Brad Pitt donates $100K for gay marriage effort

WASHINGTON (AP) — Brad Pitt has agreed to donate $ 100,000 to help the Human Rights Campaign raise money for its efforts to support same-sex marriage initiatives in several states.

The nation’s largest gay rights group announced Wednesday that Pitt agreed to match contributions from the group’s members up to $ 100,000.

In an e-mail to members of the Human Rights Campaign, Pitt wrote that it’s “unbelievable” that people’s relationships will be put to a vote on Election Day.

Same-sex marriage will be on the ballot in Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and Washington state.

The Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign says it has spent $ 8 million to push for marriage equality for gays and lesbians over the past two years, including $ 5 million in the four ballot measures this year.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Firm linked to U.S. meningitis outbreak recalls all drugs

BOSTON (Reuters) – Ameridose, the sister company to the U.S. pharmacy linked to a national outbreak of meningitis that has killed 28 people, on Wednesday announced it was recalling all its products, in a move to cooperate with U.S. and state regulators.

The Westborough, Massachusetts-based company said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked it to improve its sterility testing processes.

The company said it had not received any reports of adverse reactions to the products it is recalling.

“Ameridose and FDA agree that the use of injectable products that are not sterile can represent a serious hazard to health,” the company said in a statement.

(Reporting By Toni Clarke, writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Obama gets first-hand look at devastation

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — President Barack Obama jetted to storm-stricken New Jersey on Wednesday for a first-hand look at the devastation, as his aides tried to keep overt politics at bay for one more day.

Still, with Election Day less than a week away, Obama's visit was layered with political implications. The deadly storm has given Obama an opportunity to project presidential leadership in the final days of the tightly contested White House race. And Obama's tour guide in New Jersey was the state's Republican Gov. Chris Christie, a supporter of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

To the chagrin of some Republicans, Christie has lavished praise on Obama for his efforts in helping states dealing with the storm.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said there were no political motivations behind Obama's decision to join his supporter's rival Wednesday.

"This is not a time for politics," Carney said. "The president appreciates the efforts of governors, state and local officials across the various states that were affected by the storm regardless of political party."

Christie was on hand to greet Obama as Air Force One landed on a sunny, breezy day in Atlantic City. The two men, along with FEMA administrator Craig Fugate, boarded Marine One for an hour-long aerial tour of the storm damage.

Obama stopped by FEMA headquarters in Washington before heading to New Jersey.

Wednesday marked Obama's third straight day off the campaign trail. He canceled rallies across four battleground states and retreated to the White House to oversee the government's storm response.

Obama planned to return to the campaign trail Thursday, with stops planned in Green Bay, Wis., Las Vegas and Boulder, Colo. He planned to be on the road campaigning every day through the Nov. 6 election.

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Cuba’s 2nd city without power, water after Sandy

HAVANA (AP) — Residents of Cuba‘s second-largest city of Santiago remained without power or running water Monday, four days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall as the island’s deadliest storm in seven years, ripping rooftops from homes and toppling power lines.

Across the Caribbean, the storm’s death toll rose to 69, including 52 people in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, two in the Bahamas, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in Puerto Rico.

Cuban authorities have not yet estimated the economic toll, but the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported there was “severe damage to housing, economic activity, fundamental public services and institutions of education, health and culture.”

Yolanda Tabio, a native of Santiago, said she had never seen anything like it in all her 64 years: Broken hotel and shop windows, trees blown over onto houses, people picking through piles of debris for a scrap of anything to cover their homes. On Sunday, she sought solace in faith.

“The Mass was packed. Everyone crying,” said Tabio, whose house had no electricity, intermittent phone service and only murky water coming out of the tap on Monday. “I think it will take five to ten years to recover. … But we’re alive.”

Sandy came onshore early Thursday just west of Santiago, a city of about 500,000 people in agricultural southeastern Cuba. It is the island’s deadliest storm since 2005′s Hurricane Dennis, a category 5 monster that killed 16 people and did $ 2.4 billion in damage. More than 130,000 homes were damaged by Sandy, including 15,400 that were destroyed, Granma said.

