NYU Medical Center Evacuated

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Paramedics and other medical workers began to evacuate patients from New York University Langone Medical Center due to a power outage caused by Tropical Storm Sandy, followed by a failure of backup generators at the hospital, New York City officials said Monday night.


About 200 patients, roughly 45 of whom are critical care patients, were moved out of NYU via private ambulance with the assistance of the New York Fire Department, city officials said. ABC News’ Chris Murphey reported a long line of ambulances outside of NYU Langone waiting to transport patients to other hospitals in the city.





















The hospital had a total of 800 patients two days ago, some patients were discharged before tonight’s evacuation, which was described by emergency management officials as “a total evacuation.”




NYU Medical Center Forced to Evacuate Over 200 Patients Watch Video



According to ABC’s Josh Haskell, 24 ambulances lined the street, waiting to be waved in to pick up patients from NYU Langone Medical Center. “Every 4 minutes a patient comes out and an empty ambulance pulls up. The lobby of the Medical Center is full of hospital personnel, family members, and patients,” Haskell reports.


The patients were moved to a number of area hospitals and according to officials at NYU, the receiving hospitals would notify family members.


Sloan Kettering Hospital spokesman Chris Hickey confirmed to ABC News’ Gitika Ahuja that it is receiving 26 adult patients from NYU, at their request. Hickey said she didn’t know whether they had been admitted yet or what their conditions were.


NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital spokesman Wade Bryan Dotson said it is also accepting patients from NYU at both campuses, Columbia and Weill Cornell.


Meanwhile, ABC News affiliate WABC captured footage of patients being evacuated; among the first patients brought out of the hospital on gurneys was a mother and her newborn child.


On Monday morning, NYU Langone Medical Center had issued a press release that indicated the hospital’s emergency preparedness plan had been activated and that there were “no plans to evacuate” at the time.


Shortly after the reports of an evacuation at NYU Langone, city officials reported that a second major New York City hospital, Bellevue Hospital, was about to lose backup power due to a generator failure.


Requests for more information from NYU Langone Medical Center spokespeople were not immediately returned.


Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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'One for the record books': Sandy leaves death and destruction in wake

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NEW YORK (AP) — As superstorm Sandy marched slowly inland, millions along the East Coast awoke Tuesday without power or mass transit, with huge swaths of the nation's largest city unusually vacant and dark.

New York was among the hardest hit, with its financial heart in Lower Manhattan shuttered for a second day and seawater cascading into the still-gaping construction pit at the World Trade Center. President Barack Obama declared a major disaster in the city and Long Island.

The storm that made landfall in New Jersey on Monday evening with 80 mph sustained winds killed at least 17 people in seven states, cut power to more than 7.4 million homes and businesses from the Carolinas to Ohio, caused scares at two nuclear power plants and stopped the presidential campaign cold.

Authorities launched an effort to evacuate about 800 people in the town of Moonachie in northern New Jersey early Tuesday after a berm overflowed, authorities said.

The massive storm reached well into the Midwest: Chicago officials warned residents to stay away from the Lake Michigan shore as the city prepares for winds of up to 60 mph and waves exceeding 24 feet well into Wednesday.

"This will be one for the record books," said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Consolidated Edison, which had more than 670,000 customers without power in and around New York City.

An unprecedented 13-foot surge of seawater — 3 feet above the previous record — gushed into Gotham, inundating tunnels, subway stations and the electrical system that powers Wall Street, and sent hospital patients and tourists scrambling for safety. Skyscrapers swayed and creaked in winds that partially toppled a crane 74 stories above Midtown.

The massive storm caused the worst damage in the 108-year history of New York's extensive subway system, according to Joseph Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Right before dawn Tuesday, a handful of taxis were out on the streets, though there was an abundance of emergency and police vehicles.

Remnants of the former Category 1 hurricane were forecast to head across Pennsylvania before taking another sharp turn into western New York by Wednesday morning. Although weakening as it goes, the massive storm — which caused wind warnings from Florida to Canada — will continue to bring heavy rain and local flooding, said Daniel Brown, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

As Hurricane Sandy closed in on the Northeast, it converged with a cold-weather system that turned it into a monstrous hybrid of rain and high wind — and even snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas inland.

Just before it made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, N.J., forecasters stripped Sandy of hurricane status — but the distinction was purely technical, based on its shape and internal temperature. It still packed hurricane-force wind, and forecasters were careful to say it was still dangerous to the tens of millions in its path.

