Mom charged for leaving baby in car

Penny Nicole Hume expected to spend just a few minutes at the Baldwin County Corrections Center on Friday afternoon, authorities said.

Instead, she was booked into the facility for the weekend.

The 21-year-old had parked her 1997 Oldsmobile Delta 88 LS in front of the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office, next to the jail, and left her infant son strapped in a car seat, according to Sheriff Huey "Hoss" Mack.

Hume of Robertsdale cracked the rear driver's side window and kept the doors unlocked.

Then she stepped out and approached the docket room, a few hundred feet away, and asked the officers about bail for her boyfriend, Cody Robert Johnson.

Johnson was charged Thursday night with driving on a suspended license, driving without insurance, speeding and having switched tags.

A new French exception? Having more babies

PARIS: Thirty years ago, the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was urging the French to have "un troisième enfant pour la France!" But it is only now that they have taken the advice.
The national statistics agency says that in 2006 France had the highest birthrate in Europe. The average number of births by women of fertile age was slightly more than two.
Thus France becomes one of the two European Union states with a positive birthrate; Ireland is the other. The contrast with their neighbors is very marked. Germany, Italy and Spain all have birthrates under 1.4. The rates in the new EU members, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and even Roman Catholic Poland, are below 1.3.
French life expectancy in 2005 was also the highest in Europe, at 84 for women and 77 for men, and it increased last year by three and a half months for women and nearly five months for men.

Outdated Baby Food, Formula Found On Store Shelves

Outdated baby formula on local grocery store shelves -- it's not supposed to be there, but our KIRO 7 Consumer investigators found it.
Baby food and baby formula are the only foods required by the FDA to have a "use by" date printed on the cans and jars.
When that date comes and goes, that food and formula is supposed to be pulled.
But we found outdated food and formula still on the shelves -- and still for sale.
We took our hidden camera inside local grocery stores.
We found that of the 29 grocery stores, drug stores and other retailers, nine had baby formula on the shelves that was past the "use-by" date.
We found a can of powdered formula with a use-by date read August 2006. But it was still for sale in early January when we bought it.

Area Parents Breathing Easier After Car Seat Flub

New car seat safety crash test data from Consumer Reports magazine -- in which most of the car seats manufactured today failed the tests -- left many parents questioning the safety of the seats their children have been sitting in.
But as it turned out, the parents' fears may have been unfounded. The magazine issued a retraction after it discovered most of the tests were conducted at speeds higher than planned.
Debbie Fine, owner of "The Baby's Room in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., says this is the topic all her customers are talking about now:
"Because we sell a stroller that connects to a car seat, many customers are asking us which car seat to buy."
Angela Osterhuber, director of Pennsylvania's Traffic Injury Prevention Project, says the bottom line is that every car seat available for sale today meets national safety crash test standards.