Aerosmith puts on Boston street concert on Memory Lane

BOSTON (Reuters) – Thousands of music fans clogged a Boston street on Monday to hear Grammy award-winning rock band Aerosmith perform a free concert in front of the apartment building where the musicians began their career four decades ago.

The band blared out hits including “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion” from the back of a specially converted tractor-trailer while area residents hung out windows, sat on balconies and stood on rooftops to hear the noontime concert.

“It feels like the world stood still for this. It feels like it was yesterday,” lead singer Steven Tyler told Reuters in an interview after the concert.

The band played to mark the release of its 15th studio album, “Music from Another Dimension,” due out on Tuesday.

Aerosmith’s five members signed a plaque that Boston plans to mount outside the apartment building in the Allston neighborhood where they lived in the early days of a career that has brought them four Grammy awards and more than 20 Top 40 hits.

“That used to be my bedroom,” lead guitarist Joe Perry yelled to a woman looking out a second-story window.

The crowd of thousands included teenagers holding signs declaring that they had skipped school to see the show, celebrities such as New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and fans whose history with the band went back to its 1970 founding.

“I always loved Aerosmith. They were one of the first rock bands I got into growing up in Brazil,” said Michelle Fernandes, 43, waiting for the concert to start.

When she moved to the United States in 2003, Fernandes was surprised to learn that she was working in an office down the street from where her favorite band got its start, Fernandes said.

“How cool is that?” she said.

The band has always kept up its ties to a city that is home to hundreds of thousands of college students.

“When there’s groups of young people like there are in colleges towns like this, there’s a lot of passion,” Tyler said. “We love that.”

While the band relished the chance to see its old neighborhood, Perry declined to go into the apartment, where the band wrote songs including “Movin’ Out.”

“I didn’t want to go into it to see what it looked like today because I like the memory of what it was when we were there,” Perry told Reuters. “I didn’t want to see it all polished and spiffed up.”

On Thursday Aerosmith resumes its tour with a show in Oklahoma City.

(Reporting By Scott Malone; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Bill Trott)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Most women exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke in China

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Nearly two-thirds of women of reproductive age in China are exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke at home and over half are exposed in the workplace, which raises the risk of complications in pregnancy, including stillbirths and infant death.

The findings, released by the World Health Organisation on Tuesday, are from a tobacco survey conducted in China in 2010 by the centers for disease control and prevention in China, the United States and the WHO.

Around 100,000 people die from exposure to second-hand smoke in China each year, in addition to an estimated 1 million people who die from direct tobacco consumption.

Women in rural areas of China were more affected, with almost 3 in every 4 exposed to second-hand smoke at home, compared to just over half in urban areas.

“There is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke. Creating 100 percent smoke-free environments is the only way to protect people from the harmful effects of second-hand tobacco smoke,” said Michael O’Leary, WHO representative in China.

“Tobacco use and second-hand smoke exposure in reproductive-aged women can cause adverse reproductive health outcomes, such as pregnancy complications, fetal growth restriction, preterm delivery, stillbirths, and infant death.”

About a quarter of China’s 1.3 billion people are smokers, or about as many people as there are in the United States. But the country is gradually becoming more aware of this public health problem.

The Ministry of Health warned in May that more than 3 million Chinese would die of smoking-related illnesses annually by 2050 if nothing is done to curb this habit.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn, Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

A Write-Off That Shows Tax Reform Will Be No Game

Theodore Jones has had season tickets on the 43-yard line at Tiger Stadium, home of the perennial football powerhouse Louisiana State University, for almost 20 years. The seats, along with two others, cost him $ 5,340. That’s $ 1,640 for the tickets’ face value, plus $ 3,700 in mandatory donations that Jones gets to write off. The Baton Rouge lawyer lobbied Congress for that tax break back in 1986. It now benefits thousands of sports fans, and based on data compiled by Bloomberg, costs the U.S. Treasury more than $ 100 million a year.

Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans say they’ll slash many deductions to broaden the tax base and help fund a 20 percent tax cut across the board. The problem is, there are hundreds of write-offs and each has a rabid fan base. The ticket deduction would be tough to jettison because it’s “often associated with state institutions,” says Marcus Owens, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations division. “In a lot of states, a significant percentage of the adult population went to some state institution, has an allegiance to the athletic teams, and represents a considerable voting bloc.”