“It really shocked me to see all that has been destroyed and to know that for many people, it’s the effort of a whole lifetime,” said Maria Caridad Lopez, a media relations officer at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Santiago. “And it disappears in just three hours.”

Lopez said several churches in the area collapsed and nearly all suffered at least minor damage. That included the Santiago cathedral as well as one of the holiest sites in Cuba, the Sanctuary of the Virgin del Cobre. Sandy’s winds blew out its stained glass windows and damaged its massive doors.

“It’s indescribable,” said Berta Serguera, an 82-year-old retiree whose home withstood the tempest but whose patio and garden did not. “The trees have been shredded as if with a saw. My mango only has a few branches left, and they look like they were shaved.”

On Monday, sound trucks cruised the streets urging people to boil drinking water to prevent infectious disease. Soldiers worked to remove rubble and downed trees from the streets. Authorities set up radios and TVs in public spaces to keep people up to date on relief efforts, distributed chlorine to sterilize water and prioritized electrical service to strategic uses such as hospitals and bakeries.

Enrique Berdion, a 45-year-old doctor who lives in central Santiago, said his small apartment building did not suffer major damage but he had been without electricity, water or gas for days.

“This was something I’ve never seen, something extremely intense, that left Santiago destroyed. Most homes have no roofs. The winds razed the parks, toppled all the trees,” Berdion said by phone. “I think it will take years to recover.”

Raul Castro, who toured Cuba’s hardest-hit regions on Sunday, warned of a long road to recovery.

Granma said the president called on the country to urgently implement “temporary solutions,” and “undoubtedly the definitive solution will take years of work.”

Venezuela sent nearly 650 of tons of aid, including nonperishable food, potable water and heavy machinery both to Cuba and to nearby Haiti, which was not directly in the storm’s path but suffered flash floods across much of the country’s south.

Across the Caribbean, work crews were repairing downed power lines and cracked water pipes and making their way into rural communities marooned by impassable roads. The images were similar from eastern Jamaica to the northern Bahamas: Trees ripped from the ground, buildings swamped by floodwaters and houses missing roofs.

Fixing soggy homes may be a much quicker task than repairing the financial damage, and island governments were still assessing Sandy’s economic impact on farms, housing and infrastructure.

In tourism-dependent countries like Jamaica and the Bahamas, officials said popular resorts sustained only superficial damage, mostly to landscaping.

Haiti, where even minor storms can send water gushing down hills denuded of trees, listed a death toll of 52 as of Monday and officials said it could still rise. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe has described the storm as a “disaster of major proportions.”

In Jamaica, where Sandy made landfall first on Wednesday as a Category 1 hurricane, people coped with lingering water and power outages with mostly good humor.

“Well, we mostly made it out all right. I thought it was going to be rougher, like it turned out for other places,” laborer Reginald Miller said as he waited for a minibus at a sunbaked Kingston intersection.

In parts of the Bahamas, the ocean surged into coastal buildings and deposited up to six feet of seawater. Sandy was blamed for two deaths on the archipelago off Florida’s east coast, including a British bank executive who fell off his roof while trying to fix a window shutter and an elderly man found dead beneath overturned furniture in his flooded, low-lying home.

___

Associated Press writers Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana, David McFadden in Kingston, Jamaica, and Jeff Todd in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this report.

___

Peter Orsi is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Nokia says shipping new Lumia smartphones this week

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Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood engaged to marry

LONDON (Reuters) – Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood is engaged to be married to a 34-year-old theatre producer named Sally Humphreys, his spokesperson said on Tuesday.

The twice-married, 65-year-old musician and artist separated from his second wife Jo Wood in 2008 and had a public disagreement with her over the auction of some memorabilia in Los Angeles which went ahead earlier this month.

News of the impending wedding comes just after the Stones played a warm-up gig in Paris for 350 people and announced four dates in London and New York to celebrate their 50th anniversary.

It also comes ahead of the release next February of Jo Wood‘s memoirs, which promise to reveal her tales of life as the wife of a Rolling Stone.

