Clinton calls for overhaul of Syrian opposition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW LEADERSHIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In hurricane, Twitter proves a lifeline despite pranksters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – As Hurricane Sandy pounded the U.S. Atlantic coast on Monday night, knocking out electricity and Internet connections, millions of residents turned to Twitter as a part-newswire, part-911 hotline that hummed through the night even as some websites failed and swathes of Manhattan fell dark.

But the social network also became a fertile ground for pranksters who seized the moment to disseminate rumors and Photoshopped images, including a false tweet Monday night that the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange was submerged under several feet of water.

The exchange issued a denial, but not before the tweet was circulated by countless users and reported on-air by CNN, illustrating how Twitter had become the essential – but deeply fallible – spine of information coursing through real-time, major media events.

But a year after Twitter gained attention for its role in the rescue efforts in tsunami-stricken Japan, the network seemed to solidify its mainstream foothold as government agencies, news outlets and residents in need turned to it at the most critical hour.

Beginning late Sunday, government agencies and officials, from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo(@NYGovCuomo) to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (@FEMA) to @NotifyNYC, an account handled by New York City’s emergency management officials, issued evacuation orders and updates.

As the storm battered New York Monday night, residents encountering clogged 9-1-1 dispatch lines flooded the Fire Department’s @fdny Twitter account with appeals for information and help for trapped relatives and friends.

One elderly resident needed rescue in a building in Manhattan Beach. Another user sent @fdny an Instagram photo of four insulin shots that she needed refrigerated immediately. Yet another sought a portable generator for a friend on a ventilator living downtown.

Emily Rahimi, who manages the @fdny account by herself, according to a department spokesman, coolly fielded dozens of requests, while answering questions about whether to call 311, New York’s non-emergency help line, or Consolidated Edison.

At the Red Cross of America’s Washington D.C. headquarters, in a small room called the Digital Operations Center, six wall-mounted monitors display a stream of updates from Twitter and Facebook and a visual “heat map” of where posts seeking help are coming from.

The heat map informed how the Red Cross‘s aid workers deployed their resources, said Wendy Harman, the Red Cross director of social strategy.

The Red Cross was also using Radian6, a social media monitoring tool sold by Salesforce.com, to spot people seeking help and answer their questions.

“We found out we can carry out the mission of the Red Cross from the social Web,” said Harman, who hosted a brief visit from President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

SPREADING INFORMATION

Twitter, which in the past year has heavily ramped up its advertising offerings and features to suit large brand marketers like Pepsico Inc and Procter & Gamble, suddenly found itself offering its tools to new kind of client on Monday: public agencies that wanted help spreading information.

For the first time, the company created a “#Sandy” event page – a format once reserved for large ad-friendly media events like the Olympics or Nascar races – that served as a hub where visitors could see aggregated information. The page displayed manually- and algorithmically-selected tweets plucked from official accounts like those of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was particularly active on the network.

Agencies like the Maryland Emergency Management Agency and the New York Mayor’s Office also used Twitter’s promoted tweets – an ad product used by advertisers to reach a broader consumer base – to get out the word.

The company said offering such services for free to government agencies was one of several initiatives, including a service that broadcasts location-specific alerts and public announcements based on a Twitter user’s postal code.

“We learned from the storm and tsunami in Japan that Twitter can often be a lifeline,” said Rachael Horwitz, a Twitter spokeswoman.

Jeannette Sutton, a sociologist at the University of Colorado who has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security to study social media uses in disaster management, said government agencies have been skeptical until recently about using social media during natural disasters.

“There’s a big problem with whether it’s valid, accurate information out there,” Sutton said. “But if you’re not part of the conversation, you’re going to be missing out.”

As the hurricane hit one of the most wired regions in the country, news outlets also took advantage of the smartphone users who chronicled rising tides on every flooded block. On Instagram, the photo-sharing website, witnesses shared color-filtered snapshots of floating cars, submerged gas stations and a building shorn of its facade at a rate of more than 10 pictures per second, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told Poynter.org on Tuesday.

Many of the images were republished in the live coverage by news websites and aired on television broadcasts.