For sports that draw big crowds, colleges typically assign a face value to a ticket and then demand a donation as a condition of sale. Fans wrote off that donation for years. But in 1986 the IRS ruled that the ticket premiums weren’t deductible. During that year’s debate over tax reform, LSU’s then-athletic director asked Jones, a lobbyist for the state of Louisiana, to fight to preserve the exemption. He approached the late Louisiana Senator Russell Long, who crafted an amendment with the late Texas Representative J.J. Pickle that allowed ticket buyers at LSU and the University of Texas at Austin to write off 100 percent of their donations. In 1988, Congress made all public and private colleges eligible for the break but reduced the deductible amount of the donation to 80 percent. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the same year that the write-off would cost the Treasury less than $ 500,000 a year.

While there’s no national tally of how many schools are benefiting from the break or the exact amount it costs taxpayers, Bloomberg assembled a snapshot of the data through public records from 54 state universities in six of the largest football conferences. The 34 that track ticket donations received a total of $ 467.2 million for the 2010-11 fiscal year. As much as $ 373.7 million of that is deductible. Based on a 28 percent individual tax rate, that would cut federal revenue by $ 104.6 million. (The universities surveyed don’t break out corporate purchases.)

The actual loss may be much greater. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who’s written 12 books on the business of sports, says, based on Bloomberg’s sampling, sports fans could well be paying colleges $ 1 billion a year in tax-deductible ticket donations.

Colleges have come to rely on the money to prop up teams that don’t make any revenue and to fund student-athlete scholarships. “Those kinds of deductions are like fertilizer to a farmer. They increase the yield,” Jones says, paraphrasing a line Long used when President Jimmy Carter wanted to cut the business write-off for the three-martini lunch. Over the years, Zimbalist says, the IRS has attacked various tax breaks for universities until it’s gone “blue in the face” and has “basically succumbed” to Congress’s unwillingness to budge.

LSU is counting on Congress to continue to stand firm. It’s doubling the number of luxury boxes and premium club seats at its 92,542-seat stadium. That’ll enable the school to increase revenue from seat donations by as much as $ 15 million, according to R.G. Richard, who heads LSU’s booster organization. Even after the expansion, there’ll be a waiting list of 1,600 fans ready to empty their pockets for season tickets—and take advantage of the perk that goes with them, as long as it’s available.

The Football-Ticket Tax Break

• College teams can require a donation for tickets, on top of the official price.
 
• At LSU, donations range from $ 210 to $ 3,000 per football ticket.
 
• Schools use the cash to support teams that don’t make money and for scholarships.
 
• There’s a perk for ticket buyers. They can write off 80 percent of their donation.
 
• For the U.S. Treasury, all this means a loss. In fiscal 2010-2011 it was more than $ 100 million.

The bottom line: A tax break for people who buy college sports tickets costs the federal government more than $ 100 million a year.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

Bomb shakes Damascus, opposition holds unity talks

AMMAN (Reuters) – A bomb exploded near army and security compounds in Damascus, Syrian television reported, and fractured opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad began unity talks abroad to win international respect and arms supplies.

The 50-kilogram (110-pound) bomb, near a large hotel in a heavily guarded district, was described by state media as an attack by “terrorists” – the government’s term for insurgents in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad.

Opposition activists said Sunday’s blast appeared to be the work of the Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) Brigade, an Islamist militant unit that attacked military and intelligence targets several times in the last two months.

The mainly Sunni rebels have carried out a series of bombings targeting government and military buildings in Damascus this year, extending the war into the seat of Assad’s power.

The Syrian conflict has aggravated divisions in the Islamic world, with Shi’ite Iran supporting Assad — whose Alawite faith derives from Shi’ite Islam — and U.S.-allied Sunni nations such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar backing his foes.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an activist monitoring group, said government forces had killed 179 people on Sunday. It said most of the dead were civilians killed in shelling of Damascus suburbs and included 14 women and 20 children. The rest were rebels killed in battles in the capital and the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo.