Wood has recently been focusing on his visual art career and in April opened a New York City art show entitled, “Faces, Time and Places”, featuring portraits of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and other celebrities.

But he is still best known for his music and in April was inducted for a second time into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with other members of his former group The Faces, including Rod Stewart and Kenney Jones.

The Rolling Stones, which Wood joined in 1975 after Mick Taylor left the band, were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; editing by Steve Addison)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Should schools close during bad flu outbreaks?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A new U.S. government study suggests that during a serious flu epidemic, closing schools can keep people – especially kids – out of the ER.

Now, researchers say, the big questions include, When is it best to close schools? And what are the downsides?

The study, reported in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, looked at what happened in two Texas communities during the H1N1 “swine” flu epidemic of 2009. In one community, schools were closed as a precaution; in the other, they weren’t.

It turned out that in the district where schools shut down, there were fewer ER visits for the flu.

What’s more, among kids age 6 and up, there was no increase in flu-related ER trips, while that rate doubled in the community where schools stayed open.

“The effect was most dramatic among school-age children,” said Dr. Martin S. Cetron, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

There have been skeptics who’ve doubted that school closures could have much impact during a major flu outbreak, according to Cetron.

“They’ve said, well, people will just congregate in malls or other public places,” explained Cetron, who directs the CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine, and worked on the study.

But schools are different from malls, Cetron pointed out, with kids being in close contact with each other all day long.

He said he thinks this study, along with others, “settles” the question of whether school closures are effective. “Should this be an arrow in our quiver? I think the answer is ‘yes,’” Cetron said.

But lots of other questions remain.

“Under what conditions could (school closures) be warranted?” Cetron said. “What level of severity is needed?”

And if schools are closed, he noted, what are the downsides? Parents will have to stay home from work, or find child care. And kids and teachers will have to make up the lost school time somehow. So the expected benefits of school closings would need to be worth the troubles.

PREDICTION IS DIFFICULT

Every year, between five percent and 20 percent of Americans get the flu, contributing to some 36,000 deaths. The elderly and people with chronic medical conditions, like heart or lung disease, are among those most at risk.

But the 2009 H1N1 flu epidemic was noteworthy in that it hit children and healthy young adults hard.

The current study looked at two adjacent counties in Texas: Tarrant County, which closed its schools for eight days after a few kids were diagnosed with H1N1; and Dallas County, where schools did not shut down after a few cases were detected.

Before Tarrant County’s school closures, the flu accounted for about 3 percent of all ER visits to area hospitals; during the closures, that rate inched up to just over 4 percent. But the increase was bigger in Dallas County during the same time period: from 3 percent, to just over 6 percent.

The impact was most clear among kids ages 6 to 18. In Tarrant County, there was no increase in the proportion of ER visits blamed on the flu. In Dallas County, the figure more than doubled, from about 5 percent to 11 percent.

“It’s important to point out that this was a pre-emptive school closure,” Cetron said. “Usually, most closures we see are reactive.”

Predicting how a flu outbreak might affect a local area is far from easy. It’s not like tracking a hurricane, for instance, Cetron pointed out.

Decisions on school closures are made locally. For school districts to make wise decisions, Cetron said communication with local and state health agencies is key.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Tly968 Clinical Infectious Diseases, online October 19, 2012.

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sandy's death toll climbs; millions without power

NEW YORK (AP) — Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas awoke Tuesday without electricity, and an eerily quiet New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air as superstorm Sandy steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain. The U.S. death toll climbed to 38, many of the victims killed by falling trees.

The full extent of the damage in New Jersey, where the storm roared ashore Monday night with hurricane-force winds of 80 mph, was unclear. Police and fire officials, some with their own departments flooded, fanned out to rescue hundreds.

"We are in the midst of urban search and rescue. Our teams are moving as fast as they can," Gov. Chris Christie said. "The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of the worst we've ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this point."

More than 8.2 million people across the East were without power. Airlines canceled more than 15,000 flights around the world, and it could be days before the mess is untangled and passengers can get where they're going.

