Exclusive - Amazon to win e-book tussle with Apple

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union regulators are to end an antitrust probe into e-book prices by accepting an offer by Apple and four publishers to ease price restrictions on Amazon, two sources said on Tuesday.

The decision hands online retailer Amazon victory in its attempt to sell e-books cheaper than its rivals in the fast-growing market that publishers hope will boost revenue and increase customer numbers.

Apple and the publishers offered in September to let retailers set their own prices or discounts for a period of two years, and also to suspend "most-favored nation" contracts for five years.

Such clauses bar Simon & Schuster, News Corp. unit HarperCollins, Lagardere SCA's Hachette Livre and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, the owner of German company Macmillan, from making deals with rival retailers to sell e-books more cheaply than Apple.

The agreements, which critics say prevent Amazon and other retailers from undercutting Apple's charges, sparked an investigation by the European Commission in December last year.

Pearson Plc's Penguin group, which is also under investigation, did not take part in the offer.

The EU antitrust authority, which in September asked for feedback from rivals and consumers about the proposal, has not asked for more concessions, said one of sources.

"The Commission is likely to accept the offer and announce its decision next month," the source said on Tuesday.

Antoine Colombani, spokesman for competition policy at the European Commission, said: "We have launched a market test in September and our investigation is still ongoing."

Amazon declined to comment, while Apple did not respond to an email for comments.

Companies found guilty of breaching EU rules could be fined up to 10 percent of their global sales, which in Apple's case could reach $15.6 billion, based on its 2012 fiscal year.

FROWNING ON ONLINE TRADE CURBS

Antitrust regulators tend to frown on restrictions on online trade and the case is a good example of this policy, said Mark Tricker, a partner at Brussels-based law firm Norton Rose.

"This case shows the online world continues to be a major focus for the Commission. They are looking at lots of different aspects of e-commerce, as this can have such a significant impact on consumers, development and innovation," he said.

"These markets change very quickly and if you don't stamp down on potential infringements of competition rules, you can have significant consequences."

UBS analysts estimate that e-books account for about 30 percent of the U.S. book market and 20 percent of sales in Britain but are minuscule elsewhere. Amazon created demand for e-books when it launched its e-Kindle reader, charging $9.99 for each book.

Apple's agency model let publishers set prices in return for a 30 percent cut to the maker of iPhone and iPad.

The U.S. Department of Justice is also investigating e-book prices. HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette recently settled, but Apple, Penguin Group and Macmillan continue to fight the allegations.

(Editing by Rex Merrifield and David Goodman)

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Heart devices often approved without comparisons

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Many new heart devices, such as valves and stents, are approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) without good studies showing that they offer any benefits beyond existing treatments, according to a new study.

“This really leaves open the question of, ‘are you better off with this new device or whatever conventional therapy is already?’” said Dr. Rita Redberg, one of the authors of the study and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

Given that devices often require surgery, “from a patient point of view, you’re taking a lot more risk with a device, so the harms are potentially much greater,” added Redberg, whose team published the work in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “So it’s really very important to know that the device is an improvement over what you could have had.”

High-risk heart devices, which include implanted defibrillators, mechanical pumps and tubes called stents, go through an approval process called “premarket approval,” which includes a more stringent review of the evidence than for less risky devices.

However, the requirements for the approval of devices in general are less strict than for drugs.

The FDA requires two studies comparing the drug to a “control” – typically, the current standard of care or a fake pill called a placebo – before it will approve a drug.

For first-of-a-kind devices, FDA does require controlled trials, FDA spokeswoman Michelle Bolek told Reuters Health by email. However, the agency does not have such demands for devices that aren’t first-of-a-kind, and approval can be given without direct comparisons to controls, depending on the use of the device and the extent of experience doctors have had with it.

The FDA said there are good reasons why comparing new devices to other treatments or older generations of a product might not be feasible or ethical.

“And, requiring them could significantly and unnecessarily delay patient access to critical new technology,” Bolek added.

COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH

Recent studies have found that sometimes patients are given newer and more expensive products without a clear indication that they’re better off for it (see Reuters report of February 28, 2012 and Reuters Health report of July 9, 2012).

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, established the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which funds research on comparing the effectiveness of different approaches to medical care.

To see how often heart devices are compared to existing therapies as part of the approval process, Redberg and her colleagues collected information from the FDA on all high-risk device approvals from 2000 to 2011.

