Clinton calls for overhaul of Syrian opposition

ZAGREB (Reuters) – The United States called on Wednesday for an overhaul of Syria‘s opposition leadership, saying it was time to move beyond the Syrian National Council and bring in those “in the front lines fighting and dying”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signaling a more active stance by Washington in attempts to form a credible political opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said a meeting next week in Qatar would be an opportunity to broaden the coalition against him.

“This cannot be an opposition represented by people who have many good attributes but who, in many instances, have not been inside Syria for 20, 30, 40 years,” she said during a visit to Croatia.

“There has to be a representation of those who are in the front lines fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom.”

Clinton’s comments represented a clear break with the Syrian National Council (SNC), a largely foreign-based group which has been among the most vocal proponents of international intervention in the Syrian conflict.

U.S. officials have privately expressed frustration with the SNC’s inability to come together with a coherent plan and with its lack of traction with the disparate internal groups which have waged the 19-month uprising against Assad’s government.

Senior members of the SNC, Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other rebel groups ended a meeting in Turkey on Wednesday and pledged to unite behind a transitional government in coming months.

“It’s been our divisions that have allowed the Assad forces to reach this point,” Ammar al-Wawi, a rebel commander, told Reuters after the talks outside Istanbul.

“We are united on toppling Assad. Everyone, including all the rebels, will gather under the transitional government.”

Mohammad Al-Haj Ali, a senior Syrian military defector, told a news conference after the meeting: “We are still facing some difficulties between the politicians and different opposition groups and the leaders of the Free Syrian Army on the ground.”

Clinton said it was important that the next rulers of Syria were both inclusive and committed to rejecting extremism.

“There needs to be an opposition that can speak to every segment and every geographic part of Syria. And we also need an opposition that will be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution,” she said.

Syria’s revolt has killed an estimated 32,000. A bomb near a Shi’ite shrine in a suburb of Damascus killed at least six more people on Wednesday, state media and opposition activists said.

NEW LEADERSHIP

The meeting next week in Qatar’s capital Doha represents a chance to forge a new leadership, Clinton said, adding the United States had helped to “smuggle out” representatives of internal Syrian opposition groups to a meeting in New York last month to argue their case for inclusion.

“We have recommended names and organizations that we believe should be included in any leadership structure,” she told a news conference.

“We’ve made it clear that the SNC can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition. They can be part of a larger opposition, but that opposition must include people from inside Syria and others who have a legitimate voice which must be heard.”

The United States and its allies have struggled for months to craft a credible opposition coalition.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is not providing arms to internal opponents of Assad and is limiting its aid to non-lethal humanitarian assistance.

It concedes, however, that some of its allies are providing lethal assistance – a fact that Assad’s chief backer Russia says shows western powers are intent on determining Syria’s future.

Russia and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at increasing pressure on the Assad government, leading the United States and its allies to say they could move beyond U.N. structures for their next steps.

Clinton said she regretted but was not surprised by the failure of the latest attempted ceasefire, called by international mediator Lakhdar Brahimi last Friday. Each side blamed the other for breaking the truce.

“The Assad regime did not suspend its use of advanced weaponry against the Syrian people for even one day,” she said.

“While we urge Special Envoy Brahimi to do whatever he can in Moscow and Beijing to convince them to change course and support a stronger U.N. action we cannot and will not wait for that.”

Clinton said the United States would continue to work with partners to increase sanctions on the Assad government and provide humanitarian assistance to those hit by the conflict.

(Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; editing by Andrew Roche)

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Storm leaves death, tears in its wake

Death blew in on the superstorm's wild winds and sea water torrents, claiming 90-year-olds and children with capriciously toppling trees, taking tall-ship adventurers in mountainous Atlantic waves and average folks just trying to deal with a freakish snowstorm. It felled both heroes rushing into harm's way and, ironically, people simply following advice to play it safe at home.

At least 72 died as the shape-shifting hurricane and winter storm ravaged the eastern U.S., and searchers continued looking for victims Wednesday.

In New York City, a college student went out to take pictures in the borough of Queens and was electrocuted by a downed power line, while across town on Staten Island, an off-duty policeman drowned after moving his family to safety.

Lauren Abraham, who went by the nickname LolaDiva on YouTube, was a makeup artist who worked out of a studio in her parents' Queens home. The recent beauty school graduate was studying at City University of New York's Lehman College, according to her Facebook page. "In her time of reflection she learned to find the beauty in even the darkest situations," her online bio reads.

As the superstorm ravaged New York and floodwater surged into his Staten Island house Monday evening, off-duty NYPD officer Artur Kasprzak, 28, shepherded six adult relatives and a baby to the attic.

Then, according to police, Kasprzak, a six-year veteran of the force, told one of the women he was going to check the basement. When he didn't return, she called 911. Police came quickly with a SCUBA unit, but couldn't access the home because power lines had fallen into the water.

