Broadway takes a big hit from Superstorm Sandy

NEW YORK (AP) — Superstorm Sandy, which darkened Broadway for four days, predictably ravaged the box offices around Times Square, with shows losing more than $ 8.5 million from the previous week.

The Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry, released data Tuesday that showed, as expected, all shows took a hit. One of the hardest hurt was the Matthew Broderick musical “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” which lost $ 538,853.

Since the storm actually affected two weeks of data, the League estimates that grosses managed just $ 33.66 million for that period, a drastic fall from the same time frame last year, where the box offices earned $ 42.2 million. Attendance also plunged 19 percent from the 10-year average.

The storm, which struck last Monday, forced all 40 Broadway theaters to shutter the night before. All shows were up and running by Thursday night, but the damage had been done, though few expect the pain to last.

“It will come back to its former life, there’s no question about it. Broadway is New York and everyone celebrates the theater in this city,” said Barry Weissler, who has been producing work on Broadway since 1982. “It’s catch-up time.”

Most shows on Broadway have eight performances a week, but Sandy forced many, including “The Phantom of the Opera,” ”The Heiress,” ”Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Chicago” to put on just six shows. “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Evita” only managed five shows. Altogether, 48 individual performances were canceled.

Other shows that took a beating include “Wicked,” which lost $ 490,996, though it still managed to pull in $ 1,166,275. The least hurt was “Rock of Ages,” which lost just $ 59,209.

Sandy joins other recent shocks to have rocked Broadway finances, including the Sept. 11 attacks, which shuttered theaters for two days, and Hurricane Irene in 2011 that wiped away a weekend’s revenue.

“Storms will not stop us, the terrible tragedy of 9/11 will not stop us. Theater will continue. It’s one of the oldest art forms known to man and it will continue,” said Weissler, who together with his wife, Fran, has produced such shows as “Grease,” ”Chicago” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”

The League said that the losses from Hurricane Irene were actually larger than for Sandy. Not only were 66 individual performances scrapped for Irene, but the storm struck during the busy summer, not the slower fall.

But Sandy may have hurt off-Broadway theaters more. The SoHo Rep and The Bank Street Theater lost power and had some flooding, while many other downtown theaters lost power, including the MCC Theatre and SoHo Playhouse. The Canal Park Playhouse canceled all November and December performances.

The infectious drumming show “Blue Man Group” was quieted, the immersive, genre-bending show “Sleep No More” was stilled, and The Public Theater was shut down for almost a week. The lobby at its home at Astor Place is now a collection site for post-Sandy supplies.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Looking Old May Signal Heart Trouble

Have you seen the Internet ads for the 53-year-old mom who looks 27? Not only does she look better than people who actually show their age, a new Danish study has found there’s a good chance she’ll live longer, too.

The older you look, the worse shape your heart is in, the authors of the ongoing Copenhagen Heart Study concluded.

The study, which began in 1976, followed 11,000 men and women for 35 years to find the connection between physical appearance and heart health.

Originally, the investigators paid attention to seven telltale signs of aging. They eventually found that wrinkles, gray hair and cholesterol deposits on the cornea of the eye were all part of the inevitable wear and tear on the body rather than predictors of bad health.

“These are signs of physical aging, not necessarily biological aging,” said the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Anne Tybaerg-Hansen.

That left four physical traits – a receding hairline, baldness on top of the head, earlobe creases and yellow, fatty deposits around the eyelid – as visible evidence of heart disease. People with at least three of these markers for aging had a 57 percent increased risk for heart attack and a 39 percent increased risk for heart disease.

When the researchers considered gender separately, they found that hair loss in women was not linked with an increased risk of heart disease. However, the men with receding hairlines showed a 40 percent higher risk in men with hair loss than those without.

Overall, the group for whom the new results raises a red flag was men between ages 70 and 79. In this group, 45 percent of those with all four aging signs developed heart disease, compared to 31 percent of those with none of the four.

The markers used in the study are often cited as predictors of heart disease. Scientists have long speculated that male-pattern baldness may be linked to high levels of testosterone, which, in turn, seem to be associated with a higher incidence of heart disease.

Experts have suspected for decades that earlobe creases and cholesterol buildup on the eye are signs of heart trouble.

Wrinkles, which weren’t associated with heart health in the study, have been tied to poor bone health. Last year, a Yale study found women with deeply furrowed brows in early menopause may also have weak bones.

Tabaerg-Hansen said her research gave no clear answers as to why the four physical traits were so closely associated with the risk of heart disease. The next step would be to try to find out why they’re connected and to see if they might also predict other diseases of aging, such as cancer.

Tabaerg-Hansen added that there’s no reason physicians can’t look out for these signs right now as they assess which of their patients are in poor cardiovascular health.