They found that 40 percent of approved devices had been in studies comparing them to other treatments.

The comparison treatment could be an older generation of the same implant, a medication or a surgical procedure.

The rest of the approved devices relied on either the results from other studies in which controls were used, but the new device was not compared head-to-head with other treatments; from expectations of how well the device should work; or from research with no comparisons.

“We were surprised and disappointed,” said Redberg, who is also editor of the Archives of Internal Medicine and a member of the FDA’s Drug Administration Circulatory System Devices Panel. “We had already seen (in a previous study) there wasn’t as many randomized controlled trials as one would hope for devices, but we didn’t appreciate it until we looked at the data.”

SOMETIMES JUSTIFIABLE?

Some devices were less likely to have been compared to a conventional therapy than others.

Ventricular assist devices, for instance, used in severe cases of heart failure, were approved without any comparison to another therapy, but this could be justified, said Dr. David Brown, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, who was not involved in the study.

“People are near death when they need the device, and it may not be ethical or practical to design a trial that compares it to something else,” he said.

“However, if you look at most of the devices in the other categories, they’re not anywhere near being performed in people who don’t have other options,” Brown told Reuters Health.

For instance, there are alternatives to new cardiac stents, pacemakers and defibrillators, such as drugs or other versions of the same devices, he pointed out.

Yet only about four out of 10 approvals for these types of devices included studies that compared them to existing treatments.

The FDA’s Bolek said the information Redberg’s group used to evaluate the studies conducted to get a device approved “does not reflect all of the data reviewed by the FDA in a (premarket approval) submission.”

Bolek said FDA weighs the quality of studies and their results, tests performed outside of the clinic and data monitoring committees.

Congress, Bolek said, has authorized the FDA to take the “least burdensome provision” to approve devices, to ensure that patients are not denied early access to new medical technology.

Dr. Ron Waksman, the associate director of the division of cardiology at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, said the study does not differentiate between new products and slight improvements on already-approved devices.

“You don’t need to…for every change and iteration, do a clinical randomized trial” said Waksman, who was not part of the study but has been a consultant to medical device companies.

Still, Dr. William Boden at the Albany VA Stratton Medical Center said the different requirements for drug and device approvals is “egregious.”

“I think (the study) really elucidates the fact that there is just an unfortunate double standard, where there is a lack of transparency and a critical need for more comparative effectiveness evaluation before these devices come to market,” said Boden, who did not participate in the current research but whose research has been funded by pharmaceutical companies.

Brown said consumers should express their concerns about a lack of comparative effectiveness studies to their representatives in Congress.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Uge4Fb Journal of the American Medical Association, online November 5, 2012.

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sharon Osbourne has double mastectomy: magazine

LONDON (Reuters) – British celebrity Sharon Osbourne has had a double mastectomy after discovering she was carrying a gene that increased the risk of her developing breast cancer, she told Hello! magazine in an interview published on Monday.

Osbourne, 60, told the publication that the decision was a “no-brainer” in the end.

“As soon as I found out I had the breast cancer gene, I thought: ‘The odds are not in my favor’,” she said in remarks that also ran in the Daily Mirror tabloid.

“I’ve had cancer before and I didn’t want to live under that cloud: I decided to just take everything off, and had a double mastectomy.”

Osbourne, who put the eccentric life of her family on view in the reality TV series “The Osbournes”, said she did not want to spend the rest of her life with “that shadow hanging over me.

“I want to be around for a long time and be a grandmother to Pearl,” she added, referring to her son Jack’s first child.

“I didn’t even think of my breasts in a nostalgic way, I just wanted to be able to live my life without that fear all the time. It’s not ‘pity me’, it’s a decision I made that’s got rid of this weight that I was carrying around.”

Osbourne raised her profile by appearing as a judge on successful talent shows “The X Factor” and “America’s Got Talent”. She is married to heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne.

Her London publicist referred Reuters to the interview which ran in Hello! and the Daily Mirror when asked to confirm the news.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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If Obama wins, will he finally tell us his second-term agenda?

By Walter Shapiro

LIMA, Ohio—Speaking at a rally here last Friday afternoon, Barack Obama stressed his old-shoe familiarity: “After four years as president, you know me.” That’s a standard stump speech line, but the more than 3,000 Democrats in local high-school gym burst into cheers, brimming with confidence that they knew the Real Obama.