LIES SLAPPED DOWN

But by late Monday, fake images began to circulate widely, including a picture of a storm cloud gathering dramatically over the Statue of Liberty and a photoshopped job of a shark lurking in a submerged residential neighborhood. The latter image even surfaced on social networks in China.

Then there was the slew of fabricated message from @comfortablysmug, the Twitter account that claimed the NYSE was underwater. The account is owned by Shashank Tripathi, the hedge fund investor and campaign manager for Christopher Wight, the Republican candidate to represent New York’s 12th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Tripathi, who did not return emails by Reuters seeking comment, apologized Tuesday night for making a “series of irresponsible and inaccurate tweets” and resigned from Wight’s campaign.

His identity was first reported by Jack Stuef of BuzzFeed.

Around 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Tripathi began deleting many of his Hurricane Sandy tweets. Tripathi’s friend, @theAshok, defended Tripathi, telling Reuters on Twitter: “People shouldn’t be taking “news” from an anonymous twitter account seriously.”

Tripathi’s @comfortablysmug’s Twitter stream, which is followed by business journalists, bloggers and various New York personalities, had been a well-known voice in digital circles, but mostly for his 140-character-or-less criticisms of the Obama administration, often accompanied by the hashtag, #ObamaIsn’tWorking.

On Tuesday, New York City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. appeared to threaten Tripathi with prosecution when he tweeted that he hoped Tripathi was “less smug and comfortable cuz I’m talking to Cy,” presumably referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

For its part, Twitter said that it would not have considered suspending the account unless it received a request from a law enforcement agency.

“We don’t moderate content, and we certainly don’t want to be in a position of deciding what speech is OK and what speech is not,” said Horwitz, Twitter’s spokeswoman.

But Ben Smith, the editor at Buzzfeed, which outed Tripathi, said Twitter’s credibility would not be affected by rumormongers because netizens often self-correct and identify falsehoods.

“They used to say a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes on, but in the Twitter world, that’s not true anymore,” Smith said. “The lies get slapped down really fast.”

For Smith, the ability to disseminate information via Twitter and Facebook on Monday night became perhaps even more important than his Web publication, which enjoyed one of its better nights in readership but went dark when the blackout crippled the site’s servers in downtown Manhattan.

Buzzfeed’s staff quickly began publishing on Tumblr instead, and Smith personally took over Buzzfeed’s Twitter account to stay in the thick of the conversation.

“Our view of the world is that social distribution is the key thing,” Smith said. “We’re in the business of creating content that people want to share, more than the business of maintaining a website.”

(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco and Jennifer Ablan and Felix Salmon in New York; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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http://www.taylorswift.com

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

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Hurricane Babies: Myths and Realities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NYC Rats: Stronger Than Sandy

Unprecedented flooding throughout low-lying portions of New York City over the past two days undoubtedly left hundreds—if not thousands—of rats scrambling for their dear lives. According to experts, most of them likely survived. “They’re a jack of all trades when it comes to locomotion,” says Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. “They can’t sprint, but they run well; they’re not Michael Phelps, but they’re strong swimmers; and even though they don’t have prehensile tails, they climb well. They do it all.”

Ostfeld notes that rats can easily swim a couple hundred yards. In fact, he says, “one of the ways that rats have dispersed around the world is by jumping off of ships and swimming to shore—the proverbial ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’ is actually based on reality.”

No one knows exactly how many rats live in New York City, but Ostfeld suspects that there are at least as many rats as humans. The city’s population is dominated by the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), an invader from Europe, and the Black rat (Rattus rattus), which originated in Asia. These highly resilient rats can be found throughout New York City, but they usually don’t travel far within those limits.

The displacement of rats caused by Hurricane Sandy—a dispersal of rats that is likely unprecedented for the city in terms of numbers—has Ostfeld concerned about a possible increased spread of rat-borne diseases. “You get infected individuals mixing with uninfected individuals and that’s a recipe for an outbreak,” says Ostfeld. “It spreads like the flu, from rat to rat.”

