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Just about everyone loves puppies. But around the country, there's heated disagreement about where, and from whom, people can get one.

While the large national pet store chains don't sell dogs, other chains and shops do. But in several states, including Florida, cities are passing laws that ban puppy sales in pet stores.

At the Petland store in Plantation, Fla., a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, customers come in all day long to look at and play with the puppies. At this store, in fact, doggie accessories and puppies are all that owner Vicki Siegel sells.

"Maltese, cavalier King Charles, Yorkies, Chihuahuas, dachshunds — one of my favorites," Siegel lists off.

Even at her larger, full-service pet store in the nearby town of Davie, Siegel says puppies and puppy products account for 85 percent of her sales. "So the puppies are the ones that pay the bills," she says.

That's why Siegel says she was shocked a year ago when she learned the Davie town council was considering a law that would ban stores from selling dogs. The ban, she says, would put her out of business.

After Siegel brought her case to the council, the bill was rejected. But in at least 30 other communities in Florida, local governments have passed similar bans — most of them in the last three years. Bans on dog sales in pet stores have also been adopted in California, New Jersey and other states.

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The laws are aimed at cracking down on substandard commercial breeders who activists say supply the puppies that pet stores sell.

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Michele Lazarow is clearly a dog lover — she has three of her own. She's led the effort to stamp out pet store dog sales in South Florida.

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She says the laws are intended to encourage pet stores to follow the lead of national chains like Petsmart, Petco and Pet Supermarket. None sell dogs, but instead promote adoptions through shelters and rescue groups.

About 10 years ago, Lazarow bought a pet store puppy that developed a chronic illness. That opened her eyes about where pet stores get the puppies they sell, she says.

"All stores — 99 percent of them — sell what's called puppy mill dogs, or large-scale commercial breeder dogs," she says. "Yes, they're USDA, but that means nothing, as we've come to see."

That phrase — puppy mill — is loaded and controversial. Lazarow says it includes any large-scale breeding operation that places monetary value over the welfare of the animal.

It's a broad definition, one often applied to any breeder who sells dogs to pet stores. Those breeders are all subject to annual USDA inspections. But animal welfare activists, like Cori Menkin of the ASPCA's Puppy Mills Campaign, say the inspections don't amount to much because federal regulations are too lax.

"The regulation of breeders is so poor that all it really does is give consumers and the general public a false sense of security that their dogs are coming from a humane environment when they're not," she says.

Menkin says her group is working to put pressure directly on breeders. It posts USDA inspection reports that show breeder violations on its website. A ban on pet store dog sales would put additional pressure on an industry that she says has been slow to change.

There are many, though, who disagree, including the American Kennel Club, which opposes bans on pet store dog sales.

Patti Strand, president of the National Animal Interest Alliance, a group that works closely with the AKC, says commercial breeders have improved practices in recent years — progress that she says is ignored by activists.

"They assume everybody who is selling dogs to pet stores and every pet store that sells them are engaged in some kind of horrific puppy mill kind of operation," she says. "That's not only not fair, it's not true."

In Miami, the city commission recently adopted a six-month moratorium on new pet stores selling dogs while it studies a permanent ban.

The future of these bans, though, may be decided not by local governments, but by the courts. Lawsuits filed by pet store owners are pending in Florida, Illinois and Arizona.

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Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, who led The Washington Post to national eminence through charm, drive, instinct and, most notably, an epic confrontation with the Nixon White House, died Tuesday. He was 93.

Through his tenure at the Post, the legendary newspaper editor helped to define the standards and aspirations of American journalism for more than a generation. He oversaw an expansion of the kinds of coverage his newspaper offered readers that influenced editors at papers across the country. Internally, Bradlee was best known as a champion of ambitious reporters and stylish writers, goading them to new heights.

Bradlee's most consequential test would arrive amid the scandal that first vexed and later brought down President Nixon, starting with the report of a break-in at the national headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate complex in 1972.

"If you were told — any editor of The Washington Post since the beginning of time — there was going to be a story that 40 people would go to jail and the president of the United States would resign, he'd say, 'Thank you, Lord,' " Bradlee told an interviewer from C-SPAN several years ago. He was rewarded for standing by two unknown local reporters who doggedly pursued the story against the critical conventional wisdom of the rest of the political press.

"Reporters need to know they have to keep banging away at it. They have to give their own energies and curiosities and aggressiveness full rein," says former Washington Post reporter David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker magazine.