The storm also disrupted the presidential campaign with just a week to go before Election Day.

President Barack Obama canceled a third straight day of campaigning, scratching events scheduled for Wednesday in swing state Ohio. Republican Mitt Romney resumed his campaign, but with plans to turn a political rally in Ohio into a "storm relief event."

Sandy will end up causing about $20 billion in property damage and $10 billion to $30 billion more in lost business, making it one of the costliest natural disasters on record in the U.S., according to IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm.

Lower Manhattan, which includes Wall Street, was among the hardest-hit areas after the storm sent a nearly 14-foot surge of seawater, a record, coursing over its seawalls and highways.

Water cascaded into the gaping, unfinished construction pit at the World Trade Center, and the New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day, the first time that has happened because of weather since the Blizzard of 1888. The NYSE said it will reopen on Wednesday.

A huge fire destroyed as many as 100 houses in a flooded beachfront neighborhood in Queens on Tuesday, forcing firefighters to undertake daring rescues. Three people were injured.

New York University's Tisch Hospital evacuated 200 patients after its backup generator failed. About 20 babies from the neonatal intensive care unit were carried down staircases and were given battery-powered respirators.

A construction crane that collapsed in the high winds on Monday still dangled precariously 74 floors above the streets of midtown Manhattan, and hundreds of people were evacuated as a precaution. And on Staten Island, a tanker ship wound up beached on the shore.

Most major tunnels and bridges in New York were closed, as were schools, Broadway theaters and the metropolitan area's three main airports, LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark.

With water standing in two major commuter tunnels and seven subway tunnels under the East River, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it was unclear when the nation's largest transit system would be rolling again. It shut down Sunday night ahead of the storm.

Joseph Lhota, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the damage was the worst in the 108-year history of the New York subway.

Similarly, Consolidated Edison said it could take at least a week to restore electricity to the last of the nearly 800,000 customers in and around New York City who lost power.

Millions of more fortunate New Yorkers surveyed the damage as dawn broke, their city brought to an extraordinary standstill.

Photos: Superstorm Sandy wreaks havoc

1. 3 hrs ago

   Men survey a large tree that fell during Hurricane Sandy on October 30, 2012 in Washington, DC. The storm has claimed at least 16 lives in the United States, and has caused massive flooding across ... more&nbsp

   Men survey a large tree that fell during Hurricane Sandy on October 30, 2012 in Washington, DC. The storm has claimed at least 16 lives in the United States, and has caused massive flooding across much of the Atlantic seaboard. US President Barack Obama has declared the situation a 'major disaster' for large areas of the US East Coast including New York City, with wide spread power outages and significant flooding in parts of the city. (Photo by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images) less&nbsp

"Oh, Jesus. Oh, no," Faye Schwartz said she looked over her neighborhood in Brooklyn, where cars were scattered like leaves.

Reggie Thomas, a maintenance supervisor at a prison near the overflowing Hudson River, emerged from an overnight shift, a toothbrush in his front pocket, to find his Honda with its windows down and a foot of water inside. The windows automatically go down when the car is submerged to free drivers.

"It's totaled," Thomas said with a shrug. "You would have needed a boat last night."

Around midday, Sandy was about 120 miles east of Pittsburgh, pushing westward with winds of 45 mph, and was expected to make a turn into New York State on Tuesday night. Although weakening as it goes, the storm will continue to bring heavy rain and flooding, said Daniel Brown of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

In a measure of the storm's immense size and power, waves on southern Lake Michigan rose to a record-tying 20.3 feet. High winds spinning off Sandy's edges clobbered the Cleveland area early Tuesday, uprooting trees, cutting power to hundreds of thousands, closing schools and flooding major roads along Lake Erie.

In Portland, Maine, gusts topping 60 mph scared away several cruise ships and prompted officials to close the port.

Sandy also brought blizzard conditions to parts of West Virginia and neighboring Appalachian states, with more than 2 feet of snow expected in some places. A snowstorm in western Maryland caused a pileup of tractor-trailers that blocked part of Interstate 68 on slippery Big Savage Mountain.