Opposition campaigners said the Syrian army shelled rebel positions inside a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus on Sunday, killing at least 20 people. They said the Yarmouk camp had become the latest battleground in the war.

In northern Idlib, opposition sources said rebels were forced to halt an offensive to take a big air base because of a shortage of ammunition, a problem that has dogged their campaign to cement a hold on the north by eliminating Assad’s devastating edge in firepower.

Islamist insurgents had launched the attack on the Taftanaz military airport at dawn on Saturday, using rocket launchers and at least three tanks captured from the military.

The Syrian government restricts journalists’ access in Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from the ground.

The Jaafar bin Tayyar Division, a rebel unit in Deir al-Zor, said its fighters had taken control of the al-Ward oilfield near the Iraqi border on Sunday, after overrunning a loyalist outpost that had 40 militiamen defending it.

Rebel commanders, former Syrian officials and the Syrian head of an oil services company familiar with oil production in the area said the fields, mostly not operational, had been under de facto rebel control for months.

FEARS OF WIDER CONFLAGRATION

The conflict began with peaceful protest rallies that morphed into armed revolt when Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since 1971, tried to stamp them out with military might. About 32,000 people have been killed, wide swathes of the major Arab state have been wrecked and the civil war threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration.

The opposition talks that began in Qatar marked the first concerted attempt to meld feuding, disparate groups based abroad and coordinate strategy with rebels fighting in Syria.

Divisions between Islamists and secularists as well as between those inside Syria and opposition figures based abroad have foiled prior attempts to forge a united opposition and deterred Western powers from intervening militarily.

Analysts were skeptical the planned four days of opposition talks in the Qatari capital Doha would bring immediate results.

They aim to broaden the Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest of the overseas-based opposition groups, from some 300 members to 400, to pave the way for talks in Doha on Thursday including other anti-Assad factions to crystallise a coalition.

“The main aim is to expand the council to include more of the social and political components. There will be new forces in the SNC,” Abdulbaset Sieda, current leader of the Syrian National Council, told reporters in Doha ahead of the meeting.

The meetings would also elect a new executive committee and leader for the SNC, he said.

A Qatar-based security analyst, who asked not to be named, said the meetings would bring a small step forward, at most. “The Syrian National Council is just too divided,” he said.

In Cairo, the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, called on Sunday for world powers to issue a U.N. Security Council resolution based on a deal they reached in June to set up a transitional Syrian government.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the same news conference, dismissed the need for a resolution and said others were stoking violence by backing rebels. His comments highlighted the impasse over Syria’s civil war.

Russia and China, both permanent council members, have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad’s government for the violence. The other three permanent members are the United States, Britain and France.

(Additional reporting by Rania el Gamal and Regan Doherty in Qatar, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Stephen Powell)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Gadget-free and shopping sprees rule travel trends

LONDON (Reuters) – Luxury shopping trips for the nouveaux riches, gadget-free accommodation and booking holidays on smart TVs are some of the future travel trends predicted in a new report released on Monday.

The “Global Trends Report” by market research firm Euromonitor International predicted a continued rise in holiday packages which cater to tourists on shopping trips, a recovery in Middle East visits following the Arab Spring and Americans interested in destinations that have previously been off-limits.

Shoppers from Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC countries with rapidly growing economies, were expected to flock to European cities to splurge on luxury goods.

Chinese visitors to Europe alone reserve a third of their holiday budget for shopping, the European Travel Commission estimates and 95 percent of Chinese visitors of Louis Vuitton shops in Paris are on organized tours, according to Euromonitor.

Hotels in the Middle East are locating within or beside shopping malls to take advantage of the trend and nine major malls are due for completion across the region between 2012 and 2014. One of these, Yas Mall in Abu Dhabi, will be home to seven hotels.

After experiencing a 10 percent fall in tourism last year during the fallout from the Arab Spring, 2012 is promising to end with positive growth for the Middle East. This is forecast to continue into 2013 and beyond.

Indian travelers are helping a tourism boom in the Gulf by heading in large numbers to the region’s souks to purchase precious metals for wedding gifts and investment.