Remnick recalled being summoned to Bradlee's office after the late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had complained the young reporter was looking into anecdotes about his heavy drinking. As Bradlee leaned back in his chair, Remnick tried to reassure Bradlee not to worry. The editor cut him short and ended the meeting this way: "Worry? Me worry? I don't f- - -ing worry!"

A salty phrase; a hearty laugh; an unyielding journalistic backbone — Ben Bradlee was well known for all three. He played the role of fearless newsroom captain almost without flaw.

"They have to have somebody behind them telling them it's OK, because there are all these people out there saying it's not; all these governments and PR people saying it's not," Remnick says. "You need somebody behind you saying, 'Keep at it,' and that was Bradlee's message in a thousand different ways."

Becoming A Newsman

Born to a family of Boston Brahmins, Bradlee served in naval intelligence during World War II and saw major conflict in the Pacific arena. After the war, he launched a small paper in New Hampshire and decided to head south to seek a job at a bigger publication. Bradlee landed a job in Washington, D.C., with the Post only because he refused to get off the train in Baltimore during a downpour.

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To tell the truth, Bradlee enjoyed only mild success as a reporter. He next departed for Paris, where he became a diplomatic aide with ties to figures in the CIA. But in 1953, he joined Newsweek and thrived. He became close to a Georgetown neighbor — a young senator named John F. Kennedy — and would later find himself accused by Richard Nixon's defenders of being too cozy with the Democratic establishment.

There was another, even more fateful connection, however. In the early 1960s, Bradlee had persuaded the publisher of The Washington Post, Phil Graham, to buy Newsweek, where Bradlee was Washington bureau chief. A few years later, after Graham's suicide, the company's new president — his widow, Katharine Graham — summoned Bradlee to a private club to which she belonged.

"I said, 'What is it you do want to do? I noticed you've turned these jobs down in New York,' " Graham later told Terry Gross on WHYY's Fresh Air.

"And of course, Ben being Ben, said, 'Well, now that you ask me, I'd give my left one to be managing editor of The Post.' I know that's a little bit vulgar, but Ben talks like that," Graham said. "And I was brought up short, because I didn't expect that."

Soon enough, Bradlee joined the Post as managing editor, with the promise, quickly fulfilled, of leading the previously undistinguished paper as its executive editor.

Remaking The 'Post'

Bradlee went on a hiring spree — and a firing spree too — embracing the so-called new journalism giving feature writers leeway to develop a personalized voice once they had made a mark. Leonard Downie Jr. was a young investigative reporter and editor at the Post in the 1960s and 1970s. He wanted to prove himself to Bradlee as desperately as anyone.

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Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, and Bradlee leave U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 21, 1971. The newspaper got the go-ahead to print the Pentagon Papers. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, and Bradlee leave U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 21, 1971. The newspaper got the go-ahead to print the Pentagon Papers.

AP

"He was one of the most charismatic people I've ever met," Downie says. "He had an incredibly strong presence in the newsroom. He had incredible sex appeal — sex appeal that I dare say was felt as much by men as well as women — and he used it."

In her memoir, Graham wrote that Bradlee had an effective form of flirtation with her as well, that yielded results on paper, in the newsroom and on the bottom line. In partnership with his patron, Bradlee was, in essence, re-creating the Post from scratch to become a worthy rival of the nation's most important news organizations — right up there with The New York Times, Time magazine and CBS.

When the Nixon administration persuaded a judge to stop the Times from publishing new installments of the Pentagon Papers, Bradlee and Graham decided to publish them right away. The decision exposed her company to significant financial risk.

The ensuing Supreme Court ruling in the two papers' favor enshrined protections for the press against so-called prior restraint.

Watergate

Not long after the Pentagon Papers decision, two unknown Metro reporters for the Post started to unravel a criminal conspiracy involving the 1972 elections and a cover-up that led back to the White House itself.

Bradlee wasn't a details guy except on the stories he cared most about. This one qualified. He personally helped to oversee the coverage of a story that soon took on the cinematic elements of a thriller.

Interest from other news organizations, and even from the Post's own political reporters, ebbed soon after that initial break-in at the Watergate complex.

"It's hard for people now to remember or if they weren't yet born even then to know — even if you see the movie or read the book — what a high-wire act that was," says Downie, later Bradlee's successor as the executive editor of the Post. "Most of the other journalists in the country [thought] Watergate was a crazy story that would blow up in our face. We had no competition for weeks and months on end during that story. I was one of the line editors during the Watergate coverage, and it was scary."

