Vaccine Mistrust: Alive & Well in Romania

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Romania has the highest incidence of cervical cancer in Europe, so public health officials launched a HPV vaccination campaign there in 2008.


They offered the vaccine to 10 and 11-year-old girls, the optimal age at which to get the vaccine since  HPV, the virus that causes most cervical cancer cases, is sexually transmitted.





















Cervical cancer kills 250,000 women a year, most of them from low- to middle-income countries, according to a 2009 report from the World Health Organization. The HPV vaccine, recommended in 2006 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. for girls beginning at ages 11 and 12, can do much to stem that toll, WHO experts agree.


RELATED: Doctors Urge HPV Vaccine for Boys


However, a follow up report on the Romanian vaccine effort finds that just  2.5% of the eligible girls received parental permission to get the vaccine. Researchers from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania reported their findings Sept. 24 in the journal Vaccine.


Parents in Romania who declined the vaccine for  their daughters gave a variety of reasons why they forego the HPV immunization. Some said they see the vaccine as risky. Others feared it was an experiment that made guinea pigs of their daughters. Still others said the vaccine embodied a conspiracy aimed at reducing the world population.


And where did they get those ideas? Researchers didn’t ask, but Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, has a guess.  They may have heard that information from anti-vaccine groups.


“There are a lot more people being exposed to the anti-vaccine groups, especially on the internet,” he told TakePart.


Kalichman has begun to research anti-vaccine group activities, funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.


Has he found the groups, widespread  in the U.S. and elsewhere, more active now? “I’m not so sure they are stepping up their efforts,” he says. Their efforts have been fairly steady for the past five  years or so, he says. “What has changed is more people having access to their efforts,” he tells TakePart.


That’s because many groups now have a significant presence on social media–especially Facebook and Twitter, he says.


The groups have a conspiracy theory bent, he finds in his research, and they’re equal opportunity–against all  vaccines. “HPV vaccine is certainly part of what they are spreading misinformation about,” he says.


The excuses given by the Romanian mothers sound familiar to Robert Bednarczyk, an epidemiologist at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, and a clinical investigator at the Center for Health Research–Southeast, Kaiser Permanente Georgia. He has studied  parental response to the vaccine and the effects of the vaccine on sexual activity.


“Many of the barriers cited by the mothers in this study are similar to those we’ve seen in the US, including concerns about vaccine safety, which have been repeatedly addressed by large studies in the US, and lack of information about the need for the vaccine and relationship between HPV infection and cervical cancer,” he tells TakePart.


In his  recent study, published in Pediatrics, Bednarczyk found no differences in sexuality activity nor pregnancies in girls who got the HPV vaccine and those who did not. That should squelch concerns, he says, about the vaccine promoting promiscuity.


RELATED: All Pregnant Women Should Get the Pertussis Vaccine, Officials Say


The new finding in Romania, he says, “highlights a need for comprehensive education” about the vaccine, HPV, and the disease it can cause.


When it comes to HPV vaccination, the education should include information about anti-vaccine groups. On their web sites,  there is often talk about vaccine cover-ups. One site says cervical cancer is nearly 100 percent avoidable without relying on a vaccine–that using condoms and maintaining a strong immune system are key.


One anti-vaccine website cites deaths from the  HPV vaccine.


On the CDC vaccine safety website, it says deaths have been reported to VAERS, the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, after HPV vaccines are given,  but that “There have been no patterns of death reports that would suggest they were caused by the vaccine.”


Calls to anti-vaccine organizations, including Vaccination Liberation, were not returned.


More on vaccines and pandemics:


Doctors Urge HPV Vaccine for Boys


Anti-Vaccine Campaigners Harm Developing World’s Health


Flu Vaccines in Grade Schools Significantly Curb Illness


Kathleen Doheny is a Los Angeles journalist who writes about health. She doesn’t believe inmiracle cures, but continues to hope someone will discover a way for joggers to maintain their pace.


Sexual Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Nic Cage starrer, Christian best-seller “Left Behind,” tops Arclight’s AFM lineup

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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – On the eve of the AFM, Arclight Films has taken on international sales duties for the film adaptation of the Christian-themed best-seller, “Left Behind,” a representative for the film told TheWrap on Tuesday.