“This new study should give clinicians greater incentive to treat patients who show these physical signs,” she said. “They could suggest lifestyle changes and therapies for those who have the appearance of higher risk.”

The study results were presented at this week’s American Heart Association scientific meeting in Los Angeles. They have not yet been published.

Also Read
Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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My plea to the undecided: Stay home!

By Jeff Greenfield

As the momentous day approaches, with epochal consequences for an anxiously awaiting world, I take pen in hand—make that apply fingertips to keypad—to renew a traditional plea I first made more than 30 years ago. It’s a plea I’ve made in print, on the air and, now, through the miracle of digital technology. But its message never changes.

It’s a plea directed to those of you who are still uncertain about which way to vote. And it’s as simple as it is heartfelt: Stay home.

The candidates have been at this for years; both President Obama and Mitt Romney began running for the presidency six years ago. They’ve made speeches, answered (or evaded) questions and raised billions to convince you of their worth—or the other guy’s worthlessness.

The media have been covering their every move and word, even when the candidates thought they weren’t. (Can you say, “Cling to their religion and guns”? “47 percent”?) The coverage has been slanted, scrupulously fair, superficial, in-depth, misleading, dead-on. With the flip of a page or the click of a mouse, you have been able to find out every conceivable piece of information you might want on their backgrounds, families, values, experience, positions taken, positions abandoned, promises made, promises broken, and the music on their iPods.

And after all this time, you’re still trying to make up your minds. The overwhelmingly likely reason is this: You have the reasoning power of a baked potato.

OK, I grant that you may be of the small minority of concerned citizens who are genuinely torn and who have not yet evaluated the relative worth of health care reform notions, the vagaries of the tax proposals or the respective approaches to the increasing power of the renminbi.

But I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.

The odds are, you’ve just been too busy obsessing about the misfortunes of the Kardashians or the quality of your ringtone, to spend any time thinking about who might be the better president.

Well, that’s your right. Unlike the Australians, we don’t compel people to vote, and it would likely be a First Amendment violation if we tried. A refusal to vote can be seen as a statement that the electoral system is rigged, meaningless or so thoroughly corrupt as to deserve contempt. (“I never vote,” one citizen said long ago. “It only encourages them.”)

And there are other valid reasons for not voting. As a personal matter, I stopped voting more than a decade ago, on the grounds that it helped me as an analyst not to think about making a choice in the voting booth.

So it strikes me as a sound, honest statement for a prospective voter to say: “Look, I haven’t given this election a minute’s thought, and it’s just not fair for me to cancel out the vote of someone who actually gives a damn.”

Indeed, it’s not just sound and honest—it’s the ethically responsible thing to do.

Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 during the Selma march for voting rights. In these days of early voting, we’ve seen people waiting in line for hours to exercise the franchise. Countless others, who have never had to fight for it, have spent real time either trying to decide how to cast their vote or donating their time to persuading others.

So if you’re one of those folks who have stayed utterly disengaged through all of this, do the honorable thing: Honor those for whom the vote really matters by staying home.

You’ll be doing yourself—and the country—a favor.

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Methane warnings ignored before NZ mine disaster

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A New Zealand coal mining company ignored 21 warnings that methane gas had accumulated to explosive levels before an underground explosion killed 29 workers two years ago, an investigation concluded.

The official report released Monday after 11 weeks of hearings on the disaster found broad safety problems in New Zealand workplaces and said the Pike River Coal company was exposing miners to unacceptable risks as it strove to meet financial targets.

“The company completely and utterly failed to protect its workers,” New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said Monday.

The country’s labor minister, Kate Wilkinson, resigned from her labor portfolio after the report’s release, saying she felt it was the honorable thing to do after the tragedy occurred on her watch. She plans to retain her remaining government responsibilities.

The Royal Commission report said New Zealand has a poor workplace safety record and its regulators failed to provide adequate oversight before the explosion.

At the time of the disaster, New Zealand had just two mine inspectors who were unable to keep up with their workload, the report said. Pike River was able to obtain a permit with no scrutiny of its initial health and safety plans and little ongoing scrutiny.

Key said he agrees with the report’s conclusion that there needs to be a philosophical shift in New Zealand from believing that companies are acting in the best interests of workers to a more proscriptive set of regulations that forces companies to do the right thing.

The commission’s report recommended a new agency be formed to focus solely on workplace health and safety problems. It also recommended a raft of measures to strengthen mine oversight.

Key said his government would consider the recommendations and hoped to implement most of them. He would not commit on forming a new agency. Workplace safety issues are currently one of the responsibilities of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

In the seven weeks before the explosion, the Pike River company received 21 warnings from mine workers that methane gas had built up to explosive levels below ground and another 27 warnings of dangerous levels, the report said. The warnings continued right up until the morning of the deadly explosion.

