Officials: New mass graves found in Ivory Coast

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — Up to 10 new mass graves have been discovered near the site of a July attack on a camp for displaced people, officials said Tuesday, amid allegations that initial casualty totals were downplayed to mask killings carried out by the national army.

Rights groups claim summary executions were carried out by the Republican Forces of Ivory Coast, known by its French acronym of FRCI. Last month, officials found six bodies in a well close to the former campsite in the western town of Duekoue.

Government, army and U.N. officials toured 10 more graves in the same area on Saturday, said Paul Mondouho, vice-mayor of Duekoue. He said the graves had first been identified by civilians, and that officials did not know the number of bodies they contained because they had not yet been properly exhumed.

“People were suspecting the presence of bodies in these graves because of the smell coming out of them and because of the shoes we saw nearby,” Mondouho said.

Prosecutor Noel Dje Enrike Yahau, who is based in the commercial capital of Abidjan, confirmed that multiple new graves had been discovered but could not provide details. U.N. officials and the local prosecutor in charge of investigating the suspected killings could not be reached Tuesday.

U.N. spokeswoman Sylvie van den Wildenberg confirmed that U.N. forces helped Ivorian authorities secure a perimeter around 10 wells “similar to the one in which six bodies were found,” and that “some of those wells are suspected mass graves.”

She stressed that Ivorian authorities were leading the investigation but that the U.N. was able to provide assistance.

Army spokesmen could not be reached Tuesday. The Justice Ministry has previously vowed to investigate the discovery of the initial grave.

On the morning of July 20, a mob descended on the U.N.-guarded Nahibly camp, which housed 4,500 people displaced by violence in Ivory Coast, burning most of the camp to the ground. Officials said at the time that six people were killed.

The attack was prompted by the shooting deaths of four men and one woman on the night of July 19, according to local officials and residents. In response a mob of some 300 people overran the camp on the morning of July 20 after the perpetrators of the shootings reportedly fled there.

The victims in the July 19 attack lived in a district dominated by the Malinke ethnic group, which largely supported President Alassane Ouattara in the disputed November 2010 election. The camp primarily housed members of the Guere ethnic group, which largely supported former President Laurent Gbagbo.

Gbagbo’s refusal to cede office despite losing the election to Ouattara sparked months of violence that claimed at least 3,000 lives.

Albert Koenders, the top U.N. envoy to Ivory Coast, said one week after the attack that U.N. security forces had been inside and outside the camp at the time but that no Ivorian security forces were present. He said the U.N. forces decided not to fire at a large group of people that were attacking the camp in order to avoid “a massacre.”

Several witnesses have said soldiers and traditional hunters, known as dozos, participated in the attack on the camp. Both military and dozo leaders have denied the claims, saying they had tried to protect the camp.

In a statement released Friday, the International Federation for Human Rights, known by its French acronym of FIDH, said it had information — including the preliminary results of autopsies — confirming that the six bodies found in October were men who had been summarily executed by the army.

“The disappearance of dozens of displaced persons after the attack, as well as confirmation of cases of summary and extra-judicial executions, suggest a much higher victim rate than the official figures report,” said the organization, which counts Ivorian civil society groups among its members.

Duekoue was one of the hardest-hit towns during the post-election violence. The U.N. has established that at least 505 people were killed in and around the town, including during a notorious March 2011 massacre that claimed hundreds of lives and was allegedly carried out by fighters loyal to Ouattara.

Duekoue residents belonging to ethnic groups that supported Gbagbo have long complained about abuses carried out by the FRCI, with some pointing to the direct involvement of the local commander, Kone Daouda. FIDH said in its statement that Daouda had been transferred following the discovery of the grave in October, and called for him to be interrogated over the matter.

The group also said two FRCI members were being “actively sought” after failing to return to their barracks on Oct. 16, noting that they are believed to have fled to neighboring Burkina Faso.

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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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If Romney wins, he would begin his first term as a baffling figure

By Walter Shapiro

In the frenetic closing hours of a hard-fought presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has been ballyhooing his bipartisan credentials. It’s part of his final argument to persuadable voters that he’s really Moderate Mitt rather than the “severely conservative” Massachusetts governor of the Republican primaries.