While the hurricane's 90 mph winds registered as only a Category 1 on a scale of five, it packed "astoundingly low" barometric pressure, giving it terrific energy to push water inland, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT.

Officials blamed at least 16 deaths on the converging storms — five in New York, three each in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, two in Connecticut, and one each in Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia. Three of the victims were children, one just 8 years old.

Sandy, which killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up the Eastern Seaboard, began to hook left at midday Monday toward the New Jersey coast. Even before it made landfall, crashing waves had claimed an old, 50-foot piece of Atlantic City's world-famous Boardwalk.

"We are looking at the highest storm surges ever recorded" in the Northeast, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director for Weather Underground, a private forecasting service.

Sitting on the dangerous northeast wall of the storm, the New York metropolitan area got the worst of it.

An explosion at a ConEdison substation knocked out power to about 310,000 customers in Manhattan, said Miksad.

"We see a pop. The whole sky lights up," said Dani Hart, 30, who was watching the storm from the roof of her building in the Navy Yards.

"It sounded like the Fourth of July," Stephen Weisbrot said from his 10th-floor apartment.

New York University's Tisch Hospital was forced to evacuate 200 patients after its backup generator failed. NYU Medical Dean Robert Grossman said patients — among them 20 babies from neonatal intensive care that were on battery-powered respirators — had to be carried down staircases and to dozens of waiting ambulances.

Not only was the subway shut down, but the Holland Tunnel connecting New York to New Jersey was closed, as was a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and several other spans were closed due to high winds.

The three major airports in the New York area — LaGuardia, Newark Liberty and Kennedy — remained shut down Tuesday.

A construction crane atop a $1.5 billion luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan collapsed in high winds and dangled precariously. Thousands of people were ordered to leave several nearby buildings as a precaution, including 900 guests at the ultramodern Le Parker Meridien hotel.

Alice Goldberg, 15, a tourist from Paris, was watching television in the hotel — whose slogan is "Uptown, Not Uptight" — when a voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone to leave.

"They said to take only what we needed, and leave the rest, because we'll come back in two or three days," she said as she and hundreds of others gathered in the luggage-strewn marble lobby. "I hope so."

Trading at the New York Stock Exchange was canceled again Tuesday — the first time the exchange suspended operations for two consecutive days due to weather since an 1888 blizzard struck the city.

Fire destroyed at least 50 homes Monday night in a flooded neighborhood in the Breezy Point section of the borough of Queens, where the Rockaway peninsula juts into the Atlantic Ocean. Firefighters told WABC-TV that they had to use a boat to rescue residents because the water was chest high on the street. About 25 people were trapped in one home, with two injuries reported.

Airlines canceled around 12,500 flights because of the storm, a number that was expected to grow.

Off North Carolina, not far from an area known as "the Graveyard of the Atlantic," a replica of the 18th-century sailing ship HMS Bounty that was built for the 1962 Marlon Brando movie "Mutiny on the Bounty" sank when her diesel engine and bilge pumps failed. Coast Guard helicopters plucked 14 crew members from rubber lifeboats bobbing in 18-foot seas.

A 15th crew member who was found unresponsive several hours after the others was later pronounced dead. The Bounty's captain was still missing.

One of the units at Indian Point, a nuclear power plant about 45 miles north of New York City, was shut down around 10:45 p.m. Monday because of external electrical grid issues, said Entergy Corp., which operates the plant. The company said there was no risk to employees or the public.

And officials declared an "unusual event" at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey Township, N.J., the nation's oldest, when waters surged to 6 feet above sea level during the evening. Within two hours, the situation at the reactor — which was offline for regular maintenance — was upgraded to an alert, the second-lowest in a four-tiered warning system. Oyster Creek provides 9 percent of the state's electricity.

In Baltimore, fire officials said four unoccupied rowhouses collapsed in the storm, sending debris into the street but causing no injuries. Meanwhile, a blizzard in far western Maryland caused a pileup of tractor-trailers that blocked the westbound lanes of Interstate 68 on slippery Big Savage Mountain near the town of Finzel.

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

Hundreds of miles from the storm's center, gusts topping 60 mph prompted officials to close the port of Portland, Maine, and scaring away several cruise ships. A state of emergency in New Hampshire prompted Vice President Joe Biden to cancel a rally in Keene and Republican nominee Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, to call off her bus tour through the Granite State.

About 360,000 people in 30 Connecticut towns were urged to leave their homes under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders. Christi McEldowney was among those who fled to a Fairfield shelter. She and other families brought tents for their children to play in.