The company used unconventional methods to get rid of methane, the report said. Some workers even rigged their machines to bypass the methane sensors after the machines kept automatically shutting down — something they were designed to do when methane levels got too high.

The company made a “major error” by placing a ventilation fan underground instead of on the surface, the report found. The fan failed after the first of several explosions, effectively shutting down the entire ventilation system. The company was also using water jets to cut the coal face, a highly specialized technique than can release large amounts of methane.

The report did not definitively conclude what sparked the explosion itself, although it noted that a pump was switched on immediately before the explosion, raising the possibility it was triggered by an electrical arc.

The now-bankrupt Pike River Coal company is not defending itself against charges it committed nine labor violations related to the disaster. Former chief executive Peter Whittall has pleaded not guilty to 12 violations and his lawyers say he is being scapegoated.

An Australian contractor was fined last month for three safety violations after its methane detector was found to be faulty at the time of the explosion.

Australia / Antarctica News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Apple sells 3 million iPads over first weekend

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Experimental Pfizer cholesterol drug promising in study

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An experimental Pfizer Inc cholesterol drug showed promise in a small midstage trial, putting the world’s largest drugmaker in the race to develop a medicine from a promising new class, albeit behind similar programs by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and Amgen Inc.

The drug, RN316, which Pfizer acquired with its purchase of Rinat Neuroscience, is a PCSK9 inhibitor, a class of biotech medicines that has generated great excitement in the industry.

The drugs work by blocking a protein that slows removal of bad LDL cholesterol from the blood and are considered potentially the most important advance in the field since widely used statin drugs, such as Pfizer‘s Lipitor.

In a 12-week trial of about 130 patients already on high doses of cholesterol-lowering statins, Pfizer‘s PCSK9 drug cut LDL cholesterol by 56 percent at the highest dose of 6 milligrams/kilogram of weight. The 3 mg/kg dose lowered LDL levels by 46 percent on top of statins, according to data unveiled on Monday.

Barry Gumbiner, executive director of clinical research for Pfizer‘s PCSK9 program, said the results were somewhat misleading because any patient whose LDL level fell below 25 had doses withheld as a precaution, skewing the overall results.

After four weeks, patients on the highest dose had LDL reductions of up to 80 percent before some had doses withheld, Pfizer explained. The data was presented at the American Heart Association scientific meeting in Los Angeles.

PCSK9 drugs are intended for use by the millions of people who either cannot tolerate statins or cannot get their LDL levels down to target goals with statins and other drugs, including patients with a genetic condition that makes them predisposed to extreme, dangerously high cholesterol.

Analysts have said the PCSK9 drugs could generate billions of dollars in annual sales.

The Pfizer drug was administered intravenously once every four weeks for a total of three dosings in the brief proof-of-concept trial. Subsequent trials will use a version injected under the skin, with the next Phase II study designed to determine which doses of the drug will be advanced into much larger, late-stage studies, the company said.

Patients on the higher doses who were not taken off the drug over the 12 weeks experienced sustained LDL level declines of 75 percent, said Gumbiner, who presented the data at the meeting.

The drug was also tested at doses of 0.25 mg/kg and 1 mg/kg against a placebo.

Pfizer researchers said the drug appeared to be well-tolerated, with no allergic reactions or safety issues of concern cropping up in the small study.

Earlier on Monday, U.S. biotech Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and its partner, French drugmaker Sanofi, announced plans to begin enrolling subjects in an 18,000-patient study to determine whether its PCSK9 drug can reduce heart attacks, strokes and death. That and an ambitious program that includes several smaller Phase III studies solidify Regeneron as the clear front-runner in the race to bring one of these new medicines to market.

Amgen Inc, which is also aggressively pursuing a rival PCSK9 drug, is somewhat further along than Pfizer. The world’s largest biotech company presented data from two Phase II studies at the heart meeting on Monday and planned to present the results of two more midstage trials on Tuesday.

Sean Harper, Amgen’s research chief, said in a telephone interview that the company expects to begin its Phase III trials early next year.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot and Deena Beasley; editing by Matthew Lewis)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Florida's I-4 corridor: The mother road of swing voters

By Bob Sacha and Maisie Crow

Interstate 4 bisects the center of America's most notorious swing state, running 132 miles from Tampa, through Orlando and ending near Daytona Beach. Fifty-five percent of Florida voters live in the I-4 corridor. It is often where elections are decided in a state that has frequently switched sides, voting for Republicans seven times and Democrats three times in the past 10 elections, and voting for the winning presidential candidate 90 percent of that time.

For the final installment of our Road Trip video series for Campaign 2012, Yahoo News headed to Florida in search of the exotic, perhaps mythical, undecided voter. Here are three of our conversations.