In Sanford, Fla., on Monday, Romney boasted that in Massachusetts, working with “a Democrat legislature—85 percent Democrat—I helped turn my state from deficit to surplus.” And the Republican nominee in his final major campaign speech Friday in West Allis, Wis., pledged, “When I’m elected, I will work with Republicans and Democrats in Congress. I will meet regularly with their leaders.”

All this brings to mind a delicious story from Romney’s first days as governor in 2003. At a closed-to-the-press meeting with top legislative leaders, Romney told them about his private-sector management philosophy from Bain Capital, “My usual approach has been to set out the strategic vision for the enterprise and then work with the executive vice presidents to implement that strategy.”

As Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman make clear in their biography, “The Real Romney,” the mostly Democratic legislators were not amused by Romney’s business theories of political governance. Regardless of party, few legislators in Congress or on Beacon Hill in Boston see themselves as second-tier management implementing someone else’s strategic vision.

Romney has matured as a political leader over the past decade, though he has spent more time running for president than serving in public office. And Romney did have legislative victories in Massachusetts, including (shhh!) a health care reform plan eerily similar to the President Barack Obama’s.

The lasting relevance of that Massachusetts anecdote lies in the way it highlights the painful transition from the glib certainties of the campaign trail to the unrelenting demands of actually governing. It’s why it’s still hard to see the relevance to the White House in Romney’s frequent campaign trail claim, “I promise change—and I have a record of achieving it. I built a business, and turned around another.”

If Romney were elected, he would probably have to deal with a divided Congress in which Democrats retain a narrow majority in the Senate while the Republicans are in command of the House. The legislative arithmetic for Romney would revolve around the necessity to pick up about a dozen Democratic votes to overcome any Senate filibuster.

As the 45th president, Romney might well be able to enact a significant portion of his domestic agenda during the post-inaugural honeymoon period thanks to GOP discipline and Democratic skittishness.

Obamacare would almost certainly be eviscerated or eliminated, though in an era of austerity budgeting, it’s hard to imagine what alternatives would be offered to the uninsured. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would be made permanent—and business would be granted a permissive regulatory climate.

Far trickier would be enacting Romney’s signature proposal to slash all income tax rates by 20 percent and make up the revenue loss by closing loopholes and ending deductions. The intractable problem is that President Romney would either have to slash popular deductions like mortgage interest or concede that his numbers cannot add up as revenue neutral. Whenever Congress gets into the act on taxes, it is a safe bipartisan prediction that no voting bloc suffers and the deficit soars.

Beyond the bold strokes of his budget-slashing economic agenda, Romney would enter the Oval Office as a baffling political figure. He has reinvented himself politically so many times from his centrist days of his 1994 Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy to the fire-breathing conservatism of the Republican presidential primaries that it’s impossible for an outsider to know what’s real. In fact, Romney himself may be a bit bewildered as to where he stands.

A Romney presidency might be a portrait in schizophrenia.

On one hand, he probably would assign key roles to soft-right Republican advisers like the former Utah governor Mike Leavitt (who heads the transition team) and Beth Myers (who ran the vice-presidential search).

But whatever his personal beliefs, Romney also understands that the right-wing conservatives who dominate the Republican Party have accepted him with reservations. Whether picking Supreme Court nominees or charting his way through the thicket of social issues, President Romney would be keenly aware of the implicit threat of a primary challenge in 2016 if he deviates far from doctrinal purity.

Every new president in his confident, post-election naiveté makes serious errors. In fact, the desk chair in the Oval Office should come with a seat belt and training wheels.

The character test lies in how a new president responds to the discovery that no one, not even a veteran of Bain Capital, is prepared for the rigors of the White House. What he does with that knowledge—rather than his six-year quest for the White House—would be the true measure of the leadership style of Mitt Romney.

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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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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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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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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.

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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

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

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sandy could cast doubt on election results

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The devastating storm that slammed into the U.S. East Coast last week could send winds of uncertainty through Tuesday's presidential election, narrowing an already close contest and casting doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome.