"There's something about this storm," she said. "I feel it deep inside."

Despite dire warnings and evacuation orders that began Saturday, many stayed put.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — whose own family had to move to the executive mansion after his home in Mendham, far from the storm's center, lost power — criticized the mayor of Atlantic City for opening shelters there instead of forcing people out.

Eugenia Buono, 77, and her neighbor, Elaine DiCandio, 76, were among several dozen people who took shelter at South Kingstown High School in Narragansett, R.I. They live on Harbor Island, which is connected to the mainland by a causeway.

"I'm not an idiot," said Buono, who survived hurricanes Carol in 1954 and Bob in 1991. "People are very foolish if they don't leave."

___

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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More than ever, Barca more than club for Catalans

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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Nearly 20 minutes into the latest clash between Spain’s most popular football teams, Barcelona‘s 98,000-seat Camp Nou stadium erupted into a deafening roar. Tens of thousands of Catalans in the city at the heart of their separatist movement chanted in unison: “Independence!”


More than ever, FC Barcelona, known affectionately as Barca, is living up to its motto of being “more than a club” for this wealthy northeastern region where Spain’s economic crisis is fueling separatist sentiment.





















Lifelong Barca club member Enric Pujol was at Camp Nou for this month’s game against Real Madrid, the team of Spain’s capital. Wearing his burgundy-and-blue Barca jersey, Pujol also held one of the hundreds of pro-independence “estelada” flags, featuring a white star in a blue triangle, which bristled throughout the stands.


“It was a beautiful emotion to see Camp Nou like that,” said Pujol. “Barca is more than a club because of the values it transmits. It is linked to Catalan culture. In this sense it is a club and a social institution that acts like our flag.”


Barca has been seen as a bastion of Catalan identity dating back to the three decades of dictatorship when Catalans could not openly speak, teach or publish in their native Catalan language. Barcelona writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban famously called the football team “Catalonia‘s unarmed symbolic army.”


Barca-Real Madrid matches have a nickname: “el clasico” — the classic — and they are one of the world’s most-watched sporting events, seen by 400 million people in 30 countries. But local passions run high. In Spain, where football has deep political and cultural connotations, many see the clashes of Spain’s most successful teams as a proxy battle between wealthy Catalonia and the central government in Madrid. If Barca is a symbol of Catalan nationalism, Real Madrid is an emblem of a unified Spain.


“Look, the truth is that ever since the Civil War there has always been tension in Spain,” said Pujol. “Having traveled in Spain, they always look at us as Catalans.”


Ahead of kickoff before any “clasico,” Camp Nou traditionally greets Real Madrid players with a huge mosaic of Barcelona’s burgundy-and-blue made up of colored cards. This year, for the first time, they held up cards forming the red-and-yellow striped Catalan “senyera” flag — an explicit nationalist message. (Barca says it can neither confirm nor deny reports that its away uniform next season will be modeled on the senyera.)


Then came the crowd’s collective shout for independence at 1714 hours — in reference to the year 1714 when Barcelona fell to the troops of Philip V in the War of Spanish Succession. It was organized by a pro-independence group through social media.


Barca fan David Fort sees his team as a vehicle to show the world that Catalonia has its own language and culture, which is distinct from what he called the “bulls and flamenco” associated with Spain.


“We have this love for Barca because we have the chance to be represented around the world,” said Fort, a 38-year-old architect from the southern Catalan town of Tarragona. “When we travel and they ask me if I am Spanish, I say not exactly, but when I mention Barca they say ‘Ah! The Catalan team’, and of course since they are champions you feel proud.”


Barca, like every institution in Spain, was marked by the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s and resulting right-wing dictatorship that ended after Franco’s death in 1975.


Franco’s soldiers killed Barca’s club president in 1936, and the club was forced to change its name from a Catalan to a Spanish version. And while Real Madrid was identified with the regime, Barca, for many, came to represent Catalan anti-fascist resistance.


“Under Franco, people could not shout ‘Long Live Catalonia!,’ but they could shout ‘Long Live Barca!’ (¡Visca Barca!)” in Catalan, said Ernest Folch, a newspaper columnist who writes about Barca for El Periodico. The chant became a kind of code for expressing Catalan pride.


“Barca is an anomaly. There is no other club with its particular history,” said Folch. “It survived the Franco dictatorship, and has always been a focal point for protest and ferment where sport has mixed with politics.”


