Dog walkers in Southern California discovered a severed human head in a bag while hiking in the Hollywood Hills, authorities said.

The walkers found the severed head Tuesday afternoon as they walked their dogs on the trail near the famed Hollywood sign.

“While the dogs were playing with it, at some point the object came out of the bag and they discovered it was a head; a severed head,” Los Angeles police Sgt. Mitzi Fierro told ABC News Los Angeles station KABC.

Los Angeles Police detectives said the head belonged to a male victim.

“The head appears to be rather new. There are not a lot of signs of decomposition yet,” Fierro told KABC.

Authorities plan to resume their search for the victim’s body parts this morning.

Source:  abcnews.go.com

The new Fresh Air Weho Campaign aims to limit exposure to second hand smoke and promote good health.

According to the County of Los Angeles’ Department of Public Health Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology, West Hollywood is Los Angeles County’s third-most cigarette affected region with 19.6 percent of the population identifying as smokers. Tobacco smoke contains more than 4,000 chemical compounds causing adverse health effects that account for nearly one in five deaths each year in the United States. Unfortunately, second-hand smoke is just as harmful, containing more than 7,000 chemical compounds, many that have been linked to lung cancer in non-smokers.

On January 1, 2012 the City of West Hollywood kicked-off the Fresh Air Weho campaign in an effort to promote good health and limit exposure to second hand smoke. The two-part Fresh Air Weho campaign provides smoking cessation programs and information to West Hollywood residents
as well as spread public awareness regarding the Smoking Ordinance.

The City of West Hollywood along with Los Angeles County offers several programs to West Hollywood residents who are interested in smoking cessation:

West Hollywood Recovery Center offers Nicotine Anonymous 12-step meetings.
Location: 626 N. Robertson Boulevard, West Hollywood CA. 90069
Contact: For more information, please call (310) 360-4833 or visit www.thewhrc.org  

Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) Health Center provides smoking cessation information, trainings and toolkits.
Contact: Nadia Juma for more information at (213) 572-0477

L. A. County Department of Public Health
Free Nicotine Patches
L. A. County Residents interested in quitting smoking can call the California Smokers’ Helpline to request a free four-week supply of nicotine patches. The toll-free phone number is: 1-800-NO-BUTTS (1-800-662-8887). The California Smokers’ Helpline will mail a four-week supply of nicotine patches to the L.A. County address provided by the caller.

The West Hollywood Smoking Ordinance prohibits smoking within 5 feet of outdoor areas including restaurant patios, cafes and food courts and outdoor service areas such as ATM machines, information kiosks, banks, theater or other event venue, car washes and vehicle service establishments and valet parking pick up areas within the City of West Hollywood.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Tobacco Control and Prevention Program is a co-sponsor of the Fresh Air Weho campaign.

Ricky Gervais, who has hosted the Golden Globes three times, has ruled out the possibility of returning for a fourth.

He took to his blog to make the announcement saying, "I've told my agent to never let me be persuaded to do it again though. It's like a parachute jump. You can only really enjoy it in retrospect when you realise you didn't die and it was quite an amazing thing to do."

The British actor noted that the show went better than it did a year ago saying, "I think they finally worked out that my gags only seemed rude and nasty but were actually not too scary at all."

Gervais received negative feedback for mocking A-list stars in his monologue a year ago. This time around, he gave a tamer performance but still made room to poke fun at some calling Colin Firth 'evil' and Natalie Portman 'foolish.'

Based on information provided by local authorities, the U.S. Embassy in Rome estimates that 130 Americans may have been on board. 

The Embassy says there are no reports of serious injuries to American citizens, though not all of the Americans believed to have been present on the ship at the time of the accident have been accounted for.

Three bodies were recovered from the sea after the Costa Concordia ran aground off the tiny island of Giglio near the coast of Tuscany late Friday, tearing a 160-foot gash in its hull and sending in a rush of water.

The ANSA news agency quoting the prefect's office in the province of Grosseto as saying that authorities have accounted for 4,165 of the 4,234 people who had boarded the liner.

By morning Saturday, the ship was lying virtually flat off Gigio's coast, its starboard side submerged in the water and the huge gash showing clearly on its upturned hull.

Passengers described a scene reminiscent of "Titanic", complaining the crew failed to give instructions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many of them to be released.

