Blue Laws Curb Consumerism Where Pilgrims Gave Thanks

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

The annual Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth, Mass., is held the weekend before the holiday, so as not to interfere.

PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Here in the birthplace of Thanksgiving, where the Pilgrims first gave thanks in 1621 for their harvest and their survival, some residents are giving thanks this year for something else: the Colonial-era blue laws that prevent retailers from opening their doors on the fourth Thursday of November.

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

Participants in Saturday's town parade.

While shoppers in the rest of the country will skip out on Thanksgiving to go to Walmart or Kmart or other big-box stores, William Wrestling Brewster, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower and participated in that first Thanksgiving, will limit his activities to enjoying a traditional meal here with his extended family at his parents’ house.

“Thanksgiving is supposed to be about giving thanks for all you have,” said Mr. Brewster, 47, who runs a computer repair business. “I cringe to think what society is doing to itself,” he said of the mercantile mania that threatens one of the least commercial holidays.

Some of the nation’s biggest retailers — Sears, Target and Toys “R” Us among them — announced this month that they would be moving up their predawn Black Friday door-buster sales to Thanksgiving Day or moving up their existing Thanksgiving sales even earlier on Thursday. Walmart, which has already been open on Thanksgiving for many years, is advancing its bargain specials to 8 p.m. Thursday from 10 p.m.

But in Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the stores will sit dark until the wee hours of Friday. Even Walmart will not open in Maine until just after midnight Friday or in Massachusetts or Rhode Island until 1 a.m.

New England’s blue laws were put down by early settlers to enforce proper behavior on Sundays. (The origin of the term is unclear. Some have said the laws were printed on blue paper, while others have said the word “blue” was meant to disparage those like the “blue noses” who imposed rigid moral codes on others.)

Over decades, many of those laws — which banned commerce, entertainment and the sale of alcohol, among other things — were tossed aside or ignored, or exemptions were granted. In some cases, the statutes were extended to holidays and barred retailers specifically from operating on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Maine granted an exception to L. L. Bean, whose store in Freeport is open around the clock every day, including Christmas. When the blue laws, which had faded, were revived in the 1950s, the store in Freeport was already operating 24/7, said Carolyn Beem, a spokeswoman. She said that the store, which originally catered to hunters and fishermen who shopped at odd hours, was grandfathered in and allowed to stay open on the holidays.

Nationwide, a protest is developing against Thanksgiving Day sales. Workers at some stores have threatened to strike, saying the holiday openings were disrupting their family time. Online petitions have drawn hundreds of thousands of signatures protesting the move. The stores say that many of their workers have volunteered to work on the holiday, when they will get extra pay, and that consumers wanted to shop early. It is not yet clear what effect the protests might have.

At the same time, this corner of New England is serving as something of a bulwark against the forces of commercialism.

Even the Retailers Association of Massachusetts is treading gently on the notion of Thanksgiving sales.

“There hasn’t been any outcry from our members over the years pushing this,” said Bill Rennie, vice president of the association.

But, as Thanksgiving shopping becomes more common, he said, “it may be time to have a discussion about it.”

Blue laws seem anachronistic when people can shop anytime online, he said.

There is also the case of simple economics. These states are already at risk of losing sales to stores in New Hampshire, which has no sales tax. Now, Mr. Rennie pointed out, they could lose even more in the holiday bargain rush when stores in New Hampshire are open and stores here are closed.

Still, Barry Finegold, a Massachusetts state senator whose district abuts New Hampshire, said that so far, none of the retailers in his district had asked for a change in the law.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated William Wrestling Brewster’s occupation. He runs a computer repair business, not a computer store.

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Feds charge former hedge fund manager in big insider-trading case

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a former hedge fund portfolio manager with securities fraud in connection with what they said was the most lucrative insider-trading case ever prosecuted.

In complaints filed in New York, authorities said investment advisors and hedge funds made more than $276 million in illegal profits or avoided losses by trading before the announcement in 2008 of negative results from clinical trials for an Alzheimer's disease drug being developed by Elan Corp. and Wyeth.

Prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former portfolio manager at CR Intrinsic, an unregistered investment adviser, with securities fraud for allegedly illegally using information about the clinical trial results that he obtained from a neurologist at a hospital involved in the testing.