But does anyone outside his family and the inner sanctum of the White House staff really know Obama—or have a clear handle on what he would do with a second term? This question is not designed to feed any off-the-wall conspiracy theories about a secret second-term agenda. Rather, it’s designed to underscore the perception that Obama remains more opaque than most presidents.

During his speech in this blue-collar pocket of Ohio, the shirt-sleeved Obama waxed populist as he decried the way that the voices of the American people have “been shut out of our democracy for way too long by the lobbyists and the special interests.”

Referring to this us-versus-them rhetoric after the speech, a reporter friend, traveling with the president’s press corps, said, “That’s the real Obama.” But was it? Or was this just a president in a tight race harking back to the citizens-versus-lobbyists language that propelled him into the White House?

In his speeches, including the one in Lima, Obama talks about his second-term vision as he says, “I want to recruit 100,000 math and science teachers. I want to train two-million Americans at our community colleges.” Obama echoes this theme in a 60-second closing argument commercial heavily broadcast on Ohio television. In the ad, Obama implies that the money could come “from ending the war in Afghanistan so we can do some nation-building here at home.”

But there’s a major roadblock: The odds are very high that the Republicans will retain control of the House, even if Obama is reelected.

If that occurs, the Tea Party naysayers of 2010 almost certainly would feel emboldened by their personal electoral successes—and become even more obstinate in their resistance to new domestic spending. With the “fiscal cliff” end-of-the-year budget negotiations looming, a reelected President Obama will be hard-pressed to maintain even the current levels of educational spending let alone create new programs.

It’s politically telling that the president never mentions health care in his final TV ad and only flicked at the topic in his stump speech in Lima. But with the Democrats likely to hold the Senate, the reelection of Obama would all but guarantee that his signature domestic achievement will be fully implemented. As a result, tens of millions of Americans would never have to agonize about health insurance coverage again.

Reelected presidents, stymied by Congress, often turn their full attention to foreign affairs. While this single-mindedness can lead to unexpected breakthroughs (Richard Nixon and China), often it ends in the kind of frustration that Bill Clinton experienced over his failure to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement at Camp David in the waning days of his presidency.

The most likely flashpoint for the next president (whether Obama or Mitt Romney) is, of course, Iran. All occupants of the Oval Office and all who aspire to that job have unequivocally declared that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable.

But what would that mean, in practice, in an Obama second term? Any temptation to categorize the president as a peacenik has to be squared against Obama’s enormous expansion of drone attacks against suspected terrorists. Even without a hawkish, even by Israeli standards, government in Jerusalem, the precise American response to a nuclear Iran would be hard for foreign-policy experts to game out in advance. For ordinary voters to do so at the frenzied end of a presidential campaign is well nigh impossible.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect a president running for reelection to be overly specific about his plans for a second term. Bill Clinton campaigned in 1996 on little more than the vague promise to build “a bridge to the 21st century.” And George W. Bush gave voters—and his fellow Republicans in Congress—little warning in 2004 that he intended to attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005.

Still, if Obama prevails on Tuesday (or survives a long count that stretches into Wednesday and beyond), I would be eager to read what he says in his post-election interviews. After a stealth reelection campaign, that might be the moment when we finally learn if Obama has fresh ideas for curbing the reign of special interest in Washington. Or how the soon-to-be two-term president intends to bridge the inevitably bitter stalemate in Congress.

In the end, it comes down to the elusive qualities of trust and character. Americans have had four years to make their own judgment about President Barack Obama. So, in fact, maybe we do know him as well as we ever will. Not as a friend or (in that awful cliché) a guy to have a beer with. But as a leader, who has sometimes stumbled but has mostly prevailed during four of the most arduous economic years in American history.

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Methane warnings ignored before NZ mine disaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia / Antarctica News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Apple sells 3 million iPads over first weekend

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Study: Vitamins don’t lower heart risks in men

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Multivitamins might help lower the risk for cancer in healthy older men but do not affect their chances of developing heart disease, new research suggests.

Two other studies found fish oil didn’t work for an irregular heartbeat condition called atrial fibrillation, even though it is thought to help certain people with heart disease or high levels of fats called triglycerides in their blood.

The bottom line: Dietary supplements have varied effects and whether one is right for you may depend on your personal health profile, diet and lifestyle.