And politics is a very hot topic these days in Catalonia.


Voters will go to the polls on Nov. 25 in regional elections sure to be judged as a litmus test of the strength of the pro-independence movement that brought 1.5 million people to the streets of Barcelona on Sept. 11 in the largest rally since the 1970s.


Catalonia is heavily in debt and has in fact asked Spain for a euros 5.9 billion ($ 75 billion) bailout. Even so, regional lawmakers voted on Sept. 27 to hold a referendum on self-determination at a date still to be determined. And although it is still unclear that a “Yes” vote would win, Spain’s central government has called such a referendum unconstitutional and will surely try to stop it from taking place.


That all puts Catalonia, and therefore Barca, in the midst of Spain’s struggles to deal with consequences of back-to-back recessions, 25 percent unemployment, and high public debt that has drawn it into the euro crisis along with already bailed-out Greece, Ireland and Portugal.


Barca’s appeal, of course, transcends its regional identity. The team is beloved throughout the world, and a poll last year found that it had displaced Real Madrid as Spain’s most popular team. Barca has 546 fan clubs in Catalonia, and 841 in the rest of Spain. Some of these fans— even in Catalonia — disagree with what they perceive as the political turn the club has taken in recent years.


“It’s surreal to talk to talk about these ideas related to independence,” said fan Jamie Easton, 27, a Spaniard born in Barcelona to a British father and a mother of Catalan descent. “Barca is a Catalan and Spanish club because Barcelona is part of Spain, and fans can feel however they want.”


The upswing in separatist sentiment in Catalonia has forced both the club and its players— many of whom form the backbone of Spain’s world champion national side — to try a difficult balancing act between supporting their most fervent pro-independence fans without alienating the millions of others who are not.


“We are Barca. We represent Catalonia and we will support whatever Catalans want,” said Barca and Spain midfielder Xavi Hernandez. But he added: “We try to isolate ourselves from everything outside the game. We know the political issue is there, and the people have the right to express themselves however they wish, but we are here to play football and make sure people have fun.”


The glaring exception to the moderate tone is former coach Pep Guardiola, a hugely popular figure in Catalonia, who appeared in a video during the Sept. 11 march saying: “Here you have my vote for independence.”


Two weeks after the politically charged “clasico,” Barca president Sandro Rosell made his first official visit to southern Spain to cool tensions at a meeting of Barca fan clubs.


“I don’t know what information you are receiving here, but I preferred to come here and say on behalf of the club that Barca will never get mixed up in political issues,” Rosell told the 1,000 Spanish fans, promising that Barca would never display a mosaic of the separatist “estelada” flag at Camp Nou.


“This doesn’t mean that this isn’t a Catalan club and that of course we will defend our roots and origins, but one thing shouldn’t be mixed with the other. One thing is politics and the other is identity. Barca unites us all.”


___


AP Writer Jorge Sainz contributed to this report from Madrid.


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In San Francisco, tech investor leads a political makeover

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - One morning in April, Ron Conway, the billionaire technology investor, sat in a conference room on the second floor of San Francisco's City Hall with about 50 representatives from the city's business community.


On the agenda was a sweeping proposal by Mayor Ed Lee to reform the city's payroll tax, a plan that would favor companies with many employees but little revenue — tech start-ups, namely — while shifting the burden to the real estate and financial industries.


The head of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was arguing against the proposal when Conway abruptly cut him off.


"The tech industry is producing all the jobs in this city," Conway snapped, according to four people present, his voice rising as he insisted that old-line businesses "need to get on board."


In the end, they did get on board — and San Francisco voters on November 6 will decide whether to approve the change in the tax code.


Conway's success with the tax initiative demonstrates the profound transformation playing out in San Francisco's business corridors and its halls of power. As start-ups blossom, attracting a wave of entrepreneurs and investment dollars, the tech industry is wielding newfound clout in local politics — largely thanks to Conway, its brash, silver-haired champion.


The shift, local political experts say, harks back to the turn of the last century, when financial institutions like the Bank of Italy — forebear to present-day Bank of America — gradually eroded the railroad barons' grip over California politics.


Now the tech industry, led by Conway, is beginning to overshadow long-dominant local business lobbies, said Chris Lehane, a political consultant and former adviser in the Clinton White House.


"When you have a new business entity that really hasn't existed in the past and becomes a real player in local politics, that changes the balance a bit," said Lehane, who is based in San Francisco. "People like Ron Conway, he's an angel investor in companies but also an angel supporter of politicians he cares about."