The criminal complaint did not name the neurologist, which it said was a cooperating witness in the case.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a a related civil suit Tuesday against Martoma, CR Intrinsic and Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. The SEC suit said Gilman was chairman of the safety monitoring committee overseeing the clinical trials of the Alzheimer's drug.

Martoma met Gilman some time between 2006 and 2008 through paid consultations, the SEC complaint says. "During these consultations, Gilman provided Martoma with material, nonpublic information about the ongoing trial," the SEC complaint said.

In mid-July 2008, "Gilman provided Martoma with the actual, detailed results of the clinical trial" before an official announcement on July 29, 2008, the SEC said.

The FBI, SEC and U.S. attorney's office in New York scheduled a 12:30 p.m. EST news conference to discuss the case.

"The charges unsealed today describe cheating coming and going – specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent," said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for Manhattan.  "As alleged, by cultivating and corrupting a doctor with access to secret drug data, Mathew Martoma and his hedge fund benefited from what might be the most lucrative inside tip of all time."

Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

Also:

Senate moves insider trading bill to Obama's desk.

Baseball star Eddie Murray settles insider-trading investigation.

Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta guilty of insider trading.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/17/business/la-fi-sec-murray-20120818

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Chemists Concoct the 'White Noise' of Smell

By Sid Perkins, ScienceNOW

If you play sounds of many different frequencies at the same time, they combine to produce neutral “white noise.” Neuroscientists say they have created an analogous generic scent by blending odors. Such “olfactory white” might rarely, if ever, be found in nature, but it could prove useful in research, other scientists say.

Using just a few hundred types of biochemical receptors, each of which respond to just a few odorants, the human nose can distinguish thousands of different odors. Yet humans can’t easily identify the individual components of a mixture, even when they can identify the odors alone, says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Now, he and his colleagues suggest, various blends made up of a large number of odors all begin to smell the same—even when the blends share no common components.

For their study, the researchers used 86 nontoxic odorants that had a wide variety of chemical and physical properties such as molecular structure, molecular weight, and volatility. Those chemicals also spanned a perceptual scale from “pleasant” to “unpleasant” and another such scale on which scents were judged to range from “edible” to “poisonous.” The researchers then diluted the chemicals so that their odors were equally intense. Finally, they created mixtures by dripping individual odorants onto separate regions of an absorptive pad in a jar, a technique that prevented the substances from reacting in liquid form to create new substances or odors. The odor blends contained anywhere from one to 43 of the chemicals, Sobel says.

In the tests, volunteers sniffed a mixture and then compared it with other mixtures made up of varying numbers of odorants. When the test mixture had just a few components, volunteers could easily distinguish it from the other blends, Sobel says. But as the number of odorants in a mixture rose above 20, volunteers began to perceive the blends as becoming more and more similar. By the time mixtures contained 30 or more components, most of the blends were judged to smell alike, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team dubbed the generic scent associated with large mixtures “olfactory white.”

Although many scents—such as coffee, wine, roses, and dirty socks—are complex blends containing hundreds of components, they are very distinctive. At least two factors are responsible, Sobel says: The individual odorants are often chemically related, and often one or more of them is vastly more intense than the rest.

The team’s findings are “a clever piece of work that shows the olfactory system works exactly as we would predict from our current understanding of it,” says Tim Jacob, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. “That is, if you stimulate every olfactory ‘channel’ to the same extent, the brain cannot characterize or identify a particular smell,” he notes.

“Olfactory white is a neat idea, and it draws interesting parallels to white light and white noise,” says Jay Gottfried, an olfactory neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. The new study “definitely adds new information about how the brain interprets odors,” he notes.

Even though olfactory white is not likely to be encountered in nature, the concept could be useful, Gottfried says. “Researchers have found that white noise is a useful stimulus in experiments to probe auditory responses,” he notes, and scientists probing the human sense of smell might find similar uses for olfactory white.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

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Phillip Phillips looks at life beyond “American Idol”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Like the 10 winners before him, Phillip Phillips faces the uneven road from “American Idol” victor to pop-chart mainstay.