“Many people take vitamin supplements as a crutch,” said study leader Dr. Howard Sesso of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “They’re no substitute for a heart-healthy diet, exercising, not smoking, keeping your weight down,” especially for lowering heart risks.

The studies were presented Monday at an American Heart Association conference in Los Angeles.

A separate analysis released in connection with the meeting showed that at least 1 in 3 baby boomers who are in good shape will eventually develop heart problems or have a stroke. The upside is that that will happen about seven years later than for their less healthy peers.

The study is “a wake-up call that this disease is very prevalent in the United States and even if you’re doing a good job, you’re not immune,” said Dr. Vincent Bufalino, a Chicago-area cardiologist and spokesman for the American Heart Association.

The findings came in an analysis of five major studies involving nearly 50,000 adults aged 45 and older who were followed for up to 50 years.

The research was published online by the Journal of the American Medical Association, along with the vitamin paper and one fish oil study.

Multivitamins are America’s favorite dietary supplement. About one-third of adults take them. Yet no government agency recommends their routine use for preventing chronic diseases, and few studies have tested them to see if they can.

A leading preventive medicine task force even recommends against beta-carotene supplements, alone or with other vitamins, to prevent cancer or heart disease because some studies have found them harmful. And vitamin K can affect bleeding and interfere with some commonly used heart drugs.

Sesso’s study involved nearly 15,000 healthy male doctors given monthly packets of Centrum Silver or fake multivitamins. After about 11 years, there were no differences between the groups in heart attacks, strokes, chest pain, heart failure or heart-related deaths.

Side effects were fairly similar except for more rashes among vitamin users. The National Institutes of Health paid for most of the study. Pfizer Inc. supplied the pills and other companies supplied the packaging.

The same study a few weeks ago found that multivitamins cut the chance of developing cancer by 8 percent — a modest amount and less than what can be achieved from a good diet, exercise and not smoking.

Multivitamins also may have different results in women or people less healthy than those in this study — only 4 percent smoked, for example.

The fish-oil studies tested prescription-strength omega-3 capsules from several companies in two different groups of people for preventing atrial fibrillation, a fluttering, irregular heartbeat.

One study from South America aimed to prevent recurrent episodes in 600 participants who already had the condition. The other sought to prevent it from developing in 1,500 people from the U.S., Italy and Argentina having various types of heart surgery, such as valve replacement. About one third of heart-surgery patients develop atrial fibrillation as a complication.

Both studies found fish oil ineffective.

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Heart Association: http://www.heart.org

JAMA: http://www.jama.ama-assn.org

Vitamin facts: http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/MVMS-QuickFacts/

Dietary advice: www.dietaryguidelines.gov

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP .

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sharon Osbourne has double mastectomy-magazine

LONDON (Reuters) – British celebrity Sharon Osbourne has had a double mastectomy after discovering she was carrying a gene that increased the risk of her developing breast cancer, she told Hello! magazine in an interview published on Monday.

Osbourne, 60, told the publication that the decision was a “no-brainer” in the end.

“As soon as I found out I had the breast cancer gene, I thought: ‘The odds are not in my favor’,” she said in remarks that also ran in the Daily Mirror tabloid.

“I’ve had cancer before and I didn’t want to live under that cloud: I decided to just take everything off, and had a double mastectomy.”

Osbourne, who put the eccentric life of her family on view in the reality TV series “The Osbournes”, said she did not want to spend the rest of her life with “that shadow hanging over me.

“I want to be around for a long time and be a grandmother to Pearl,” she added, referring to her son Jack’s first child.

“I didn’t even think of my breasts in a nostalgic way, I just wanted to be able to live my life without that fear all the time. It’s not ‘pity me’, it’s a decision I made that’s got rid of this weight that I was carrying around.”

Osbourne raised her profile by appearing as a judge on successful talent shows “The X Factor” and “America’s Got Talent”. She is married to heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne.

Her London publicist referred Reuters to the interview which ran in Hello! and the Daily Mirror when asked to confirm the news.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Everything you wanted to know about voting machines

Ever since punch-card voting machines produced the "hanging chads" that led to the Florida recount in the 2000 election, Americans have been looking for new and more reliable technology to use on Election Day.

One result: The Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.9 billion in federal funds for trading in punch-card and lever systems with either e-voting or optical scan systems. The act also stipulates that all polling places should make available a handicap-accessible voting device.