Although the report maintains that any growth in tourism arrivals will come from the relatively new outbound markets of Asia Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe, U.S. travelers are showing a particular interest in flocking to countries that have previously been off limits such as North Korea, Libya, Cuba and Myanmar thanks to the easing of travel restrictions.

American tourism to Myanmar is expected to rise by 71 percent by 2016, says Euromonitor.

Smart TVs are also highlighted in the report as vital new platforms for travel marketers seeking to use the device to directly connect consumers to the market by enabling them to make immediate bookings through the TV or via travel apps and Internet links.

“The next big thing is to have a presence on these machines,” Euromonitor’s travel and tourism research head Caroline Bremner said in the report. “With 50 percent penetration by 2014, it’s going to be fast adoption.”

On the flipside, customers will also want to be prised away from their technological gizmos on “digital detox” holidays in gadget-free hotels or those which offer incentives to put down the “crackberry” for a while.

Relaxing holiday options like spa, cruise and rail sojourns were also expected to perform particularly well through 2016.

(Reporting By Peter Myers, editing by Paul Casciato)

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Surgery seems best for heart disease in diabetics

LOS ANGELES (AP) — New research shows that people with diabetes and several clogged heart arteries fare better with bypass surgery instead of having stents placed to prop open their blood vessels.

Doctors compared the treatments in a study of 1,900 diabetics and looked five years later to see how many had suffered a heart attack, stroke or death. Only 19 percent of the bypass group had, versus 27 percent of those given stents.

People like this represent about one-fourth of all heart disease patients.

Results were discussed Sunday at an American Heart Association conference and published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

HSBC earmarks more for US fines

5 November 2012 Last updated at 03:47 ET

HSBC bank has put aside a further $ 800m (£500m) to cover potential money-laundering fines in the US as it announced a fall in quarterly profits.

The bank had already put aside $ 700m after a US Senate report published in July said lax controls had left it vulnerable to money laundering.

Pre-tax profit for the three months to the end of September was $ 3.5bn, down $ 3.7bn from a year earlier.

However, the bank said underlying profits in the quarter had increased.

They totalled $ 5bn, more than double the figure recorded for the same quarter a year ago.

Europe’s largest bank also put aside a further £223m to cover UK payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling claims. This brings the total the bank has set aside for PPI compensation to £1.3bn and the total for the UK banking industry as a whole to almost £13bn.

BBC News – Business

Read More..

Meet the Only Guy In Line for an iPad Mini in NYC [PICS]

Amid the rushing passersby outside the flagship Apple Store, one man stood alone Thursday afternoon in the official line for Friday morning’s iPad mini launch.

Luis Lorenzo braved New York City’s transit system — still weakened by flooding from Hurricane Sandy — to get from East New York in Brooklyn to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store near Central Park. He commuted for two hours, 75 minutes of which he spent waiting for the F train to arrive.

[More from Mashable: Hurricane Sandy Won’t Stop the iPad Mini Launch]

“I’m surprised a line hasn’t formed yet. But Sandy and the transit system have made it hard for people to get here.”

With a folding lawn chair and backpack in tow at 6 a.m., 42-year-old Lorenzo became the first person to queue up for Apple‘s latest iPad iteration.

He wants two iPad minis to give away as holiday gifts, he told Mashable at 12:30 p.m. ET Thursday.

[More from Mashable: How to Use Your Tablet as a Second Monitor]

“I’m surprised a line hasn’t formed yet,” Lorenzo says. “But Sandy and the transit system have made it hard for people to get here. … I think more people will start showing up at 8 or so.”

Some people were unsure Thursday whether the iPad mini launch would still happen or even if NYC stores would be open Friday because of Sandy’s aftermath. An Apple spokesperson, however, confirmed to Mashable the event will occur, and an employee at the flagship store said doors will open at 8 a.m.

Apple reportedly picked up employees, who for now don’t have adequate transportation after Sandy hit, and shuttled them to Manhattan to work.

Lorenzo thinks crippled transportation isn’t the only thing keeping people away from the flagship store. He believes the iPad mini’s less expensive competition could be a factor, too.

Pre-orders for iPad mini began Oct. 26. The device costs between $ 329 and $ 539 for Wi-Fi-only versions and between $ 459 and $ 659 for cellular models.