"He went to the basement. And the water just started washing in," his sister Marta told the Daily News. "He was pushed into a window. ... The water just kept coming in."

Bunting draped a firehouse in Easton, Conn., honoring another first responder who rushed to help. Lt. Russell Neary was killed when an enormous tree crashed down on his fire truck as he and others tried to clear storm debris.

"We're a small volunteer department, and so everybody knew everybody," said Casey Meskers, the department vice president. Neary was the president. An insurance executive, he had volunteered for 13 years, and also helped with his children's sports teams.

"We've been on the soccer fields with each other with our kids," Meskers said Wednesday. "There's been a lot of tears shed, I'll tell you."

So many times, trees and heavy limbs that fell to the storm's powerful gusts left mourners along its path.

Two people died when a tree fell on their vehicle in Morris County, N.J., and many others perished inside homes, where they thought they'd be safe — from North Salem, N.Y., where two boys, 11 and 13, were killed when a tree fell on their home, to Pasadena, Md.

Donald Cannata Sr., 73, was at home in Pasadena, a leafy suburb between Baltimore and Annapolis, when the storm knocked a large tree into his house. The retired civil engineer lived alone with his cat and dog and had stepped into the kitchen just when the tree fell.

He loved photography and opera and was considerate, hardworking and selfless, said his son, Donald Jr., an opinion shared by neighbors. Cannata's son said his father's death "shook me so to the core," partly because they had talked about taking down the tree.

"We talked about it so many times. I said, 'Pop, the tree's getting pretty old,'" Cannata said.

An elderly man trimming a tree in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County was killed when a limb broke and fell on him, authorities said.

A limb fall also killed John Rose Sr. as he and his wife checked fences on his snow-covered 100-acre farm near Philippi, W.Va., on Tuesday. The storm had dumped about seven inches of snow in the region, where Rose was a Republican candidate for the House of Delegates. He had traveled to Charleston regularly to lobby lawmakers on farming and other issues, and he hoped to continue making the trip as a member.

Rose, 60, had previously run a power-washing business and worked as a coal miner, his son George Rose said.

"The whole county knew him," he said.

The storm's blizzard threat was still far off when, churning in the relatively warm Atlantic off Cape Hatteras, N.C., on Monday, Hurricane Sandy engulfed the replica tall ship HMS Bounty. The ship, which was featured in the films "Mutiny on the Bounty" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," took on water and eventually went down.

Coast Guard rescuers saved most of the 17 crew members, but a search continues for the ship's captain, Robin Wallbridge.

Swept overboard with him was Claudene Christian, 42, who said she was a direct descendant of the man who led the infamous 1789 mutiny on the real HMS Bounty. In the 1962 Bounty film, Marlon Brando starred as lead mutineer Fletcher Christian.

Searchers found Christian — a novice sailor who was wearing an orange survival suit — unresponsive in the water late Monday, about eight nautical miles from where the Bounty sank. She was flown by helicopter to a hospital on the mainland, where she was pronounced dead.

A marketing specialist, she had lived in Alaska, Oklahoma and California. She was a member of the University of Southern California cheering squad, the Song Girls, from 1989 to 1991, said coach Lori Nelson. "Claudene will always be remembered for her energetic and bubbly personality on and off the field," the team posted on its Facebook page.

Endless accidents that would be described as freak twists of fate spun off from the superstorm.

Eugene "Rusty" Brooks, 42, of Woodstock, N.H., died Tuesday morning when a hillside construction site in the state's White Mountains collapsed beneath him. Brooks, owner of Pemmi Contracting, had been preparing a cellar on a home site on Loon Mountain in the ski resort town of Lincoln, said Police Chief Ted Smith. The cellar hole had filled up with rain from Sandy, and Brooks had just thrown a hose in to drain it off when the ground gave way.

"The retaining wall just liquefied with him standing there," Smith said. "He washed down with all the boulders, mud and water into the street."

When police and rescue workers arrived, they found a bystander performing CPR on Brooks, who could not be revived.

"It just basically was a freak, bizarre accident," the chief said. "It could have given way prior to him being there or afterwards."

The massive storm's unrelenting stress was blamed as a contributor to death by some loved ones, and in other cases the paralyzing wind and water compounded medical problems.

An Atlantic City, N.J., woman had a heart attack while she was being evacuated on Monday, officials reported.

In Pennsylvania's Lehigh County, an 86-year-old woman was pronounced dead of hypothermia after being found unresponsive in her yard following exposure to the storm, and a 48-year-old woman died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her home, the coroner's office reported.

A 90-year-old woman also died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator in the Philadelphia area, one of two claimed by the storm at age 90. The other was a Mansfield, Conn., woman who neighbors said left her home after a small tree snapped and was killed by a larger one.