Urban rats are known to carry infectious diseases including leptospirosis, typhus, salmonella, hantavirus, and even the plague. The incubation period for these diseases in humans is usually a couple of weeks or months, and symptoms are often similar to those of a common flu. According to Ostfeld, “In the coming weeks and months, health-care providers should have rat-borne diseases on their radars and potentially test for them.”

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Hurricane’s death toll rises to 65 in Caribbean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nexus 10 Cheaper Than iPad; Has Sharper Screen, Fewer Apps

Up to now, Google has avoided competing directly with Apple‘s iPad. It’s done so indirectly, through third-party products like the Motorola Xoom, and the many other generic-brand Android tablets. But when Google itself stepped up to bat, earlier this year, it released the Nexus 7, which is half the size and half the price of the iPad, and designed to compete with the Kindle Fire and Nook.

Perhaps Google’s Android execs are feeling more confident this fall. Because right after Apple’s new iPad came out, they’ve just released the aggressively-priced $ 399 Nexus 10 tablet, made in partnership with Samsung (the way Asus produced the last Nexus-branded tablet). It’s got a number of hardware and feature advantages over the iPad … but still suffers from the same big disadvantage all Android tablets have.

The good news

Just like with PCs versus Macs, Android devices tend to compete favorably spec-wise. And according to their respective tech specs (iPad, Nexus 10), the Nexus 10 is thinner and lighter than the new full-sized iPad, even though it has a larger screen (10.055 inches across diagonally compared to 9.7 inches).

The other big way that the Nexus 10 outperforms the iPad? That larger screen is sharper than even the Retina Display, at 300 versus 264 ppi (pixels per inch). Screens this sharp are becoming expected on modern tablets, while Apple continues to expand them into its laptop lineup as well.

Unlike the Nexus 7, the Nexus 10 features a rear-facing camera. Its front-facing camera (for video chats) is sharper than the iPad’s, although megapixel ratings are rarely the best way to tell which camera is better and Apple’s built-in cameras are world-class. Likewise, the Nexus 10 product page makes a point of its having 2 GB of RAM, while Apple’s only says that the iPad features a “Dual-core A6X” processor.

The bad news

The Nexus 10′s biggest weakness? Its dearth of apps compared to the iPad’s App Store selection. There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the Google Play store, but its game selection lags up to a year behind Apple’s and there are far fewer tablet-specific apps. Even some major apps, like Amazon.com and Flickr, didn’t work on the Nexus 7′s Jelly Bean version of Android, although it’s still possible to visit their sites in the browser.

Google’s Nexus 10 product page goes on at length about how you can watch movies and TV shows through Google Play, plus read magazines and join Google+ Hangouts. On the subject of apps, though, it’s conspicuously silent. Especially compared to Apple’s iPad site, which has a whole section devoted to the App Store.

It does note that the Nexus 10 can run Google apps, like Chrome and Google Earth. And especially with the removal of the Google Maps app from Apple devices, Google apps on Android tend to be far ahead of where they are on iOS. They also tend to have more ads, though — a “feature” being increasingly pushed on customers through tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire, but absent from Apple’s premium products.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

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Ghosts scare off gore for Halloween movies

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After almost a decade in which torture films dominated the box office, horror movies are returning to ghostly thrills with a new slew of low-budget productions making big money for studios.

The success of 2009′s “Paranormal Activity” – which was made for $ 15,000 and grossed more than $ 107 million at U.S. box offices – has fueled a thirst in audiences and movie studios for things that go bump in the night.

Halloween audiences previously gripped by the gory “Saw” franchise about a sadistic serial killer are flocking this season to see supernatural horrors, with “Sinister” and “Paranormal Activity 4″ providing otherworldly scares for the spooky festivities.

The supernatural trend, with very little blood, started this year with “The Woman in Black” and “The Apparition”, and will spill into 2013 with upcoming horror films including “Mama”, “Evil Dead”, “Carrie”, and ghostly spoof “Scary Movie 5″, which will parody “Paranormal Activity“.

“It’s a return to a more classic style of suspense,” Henry Joost, who co-directed the third and fourth “Paranormal Activity” films with Ariel Schulman, told Reuters.

