levels of lead before birth and during the first seven years of life and then correlating the levels with arrest records and brain size, Cincinnati researchers have produced the strongest evidence yet that lead plays a major role in crime.

The team also found that lead exposure is a continuing problem despite the efforts of the federal government and cities to minimize exposure.

The average lead levels in the study "unfortunately are still seen in many thousands of children throughout the United States," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

The link between criminal behavior and lead exposure was found among even the least-contaminated children in the study, who were exposed to amounts of lead similar to what the average U.S. child is exposed to today, said Landrigan, who was not involved in the study.

"People will sometimes say, 'This is in the past. We are cleaning up lead. We don't have lead problems anymore,' " said criminologist Deborah Denno of Fordham University in New York, who was not involved in the study. "The Ohio study says this is still a big problem."

Nationwide, about 310,000 children between 1 and 5 have blood lead levels above the federal guideline of 10 micrograms per deciliter, and experts suspect that many times that number have lower levels that are nonetheless dangerous.

"It is a national disgrace that so many children continue to be exposed at levels known to be neurotoxic," said Dr. David Bellinger, of the Harvard Medical School, who wrote an editorial accompanying the research.

Although some urban soil is contaminated with lead from gasoline, 80 percent of lead exposure comes from houses built before 1978. Paint in such houses often contains up to 50 percent lead and, even though it has been covered by newer, lead-free paints, it flakes or rubs off.

About 38 million U.S. homes, 40 percent of the nation's housing, contain lead-based paint, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The problem is particularly acute in urban areas, which typically have older housing that has not been renovated.

More recently, parents and authorities have become concerned about lead-based paint in toys imported from China.

Researchers have long known that lead exposure reduces IQ by damaging brain cells in children during their early years.

It is also known that lead increases children's distractibility, impulsiveness and restlessness and leaves them with a shortened attention span, all factors considered precursors of aggressive or violent behavior.

A landmark 1990 paper by Denno linked lead to increases in criminal behavior, but the children in the study were not tested for lead levels. The diagnosis was based on their physicians' evaluation, Denno said.

The Cincinnati Lead Study enrolled 376 pregnant women in Cincinnati between 1979 and 1984, measuring their blood lead levels during pregnancy and the children's levels during the their first seven years.

In the first of the new studies, environmental health research Kim Dietrich of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine studied 250 of the original group, correlating their lead levels with adult criminal-arrest records from Hamilton County, Ohio.

Controlling for a variety of factors, including parental IQ, education, income and drug use, Dietrich and colleagues found that the more lead in a child's blood from birth through age 7, the more likely he or she was arrested as an adult. The tie between high lead and violent crime was particularly strong.

They found that 55 percent of the subjects (63 percent of males) had been arrested, and that the average was five arrests between the ages of 18 and 24.

The higher the blood-lead level at any time in childhood, the greater the likelihood of arrests. "The strongest association was with violent criminal activity: murder, rape domestic violence, assault, robbery and possession of weapons," Dietrich said.

Blood levels in the children ranged from 4 to 37 micrograms per deciliter.

The researchers found, for example, that every 5-microgram-per-deciliter increase in blood lead level at age 6 was accompanied by a 50 percent increase in violent crime later in life.

Confirming previous findings, the effect of lead was strongest in males, who had an arrest rate 4.5 times that of females.

"We need to be thinking about lead as a drug and a fairly strong one," Dietrich said.

In the second study, radiologist Kim Cecil and her colleagues examined a "representative sample" of 157 members of the same group using whole-brain MRI scans. They found that those with the highest blood levels of lead during childhood had the smallest brain volume.

For those with average lead level in the study, their brains were about 1.2 percent smaller. The most affected regions of the brain were those regulating decision making, impulse control and attention, among other areas.

"The most important message is that lead affects brain volume, independent of demographic and social factors that are often used to explain away poor outcomes" in life, Cecil said. "This is independent biological evidence showing that the brain is affected by lead."

By John McPhaul

TAMARINDO, Costa Rica (Reuters) - Pungent brown sewage spews into the Pacific ocean. In the background, cranes put up hotels and beachfront apartments.

Once home to monkeys, turtles and other rare wildlife, this stretch of coast in northwest Costa Rica is developing so fast that it is tarnishing the country's reputation as a destination for eco-tourists.

Some 1.4 million people visit Central America's richest country every year, but they no longer come just for the national parks that cover more than a quarter of its area and are home to almost 5 percent of the world's plant and animal species.

They also want sand, surf and even real estate.

The biggest stimulus came when the airport at nearby Liberia began handling international flights five years ago, putting the previously little-known Guanacaste province within, for example, three hours of Miami.

With tropical sunshine, sandy beaches and surf, developers saw a chance to attract everyone from surfers and honeymooners to U.S. retirees seeking a second home, transforming sleepy towns with names like Tamarindo, Quepos, Playas del Coco and Jaco.

The result is rampant construction that environmentalists fear could balloon into noisy, sprawling resorts with cruise ship ports and golf courses like those of Cancun, Mexico, which guzzle water and pollute the environment.

"These cases of poorly planned tourist developments in Costa Rica could affect the well-deserved reputation as a pioneer in eco-tourism," said Ronald Sanabria, a Costa Rican who works for the Rainforest Alliance, an international advocate for sustainability.