In New York City, Herminia St. John, a 75-year-old grandmother of 14 who suffered from congestive heart failure and diabetes, died after her oxygen machine lost power and a backup failed. Her grandson, Claudio St. John, rushed into the street and tried unsuccessfully to flag down an ambulance. Finally, he went around the corner to Bellevue Hospital, where his mother worked as a food supervisor for 30 years. But by the time someone came it was too late.

"I hugged her and she hugged and kissed me," Elsa St. John, 54, told the Daily News. "She asked me to turn her to the window and she was gone."

___

Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., Alex Dominguez in Pasadena, Md., Sharon Cohen in Chicago, Justin Pope in Ann Arbor, Mich., Lawrence Messina in Charleston, W.Va., and Vicki Smith in Philippi, W.Va., contributed to this report.

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“A Late Quartet” Review: classical-music drama gets soapy but actors avoid the false notes

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “A Late Quartet,” as it turns out, has more than one meaning: The film’s musicians spend most of the movie grappling with Beethoven’s Opus 131, the String Quartet No. 14 in C# Minor, which was one of the composer’s “late quartets,” completed the year before his death.

But the title also refers to a foursome of players whose relationship as a performing entity could very well reach its demise at any moment. When cellist Peter (Christopher Walken) is diagnosed with Parkinson’s, he announces his intention to leave the Fugue String Quartet, which has just celebrated its 25th anniversary. The news rocks Peter’s colleagues, all of whom are decades younger, and the impending seismic shift exposes unspoken rivalries and frustrations among the rest of the group.

For second violinist Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the shake-up in the roster inspires him to demand that he take first chair on some pieces. The idea that Robert wants to be less Pip and more Gladys Knight completely rankles the quartet’s precise and arrogant first violinist, Daniel (Mark Ivanir). Robert‘s wife Juliette (Catherine Keener), who plays viola, can barely process her grief over the illness of her mentor Peter before finding herself stuck between the conflicting demands of Daniel (her former lover) and Robert.

Complicating matters further is the fact that Robert and Juliette’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), a talented violinist in her own right, is currently studying under both Peter and Daniel – and possibly nurturing feelings of her own for the latter while also nursing resentment toward her globe-trotting parents for being absent during so much of her childhood.

So yes, “A Late Quartet” may ensconce itself in the elite and heady world of classical music – down to the cameos by cellist Nina Lee and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter – but the character dynamics could easily find a home on The CW. Nonetheless, if you’re in the mood to mix highbrow trappings with some bitter arguments, infidelity and face-slapping, screenwriters Yaron Zilberman (who also directs) and Seth Grossman keep things allegro con brio throughout.

Hoffman and Keener, who are pretty much the William Powell and Myrna Loy of indie movies at this point, bring their shared screen experience to their portrayal of a married couple who seem perfectly matched but whose longstanding relationship is patched together with compromises and unspoken desires. The moment where Robert seeks Juliette’s assurance that he’s skilled enough to play first violin, and she hesitates to agree, is a powerfully devastating marital moment.

Ivanir makes his character convincing as both a cold taskmaster and a hot-blooded romantic, and Poots explodes with youthful passion and indecision, all the while rocking a deadly accurate privileged-New-Yorker accent that many of her fellow U.K. thespians would envy.

Christopher Walken manages to be as compelling here as in “Seven Psychopaths” while playing an altogether different character. Walken may have reached the point in his career where he inspires impersonators, but both of his current films remind audiences that he still has a deep well of emotion that make him more than just the sum of his trademark delivery.

“A Late Quartet” may be better suited for the back-balcony crowd who wears jeans and comfortable shoes to the symphony rather than the folks who know their Kochel listings by heart, but sometimes it’s worth sitting through forgettable music just to watch a great group of players plying their trade.

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Alternative Therapies Help Many Arthritis Patients

Researchers have confirmed that complementary and alternative therapy (CAT) can help many arthritis patients manage their condition. Their results suggest that the majority of patients who used CAT plus prescribed medication believed they benefited from the alternative treatment.

The scientists published their findings in the November 2012 issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing. The lead author is Professor Nada Alaaeddine of the University of St. Joseph in Beirut, Lebanon. The team studied 250 patients ages 20 to 90, according to Medical News Today. Around one in three suffered from osteoarthritis. The others had rheumatoid arthritis.

The cause of rheumatoid arthritis remains unknown, but experts consider it an autoimmune disease that leads to inflammation of joints and surrounding tissues, PubMed reports. Treatments in traditional medicine include anti-inflammatory drugs, disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, antimalarial medications, corticosteroids, and biologic agents that control how the immune system works. Surgery is sometimes necessary for severe joint problems.

Osteoarthritis is the most common type of arthritis, according to the Mayo Clinic. It develops when protective cartilage on the ends of bones wears away over the years. Patients typically use acetaminophen, NSAIDs, and narcotics for pain relief. Some undergo physical therapy, wear braces or shoe inserts, or receive training in managing chronic pain. Injections into the joints are also part of traditional medicine. Some individuals require surgery to realign bones or replace joints.