After the success of his Top 10 hit, “Home,” the Georgia native is facing a new challenge – to replicate the mainstream successes of past “Idol” winners Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson on his debut album, “The World from the Side of the Moon,” released on Monday by Interscope Records.

Phillips, 22, spoke to Reuters about making his first proper studio album, what he might do differently on a second one, and whether he could have won “Idol” with this season’s panel of judges.

Q: How do you plan to transition from “American Idol” winner to a mainstream music career?

A: “It’s pretty funny that you mention that because the majority of the people I meet don’t even know that I was on ‘Idol.’ It’s really cool to hear that. When I go home, people ask, ‘What’ve you been doing? I’ve heard your song,’ but they don’t even know that I’ve been on ‘Idol.’”

Q: Your first single “Home” has gone twice platinum. You’ve said that it isn’t a song you would have written yourself. What’s your relationship now with your first hit?

A: “It’s amazing how well it has done, and I look at all the stories that I hear like how it has helped families out with their situation, or something’s happened with their kid, mom or dad, or if their child’s overseas in the war. Something like that’s pretty amazing how many different stories come out of it.”

Q: Did you have any ideas on how you wanted to develop your sound finally getting into a big-time studio?

A: “I already had the songs written, and it was just a matter of throwing in ideas and then just trimming it down to what felt right, because we only had three weeks to do this album. So it was kind of pressured, but that kind of helped out as well. It didn’t make us overthink anything.”

Q: Was there anything in particular you wanted to achieve?

A: “I wanted to make it similar to what I did on the show – a horn section and some rock. I tried to be a little artistic. I just wrote what came from my heart and what felt right.”

Q: Unlike many of the other contestants, you went into “Idol” as a songwriter, how many of the album’s songs did you write?

A: “I think five. Some of the co-writes, (the writers) really just kind of pushed me, so I kind of wrote most of those myself. But it was a lot of fun; it was a great experience.”

Q: Would you do anything differently next time?

A: “It’s still early, but I’d definitely want a little more time to do it. But that’s really about it, because three weeks is just really quick, and also I have just so many other things going on. … It was very kind of stressful and hopefully for the next record I’ll have a little more time.”

Q: What would that time allow you to do in the studio?

A: “Just being able to listen to it a little more. We all knew that it sounded really good but also having to listen to, like 17 songs in a row. You say, ‘Yeah that sounds great’ but you listen to it more and more and (say) ‘Maybe I would’ve brought this instrument down a little bit or brought it up a little bit more.’”

Q: Would you have fared any differently on ‘Idol’ with the current judges Nicky Minaj and Mariah Carey?

A: “I don’t know. I’m curious to see how they’re going to judge. It’s a completely different panel this year. … I don’t really know how I would’ve turned out. Maybe I’ll have to go out and audition again (laughs).”

Q: Would you have had to change your roots-y style?

A: “Naw, I would’ve still been the same dude. If they wouldn’t have sent me through, they wouldn’t have sent me through. And if they did, that’d be awesome.”

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Gunna Dickson)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Responding to Illnesses Manifesting Amid Recovery From Storm

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Dr. Aaron Gardener, center, attended to a patient at an ad hoc medical unit in Long Beach, N.Y. Many people have coughs, rashes and other ailments.

Day and night, victims of Hurricane Sandy have been streaming into ad hoc emergency rooms and relief centers, like the MASH-type medical unit on an athletic field in Long Beach, and the warming tent in the Rockaways the size of a small high school gym.

They complain of rashes, asthma and coughing. They need tetanus shots because — house-proud and armed with survivalist instincts — they have been ripping out waterlogged boards and getting poked by rusty nails. Those with back pain from sifting through debris receive muscle relaxants; those with chest pain from overexertion are hooked up to cardiac monitors.

“I’ve been coughing,” said Gabriel McAuley, 46, who has been working 16-hour days gutting homes and hauling debris in the Rockaways since the storm hit. “I’ve never felt a cough like that before. It’s deeper down.”

It is impossible to say how many people have been sickened by what Hurricane Sandy left behind: mold from damp drywall; spills from oil tanks; sewage from floodwater and unflushable toilets; tons upon tons of debris and dust. But interviews with hurricane victims, recovery workers, health officials and medical experts over the last week reveal that some of the illnesses that they feared would occur, based on the toxic substances unleashed by the storm and the experience of other disasters, notably Hurricane Katrina, have begun to manifest themselves.