Not everyone in this famously liberal city is enthused about the new tech boom, which is driving up rents and threatening to price out all but the wealthy.


"As someone who lived through the tech boom in the '90s and watched countless friends and community members get pushed out of their homes, only for the bubble to disintegrate, this is painful to watch," said Gabriel Haaland, political director for the SEIU Local 1021, the largest union in the city. "Those times are here again."


Last month, when San Francisco Magazine published an article bemoaning tech-driven gentrification, traffic on the magazine's website broke all records.


"It touched on an issue that people have been thinking about for a while," said Jon Steinberg, the magazine's editor.


Conway and Lee make no apologies.


"Tech added 13,000 out of the 25,000 new jobs we created the last couple years, which helped us bring the unemployment rate to the third-lowest in the state," Lee, a Democrat, said in an interview. "We have to work with the new jobs creators, and that's what I believe the public wants me to do."


Conway, who made his name in the 1990s by betting on small, early-stage companies and scoring a huge win with Google, says a key goal of a new civic organization he has started, San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology & Innovation, is to provide service jobs in tech for long-term residents and the unemployed.


"It would be great if we could create a few hundred jobs in the $50,000 to $80,000 income bracket," said Conway. "We're here to improve the living conditions for all of San Francisco. That's the responsibility tech wants to take."


ODD COUPLE


Conway and Lee have an exceptionally close relationship, one that has captivated the city's political set even while attracting accusations of favoritism from the mayor's rivals.


The two make an odd couple. Lee was a publicity-shy city bureaucrat and civil rights lawyer for decades before being named caretaker mayor of this Democratic bastion in 2011 after his predecessor was elected lieutenant governor. Conway, until recently a registered Republican, counts Tiger Woods and Henry Kissinger among his investors and considers a start-up tour with Ashton Kutcher in tow just another day's work.


In a city that faces chronic budget deficits even as it enjoys a comparatively strong economy, the relationship is symbiotic. Conway taps his access to Lee to promote his companies, from Twitter to Zynga to Airbnb; Lee persuades Conway to rally tech leaders to help fund the police, the schools, the parks.


Their alliance began only last year. As interim mayor, Lee impressed Conway when he pushed through a tax exemption for Twitter, which had considered moving out of the city to avoid the tax bill that would have resulted from an initial public offering. San Francisco imposes a 1.5 percent payroll tax on local companies, a levy that applies to any gains in an IPO.


When Lee ran for a full four-year term several months later, Conway formed an independent political action committee on his behalf. He rustled up almost $700,000 from the likes of entrepreneur Sean Parker; Zynga CEO Mark Pincus; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; venture capitalists John Doerr and Tom Byers; and Credit Suisse banker Bill Brady.


He also enlisted Portal A, a video production outfit consisting of three twentysomething hitmakers, to create a YouTube video that featured rapper MC Hammer, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and San Francisco Giants pitcher Brian Wilson dancing on Conway's rooftop. The clip went viral and effectively drowned out ads from Lee's rivals.


A year later, Conway rated the mayor's performance a "9.5 out of 10."


"I have a tremendous respect for Mayor Lee," he said. "He listens to people. He builds consensus, and that's an improvement from the past."


Conway said he and Lee are "too busy with our day jobs" to socialize frequently. Neither likes to publicly discuss their relationship. But when the mayor turned 60 in May, Lee and his family sat down for a three-hour private dinner with Conway and his wife, Gayle, at an Italian restaurant in North Beach, according to the San Francisco Chronicle's gossip columnists.


For Conway — whose calls to the mayor's office are considered the highest priority, City Hall insiders say — no issue facing his portfolio companies is too insignificant for him to get involved. In one instance this year, after social media company Pinterest moved to San Francisco, Conway pressed officials to repaint curbs to allow employee parking near the start-up's offices, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The city refused; Conway denied that the incident occurred.


While some cities have cracked down on services like Airbnb, which lets residents rent out spare bedrooms and can run afoul of local lodging ordinances, Lee has taken the opposite tack. This year he formed a policy-making group to consider how to regulate and foster such companies, which are part of what's known in Silicon Valley as the "sharing economy."


The mayor has also urged Conway to help city initiatives. Conway recently contributed $100,000 toward a campaign to approve bonds to restore the city's parks, and gave $25,000 to a charity founded by Lee that funds impoverished public schools. When a group of software developers tried recently to create an app that would improve public bus performance but lacked funds for a pilot program, SF Citi stepped in and cut a check.