The Beirut scientists found that 23 percent of the patients used CATs in addition to prescribed drugs. Nearly two-thirds considered CAT beneficial, citing improved sleeping patterns and activity levels, plus lower pain intensity.

The CAT utilized most was herbal therapy (83 percent). Others included exercise (22 percent), massage (12 percent), acupuncture (3 percent), yoga and meditation (3 percent), and dietary supplements (3 percent). Twenty-four percent sought medical care for side effects that proved reversible. Surprisingly, 59 percent did not mention using CATs to their healthcare providers.

Before CAT use, 12 percent said they had no pain. Afterward, the number was 43 percent. The percentage of those who slept all night increased from 9 to 66 percent.

Prior to using CATs, 3 percent of patients said pain didn’t limit them. Afterward, the figure rose to 12 percent. The percentage who reported that they could do all activities, but with pain, increased from 26 to 52 percent.

The researchers stressed that when considering CAT, patients should discuss the various therapies with their healthcare providers. This is important because of potential side effects and due to possible interactions between herbal products and prescription medications.

For the last 10 years, I have experienced significant pain from osteoarthritis but have successfully managed the illness. The physicians treating me continue to believe that alternative therapies help many arthritis patients. As a result, they have encouraged me to try massage, yoga, meditation, acupuncture, and certain dietary supplements along with traditional medical treatments.

Vonda J. Sines has published thousands of print and online health and medical articles. She specializes in diseases and other conditions that affect the quality of life.

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Apple's Cook fields his A-team before a wary Wall Street

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook's new go-to management team of mostly familiar faces failed to drum up much excitement on Wall Street, driving its shares to a three-month low on Wednesday.

The world's most valuable technology company, which had faced questions about a visionary-leadership vacuum following the death of Steve Jobs, on Monday stunned investors by announcing the ouster of chief mobile software architect Scott Forstall and retail chief John Browett -- the latter after six months on the job.

Cook gave most of Forstall's responsibilities to Macintosh software chief Craig Federighi, while some parts of the job went to Internet chief Eddy Cue and celebrated designer Jony Ive.

But the loss of the 15-year veteran and Jobs's confidant Forstall, and resurgent talk about internal conflicts, exacerbated uncertainty over whether Cook and his lieutenants have what it takes to devise and market the next ground-breaking, industry-disrupting product.

Apple shares ended the day down 1.4 percent at 595.32. They have shed a tenth of their value this month -- the biggest monthly loss since late 2008, and have headed south since touching an all-time high of $705 in September.

For investors, the management upheaval from a company that usually excels at delivering positive surprises represents the latest reason for unease about the future of a company now more valuable than almost any other company in the world.

Apple undershot analysts targets in its fiscal third quarter, the second straight disappointment. Its latest Maps software was met with widespread frustration and ridicule over glaring mistakes. Sources told Reuters that Forstall and Cook disagreed over the need to publicly apologize for its maps service embarrassment.

And this month, Apple entered the small-tablet market with its iPad mini, lagging Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc despite pioneering the tablet market in 2010.

Investor concerns now center around the demand, availability and profitability of new products, including the iPad mini set to hit stores on Friday.

"The sudden departure of Scott Forstall doesn't help," said Shaw Wu, an analyst with Sterne Agee. "Now there's some uncertainty in the management."

"There appears to be some infighting, post-Steve Jobs, and looks like Cook is putting his foot down and unifying the troops."

Apple declined to comment beyond Monday's announcement.

Against that backdrop, Cook's inner circle has some convincing to do. In the wake of Forstall's exit, iTunes maestro Eddy Cue -- dubbed "Mr Fixit", the sources say -- gets his second promotion in a year, taking on an expanded portfolio of all online services, including Siri and Maps.

The affable executive with a tough negotiating streak who, according to documents revealed in court, lobbied Jobs aggressively and finally convinced the late visionary about the need for a smaller-sized tablet, has become a central figure: a versatile problem-solver for the company.

Ive, the British-born award-winning designer credited with pushing the boundaries of engineering with the iPod and iPhone, now extends his skills into the software realm with the lead on user interface.

Marketing guru Schiller continues in his role, while career engineer Mansfield canceled his retirement to stay on and lead wireless and semiconductor teams. Then there's Federighi, the self-effacing software engineer who a source told Reuters joined Apple over Forstall's initial objections, and has the nickname "Hair Force One" on Game Center.

"With a large base of approximately 60,400 full-time employees, it would be easy to conclude that the departures are not important," said Keith Bachman, analyst with BMO Capital Markets. "However, we do believe the departures are a negative, since we think Mr. Forstall in particular added value to Apple."