Emergency rooms and poison control centers have reported cases of carbon monoxide exposure — and in New Jersey, several deaths have been attributed to it — from the misuse of generators to provide power and stoves to provide heat.

In Livingston, N.J., the Burn Center at St. Barnabas Medical Center had 16 burn cases over about six days, three times as many as usual, from people trying to dispel the cold and darkness with boiling water, gasoline, candles and lighter fluid.

Raw sewage spilled into homes in Baldwin and East Rockaway, in Nassau County, when a sewage plant shut down because of the surge and the system could not handle the backup. Sewage also spilled from a huge plant in Newark. “We tried to limit our presence in the house because the stink was horrible,” said Jennifer Ayres, 34, of Baldwin, who has been staying temporarily in West Hempstead. She said that she felt ill for several days, that her son had a scratchy throat, and that her mother, who lives in the house, had difficulty breathing, all problems she attributed to the two days they spent inside their house cleaning up last week. “I had stomach problems. I felt itchy beyond itchy on my face.”

Coughing — locally known as the Rockaway cough — is a common symptom that health officials said could come from mold, or from the haze of dust and sand kicked up by the storm and demolitions. The air in the Rockaways is so full of particles that the traffic police wear masks — though many recovery workers do not, worrying people who recall the fallout of another disaster.

“It’s just like 9/11,” said Kathy Smilardi, sitting inside the skeleton of her gutted home in Broad Channel, wrapped in a white puffy jacket, her breath visible in the afternoon cold. “Everyone runs in to clean up, and they’re not wearing masks. Are we going to wait 20 years to figure out that people are dying?”

Health officials and experts say the risks are real, but are cautioning against hysteria. Some coughing could be due to cold, damp weather. Lasting health effects from mold, dust and other environmental hazards generally require long-term, continuous exposure, they said. And the short-term effects can be mitigated by taking precautions like wearing masks, gloves and boots and removing mold-infested wallboard. “The reality is that cleaning up both muck and sewage and spills and removing walls and reconstruction and dealing with debris all do in fact pose concerns,” Daniel Kass, New York City’s deputy commissioner for environmental health, said Friday. “Are they vast or uncontrollable? No. But they depend on people doing work correctly and taking basic precautions.”

The Katrina cough was found to be temporary, said Roy J. Rando, a professor at Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Felicia Rabito, an epidemiologist at the school, said that healthy children exposed to mold after Hurricane Katrina showed no lasting respiratory symptoms when they moved back to new or renovated homes.

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, lead levels in New Orleans’s soil dropped after the top layers of dirt, where lead from paint and gasoline can accumulate, were washed away. But in the two years afterward, soil testing found extremely high lead levels, Dr. Rabito said, which she theorized came from renovating old homes. “That’s a cautionary tale,” she said. Lead in soil can be tracked into homes and pose a health hazard to children playing inside or outside.

Though at least one outbreak of norovirus, a contagious gastrointestinal virus, occurred in a Brooklyn high school that was used as a shelter, New York and New Jersey health officials said they had not seen any significant spike in respiratory or gastrointestinal diseases related to the storm.

In Broad Channel, most homes on Noel Road, where Ms. Smilardi lives, have outdoor oil tanks that were overturned by the storm. The innards of many homes, built when asbestos was used, lie spilled among major and minor roads.

Ominous red spots covered both sides of Paul Nowinski’s burly torso. After the storm, Mr. Nowinski, a musician, waded into the basement of his childhood home on Beach 146th Street in the Rockaways to try to salvage records, books and instruments. He was up to his chest in water, which he thinks might have been contaminated with sewage. He said that he did not know the cause of the red marks; and that he had been too busy “schlepping” to go to the doctor.

Angela Macropoulos contributed reporting.

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DealBook: Hewlett-Packard Takes $8.8 Billion Charge

Hewlett-Packard said on Tuesday that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge, after discovering “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy, a British software maker that it bought for $10 billion last year.

It is a major setback for H.P., which has been struggling to turn around its operations and remake its business.