Apple iPad Mini Hands-on

Click here to view this gallery.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

DA seeks rehearing in Anna Nicole Smith drug case

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Prosecutors refusing to accept an appellate court‘s ruling in the Anna Nicole Smith case asked the court on Friday to change its decision and allow her former boyfriend and manager to be retried.

California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled last month that Howard K. Stern could not be retried without violating the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy. Attorneys in the office of District Attorney Steve Cooley filed a 19-page motion for rehearing that contends the court misinterpreted the law.

The court said a trial judge erred in dismissing conspiracy convictions against Stern and Smith’s psychiatrist, Dr. Khristine Eroshevich, in a case that partially revolved around obtaining prescription drugs for the celebrity model under false names. The defendants were not charged with causing her death.

Superior Court Judge Robert Perry found it was not unusual in the celebrity world Smith inhabited for fake names to be used to protect privacy. The appellate court sent the case back to Perry but gave no guidance on what the judge should do next.

The motion filed Friday asked that the court modify its ruling so that Stern can be retried, or to grant a rehearing on the issue.

The defendants’ nine-week trial was the final act of the long-running drama centering on the blond beauty’s troubled life, which was documented on reality TV, in tabloids and in trial testimony. The defendants were acquitted of most charges, and the judge suggested prosecutors had chosen the wrong case in which to make its point about prescription drug abuse.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Israel’s Neuronix offers new Alzheimer’s treatment

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel-based Neuronix, which has developed a non-invasive medical device to help to treat Alzheimer’s disease, expects the system to be approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration in late 2014.

The device, which combines electromagnetic stimulation with computer-based cognitive training, is already approved for use in Europe, Israel and several Asian countries. In Singapore it is approved for clinical trial use and the application for registration of the product is still under evaluation.

“You stimulate the brain on a biological level as well as on a cognitive level,” Neuronix CEO Eyal Baror told Reuters, saying this double approach created longer-lasting benefits.

The device, which consists of a chair containing an electronic system and software in the back and a coil placed at the head, has been tested on mild to moderate Alzheimer’s patients who suffer from dementia but are not totally dependent.

The system is in trials at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre. Patients are treated for one hour a day, five days a week over six weeks.

“We see improvement lasting for 9-12 months and the good thing is that patients can return and undergo treatment again,” Baror said. “If out of 10 years the patients have left to live we can keep them at home in a relatively mild state of the disease for three, four, five years, it’s a lot.”

According to Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the hospital’s Berenson-Allen Centre for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation, brain stimulation – or transcranial magnetic stimulation – involves a very low current applied to a specific part of the brain and is approved by the FDA for treatment of a variety of ailments and diagnostic applications.

“The application in Alzheimer’s disease and in combination with cognitive training is novel,” Pascual-Leono said in a phone interview from Boston.

About 20 percent of patients experience a mild headache but there are no long-term negative effects, he said.

Pascual-Leone, who is principal investigator in the Harvard trial, said that of 12 patients in the study, six received the real treatment and all showed cognitive improvement. Their improvement was significantly more than the average seen in patients taking just medication, he said.

The study’s results will be submitted for publication in the coming weeks and a follow-up study on 30 patients is planned.

Neuronix received European approval several months ago and has installations in the UK and Germany. In Israel, a few dozen patients are being treated with the device.

The U.S. trials are expected to run till the end of 2013. Neuronix is also running a trial in Israel for pre-Alzheimer’s patients.

The company expects to sell half a dozen systems in the second half of 2012 and three dozen in 2013. In Israel, the treatment costs $ 6,000.

“Our target for becoming profitable is in parallel to entering the U.S. market around 2015,” Baror said.

Neuronix has raised $ 8 million from private individuals as well as in grants from the Israeli Chief Scientist’s Office and is exploring options to raise more money in the coming year, including the possibility of going public.

(This version of the October 24 story corrects paragraph two that company corrects to say that in Singapore, device is approved for clinical trial use and its application for registration of the product is under evaluation, not that device is approved for commercial use.)

(Reporting by Tova Cohen; editing by Stephen Nisbet)

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..