TEAM COOK

Few would argue with Forstall's success in leading mobile software iOS and that he deserves a lot of credit for the sale of millions of iPhones and iPads.

But despite the success, his style and direction on the software were not without critics, inside and outside.

Forstall often clashed with other executives, said a person familiar with him, adding he sometimes tended to over-promise and under-deliver on features. Now, Federighi, Ive and Cue have the opportunity to develop the look, feel and engineering of the all-important software that runs iPhones and iPads.

Cue, who rose to prominence by building and fostering iTunes and the app store, has the tough job of fixing and improving Maps, unveiled with much fanfare by Forstall in June, but it was found full of missing information and wrongly marked sites.

The Duke University alum and Blue Devils basketball fan -- he has been seen courtside with players -- is deemed the right person to accomplish this, given his track record on fixing services and products that initially don't do well.

The 23-year veteran turned around the short-lived MobileMe storage service after revamping and wrapping it into the reasonably well-received iCloud offering.

"Eddy is certainly a person who gets thrown a lot of stuff to ‘go make it work' as he's very used to dealing with partners," said a person familiar with Cue. The person said Cue was suited to fixing Maps given the need to work with partners such as TomTom and business listings provider Yelp.

Cue's affable charm and years of dealing with entertainment companies may come in handy as he also tries to improve voice-enabled digital assistant Siri. He has climbed the ladder rapidly in the past five years and was promoted to senior vice president last September, shortly after Cook took over as CEO.

Both Cue and Cook will work more closely with Federighi, who spent a decade in enterprise software before rejoining Apple in 2009, taking over Mac software after the legendary Bertrand Serlet left the company in March last year

Federighi was instrumental in bringing popular mobile features such as notifications and Facebook integration onto the latest Mac operating system Mountain Lion, which was downloaded on 3 million machines in four days.

The former CTO of business software company Ariba, now part of SAP, worked with Jobs at NeXT Computer. Federighi is a visionary in software engineering and can be as good as Jobs in strategic decisions for the product he oversees, a person who has worked with him said.

His presentation skills have been called on of late, most recently at Apple annual developers' gathering in the summer.

Then there's Ive, deemed Apple's inspirational force. Among the iconic products he has worked on are multi-hued iMac computers, the iPod music player, the iPhone and the iPad.

Forstall's departure may free Ive of certain constraints, the sources said. His exit brought to the fore a fundamental design issue -- to do or not to do digital skeuomorphic designs. Skeuomorphic designs stay true to and mimic real-life objects, such as the bookshelf in the iBooks icon, green felt in its Game Center app icon, and an analog clock depicting the time.

Forstall, who will stay on as adviser to Cook for another year, strongly believed in these designs, but his philosophy was not shared by all. His chief dissenter was Ive, who is said to prefer a more open approach, which could mean a slightly different design direction on the icons.

"There is no one else who has that kind of (design) focus on the team," the person said of Ive. "He is critical for them."

(Additional reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by Edwin Chan and Ken Wills)

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Hurricane’s death toll rises to 65 in Caribbean

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — As Americans braced Sunday for Hurricane Sandy, Haiti was still suffering.

Officials raised the storm-related death toll across the Caribbean to 65, with 51 of those coming in Haiti, which was pelted by three days of constant rains that ended only on Friday.

As the rains stopped and rivers began to recede, authorities were getting a fuller idea of how much damage Sandy brought on Haiti. Bridges collapsed. Banana crops were ruined. Homes were underwater. Officials said the death toll might still rise.

“This is a disaster of major proportions,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press, adding with a touch of hyperbole, “The whole south is under water.”

The country’s ramshackle housing and denuded hillsides are especially vulnerable to flooding. The bulk of the deaths were in the southern part of the country and the area around Port-au-Prince, the capital, which holds most of the 370,000 Haitians who are still living in flimsy shelters as a result of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Santos Alexis, mayor of the southern city of Leogane, said Sunday that the rivers were receding and that people were beginning to dry their belongings in the sun.

“Things are back to being a little quiet,” Alexis said by telephone. “We have seen the end.”

Sandy also killed 11 in Cuba, where officials said it destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of houses. Deaths were also reported in Jamaica, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. Authorities in the Dominican Republic said the storm destroyed several bridges and isolated at least 130 communities while damaging an estimated 3,500 homes.

Jamaica’s emergency management office on Sunday was airlifting supplies to marooned communities in remote areas of four badly impacted parishes.

In the Bahamas, Wolf Seyfert, operations director at local airline Western Air, said the domestic terminal of Grand Bahamas‘ airport received “substantial damage” from Sandy’s battering storm surge and would need to be rebuilt.

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Millions in Northeast struggle after massive storm

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The northeastern United States battled epic flood waters and lengthy power outages on Tuesday after the massive storm Sandy pummeled the coast with a record storm surge, high winds and heavy rains that killed at least 45 people and caused billions of dollars in losses.