The film, which will star Nicolas Cage and will be directed by Vic Armstrong, is looking for an early 2013 start date.





















The book about the end of the world hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list, with more than 65 million novels sold. It went on to be translated into 30 languages.


Arclight is also circling another project “Reclaim,” which is eyeing Isla Fisher (“The Great Gatsby”) for a starring role. Ian Sutherland, Alan White, and Brian Etting are producing, and Alan White is directing the film.


The filmmakers are also interested in Joel Edgerton for the picture, which follows a couple who go to Australia to adopt a little girl from Afghanistan. They wind up getting taken advantage of by criminals and soon find themselves in terrible danger.


Other projects in Arclight‘s AFM lineup includes “Heart of Darkness,” by Roger Donaldson; “Outcast,” which stars Hayden Christensen; “Predestination” with Ethan Hawke for the Spierig Brothers; “Mental,” starring Liev Schreiber; and “Berlin Job” from director Frank Harper. The company’s genre arm, Easternlight Films, is handling such titles as “Seven Assassins,” and “Dangerous Liaisons” with Zhang Ziyi.


“We are extremely excited about this year’s AFM and the commercial appeal of our slate,” Clay Epstein, VP sales & acquisitions for Arclight Films, said. “We are presenting the buyers with films that are not only perfect for the marketplace but well made projects we can all be very proud of.”


Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Obama touring hard-hit New Jersey

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ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — President Barack Obama got an up-close look at the devastation wrought by superstorm Sandy on Wednesday, forsaking partisan campaigning days before the close election in favor of a disaster tour guided by the Republican governor of New Jersey. Rival Mitt Romney muted criticism of his foe as he barnstormed battleground Florida.


Yet a controversy as heated as any in the long, intense struggle for the White House flared over Romney's late-campaign television and radio ads in bellwether Ohio. "Desperation," Vice President Joe Biden said of the broadcast claims that suggested automakers General Motors and Chrysler are adding jobs in China at the expense of Ohio workers. "One of the most flagrantly dishonest ads I can ever remember."


Republicans were unrepentant as Romney struggled for a breakthrough in the Midwest.


"American taxpayers are on track to lose $25 billion as a result of President Obama's handling of the auto bailout, and GM and Chrysler are expanding their production overseas," said an emailed statement issued in the name of Republican running mate Paul Ryan.


The two storms — one inflicted by nature, the other whipped up by rival campaigns — were at opposite ends of a race nearing its end in a flurry of early balloting by millions of voters, unrelenting advertising and so many divergent public opinion polls that the result was confusion, not clarity.


National surveys make the race a tight one for the popular vote, with Romney ahead by a statistically insignificant point or two in some, and Obama in others.


Both sides claim an advantage from battleground state soundings that also are tight. Obama's aides contend he is ahead or tied in all of them, while Romney's team counters that his campaign is expanding in its final days into what had long been deemed safe territory for the president in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.


The storm added yet another element of uncertainty, as Obama spent a third straight day embracing his role as incumbent and Romney tried to tread lightly during a major East Coast disaster.


The president received a briefing at the Federal Emergency Management Agency across town from the White House before flying to New Jersey, where the shoreline absorbed some of the worst damage in a storm that killed 50 and laid waste to New York City's electrical and transportation systems.


Gov. Chris Christie was waiting when Air Force One landed, and he and Obama, two figures in blue windbreakers, walked together toward the president's helicopter to begin their tour. It was a tableau that seemed impossible a week ago — a president struggling to defend his economic record in a tight election, flying off to a non-battleground state to spend the afternoon in the company of the man who delivered the keynote address at Romney's Republican National Convention this summer.

 

The storm forced an abrupt change in Romney's campaign, as well.


A spokesman, Kevin Madden, told reporters the president's challenger maintained a "positive tone and talked about what the governor would hope to do on day one of his presidency.


Romney told his crowd in Tampa, "We love all of our fellow citizens. We come together at times like this, and we want to make sure that they have a speedy and quick recovery from their financial and, in many cases, personal loss." His criticism of Obama was glancing. "I don't just talk about change. I actually have a plan to execute change and make it happen."