Though superstorm Sandy is unlikely to determine whether President Barack Obama or Republican Mitt Romney wins the White House, experts said it could expose flaws in how the United States conducts elections, leading to protracted legal wrangling and lingering bitterness in a country already fractured along partisan lines.

In a worst-case scenario, the storm disruption could cause Obama to lose the popular vote and still win re-election, stirring up vitriolic memories of the contested 2000 battle that allowed Republican George W. Bush to triumph over Democrat Al Gore.

Last-minute changes imposed by election officials also could

further arm campaign lawyers looking to challenge the result.

At minimum, low turnout would add another wild card to an election projected to be among the closest in U.S. history. Voting could be an afterthought for hundreds of thousands of people still struggling with power outages, fuel shortages and plummeting temperatures.

"It's a possibility that we'll see significant drops in turnout in some of these densely populated areas," said George Mason University professor Michael MacDonald, a voter turnout expert.

"The effects could be quite dramatic in terms of the popular vote," he said.

ONE MORE HEADACHE

Tuesday's election presents yet another headache for local officials in New York and New Jersey, which were hardest hit by the storm. Rescue workers are still recovering bodies, 1.9 million homes and businesses have no power, and tens of thousands of people are without heat as temperatures dip near freezing.

Sandy, one of the most damaging storms to hit the United States, hammered the region with 80-mile-per-hour (129-kph) winds, while walls of water overran seaside communities. At least 113 people in the United States and Canada died.

Election authorities now face unprecedented challenges. In New York City, 143,000 voters have been assigned new polling stations. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Sunday called the city's elections board "dysfunctional" and warned that it needs to clearly communicate changes to poll workers.

In New Jersey, where 25 percent of homes and businesses have no power, officials are allowing displaced voters to cast their ballots by email. In battered Monmouth County, officials are spreading the word about new polling locations in at least 29 towns and setting aside paper ballots to use if electronic voting machines fail.

"Whatever it takes, Asbury Park is voting," City Manager Terence Reidy said.

Legal experts said the late changes, however well-intentioned, may give the losing candidate a basis to challenge results.

"The devil is in the details and no doubt these new rules will be fertile ground for those who choose to challenge the results in the election." said Angelo Genova, a New Jersey election law expert who represents Democratic candidates in this election.

The post-Sandy chaos also could expose flaws in the arcane electoral college system the United States uses to elect presidents.

Candidates are not required to win the popular vote nationwide, but they must amass a majority of the 538 "electoral votes" that are awarded to each state based on population. The system was set up when the United States was founded, as a compromise between slave states and free states.

Usually the electoral college winner also wins the popular vote. But in two elections - 1876 and 2000 - the results diverged, creating historic controversies.

This year, Obama is expected to handily win New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the states most impacted by the storm. But his popular vote total could fall by hundreds of thousands if large numbers of storm-hit voters in Democratic areas are unable to participate. Conceivably, Obama could win the White House while losing the popular vote.

Several experts said they consider that outcome unlikely.

"You'll see lower turnout, yes, but it's not going to change the outcome of the election," said Hunter College political-science professor Jamie Chandler, who predicts Obama will win by at least 1 million votes.

If Obama carries the popular vote by a narrow margin, it could have implications on his ability to govern effectively, according to Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.

"The more Obama has a solid popular margin the better his victory," he said.

On Sunday, several Republicans said the storm gave Obama an advantage in the campaign's final week by shifting public attention away from the sluggish economy and other topics they hoped to emphasize.

"The hurricane is what broke Romney's momentum," former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said on CNN.

Obama campaign officials said that they are confident the storm will not interfere with the voting process. But they intend to have legal experts on standby just in case.

"We're going to have lawyers who are ready to make sure people can exercise their right to vote. We're going to protect that as fiercely as we can," Obama senior adviser David Plouffe said on Friday.

(Fixes typo in quote in 14th paragraph) (Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Erin Smith, Jonathan Spicer, Philip Barbara and Andrew Longstreth; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Paul Simao)

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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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Apple sells 3 million iPads over first weekend

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