Helicopters plucked to safety some people who were trapped on the ship, some survivors were rescued by boats in the area, and witnesses said some people jumped from the ship into the dark, cold sea. Coast guard rescuers were continuing to search the ship for passengers.

Authorities still hadn't counted all the survivors by the time they reached mainland 12 hours later.
The evacuation drill was only scheduled for Saturday afternoon, even though some passengers had already been on board for several days.

"It was so unorganized, our evacuation drill was scheduled for 5 p.m.," said Melissa Goduti, 28, of Wallingford, Connecticut, who had set out on the cruise of the Mediterranean hours earlier. "We had joked 'What if something had happened today?"'

"Have you seen 'Titanic?' That's exactly what it was," said Valerie Ananias, 31, a schoolteacher from Los Angeles who was traveling with her sister and parents on the first of two cruises around the Mediterranean. They all bore dark red bruises on their knees from the desperate crawl they endured along nearly vertical hallways and stairwells, trying to reach rescue boats.

"We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing," her mother, Georgia Ananias, 61 said. "We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls."

She choked up as she recounted the moment when an Argentine couple handed her their 3-year-old daughter, unable to keep their balance as the ship lurched to the side and the family found themselves standing on a wall. "He said 'take my baby,"' Mrs. Ananias said, covering her mouth with her hand as she teared up. "I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn't want the baby to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn't hold her.

"I thought that was the end and I thought they should be with their baby," she said.

"I wonder where they are," daughter Valerie whispered.

The family said they were some of the last off the ship, forced to shimmy along a rope down the exposed side of the ship to a waiting rescue vessel below.

Survivor Christine Hammer, from Bonn, Germany, shivered near the harbor of Porto Santo Stefano, on the mainland, after stepping off a ferry from Giglio. She was wearing elegant dinner clothes -- a gray cashmere sweater, a silk scarf -- along with a large pair of hiking boots, which a kind islander gave her after she lost her shoes in the scramble to escape. Left behind in her cabin were her passport, credit cards and phone.

Hammer, 65, told The Associated Press that she was eating her first course, an appetizer of cuttlefish, sauteed mushrooms and salad, on her first night aboard her first-ever cruise, which was a gift to her and her husband, Gert, from her local church where she volunteers.

Suddenly, "we heard a crash. Glasses and plates fell down and we went out of the dining room and we were told it wasn't anything dangerous," she said.

Several passengers concurred, saying crew members for a good 45 minutes told passengers there was a simple "technical problem" that had caused the lights to go off. Seasoned cruisers, however, knew better and went to get their life jackets from their cabins and report to their "muster stations," the emergency stations each passenger is assigned to, they said.

Once there, though, crew members delayed lowering the lifeboats even thought the ship was listing badly, they said.

"We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side," said Mike van Dijk, a 54-year-old from Pretoria, South Africa. "We were standing in the corridors and they weren't allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble."

Passengers Alan and Laurie Willits from Wingham, Ontario, celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary, said they were watching the magic show in the ship's main theater when they felt an inital lurch, as if from a severe steering maneuver, followed a few seconds later by a "shudder" that tipped trash cans over. The subsequent listing of the ship made the theater curtains seem like they were standing on their side.

"And then the magician disappeared," Laurie Willits said, saying the magician left the stage and panicked audience members fled for their cabins as well.

Once at their life boat station, crew members directed passengers to go upstairs from the fourth floor deck; Alan Willits said he refused.

"I said 'no this isn't right.' And I came out and I argued 'When you get this boat stabilized, I'll go up to the fifth floor then," he said. Eventually, his lifeboat was lowered down.
But things didn't improve for passengers once aboard the lifeboats or on land.

"No one counted us, neither in the life boats nor on land," said Ophelie Gondelle, 28, a French military officer from Marseille. She said there had been no evacuation drill since she boarded in Marseille, France on Jan. 8.

As dawn neared, a painstaking search of the 950-foot long ship's interior was being conducted to see if anyone might have been trapped inside, Paolillo said.

"There are some 2,000 cabins, and the ship isn't straight," Paolillo said, referring to the Concordia's dramatic more than 45-degree tilt. "I'll leave it to your imagination to understand how they (the rescuers) are working as they move through it."

Some Concordia crew members were still aboard to help the coast guard rescuers, he said.
Paolillo said it wasn't immediately known if the dead were passengers or crew, nor were the nationalities of the victims immediately known. It wasn't clear how they died.