The charge essentially wiped out its profit. In the latest quarter, H.P. reported a net loss of $6.9 billion, compared with a $200 million profit in the period a year earlier. The company said the improprieties and misrepresentations took place just before the acquisition, and accounted for the majority of the charges in the quarter, more than $5 billion.

Shares in H.P. plummeted nearly 11 percent in early afternoon trading on Tuesday, to less than $12.

Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in the summer of 2011 in an attempt to bolster its presence in the enterprise software market and catch up with rivals like I.B.M. The takeover was the brainchild of Léo Apotheker, H.P.’s chief executive at the time, and was criticized within Silicon Valley as a hugely expensive blunder.

Mr. Apotheker resigned a month later. The management shake-up came about one year after Mark Hurd was forced to step down as the head of H.P. after questions were raised about his relationship with a female contract employee.

“I’m both stunned and disappointed to learn of Autonomy’s alleged accounting improprieties,” Mr. Apotheker said in a statement. “The developments are a shock to the many who believed in the company, myself included. ”

Since then, H.P. has tried to revive the company and to move past the controversies. Last year, Meg Whitman, a former head of eBay, took over as chief executive and began rethinking the product lineup and global marketing strategy.

But the efforts have been slow to take hold.

In the previous fiscal quarter, the company announced that it would take an $8 billion charge related to its 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, as well as added costs related to layoffs. Then Ms. Whitman told Wall Street analysts in October that revenue and profit would be significantly lower, adding that it would take several years to complete a turnaround.

“We have much more work to do,” Ms. Whitman said at the time.

Hewlett-Packard continues to face weakness in its core businesses. Revenue for the full fiscal year dropped 5 percent, to $120.4 billion, with the personal computer, printing, enterprise and service businesses all losing ground. Earnings dropped 23 percent, to $8 billion, over the same period.

“As we discussed during our securities analyst meeting last month, fiscal 2012 was the first year in a multiyear journey to turn H.P. around,” Ms. Whitman said in a statement. “We’re starting to see progress in key areas, such as new product releases and customer wins.”

The strategic troubles have weighed on the stock. Shares of H.P. have dropped to less than $12 from nearly $30 at their high this year.

The latest developments could present another setback for Ms. Whitman’s efforts.

When the company assessed Autonomy before the acquisitions, the financial results appeared to pass muster. Ms. Whitman said H.P.’s board at the time – which remains the same now, except for the addition of the activist investor Ralph V. Whitworth – relied on Deloitte’s auditing of Autonomy’s financial statements. As part of the due diligence process for the deal, H.P. also hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s work.

Neither Deloitte nor KPMG caught the accounting discrepancies. Deloitte said in a statement that it could not comment on the matter, citing client confidentiality. “We will cooperate with the relevant authorities with any investigations into these allegations,” the accounting firm said.

Hewlett-Packard said it first began looking into potential accounting problems in the spring, after a senior Autonomy executive came forward. H.P. then hired a third-party forensic accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to conduct an investigation covering Autonomy sales between the third quarter 2009 and the second quarter 2011, just before the acquisition.

The company said it discovered several accounting irregularities, which disguised Autonomy’s actual costs and the nature of the its products. Autonomy makes software that finds patterns, data that is used by companies and governments.

H.P. said that Autonomy, in some instances, sold hardware like servers, which has higher associated costs. But the company booked these as software sales. It had the effect of underplaying the company’s expenses and inflating the margins.

“They used low-end hardware sales, but put out that it was a pure software company,” said John Schultz, the general counsel of H.P. Computer hardware typically has a much smaller profit margin than software. “They put this into their growth calculation.”

An H.P. official, who spoke on background because of ongoing inquiries by regulators, said the hardware was sold at a 10 percent loss. The loss was disguised as a marketing expense, and the amount registered as a marketing expense appeared to increase over time, the official said.

H.P. also contends that Autonomy relied on value-added resellers, middlemen who sold software on behalf of the company. Those middlemen reported sales to customers that didn’t actually exist, according to H.P.

H.P. also claims that that Autonomy was taking licensing revenue upfront, before receiving the money. That improper assignment of sales inflated the company’s gross profit margins.pfront, before receiving the money. It had the effect, the company said, of significantly bolstering Autonomy’s gross margin.