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Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post (left) and journalist Bob Woodward talk in 2011 during the program "Remembering Watergate: A Conversation" at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif. Chris Carlson/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Chris Carlson/AP

Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post (left) and journalist Bob Woodward talk in 2011 during the program "Remembering Watergate: A Conversation" at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif.

Chris Carlson/AP

The Post's parent company had local television station licenses up for review by federal regulators appointed by Nixon; Graham was warned by Washington intimates that she could lose the paper too. But despite threats from former Attorney General John Mitchell, among others, Bradlee persuaded Graham to hold firm.

Bradlee catapulted to celebrity along with his so-very-green reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, thanks to the Watergate story and the ensuing book and movie, All The President's Men. Jason Robards won an Academy Award for playing an editor whose reporters helped expose the criminality of a White House, the ultimate (and basically true) conspiracy story.

"You guys are about to write a story that says the former attorney general — the highest-ranking law enforcement official in this country — is a crook," Robards, as Bradlee, warned his young reporters, pausing for effect before delivering this warning: "Just be sure you're right."

For all that mystique, Bradlee could be a notably incurious editor. He didn't know the identity of Bob Woodward's top secret source, "Deep Throat," until two years after President Nixon resigned. Bradlee spoke to NPR's Michele Norris in 2005 after the source was revealed to be a top FBI official, Mark Felt, who had wanted to be the director of the FBI.

"I knew that he was high-ranking, but I didn't know how high-ranking. And as a matter of fact, it wasn't very important what job he held, so long as he did one thing, and that was tell the truth," Bradlee said. "And before long it was obvious that this man knew what he was talking about, because from Day 1 he never gave us a bad steer."

Legacy Of A Leader

Bradlee's strengths were often also closely linked to his weaknesses. The star system that orbited around him led to tensions within the newsroom. A celebration for a Pulitzer Prize for one of those young stars — an expose by Janet Cooke about an 8-year-old heroin addict — turned to ash in just hours. The story proved to be largely fabricated, as Cooke couldn't even introduce skeptical editors to the boy.

Woodward had been the top editor for Metro news and the scandal knocked him from the path to succeed Bradlee, though he became a best-selling investigative author. But Bradlee survived largely unscathed, in large part because so much of his DNA marked the paper as his own.

Major regional newspapers mimicked the format he devised for the Post, with a Style section devoted to features involving politics, regional personalities, celebrity and popular culture and highbrow culture alike. He also insisted on a high profile for beats on the subjects he vigorously and vulgarly called "SMERSH — science, medicine, education, religion and all that s- - -" — the subjects from which Bradlee personally took little enjoyment.

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President Obama awards Bradlee the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Nov. 20, 2013. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Win McNamee/Getty Images

President Obama awards Bradlee the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Nov. 20, 2013.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

As Bradlee's tenure drew to a close, Remnick says, it was almost touching to witness the degree to which several senior editors competing to replace him adopted some of his sartorial traits, such as the reading glasses on a string, the slicked-back hair and the striped shirts. After decades of Bradlee's leadership, no one could imagine an editor with a different look.

Downie — a less flamboyant, more careful newsroom leader with a dedication to investigative reporting — succeeded Bradlee in 1991. But the paper continued to carry Bradlee's trademark swagger.

After his retirement, Bradlee served as a vice president at large for the parent Washington Post Co., a charismatic talisman for the glories of the paper's journalism even as it hit rocky economic times. Graham's son and granddaughter would later sell the paper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos after failing to hit on a strategy that would revive its financial fortunes; staffers say it gave the newsroom a jolt of confidence it had not seen in years — perhaps since the Bradlee era.

Bradlee wasn't introspective, but in an interview with his friend Jim Lehrer of PBS late in life, he sought to pin down what animated him.

"It changes your life, the pursuit of truth," Bradlee said. "At least, if you know that you have tried to find the truth and gone past the first apparent truth towards the real truth, it's very, it's very exciting, I find."

Among Bradlee's survivors are his wife, the longtime Washington Post feature writer Sally Quinn; their son, Quinn; and his son by an earlier marriage, the journalist Ben Bradlee Jr.

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To clamp down on health care costs, a growing number of employers and insurers are putting limits on how much they'll pay for certain medical services such as knee replacements, lab tests and complex imaging.

A recent study found that savings from such moves may be modest, however, and some analysts question whether "reference pricing," as it's called, is good for consumers.

The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), which administers the health insurance benefits for 1.4 million state workers, retirees and their families, has one of the more established reference pricing systems.