“When you’ve just been obliterated with gore, having it slammed in your face for a decade, you respond by seeking the opposite.”

“Sinister”, currently playing in U.S. movie theaters for Halloween-loving audiences, features an author (Ethan Hawke) who discovers home videos of mysterious murders and soon finds himself pursued by an otherworldly presence.

Director Scott Derrickson said audiences were drawn to bloodless supernatural horrors as a means to escape from news about wars and violent killings.

“There’s something about the real-world pain and violence that has enveloped the American reality, that makes films like (“Saw”) not necessarily the catharsis that people are looking for,” Derrickson told Reuters in an interview.

INEXPENSIVE GHOSTS REAP BOX-OFFICE BENEFITS

“Saw”, made for $ 1.2 million, grossed more than $ 55 million at the U.S. box office in 2004 and spawned a franchise, leading a slew of films dubbed “torture porn” for the excessive use of gratuitous violence.

The trend produced the “Hostel” trilogy, 2006′s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” and 2008′s “The Strangers”.

But while the “Saw” franchise initially brought in big money for movie studios – the second and third films each grossed more than $ 80 million at the domestic box office – the profits slowed by 2009, when the franchise’s seventh and final film “Saw 3D: The Final Chapter” was made for $ 20 million and grossed only $ 45 million.

“The torture porn stuff really played itself out, ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel’, they were just too much. People want to be engaged with the story and not just grossed beyond imagination,” Bradley Jacobs, film editor at Us Weekly, told Reuters.

In comparison, the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, which relies on suspense and strange phenomena, has revamped the genre with a more cost-effective model since most of the scares are off-screen and on deliberately grainy footage, minimizing the need for costly special effects and action shots.

The second “Paranormal” film was shot for an estimated $ 3 million and made $ 84 million, while the third film, made for $ 5 million, has grossed more than $ 104 million in North America.

“The profitability of making a film for less than $ 5 million and hedging the bet of the financiers and the studios with a possible giant upside becomes extremely attractive,” Derrickson said.

“Sinister”, made for $ 3 million, has grossed $ 39 million after three weeks in U.S. theaters. “Paranormal Activity 4″, which cost $ 5 million, has made more than $ 42 million since it opened on October 19.

“Audiences realized that the feeling of suspense and the anticipation of horror is actually more emotionally impacting than graphic horror itself in these low-budget movies,” Derrickson said.

The “Paranormal Activity” franchise was released by Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc, while Lions Gate Entertainment’s Summit studio distributed “Sinister” as well as the “Saw” and “Hostel” films.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Dale Hudson)

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Meningitis outbreak spreads to 19 states with case in Rhode Island

(Reuters) – The deadly meningitis outbreak tied to steroid injections from potentially tainted medications spread to a 19th state on Monday with the first case reported in Rhode Island, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Only four of the 23 states that received some of the medication have not reported cases of fungal meningitis, which has killed 25 people nationwide.

The four states that have not reported at least one case of meningitis are California, Nevada, West Virginia and Connecticut, the CDC said.

The total number of meningitis cases including the expansion to Rhode Island reached 347 nationwide on Monday, the CDC said, up 10 from the last report on Saturday.

There also are seven reported cases of infections after the tainted steroid was injected into a joint such as a knee, hip, shoulder or elbow, bringing the total number of infections to 354.

The steroid was supplied by New England Compounding Center of Massachusetts, which faces multiple investigations. Health authorities have said its facility near Boston failed to make medications in sterile conditions.

(Reporting by Greg McCune; Editing by Eric Beech)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sandy and 100 Years of Hurricanes

Even before it slammed into the New Jersey coast, Hurricane Sandy had disrupted travel, halted stock trading, and forced thousands to flee to higher ground.  Rated initially as a Category 1 hurricane (based on the five-point Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale), Sandy still was, as President Barack Obama put it, “a serious and big storm.” Its 90 mph winds spanned more than 900 miles across and the prospect of flooding and wind damage left New York City a ghost town as the East Coast awaited its landfall.

Here’s a look at Sandy’s damage so far, and a look back at the worst U.S. storms of the past 100 years.
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