Millions of people in New York City and other hard-hit areas will spend days or weeks recovering from a storm already seen as far more destructive that Hurricane Irene, which slammed into the same region a year ago. One disaster modeling company said Sandy may have caused up to $15 billion in insured losses.

The storm killed 18 people in New York City, among 23 total in New York state, while six died in New Jersey. Seven other states reported fatalities.

Some 8.2 million homes and businesses in several states were without electricity as trees toppled by Sandy's fierce winds took down power lines.

Sandy hit the coast with a week to go to the November 6 presidential election and turned its fury inland with heavy snowfall, dampening an unprecedented drive to encourage early voting and raising questions whether some polling stations will be ready to open on Election Day.

New York City will struggle without its subway system, which was inundated and will remain shut for days. Much of the Wall Street district was left underwater but officials hoped to have financial markets reopen on Wednesday.

Sandy was the biggest storm to hit the country in generations when it crashed ashore with hurricane-force winds on Monday near the New Jersey gambling resort of Atlantic City, devastating the Jersey Shore tourist haven. Flood waters lifted parked cars and deposited them on an otherwise deserted highway.

With the political campaign and partisanship on hold, Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie planned to tour New Jersey disaster areas on Wednesday.

"It's total devastation down there. There are boats in the street five blocks from the ocean," said Peter Sandomeno, an owner of the Broadway Court Motel in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey.

Christie, who has been a strong supporter of Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney, praised Obama and the federal response to the storm.

Obama and Romney put campaigning on hold for a second day but Romney planned to hit the trail again in Florida on Wednesday and Obama seemed likely to resume campaigning on Thursday for a final five-day sprint to Election Day.

Obama faces political danger if the government fails to respond well, as was the case with predecessor George W. Bush's botched handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Obama has a chance to show that his administration has learned the lessons of Katrina and that he can lead during a crisis.

NEW YORK UNDER WATER

Sandy brought a record storm surge of almost 14 feet to downtown Manhattan, well above the previous record of 10 feet during Hurricane Donna in 1960, the National Weather Service said.

The storm forced New York City to postpone its traditional Halloween parade, which had been set for Wednesday night in Greenwich Village and threatened to disrupt Sunday's New York City marathon.

The lower half of Manhattan went dark when surging seawater flooded a substation and as power utility Consolidated Edison shut down others pre-emptively. Some 250,000 customers lost power.

Fire ravaged the Breezy Point neighborhood in the borough of Queens, destroying 110 homes and damaging 20 while destroying still more in the nearby neighborhood of Belle Harbor. Remarkably, no fatalities were reported.

"To describe it as looking like pictures we've seen of the end of World War Two is not overstating it," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said after touring the area. "The area was completely leveled. Chimneys and foundations were all that was left of many of these homes."

Hospitals closed throughout the region, forcing patients to relocate and doctors to carry premature babies down more than a dozen flights of stairs at one New York City facility.

While some parts of the city went unscathed, neighborhoods along the East and Hudson rivers bordering Manhattan were underwater and expected to be without power for days, as were low-lying streets in Battery Park near Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center stood before the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"I'm lucky to have gas; I can make hot water. But there is no heating and I'm all cold inside," said Thea Lucas, 87, who lives alone in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

DESTRUCTION THROUGHOUT REGION

Airlines canceled more than 18,000 flights, though two of the New York City area's three major airports planned to reopen with limited service on Wednesday.

Cellphone service went silent in many states and some emergency call centers were affected.

Some cities like Washington, Philadelphia and Boston were mostly spared but he storm reached as far inland as Ohio and parts of West Virginia were buried under 3 feet (1 meter) of snow, a boon for ski resorts that was one of the storm's few bright spots.

The western extreme of Sandy's wind field buffeted the Great Lakes region, according to Andrew Krein of the National Weather Service, generating wind gusts of up to 60 mph on the southern end of Lake Michigan and up to 35 mph Chicago.

In Cleveland, buildings in the city's downtown area were evacuated due to flooding, police said. Winds gusting to 50 mph brought down wires and knocked out power to homes and business. City officials asked residents to stay inside and for downtown businesses to remained closed for the day.

Amid the devastation there was opportunity. Snowmakers at Snowshoe Mountain in the mountains of West Virginia had their equipment running at full speed on Tuesday, taking advantage of the cold temperatures to build the 24-30 inch base they need to open for skiing by Thanksgiving.

"There are snowmakers out there making snow in what was a hurricane and blizzard," said Dave Dekema, marketing director for the resort, which received a foot-and-a-half of snow, with another foot or two expected.

The resort's phones, email account and Facebook pages were "going crazy," Dekema said, with avid skiers and snowboarders wondering if there was any chance of getting out on the mountain this weekend. He said that was unlikely.