More than three years ago, CalPERS began using reference pricing for elective knee and hip replacements, two common procedures for which hospital prices varied widely without discernible differences in quality, says Ann Boynton, who helps set benefits policies at CalPERS.

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Working with Anthem Blue Cross, the CalPERS set $30,000 as the reference price for those two surgeries in its preferred provider organization plan.

Members who get surgery at one of the 52 hospitals that charge $30,000 or less pay only their plan's regular cost-sharing. If member choose to use an in-network hospital that charges more than the reference price, however, they're on the hook for the entire amount over $30,000, and the extra spending doesn't count toward their annual maximum out-of-pocket limit, Boynton says.

"We're not worried about people not getting the care they need," says Boynton. "They have access to good hospitals; they're just getting it at a reasonable price."

In two years, CalPERS saved nearly $6 million on those two procedures, and members saved $600,000 in lower cost sharing, according to research published last year by James C. Robinson, a professor of health economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Center for Health Technology. Most of the savings came from price reductions at expensive hospitals.

The agency recently set caps on how much it would spend for cataract surgery, colonoscopies and arthroscopic surgery, Boynton says.

Those who have studied reference pricing say it is most appropriate for common, non-emergency procedures or tests that vary widely in price but are generally comparable in quality. Research has generally shown that higher prices for medical services don't mean their quality is higher. Setting a reference price steers consumers to high-quality doctors, hospitals, labs and imaging centers that perform well for the price, proponents say.

Others point out that reference pricing doesn't necessarily save employers a lot of money, however. A study released earlier this month by the National Institute for Health Care Reform examined the 2011 claims data for 528,000 autoworkers and their dependents, both active and retired. It analyzed roughly 350 high-volume and/or high-priced inpatient and ambulatory medical services that reference pricing might reasonably be applied to.

The overall potential savings was 5 percent, the study found.

"It was surprising that even with all that pricing variation, reference pricing doesn't have a more dramatic impact on spending," says Chapin White, a senior policy researcher at RAND and lead author of the study.

Even though the results may be modest, a growing number of very large companies are incorporating reference pricing, according to benefits consultant Mercer's annual employer health insurance survey. The percentage of employers with 10,000 or more employees that used reference pricing grew from 10 percent in 2012 to 15 percent in 2013, the survey found. Thirty percent said they were considering adding reference pricing, the survey found. Among employers with 500 or fewer workers, adoption was flat at 10 percent in 2013, compared with 11 percent in 2012.

This spring, the Obama administration said that large group and self-insured health plans could use reference pricing.

The health law sets limits on how much consumers have to pay out of pocket annually for in-network care before insurance picks up the whole tab — in 2015, it's $6,600 for an individual and $13,200 for a family plan. But if consumers choose providers whose prices are higher than a plan's reference price, those amounts don't count toward the out-of-pocket maximum, the administration guidance said.

Leaving consumers on the hook for amounts over the reference price needlessly drags them into the battle between providers and health plans over prices, says White.

"You expect the health plan to do a few things: negotiate reasonable prices with providers, and not to enter into network contracts with providers who provide bad quality care," White says. "Reference pricing is kind of an admission that health plans have failed on one or both of those fronts."

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The number of men getting vasectomies spiked during the Great Recession, rising one-third from 2006 to 2010, a study finds.

In 2006, 3.9 percent of men said they had had a vasectomy; in 2010, 4.4 percent reported having the surgery. That means an additional 150,000 to 180,000 men per year had vasectomies in each year of the recession.

That squares with earlier research that showed birth rates dropped during the recession, falling 4 percent between 2007 and 2009.

After the recession, man were making less money, were less likely to be working full time, and were less likely to have health insurance, according to the National Survey for Family Growth, which researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College used to come up with the vasectomy numbers.

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They reported their results Monday at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Hawaii.

OK, so what were women up to? The Weill Cornell researchers didn't look at this, but the survey did ask recession-era women about birth control, and there was no increase in the number of women who got birth control or had sterilization surgery from 2002.

Men typically aren't nearly as apt to embrace sterilization as a form of birth control as are women.

For women who use contraception, 26.6 percent chose tubal sterilization, which is permanent, compared to 27.5 percent for the pill, according to 2010 numbers from the Guttmacher Institute.

But just 10 percent of women said they're relying on their partner's vasectomy to avoid pregnancy, according to Guttmacher.

We'll have to stay tuned to see if guys' seeming embrace of vasectomy was just a recessionary blip, or if they really are saying no (or no mas) to fatherhood.

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