Hewlett Packard turned over its findings to Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain with the last week. In a conference call with analysts, Ms. Whitman said the company might consider legal actions against several parties.

The former management team of Autonomy, which includes the company’s founder Mike Lynch, rejected H.P. claims about the accounting issues.

“H.P. has made a series of allegations against some unspecified former members of Autonomy Corporation PLC’s senior management team. The former management team of Autonomy was shocked to see this statement today, and flatly rejects these allegations, which are false,” the group said in a statement. “It took 10 years to build Autonomy’s industry-leading technology and it is sad to see how it has been mismanaged since its acquisition by H.P.”

While Mr. Schultz would not detail H.P.’s future legal strategy, he said “we intend to be aggressive in recovering value for our shareholders.” In addition to Mr. Lynch, the company indicated this could include other individuals, including perhaps former senior executives of H.P. who missed the bad accounting. “We’re not limiting it to Autonomy,” Mr. Shulz said.

H.P. also underscored the importance of Autonomy to the broader strategy, emphasized the quality of the products. “This is a very healthy company with good products that exist,” said Mr. Shultz. “At its core, these are very good products.”

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Existing-home sales and builder confidence rise

WASHINGTON -- The housing market recovery showed signs it is continuing to strengthen as sales of existing homes increased 2.1% in October from the previous month and a measure of home-builder confidence jumped in November to its highest level since 2006.

Sales of existing homes rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.79 million last month, up from a downwardly revised 4.69 million rate in September, that National Assn. of Realtors reported Monday. Sales were up 10.9% in October from a year earlier.

Stronger demand helped push up the median home price nationwide to $178,600 in October, an increase of 11.1% from a year earlier, the group said. It was the eighth-straight month to show a year-over-year increase, the first time that's happened since 2005-2006.

Fewer houses on the market also helped drive price increases. There were 2.14 million existing homes for sale in October, down 1.4% from September. That translates to a 5.4-month supply at the current sales rate, the lowest level since February 2006.

Sales by distressed homeowners still accounted for a large chunk of activity. Foreclosures and short sales made up 24% of October's sales. That was the same level as in September, but down from 28% a year earlier.

Superstorm Sandy had some negative impact on sales, the group said.

The Northeast, which was hit hard by the storm, was the only region to show a decrease in sales in October from the previous month. Sales were down 1.7% there, while they increased 1.8% in the Midwest, 2.1% in the South and 4.4% in the West.

"Home sales continue to trend up and most October transactions were completed by the time the storm hit, but the growing demand with limited inventory is pressuring home prices in much of the country," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the Realtors group. 

He expected more of an impact in the Northeast in coming months.

The improving housing market led to a boost in builder confidence, according to a measure released Monday.

The National Assn. of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index rose five points in November to 46 from the previous month. It was the seventh straight monthly increase, lifting the index to its highest level since May 2006, before the crash of the subprime housing market.

The index remained below 50, indicating that builders who view sales conditions as poor still outnumber those who view them as good. But the index is up sharply from its 19 reading a year ago, the home builders group said.

“Builders are reporting increasing demand for new homes as inventories of foreclosed and distressed properties begin to shrink in markets across the country,” said Barry Rutenberg, a home builder from Gainesville, Fla., and chairman of the builders' group.

“In view of the tightening supply and other improving conditions, many potential buyers who were on the fence are now motivated to move forward with a purchase in order to take advantage of today’s favorable prices and interest rates,” he said. 

ALSO:

FHA's reserves fall into the red

California home sales pop in October

Most aid from mortgage settlement in state going to short sales

Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

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Apple Eyes First Overseas Data Center in Hong Kong

Apple’s data-center empire has yet expand oversees, but it seems this is about to change.

Citing three unnamed sources, the Chinese-language Hong Kong Economic Times reports that Apple is planning to open a data center in Hong Kong, following in the footsteps of Google, its biggest rival.

This would be Apple’s first data center outside the U.S. Currently, the company serves up iCloud and other online services from massive computing facilities in Cupertino, California, at its headquarters; Newark, California, just north of Cupertino; and Maiden, North Carolina. It’s also developing additional facilities in Prineville, Oregon, and Reno, Nevada.