Some 30 people were reported injured, most of them suffering only bruises, but at least two people were reported in grave condition. Several passengers came off the ferries on stretchers, but it appeared more out of exhaustion and shock than serious injury.

Some passengers, apparently in panic, had jumped off the boat into the sea, witnesses said. Authorities were trying to obtain a full passenger and crew list from Costa, so they could do a roll call to determine who might be missing.

The evacuees were taking refuge in schools, hotels, and a church on the tiny island of Giglio, a popular vacation isle about 18 miles off Italy's central west coast. Those evacuated the port of Porto Santo Stefano on the nearby mainland.

Passengers sat dazed in a middle school opened for them, wrapped in wool or aluminum blankets, with some wearing their life preservers and their shoeless feet covered with aluminum foil. Civil protection crews served them warm tea and bread, but confusion reigned supreme as passengers tried desperately to find the right bus to begin their journey home.

Tanja Berto, from Ebenfurth, Austria, was shuttled from one line to another with her mother and 2-year-old son Bruno, trying to figure out how to get back to Savona, where they began their cruise a week ago.

"It's his birthday today," she said of her son, rolling her eyes as she held Bruno and tended to her mother, who had grown faint and was lying on the ground. "Happy birthday, Bruno."

Survivors far outnumbered Giglio's 1,500 residents, and island Mayor Sergio Ortelli issued an appeal for islanders -- "anyone with a roof" -- to open their homes to shelter the evacuees.

Paolillo said the exact circumstances of the accident were still unclear, but that the first alarm went off about 10:30 p.m., about three hours after the Concordia had begun its voyage from the port of Civitavecchia, en route to its first port of call, Savona, in northwestern Italy.

The coast guard official, speaking from the port captain's office in the Tuscan port of Livorno, said the vessel "hit an obstacle" -- it wasn't clear if it might have hit a rocky reef in the waters off Giglio -- "ripping a gash 160 feet across" in the side of the ship, and started taking on water.

The cruise liner's captain, Paolillo said, then tried to steer his ship toward shallow waters, near Giglio's small port, to make evacuation by lifeboat easier. But after the ship started listing badly, lifeboat evacuation was no longer feasible, Paolillo said.

Five helicopters, from the coast guard, navy and air force, were taking turns airlifting survivors still aboard and ferrying them to safely. A coast guard member was airlifted aboard the vessel to help people get aboard a small basket so they could be hoisted up to the helicopter, said Capt. Cosimo Nicastro, another Coast Guard official.

Costa Cruises said the Costa Concordia was sailing on a cruise across the Mediterranean Sea, starting from Civitavecchia with scheduled calls to Savona, Marseille, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Cagliari and Palermo.

It said about 1,000 Italian passengers were onboard, as well as more than 500 Germans, about 160 French and about 1,000 crew members.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Concordia had a previous accident in Italian waters, ANSA reported. In 2008, when strong winds buffeted Palermo, the cruise ship banged against the Sicilian port's dock, and suffered damage but no one was injured, ANSA said.

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady may not need the help, but some witches are planning to cast a spell to put an end to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow’s miraculous season.

Witches Lorelei and Lori Bruno were scheduled to hold a seance at noon today – Friday the 13th – at Haven Crow Corner in Salem, Mass. to fix a win for the Pats.

“I’m going to raise the energy of the universe and send out all the good mojo,” Lorelei told the Boston Herald. “Lori will call in the Angels.”

The good witches won’t hex Tebow, as it’s “not their way,” but plan on setting up an altar with a hand-sewn Brady puppet and mojo bags filled with herbs and stones for every Patriots team member.

At the altar, the witches will chant, “Tom Brady will see what he needs to see, be where he needs to be and will take the Patriots to another victory.”

Hunky QB Brady, married to supermodel Gisele Bundchen, is a bigger draw for the witches of Salem than another recent marquee recipient of their spells, Charlie Sheen.

“You know, when we had our spiritual intervention for Charlie Sheen last year, we had a hard time getting all the girls to come,” laughed Lorelei. “But when we told them this Circle was for Tom Brady, oh, everybody will be there!”

“We want the true champion to come out on Saturday night,” Bruno added. “But since we live in Patriot Land, it’s red, white and blue and make the dream come true!”