Lee said he hoped Conway would fill a void left by recently deceased philanthropists such as Gap Inc founder Don Fisher, real estate mogul Walter Shorenstein and private equity investor Warren Hellman.


"The tech guys like Conway usually want to meet presidents and such. You never see them play so deep in local government," said one Democratic fundraiser. "It's unusual."


But the tech world says the headlong plunge into local politics is classic Conway.


"When Ron is passionate about an issue or a company or a person, it's never a secret," said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. "He's passionate about San Francisco right now, and it's exhibiting itself in the way he helps companies in the city, the way he helps the city. It's fantastic to see."


CHANGING TAX POLICY


Conway says his top priority is passage of the payroll tax reform initiative on November 6.


The measure would tax local businesses based on their gross receipts instead of the size of their payroll, which benefits low-revenue, high-headcount companies like startups. Financial, insurance and real estate companies would see their local taxes rise by 30 percent, while taxes will remain flat for most scientific and technical companies.


Crucially, the measure would also mean that proceeds from an IPO would not be subject to taxes.


Landlords, and to a lesser extent financial services companies, conceded that they had lost their first political fight with the tech industry, but took the long view.


"We knew we were going to be socked in a big way, and we worked early and long and hard with the city for a rate that was fair," said Ken Cleaveland of the Building Owners and Managers Association. "In the end it wasn't in our best interest to fight our tenants."


(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Douglas Royalty and Dale Hudson)


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Analysis: U.S. foreign bribery penalties for drugmakers may lack bite

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Global drugmakers are paying tens of millions of dollars to settle U.S. allegations that they bribed their way across emerging markets, but harsher penalties may be needed to deter the practice in untapped regions where billions are at stake.


Federal authorities have cast a wide net to weed out suspected gift-giving and kickbacks to foreign doctors and government officials to gain a foothold in burgeoning new markets in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.





















At least eight of the world’s top 10 drugmakers, including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, Pfizer Inc and Johnson &, have disclosed U.S. probes under the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).


Pfizer agreed to pay $ 60 million this year to settle FCPA charges and J&J reached a $ 70 million settlement last year. Pfizer is on track to record $ 10 billion in sales from emerging markets this year, while J&J said Brazil, Russia, India and China accounted for just under 10 percent of the $ 65 billion in sales it reported last year.


With so much at stake outside of established markets in the United States and Europe, some experts say fines like these are hardly a deterrent.


“The $ 60 million fine for Pfizer to a lay person sounds like quite a bit of money, but in perspective it took less than two days of Lipitor sales during its peak. It’s really just chump change for them,” said Michael Leibfried, a senior analyst with market research consulting firm GlobalData. The cholesterol pill at its height was a $ 13 billion a year cash cow for Pfizer.


Kara Brockmeyer, chief of FCPA investigations within the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, said the SEC and Department of Justice make a considerable effort to ensure penalties are appropriate and a deterrent. And there has yet to be a repeat FCPA prosecution.


The SEC relies on legal provisions that call for disgorgement of profits based on ill-gotten gains plus penalties. Companies that report violations and cooperate with authorities are often rewarded with penalty reductions.


“I would hate to think the companies view enforcement actions as the cost of doing business,” Brockmeyer told Reuters. “If we find that out, it will certainly increase the size of the penalty,” she said.


The law firm Shearman & Sterling, which puts out a semi-annual report tracking FCPA enforcement, found that penalties across all industries have averaged less than $ 20 million.


In 2009 Danish insulin maker Novo Nordisk paid $ 9 million for FCPA violations, while medical device maker Smith & Nephew this year agreed to $ 22 million in fines and profit disgorgement. The largest FCPA penalty on record was $ 800 million paid in 2008 by Germany-based Siemens.


The industry’s FCPA payments pale in comparison to billion-dollar settlements over allegations drugmakers promoted medications for unapproved uses in the United States. These penalties often involve how much federal Medicare and Medicaid programs spent on the so-called off-label prescriptions.


“I’m not terribly surprised that dollar settlements (for FCPA violations) are strikingly lower because the government isn’t directly being harmed,” said Boston University law professor Kevin Outterson.


PLAYING THE RIGHT WAY


Pfizer’s settlement covered infractions dating back to 2004, including some attributed to drugmaker Wyeth, which it bought in 2009. The company lightened its penalty by voluntarily providing information about kickbacks and bribes in Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Russia, China, the Czech Republic, Italy, Serbia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.