But the clash was ferocious over Romney's broadcast ads. The radio version said that after Obama's auto bailout, General Motors "cut 15,000 American jobs, but they are planning to double the number of cars built in China which means 15,000 more jobs for China.


"And now comes word that Chrysler is starting to build cars in, you guessed it, China."


Biden said the ads were scurrilous, and he noted that executives from General Motors and Chrysler, which produces Jeeps, had said the claims were inaccurate.


"Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is, just recently in the last couple of months, in Toledo, Ohio, not only is the Jeep plant open and churning out Jeeps, they announced they're adding 1,100 new jobs."


Ryan's emailed response conceded nothing. "President Obama has chosen not to run on the facts of his record, but he can't run from them," it said.


His reference to a $25 billion cost to taxpayers reflected the Treasury Department's most recent estimate of the amount General Motors and Chrysler still owe the government from the financing it received during a managed bankruptcy in 2009.


Ryan didn't mention that the two companies have repaid billions more than that. Nor did he refer to Obama's frequent claim that the administration's bailout, which Romney opposed, saved large numbers of jobs and prevented the collapse of the U.S. auto industry itself.


Obama's aides said the president would return to political travel on Thursday with stops in Wisconsin, Nevada and Colorado. But for one more day, he was hands-on commander of the federal response to Sandy, and consoler-in-chief for its victims.


He and Christie flew by helicopter over washed-out roads, flooded homes, boardwalks bobbing in the ocean, and in Seaside Heights, a fire still burning after ruining about eight structures.


The president's itinerary also included a community center in Brigantine Beach that is serving as a shelter for local storm victims. Officials said about 200 people were sleeping in the center's gym at the height of the storm, a number that has been reduced.


The political impact of the storm on the race was difficult to gauge.


Obama senior adviser David Axelrod told reporters it had "tended to freeze this race" in place because "people are focused on the storm. That's what's been in the news."


Not everyone, and not all the time.


In the race's final days, Romney's campaign is running ads in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, two states long considered safe for the president, and the Republican's allies are airing commercials in Michigan and New Mexico.


Obama's aides insisted the states were safe for him, but it dispatched former President Bill Clinton to Minnesota, and purchased airtime in the other three states to respond to the Republicans.


Both campaigns invested in get-out-the-vote operations well in advance of Election Day.


Officials in Florida said more than 2.6 billion ballots had been cast as of Tuesday night. Democrats voted in slightly higher numbers than Republicans, but nearly 450,000 voters were independents.


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Associated Press writers Steve Peoples and Kasie Hunt in Florida, Philip Elliott in Eau Claire, Wis., Ben Feller, Charles Babington, Ken Thomas and Martin Crutsinger in Washington, Matthew Daly in Sarasota, Fla., Brian Bakst in St. Paul, Minn., and Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Fla., contributed to this report. Espo reported from Washington.

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

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


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





















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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Hurricane Sandy disrupts Northeast U.S. telecom networks

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Power outages and flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy disrupted telecommunications services in Northeastern states on Tuesday, resulting in spotty coverage for cellphones, television, home telephones and Internet services.


While all the region's telecom service providers were having problems, Verizon Communications, which serves many of the states in the hurricane's path, appeared to have suffered some of the worst damage from the storm.


The New York-based company said the storm caused flooding at three Verizon central offices that hold telecom equipment in Lower Manhattan as well as sites in Queens and Long Island.


Its downtown headquarters, which was put out of action 11 years ago by the September 11 attacks, had three feet of water in the lobby at one point. Because of flooding, all its telecom equipment at that office, which serves much of Wall Street and downtown consumers, was knocked out of service.


The company said it was working on pumping out the water in the hope that it could restart its back-up power generators in the facility as commercial power services were not yet restored the morning after the big storm hit.


"The bullseye of the impact is the metro area," said spokesman William Kula, adding that restoring service for the city's financial district was a top priority for Verizon.


Telecom disruptions affect electronic trading as well as corporate operators. The Chief Operating Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, which does not expect to open again until Wednesday, said "lots of telecom infrastructure is down" and that the NYSE was working with big firms to ensure they were doing testing of their systems.


Verizon did not give an estimate as to how many businesses and consumers were affected. Two of three Manhattan central offices were partially flooded and operating minimal services.