"It's like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs up here," said Bill Wiltson, a Maryland State Police dispatcher.

The death toll climbed rapidly, and included 17 victims in New York State — 10 of them in New York City — along with five dead in Pennsylvania and four in New Jersey. Sandy also killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up the Eastern Seaboard.

In New Jersey, Sandy cut off barrier islands, swept houses from their foundations and washed amusement pier rides into the ocean. It also wrecked several boardwalks up and down the coast, tearing away a section of Atlantic City's world-famous promenade. Atlantic City's 12 waterfront casinos came through largely unscathed.

Jersey City was closed to cars because traffic lights were out, and Hoboken, just over the Hudson River from Manhattan, was hit with major flooding.

A huge swell of water swept over the small New Jersey town of Moonachie, near the Hackensack River, and authorities struggled to rescue about 800 people, some living in a trailer park. And in neighboring Little Ferry, water suddenly started gushing out of storm drains overnight, submerging a road under 4 feet of water and swamping houses.

Police and fire officials used boats and trucks to reach the stranded.

"I looked out and the next thing you know, the water just came up through the grates. It came up so quickly you couldn't do anything about it. If you wanted to move your car to higher ground you didn't have enough time," said Little Ferry resident Leo Quigley, who with his wife was taken to higher ground by boat.

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Hays reported from New York and Breed reported from Raleigh, N.C.; AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington. Associated Press writers David Dishneau in Delaware City, Del., Katie Zezima in Atlantic City, Emery P. Dalesio in Elizabeth City, N.C., and Erika Niedowski in Cranston, R.I., also contributed.

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Google unveils first 10-inch Nexus tablet

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc unveiled a larger version of its Nexus-branded tablet computer on Monday, and updated its mobile gadget and online content offerings as competition with Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp heats up ahead of the holiday sales season.

The device follows a spate of new product launches by the technology leaders in recent weeks, including Apple's iPad Mini last week and software-maker Microsoft's first-ever home-built tablet, the Surface.

Google, the world's No.1 Internet search engine, has pushed deeper into the hardware business at a time when consumers are increasingly accessing the Web on mobile devices.

Google's new Nexus 10, made in partnership with consumer electronics company Samsung Electronics Co, is the first 10-inch tablet to come to market under Google's Nexus brand. The device, with prices starting at $299, will be available on November 13 in the United States and seven other countries, Google said in its official blog on Monday.

Google was scheduled to introduce the device at a media event in New York on Monday, but was forced to cancel because of Hurricane Sandy.

Google also said it was expanding its online movie and music retail businesses to several countries in Europe.

And the company introduced an improvement to its online-music storage service. The new "matching" feature scans songs in a consumer's music collection and automatically creates an online or "cloud-based" library of the same tracks which consumers can access from any device or computer.

Google said the music matching feature, which only works with tracks that are part of the Google Play store's music catalog, will be available in Europe on November 13 and in the United States soon after.

Google also updated its smaller, Nexus 7 tablet released earlier this year. It increased the storage on the $199 version of the device to 16GB from 8GB, and introduced a new $299 version of the Nexus 7 with a cellular data service option. Google also unveiled a new Nexus 4 smartphone, made in partnership with LG Electronics, that features a quad-core processor and a 4.7-inch display.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang)

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Labrinth, Taylor Swift top UK music charts

LONDON (Reuters) – Singer-producer Labrinth topped the British singles charts this week with the ballad “Beneath Your Beautiful” featuring Emeli Sande.

It was the first No. 1 as a solo artist for the British singer.

Boy band JLS was new in at No. 6 with “Hottest Girl in the World”, the Official Charts Company said on Sunday.

The other new entry in the singles chart was “Wonder” by British rapper Naughty Boy, also featuring Sande, which took the 10th position.

Taylor Swift swept the album charts with her fourth full-length release “Red”. It is the first time the American country singer has topped the British charts.

British band Lawson, another new entry, scored fourth position with their debut studio album “Chapman Square”.

(Editing by Jon Hemming)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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