(Additional reporting by Scott Malone in Boston; Ilaina Jonas, Daniel Bases, Lucas Jackson, Edward Krudy and Scott DiSavino in New York; Ian Simpson in West Virginia; Diane Bartz and Andrea Shalal-Esa in Washington; Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Susan Guyett in Indianapolis; Kim Palmer in Cleveland and James B. Kelleher in Chicago. Writing by Daniel Trotta and Ros Krasny; Editing by Bill Trott)

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Swift’s ‘Red’ sells 1.2 million copies in debut

NEW YORK (AP) — Taylor Swift‘s new album is called “Red,” but its true color is a brilliant platinum. The 22-year-old sold 1.2 million copies of her latest album in its first week — the largest sales week for any album in a decade.

Nielsen SoundScan confirmed the blockbuster sales on Tuesday night. “Red” marks Swift’s second straight album to sell more than 1 million copies in its first week; “Speak Now,” her third album, sold a little over 1 million copies when it was released in 2010. She is the only woman to have two albums sell more than 1 million copies in its first week.

“They just told me Red sold 1.2 million albums first week. How is this real life?! You are UNREAL. I love you so much. Thanks a million ,” Swift tweeted Tuesday night.

The only other act to sell more than 1 million copies of an album in its debut week twice was ‘N Sync.

Swift isn’t a boy band, but she’s certainly got the appeal of one: the country crossover has a huge following, particularly among teens who have followed her since she was a teen herself, releasing her first album. But she’s also a critic’s darling: The Grammy-winner’s “Red” garnered plenty of acclaim when it was released last week.

Swift was omnipresent in the week of the album’s release, appearing on such shows as “Good Morning America” and “Katie.” She also joined with two untraditional partners — Papa John’s and Walgreens, which offered the album for sale. And she announced her upcoming tour.

The last album to sell more than 1 million copies in its debut week was Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” which sold 1.1 million copies last year. However, that album was deeply discounted on Amazon.com in its first week.

Swift has the opportunity to celebrate for a second time this week: As the reigning “Entertainer of the Year” at the CMA Awards, she has the chance to capture the trophy again when it is held Thursday in Nashville.

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http://www.taylorswift.com

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Nekesa Mumbi Moody is the AP’s Global Entertainment & Lifestyles Editor. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi

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Hurricane Babies: Myths and Realities

Robyn Moreno, due to give birth, paid little attention to Hurricane Sandy, until police circled her Battery Park City neighborhood in Lower Manhattan and ordered mandatory evacuations in anticipation of a record tidal surge.

Just before the historic storm hit New York City, the 36-year-old freelance writer and her husband had talked about taking a short vacation in the Hamptons, on Long Island’s East End, before the baby arrived.

“I was looking forward to a relaxing week,” said Moreno. “We fixed the nursery, and put the crib together and suddenly the big rainstorm came. Holy cow – what are we going to do? I am going to have a baby in the middle of a storm, and I live in Zone A?”

Along with Manhattan‘s Battery Park City, Zone A includes Coney Island in Brooklyn, Far Rockaway and Broad Channel in Queens, and other low-lying areas on Staten Island.

“We had to be prepared to have the baby,” Moreno said. “I had to pack a hospital bag and a baby bag, a car seat – literally seven bags of stuff.”

Having a baby in the midst of a natural disaster takes on mythical proportions in the world of medicine. Some say that the plummeting barometric pressure can trigger labor. Others say mammals instinctively forestall labor in a stressful environment.

“After delivering over 1,000 babies as an obstetrician, I can tell you that most OBs have heard the saying that storms and full moons often mean a busier day or night on labor and delivery,” said Dr. Jennifer Ashton, an obstetrician in Englewood, N.J. “The theory is that a drop in barometric pressure is associated with the rupturing of the membranes of the amniotic sac, causing a pregnant woman to ‘break her water.’”

Although hard scientific evidence is nonexistent, Ashton said that one retrospective study published in a midwifery journal reported a “significant increase in deliveries” in the 24 hours after a storm compared with before a storm.

“The link between weather and lunar cycles extends beyond childbirth; there are associations between migraines, other headaches and musculoskeletal pain,” said Ashton.

Dr. Jacques Moritz, director of the division of gynecology at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, debunks the storm theory as a myth. “Mammals in general have stress hormones that prevent them going into labor,” he said. “Generally, they don’t have babies when there is stress outside.”

But both doctors confirm conventional wisdom that nine months after an event such as Hurricane Sandy, which had been reduced to a post-tropical cyclone when it finally made landfall just south of Atlantic City, N.J., Monday evening, will result in an uptick in pregnancies.

“At the hospital, we were just saying that nine months from now business will be busier than hell,” Moritz said. “That’s probably for sure. Everybody is cooped up inside. … I would not be surprised. It happened after 9/11.”

That, too, has been upended by at least two university studies. The theory arose after New York City’s blackout on Nov. 9, 1965, when The New York Times reported “a sharp increase in births” nine months afterward.