“Pfizer subsidiaries in several countries had bribery so entwined in their sales culture that they offered points and bonus programs to improperly reward foreign officials who proved to be their best customers,” Brockmeyer said in a statement at the time the settlement was announced.


Pfizer executives say their emerging market operations will not repeat those practices. It has introduced an anti-corruption audit program, closer monitoring of relationships with non-U.S. healthcare providers and government officials, a mandatory global training program for appropriate employees and enhanced due diligence to make sure buyout targets follow the rules.


J&J said it has enacted similar anti-corruption initiatives.


“We’re not out there to play the game that’s been played before,” said Adele Gulfo, head of Latin America for Pfizer’s emerging markets unit. “We’re either going to win by playing the right way or we’re going to find another place to go.”


Asked if there is still an expectation of payoffs for business in some Latin American circles, Gulfo said: “I’m sure it exists. I’d be naive to say it doesn’t exist.”


Latin American business practices were cited in August as the reason No. 1 generic drugmaker Teva Pharmaceutical Industries was targeted for an FCPA investigation.


J&J also voluntarily reported violations by foreign subsidiaries going back to 2007. Its settlement covered allegations of bribes and kickbacks to win business in Greece, Iraq, Poland and Romania.


DOJ spokeswoman Rebekah Carmichael said the penalties have already had a ripple effect in the industry, forcing companies to “make real, lasting changes to their operations that have altered the way they engage with foreign countries.”


BEYOND THE PENALTIES


The U.S. government sees vast potential for abuse in the drug industry’s business model, said Andy Spalding, assistant law professor at the University of Richmond and a senior editor for The FCPA Blog, which closely follows such cases.


“So much of their research and development, their marketing, their pricing and distribution and sales are occurring in foreign countries,” Spalding said. “And often they are occurring through a big chain of subsidiaries and other operations that make compliance challenging.”


Legal experts noted that any company subject to an FCPA probe is already spending a great deal to investigate the charges internally, and that the final cost can run into hundreds of millions of dollars.


“Overall expense vastly dwarfs the penalty,” said Philip Urofsky, head of Shearman & Sterling’s FCPA practice who previously worked on FCPA cases for the DOJ.


Drugmakers can have a tough time tracking kickbacks to local officials. Such payments, while widespread, are typically smaller than in other industries.


“In pharma there are thousands of daily interactions with government officials. There are always going to be people that step over the line,” Urofsky said.


Since FCPA investigations typically take years to come to a head, Outterson said the jury is still out on whether the current strategy is working.


“Whether they’re taking aggressive enough action to end it is a question we’ll know in five more years … when we see the cases refer to 2012.”


(Editing by Michele Gershberg and David Gregorio)


Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Live-blog: Hurricane Sandy bears down on East Coast

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Hurricane Sandy, a massive storm described by forecasters as one of the largest to ever hit the United States, is making her way towards the population-dense East Coast. Evacuations have been ordered from Maryland to Maine, where storm surge and high winds are expected to wipe out power to millions.


The Category 1 hurricane threatens nearly 50 million people, and is expected to make landfall around 8 pm Monday in New Jersey. Storm surges of up to 11 feet are expected in New York City, and rescue efforts are already underway for people who ignored evacuation orders on the coast of Delaware.


Yahoo News is tracking the latest in the live-blog player below, with dispatches from our reporters and editors in New York City, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. We'll also pull in tweets from forecasters, storm chasers and others. We welcome Yahoo readers to join the chat and let us know what is going on in your neighborhood.



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Lithuania opens 2nd round of national election

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VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Voting stations have opened in the second round of Lithuania’s parliamentary elections, with the results likely to determine whether the small East European nation continues tough austerity measures in an effort to join the euro zone.


Nearly half of Parliament’s 141 seats are at stake in single-mandate district voting, which takes place two weeks after the party-list round that failed to produce a clear favorite.





















Two center-left opposition parties took the most seats and have pledged to form a new coalition government, but the ruling conservative party, which came in third, still has a chance to emerge victorious as it has candidates in over half the 67 districts where voting will be held Sunday.


Opposition parties have vowed to increase social spending and postpone tentative plans to adopt the euro in 2014.


Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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SAP eyes "long" period of high sales growth: report

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Beethoven discovery gets first performance in UK

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LONDON (Reuters) – A previously undiscovered musical arrangement by Ludwig van Beethoven was performed for the first time at a British university on Thursday.