Customers served by the damaged central offices will experience "a loss of all services" including TV, Internet, and traditional telephone services, Kula said. Some customers may experience intermittent busy signals for non-emergency calls.


Verizon said its engineers were working on assessing the damage from the early hours. Outside of New York, the company warned that it was also having some trouble.


"Verizon is discovering that many poles and power lines/Verizon cables are down throughout the region due to heavy winds and falling trees," the company said in a statement.


Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA said they were dealing with wireless service problems in the hurricane region. Cable operators Cablevision Systems Corp, Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable also said they were having service problems.


"I think everybody's equipment's going to be damaged, including cellphone towers," Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher King said from his Verizon Wireless cellphone in Baltimore.


"Particularly for Verizon, they're clearly going to have the most damage on the wireline side because its pretty much all of their territory (where the storm hit)," King said.


Sprint Nextel, the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider said it was seeing outages at some cell sites because of the power outages across all the states in Sandy's path including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, North Virginia and New England.


"(Repair crews) have started on some critical areas but they haven't been able to get to everywhere they need to be," spokeswoman Crystal Davis said. She noted that 80 of the company's stores would reopen at noon. Sprint had closed about 180 stores ahead of the storm.


T-Mobile USA said that "customers may be experiencing service disruptions or an inability to access service in some areas, especially those that were hardest hit by the storm."


People complained of outages to their cable telephone, Internet and television services from providers including Comcast, Cablevision and Verizon in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York.


Cablevision said it was experiencing widespread service interruptions primarily related to loss of power. The company said it is working to restore services.


Comcast, whose headquarters is in Philadelphia and serves East Coast states, said that for the majority of customers, "Comcast service should be restored as power comes back on to their homes."


Cellphone service was spotty for top wireless providers Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, according to some customers.


Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group, said on Tuesday afternoon that customers may be experiencing service issues and that about 94 percent of its cell sites were up and running.


AT&T said it was experiencing some issues in areas heavily affected by the storm. By Tuesday morning spokesman Mark Siegel said AT&T was in the initial stages of on-the-ground assessment and that it expected "crews will be working around the clock to restore service."


Several Time Warner Cable customers in Brooklyn said that their Internet, television and phone services stopped working Monday night but were back again by Tuesday morning.


Time Warner Cable said that while it has not seen any major damage to its infrastructure, its customers who do not have electricity do not have cable services.


Millions of people in the eastern United States awoke on Tuesday to flooded homes, fallen trees and widespread power outages caused by Sandy, which swamped New York City's subway system and submerged streets in Manhattan's financial district.


At least 30 people were reported killed in the United States by one of the biggest storms to ever hit the country. Sandy dropped just below hurricane status before making landfall on Monday night in New Jersey.


(Additional reporting by Jennifer Saba, Liana Baker in New York and other Reuters reporters around the hurricane region; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)


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Meningitis outbreak toll: 363 cases, 28 deaths

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An outbreak of fungal meningitis has been linked to steroid shots for back pain. The medication, made by a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts, has been recalled.


Latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:





















Illnesses: 363, including seven joint infections.


Deaths: 28.


States: 19; Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.


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Online:


CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/outbreaks/meningitis.html


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Letterman and Fallon tape sans audiences as Stewart and Colbert cancel shows due to Sandy

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NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon said they would tape their shows without audiences Monday as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert joined Jimmy Kimmel in cancelling tapings because of Hurricane Sandy.


All decided to cancel or not admit audiences because of fears of people being injured going to or from the tapings. Kimmel, who normally tapes in Los Angeles, is in Brooklyn for this week’s tapings of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”





















Letterman’s “Late Show” on CBS will also tape without an audience on Tuesday. Fallon’s “Late Night” will be audience-free for at least Monday. There was no word on whether “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report” would return Tuesday.


The late-night shows join a long list of entertainment options that have shut down because of the storm: Broadway and movie theaters were shuttered, and Louis C.K. rescheduled a standup performance Sunday at New York’s City Center.


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Sandy's death toll climbs; millions without power

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NEW YORK (AP) — Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas awoke Tuesday without electricity, and an eerily quiet New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air as superstorm Sandy steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain. The U.S. death toll climbed to 39, many of the victims killed by falling trees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.


Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Google unveils first 10-inch Nexus tablet

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang)


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