The newspaper quoted Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which explained, “Sexuality is a very powerful force, and people would normally indulge in sex if they didn’t have anything else to do.”

Still, hurricanes hold an allure, particularly when it comes to naming a baby.

Monday afternoon, at the height of the storm, Moritz delivered blue-eyed, black-haired Isla Rose O’Flynn, who was almost named Sandy.

“I actually like Frankie better [for Frankenstorm],” said Isla’s mother, Corinna Durland. “I do think Frances is great, but we had something else in mind.”

Durland, 38, was scheduled to have labor induced next week because she was two weeks past her due date. “But with the storm coming on, they wanted to get going and do this for me,” she said. “I was right at the edge.”

She texted a friend this morning to tell her she would be going to the hospital, only to learn that her friend had gone into labor. “We were kind of joking around, but I got to see her new baby, Max, this morning.”

Durland said her daughter’s birth, in the midst of a storm, was, if not auspicious, a “pretty dramatic story.”

“There is a full moon, my dad’s birthday was yesterday, the hurricane is starting and we are on the edge of Halloween,” she said. “We think maybe she waited on purpose. She was out and perfect before the full storm.”

Doctors say that aside from the myths, women should pay attention to the weather if their due date is approaching.

“Women close to their due date who think they are in early labor should not wait until they feel the baby’s head come out,” said obstetrician Ashton. “Call your doctor or go to the hospital sooner, rather than later.”

Hospitals will also consider “soft admissions” for women who are not actually in labor, according to Ashton. “They just don’t want to take chances that women get stranded before they can get to the hospital.”

But one 31-year-old mother from New Jersey didn’t feel the need to panic. Alice, who did not want to share her last name, is 37 weeks pregnant, and has a 2-year-old at home.

“I have no contingency plans,” she said. “I’m just hoping I don’t go into labor! My first one was close to on time, so I’m hoping my second one will be too. … [The hospital] is a five-minute drive, though I wouldn’t look forward to making that drive in this weather.

Monday night, her husband said, “Thank you for not going into labor.”

“At least not tonight,” Alice said, as the storm closed in.

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Apple's iPad mini packs full-sized punch but screen inferior: reviews

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc's entry in the accelerating mobile tablet race squeezes about 35 percent more viewing space onto a lighter package than rival devices from Google or Amazon.com Inc, but it sports inferior resolution and a lofty price tag, two influential reviewers wrote on Tuesday.

The iPad mini, which starts at $329 versus the $199 for Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire HD, is easy to hold with one hand, eliminating a drawback of the 10-inch iPad, Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg wrote in one of the first major reviews of a gadget introduced last week.

Both Mossberg and New York Times columnist David Pogue offered kudos for cramming most of its full-sized cousin's functions onto a smaller device, as advertised.

But the iPad mini's 1024 x 768 resolution was a big step backwards from the iPad's much-touted Retina display, and underperformed the rival Kindle and Nexus, the two reviewers agreed.

Mossberg said Apple chose to go with a lower-quality display because the existing 250,000-plus iPad applications could only run unmodified in two resolutions - and the higher level would have sapped too much power.

"The lack of true HD gives the Nexus and Fire HD an advantage for video fans. In my tests, video looked just fine, but not as good as on the regular iPad," Mossberg wrote.

The original iPad was launched in 2010 and went on to upend the personal computer industry, spawning a raft of similar devices. The iPad mini marks Apple's first foray into a smaller 7-inch segment that Amazon's Kindle Fire now dominates, demonstrating demand exists for such a device.

Apple, making its boldest consumer hardware move since Tim Cook took the helm from late co-founder Steve Jobs, hopes the smaller tablet can beat back incursions onto its home turf of consumer electronics.

"In shrinking the iconic iPad, Apple has pulled off an impressive feat," Mossberg wrote. "It has managed to create a tablet that's notably thinner and lighter than the leading small competitors with 7-inch screens, while squeezing in a significantly roomier 7.9-inch display.

"And it has shunned the plastic construction used in its smaller rivals to retain the iPad's sturdier aluminum and glass body."

Mossberg, whose reviews are followed closely by consumers and tech companies alike, wrote that the iPad mini did as advertised by bringing the full-sized iPad experience onto a smaller screen.

He noted, however, that the device was too large to fit easily into pockets. It exhibited battery life of about 10 hours and 27 minutes, an hour more than the Kindle Fire at the same settings, but about 17 minutes less than the Nexus 7.

"By pricing the Mini so high, Apple allows the $200 class of seven-inch Android tablets and readers to live," Pogue wrote.

"But the iPad Mini is a far classier, more attractive, thinner machine. It has two cameras instead of one. Its fit and finish are far more refined. And above all, it offers that colossal app catalog, which Android tablet owners can only dream about."

(Reporting By Edwin Chan; Editing by Ken Wills)

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