'I have been registered to vote for seven years, and I have never voted.'

In a state filled with colorful characters, Eve Banks, 25, entertains many of them at the Mons Venus club in Tampa. She also travels extensively for her work as an exotic dancer. Eve Banks is a stage name: "I don't want girls from my sorority looking me up online," she says.

"I'm living a version of the American dream," she told Yahoo News. "It's not like the white picket fence, but I do have the dogs and I do have the husband. And I have everything I want. It's just kind of a different way of achieving it."

In the 2012 presidential election, Banks will be voting for the first time, casting a ballot for Barack Obama, she says, because of his support for women. "I generally don't care about politics because I feel like little old me does not make a difference," she said. "But this year I think is a lot different than previous years because of what's at stake right now.

"There was a lot of discrimination against women, believe it or not, not even that long ago really if you think about it. And that'll all change if we don't put the right person in the position," Banks said. "No woman wants a government to control her body or her choices."

'It has gotten pretty ugly between the two. I'm not sure I would want to be a part of it.'

Lloyd Parker, 33, hasn't decided how he is going to vote. He was working for a land development company in Lake Tahoe in Nevada until business started to slow down. His best friend lured him to Florida to become an entrepreneur by starting the Savage Race, an obstacle race in the mud. We hung out with him during their third race in Dade City.

"The Savage Race is a four- to six-mile mud obstacle course," Parker said. "It's timed. Twenty to 25 military-style obstacles that challenge you in many different ways. And afterward it's a fun gathering with live music and a party atmosphere."

Parker called Florida a Savage Race of sorts for Obama and Mitt Romney: "It is everywhere. It seems to be all over Facebook, everything. Maybe that has turned me off a little bit. That it's just been too much of back and forth and negativity, and it probably pushed me away a little bit.

"I have not been following it very much lately," he told Yahoo News. "In the last month I have been extremely busy with this course. I'm out on a ranch with no cable."

'I think somebody that's been in the farming business as long as we have—I don't think we should have to pay any inheritance tax.'

When Dave Black, 73, started in the citrus-farming and ranching business 42 years ago in Clermont, he stood on his 22 acres and saw fruit trees everywhere. Now his property is down to 14 acres, and it is hemmed in by new housing developments on three sides.

"We've got enough houses," Black told Yahoo News. "I mean we should leave a little open space."

Black is voting for Romney because of his opposition to the inheritance tax, in the hope that he can pass his property to his children undivided and tax-free.

"The Electoral College, I don't care for," he said. "I want the people to decide, not this state or that state. You know, Bush, the first election, he won on electoral votes. He didn't win on popular votes. Gore beat him on popular votes. So, that's wrong. That's just my opinion."

Bob Sacha is a multimedia producer, a documentary filmmaker, a photojournalist and a teacher. Maisie Crow is a documentary photographer, a filmmaker and a visual storytelling teacher. Earlier this year, Bob Sacha and Zach Wise traveled to Nevada to talk to Hispanics about the presidential election. In October, they talked to small-business owners along Colorado's Colfax Avenue. In July, Bob Sacha and Miki Meek traveled to Northern Virginia to talk to Mormons about what a President Romney would mean to them. In March, they drove Ohio's I-71 and talked to Republicans before Super Tuesday.

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Newspaper discloses new Cameron text messages

LONDON (AP) — A British lawmaker says he’s asked the country’s media ethics inquiry to consider newly disclosed text messages sent between Prime Minister David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks, the ex-chief executive of Rupert Murdoch‘s British newspaper division.

The Mail on Sunday newspaper on Sunday published two previously undisclosed messages exchanged between the pair, who are friends and neighbors.

Brooks is facing trial on conspiracy charges linked to Britain’s phone hacking scandal, which saw Murdoch close down The News of The World tabloid.

In one newly disclosed message, Cameron thanked Brooks in 2009 for allowing him to borrow a horse, joking it was “fast, unpredictable and hard to control but fun.”

Opposition lawmaker Chris Bryant has asked a judge-led inquiry scrutinizing ties between the press and the powerful to examine the messages.

Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Robbie Williams returns to top spot on UK pop charts

LONDON (Reuters) – Robbie Williams‘ new single “Candy” shot straight to number one in Britain’s pop charts on Sunday, the Official Charts Company said, dislodging Labrinth and Emeli Sande‘s “Beneath Your Beautiful” from the top spot.

Scottish producer and singer Calvin Harris entered the album charts at number one with “18 Months”, his second top-selling effort, and Kylie Minogue‘s “The Abbey Road Sessions” came in at number two on the long player list.

“Candy”, written with Take That band mate Gary Barlow, is Williams’ 14th career number one.

(Reporting by Matt Falloon)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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