But while the country, for the most part, has moved on from the older, more unreliable machines, the new models present their own set of challenges. From shadowy conspiracy theories to genuine concerns about glitches, here's what you need to know about the machines that are supposed to make democracy work.

What kind of machines are used, and where?

Sixty percent of the country now supplies voters with optical scanners. To use them, voters shade in their choices on paper ballots (similar to how they would take an SAT test) before feeding it to the machines. These optical scanners, while not exactly a brand-new technology, are the state-of-the-art for both their accuracy in processing votes and their security against tampering.

But the same cannot always be said for the alternative, e-voting equipment (direct-recording electronic machines, or DREs), which is used in about 25 percent of the country. These are lined up in places like Georgia, Maryland, Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas.

E-voting machines come in three variants: push-button machines sporting a keypad; LCD touch-screens; and machines that use a rolling wheel to select and confirm a vote onscreen. All of these register votes on an electronic ballot. The absence of a paper trail, which is preserved by the optical scanners, has caused concerns since the inception of the machines.

VerifiedVoting.org provides more specifics on the history and different forms of voting technology, including a map showing the brand of election equipment for different states.

Does anyone still use punch-card or lever systems?

Four counties in Idaho still use punch-card ballots, while none in the country has used lever machines since 2010.

What are some of the examples of problems with e-voting machines?

In 2004, electronic votes were wiped from machines in New Jersey and North Carolina. But the much more ominous worries over the limits and liabilities of e-voting became clear in 2008, when a study by Princeton University revealed how easy it would be to hack into the Sequoia brand of e-voting machines (used chiefly in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana) to steal votes.

More disturbing is this quote from Roger Johnston, a computer science expert leading a subsequent test on Diebold AccuVote e-voting machines just last year: "I've seen high-school science fair projects that are more sophisticated than what is needed to hijack a voting machine." His crash course in vote-jacking went as follows: The equipment was hacked by inserting a very inexpensive homemade device into the voting machine, which could be remotely controlled from afar. In practice, when the voter attempted to mark her e-ballot, the hacker could intercept and alter the vote from one party to the other.

Despite these widely reported studies, as well as HBO's 2006 documentary "Hacking Democracy," there has not yet been any effort to address these sorts of problems with either the Diebold machines or the smaller malfunctions of e-voting machines more broadly. (It is, of course, also true that there have been problems with fraud and machine error with more traditional forms of voting technology.)

The software for the e-voting machines is proprietary, which means that only the companies that manufacture them have access to their design, which they have kept from examination through extended legal battles.

What's with stories about Tagg Romney owning voting machines?

In a tight election, even the most tenuous connections can be spun quickly into a web of conspiracy. That's not to say that there aren't genuine links between very enthusiastic Mitt Romney donors and Hart InterCivic, a large supplier of voting machines in Ohio—but the theories attempting to prove that Tagg Romney, the Republican nominee's eldest son, owns Ohio voting machines overstep the boundaries of available evidence.

As Rick Ungar reported in Forbes, two Hart InterCivic board members made direct donations to the Romney campaign; furthermore, several directors of H.I.G. capital, which owns Hart, are major money-raisers for the campaign. (Some of them were in the room during Romney's infamous "47 percent" remarks.)

But there is no evidence that Tagg Romney's private equity firm, Solamere Capital, invests, owns or controls voting machines made by InterCivic. The closest one gets by following the money is to find Solamere investing in H.I.G.'s medical fund, BioVentures, a wholly separate fund, as reported by Eugene Kiely and Lucas Isakowitz at Factcheck.org.

What will superstorm Sandy's impact be on voting in the Northeast?

In the back of people's minds, Sandy's effect on voting in the Northeast has been a quiet but pressing concern. As Thad Hall, a University of Utah political scientist and researcher for the Voting Technology Project, told the Associated Foreign Press, "Some voters will literally not be able to vote because they will have been evacuated from their local polling place and there is no provision for remote voting."

The voting machines themselves will be left operating on batteries, not an encouraging prospect as Election Day drags on longer in areas where debris and destruction have complicated the process and organization.

In New Jersey, the state is allowing residents to combat the aftermath of the storm by voting through absentee ballots by email or fax. And state officials in New York have said that residents may be granted an extra day to vote if Tuesday's turnout is below 25 percent.

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Newspaper discloses new Cameron text messages

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

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

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

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

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

Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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