The two-minute long piece is an organ harmony to the 1,000-year old Gregorian hymn “Pange Lingua”, University of Manchester Professor Barry Cooper told Reuters of the discovery he made while studying a copy of a 192-year-old Beethoven sketchbook.





















“Other scholars looked at it without realizing what it was as it looks like a random collection of chords. When I looked at it I saw the series of chords and saw a tune there,” Cooper said.


“It’s a Gregorian chant that I happen to know so I realized that he’d obviously harmonized the chant and produced a new composition.”


The hymn had likely eluded other experts because the German composer had not included the words to the piece or the first line, which in a chant is usually sung unaccompanied, Cooper added.


“And Beethoven specialists tend not to be specialists in plainsong hymns and specialists in Gregorian chant don’t normally look at Beethoven sketches,” he said.


It is thought the hymn was penned for the composer’s friend Archduke Rudolph of Austria, for whom Beethoven also wrote the “Missa Solemnis”, or Mass in D, when the archduke was made an archbishop around 1820.


“The dates match up nicely: he transposed this Gregorian chant into an unusual key that fits well with his mass in D. It seems more than a coincidence,” Cooper said.


Cooper, a leading Beethoven expert, enlisted the help of a group of music students to put on the first known performance of the composition at Manchester University in northern England on Thursday afternoon.


The short hymn is significant because it marks a rare experiment into religious music for Beethoven, who died aged 57 in 1827.


“He wrote only two masses and didn’t write any simple, functional liturgical music like what we have here. It’s the first piece in this genre in his hand,” Cooper said.


“It doesn’t turn the knowledge we have about him upside down but adds a little and that is always interesting.


(Reporting by Clare Hutchison, editing by Paul Casciato)


Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Big storm scrambles presidential campaign schedules

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LAND O'LAKES, Fla. (AP) — The big storm taking aim at the East Coast a little more than a week before the election has scrambled campaign plans, with Mitt Romney ditching Virginia to campaign Sunday with running mate Paul Ryan in Ohio and President Barack Obama moving up his departure for Florida.

In an extraordinarily tight race, Hurricane Sandy has forces the campaigns to toss out carefully mapped-out itineraries as the candidates work to maximize voter turnout while avoiding any suggestion they were putting politics ahead of public safety.

On Saturday, Romney was in Florida speaking of bipartisanship, while Obama tried to nail down New Hampshire's four electoral votes.

The former Massachusetts governor presented himself as a staunch conservative during the Republican primaries but has struck a more moderate tone as he appeals for support from women and independent voters. He promised to "build bridges" with Democrats.

Romney coupled his message with digs at Obama for "shrinking from the magnitude of the times" and advancing an agenda that lacks vision.

Obama, heading to Florida on Sunday night rather than Mondays as first planned, spoke with volunteers at a Teamsters hall in Manchester, N.H., on Saturday. "We don't know how this thing is going to play out. These four electoral voters right here could make all the difference."

Winning the White House takes 270 electoral votes. Obama is ahead in states and the District of Columbia representing 237 electoral votes; Romney has a comfortable lead in states with 191 electoral votes. The rest lie in nine contested states that remain too close to call.

The president adjusted his campaign speech at a Nashua rally to appeal to voters in low-tax New Hampshire, hammering Romney for raising taxes and fees when he led Massachusetts.

Obama accused Romney of running in Massachusetts on a pledge to lower taxes, then making life more expensive for the middle class after taking office.

"All he's offering is a big rerun of the same policies," Obama said.

The candidates worked to lock down every possible early vote without intruding on emergency preparations as the storm's expected track looked to affect at least four of the most competitive states: New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

Obama canceled appearances in Prince William County, Va., on Monday, and Colorado Springs, Colo., on Tuesday so he could monitor Hurricane Sandy.

He moved the departure for Florida to beat the storm and planned a Monday stop in Youngstown, Ohio, before returning to Washington.

Instead of campaigning in Virginia as scheduled, Romney was set to join Ryan for three stops of his Ohio bus tour. Romney's trip to Florida was timed to coincide with the first day of in-person early voting in a state where 29 electoral votes are up for grabs.

Vice President Joe Biden canceled a Saturday rally in coastal Virginia Beach, Va., to allow officials there to focus on disaster preparedness and local security concerns. But he went ahead with an appearance in Lynchburg, which is inland.

Biden said Romney and Ryan are fleeing from their record to appear more moderate than they are. The Republican nominees, Biden said, "are counting on the American people to have an overwhelming case of amnesia."

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