Already, Costa Rica has lost up to half of its monkey population in the last 12 years as developers expand into their jungle habitat, according to scientists at the University of Costa Rica.

Light pollution from Tamarindo is making life harder for leatherback turtles. The town's lights disorient the tiny hatchlings, sending them toward the luminescence instead of out to sea, where they are safer from predators.

"These large-scale tourism projects have big consequences for the environment," said Fabian Pacheco, of the Costa Rican Federation for the Conservation of Nature.

SURF'S UP

The issue is a familiar one in developing countries as they weigh the benefits of tourist dollars that come with high-rise hotels against the loss of greenery when virgin land is paved over.

Tourism is Costa Rica's top foreign exchange earner. Property developers point to the big contribution the construction sector makes to the economy, accounting for 5 percent of gross domestic product and growing by 16 percent last year.

The tourist boom has also created jobs in a poor region. "It's been good for the locals. Most of them are happy to have good, decent jobs," said Denise Shante, 51, a Canadian property broker who sells apartments priced up to $2.5 million.

As Costa Rica attracts more mainstream tourism, neighboring Panama is aggressively promoting its own eco-tourism credentials.

The breakneck development has the government and even the tourism industry worried.

When rains overflowed septic tanks in Tamarindo, tons (tonnes) of raw sewage flowed into the ocean and the resort lost its "blue flag" issued by Costa Rica's water utility to indicate healthy ocean water conditions.

"Costa Rica can no longer project the pure image of an eco-tourism paradise since reality shows investors are free to develop more and more projects without clear rules," the Costa Rican Hotel and Resorts Association warned in a report in May.

President Oscar Arias, whose government wants to cut the country's net carbon emissions to zero by 2021, has begun a crackdown at newer Pacific resorts, closing some businesses and ordering height restrictions on buildings near the beach.

"Tamarindo and Jaco got out of our hands, but our scientists are working on ways of assuring development that is compatible with nature," Arias told Reuters.

The Costa Rican Chamber of Construction says unregulated building is still going on, and in Tamarindo the most prominent feature is its building sites swarming with laborers.

The town, world-famous for its surf, bustles with surfers and tanned shoppers who fill its shops, bars and restaurants.

Some, like Shawn O'Neil, 28, a surfer from San Diego, California, say it is unfair to rope off pretty beaches for an elite who can afford expensive eco-resorts while shutting out those who prefer cheaper all-inclusive hotels.

"People say how built up Tamarindo is, but it doesn't seem like much after San Diego and Los Angeles."

By Tim Paradis

Stocks plunged Thursday as Wall Street contended with a barrage of bad news: another surge in oil prices and warnings of trouble in the key financial, automotive and high-tech industries. The major indexes showed losses of about 2 percent, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which shed more than 300 points and dropped to its lowest level in nearly two years.

The Dow fell as much as 302.97, or 2.56 percent, to 11,508.86, well under its 2008 trading low of 11,634.82 and to its lowest level since September 2006. That sent some investors rushing for the safety of Treasury bonds — government debt is regarded as a haven when the stock market is in turmoil.

The passel of worries that investors juggled Thursday added up to an increasingly troubled economy. Analysts' negative comments on General Motors Corp. sent shares of the largest U.S. automaker to their lowest level in more than 30 years, while Citigroup Inc. fell sharply after an analyst placed a "sell" rating on the stock and warned investors to expect less from the brokerage sector in an uneasy economic climate. Disappointing outlooks from technology bellwethers Oracle Corp. and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. further soured investors' moods and made the tech sector one of the steepest decliners.

The gloom was compounded by an unnerving forecast about oil prices that raised the specter of higher inflation and even more damage to the economy.

OPEC President Chakib Khelil was quoted as telling a French television station that oil could rise to between $150 and $170 per barrel this summer before pulling back later in the year. That and a falling dollar helped send light, sweet crude up more than $5 and past $140 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Rising oil has saddled nearly all parts of the economy with higher costs, weighing on consumers who now have to reach much deeper into their wallets at the gas pump and therefore have less to spend elsewhere.

Thursday's confluence of bad news overshadowed the National Association of Realtors' report that existing home sales edged up last month, only the second increase in the past 10 months. It also wiped out any positive impact from the Federal Reserve's widely expected decision Wednesday to leave interest rates unchanged.

The stream of downbeat assessments drove home to investors how much U.S. companies stand to be hurt from the fallout of the prolonged housing slump, the nearly year-old credit crisis and the soaring price of oil. The great fear on the Street has been that rising prices and worries about their finances will force consumers to further curb their spending, sending the economy into even more of a decline.

The latest reading on the gross domestic product Thursday backed up that fear. The Commerce Department said the economy as measured by GDP rose at 1 percent annual rate in the first quarter, a slight improvement from the previous estimate of 0.9 percent, but still quite anemic. Moreover, the number does not reflect the impact of higher gas and oil prices that shot up further during the second quarter, which ends Monday.

"This is unfortunately kind of a slack period. We're waiting for second-quarter earnings. Until then, we have this very negative attitude among investors and everyone seems to be latching onto negative news and shrugging off the positive news," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago, pointing to the uptick in housing sales.