Apple is just one of several big-name web outfits that have erected their own data centers in an effort to save power and cost, rather than just leasing space in third-party facilities. Google was at the forefront of this movement — it now operates nine data centers across the globe — and it was soon joined by the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook.

According to the Hong Kong Ecocomic Times, Apple is an eyeing a place at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, located on the Tsueng Kwan O Industrial Estate in the southeast part of the city. Several others companies — including Japanese telecom giant NTT and Hong Kong bank HSBC — already operate data centers there.

Apple news site 9to5Mac has previously reported that Apple plans to begin work on its Hong Kong data center in the first quarter of next year, and that it plans to open the facility in 2015. China represents Apple’s fastest growing market, and having it local data center would allow the company to accelerate the delivery of online services to the region.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Rock band AC/DC releases entire catalog on iTunes

NEW YORK (AP) — AC/DC is finally releasing its music digitally on iTunes.

Columbia Records and Apple announced Monday that the classic rock band’s music will be available at the iTunes Store worldwide. Sixteen studio albums will be released, including “High Voltage” and “Back in Black.”

AC/DC was one of the few acts that would not release music through the digital outlet. The Beatles and Kid Rock were also against selling music on iTunes, but have since jumped onboard. Country star Garth Brooks has yet to release his music on iTunes.

Four of AC/DC’s live albums and three compilation records are also available. The statement said the songs have been mastered for iTunes “with increased audio fidelity.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Teenage Boys, Worried About Body Image, Take Health Risks

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

David Abusheikh at a gym in Brooklyn. He goes six days a week and says he uses protein supplements to help build muscle.

It is not just girls these days who are consumed by an unattainable body image.

Take David Abusheikh. At age 15, he started lifting weights for two hours a day, six days a week. Now that he is a senior at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn, he has been adding protein bars and shakes to his diet to put on muscle without gaining fat.

“I didn’t used to be into supplements,” said Mr. Abusheikh, 18, who plans on a career in engineering, “but I wanted something that would help me get bigger a little faster.”

Pediatricians are starting to sound alarm bells about boys who take unhealthy measures to try to achieve Charles Atlas bodies that only genetics can truly confer. Whether it is long hours in the gym, allowances blown on expensive supplements or even risky experiments with illegal steroids, the price American boys are willing to pay for the perfect body appears to be on the rise.

In a study to be published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, more than 40 percent of boys in middle school and high school said they regularly exercised with the goal of increasing muscle mass. Thirty-eight percent said they used protein supplements, and nearly 6 percent said they had experimented with steroids.

Over all, 90 percent of the 1,307 boys in the survey — who lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, but typify what doctors say is a national phenomenon — said they exercised at least occasionally to add muscle.

“There has been a striking change in attitudes toward male body image in the last 30 years,” said Dr. Harrison Pope, a psychiatry professor at Harvard who studies bodybuilding culture and was not involved in the study. The portrayal of men as fat-free and chiseled “is dramatically more prevalent in society than it was a generation ago,” he said.

While college-age men have long been interested in bodybuilding, pediatricians say they have been surprised to find that now even middle school boys are so absorbed with building muscles. And their youth adds an element of risk.

Just as girls who count every calorie in an effort to be thin may do themselves more harm than good, boys who chase an illusory image of manhood may end up stunting their development, doctors say, particularly when they turn to supplements — or, worse, steroids — to supercharge their results.

“The problem with supplements is they’re not regulated like drugs, so it’s very hard to know what’s in them,” said Dr. Shalender Bhasin, a professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. Some contain anabolic steroids, and even high-quality protein supplements might be dangerous in large amounts, or if taken to replace meals, he said. “These things just haven’t been studied very well,” he said.

Anabolic steroids pose a special danger to developing bodies, Dr. Bhasin said. Steroids “stop testosterone production in men,” he said, leading to terrible withdrawal problems when still-growing boys try to stop taking them. Still, the constant association of steroids with elite athletes like Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds perpetuates the notion that they can be managed successfully.

Online, in bodybuilding forums for teenagers, boys barely out of puberty share weight-lifting regimens and body fat percentages, and judge one another’s progress. On Tumblr and Facebook, teenagers post images of ripped athletes under the heading “fitspo” or “fitspiraton,” which are short for “fitness inspiration.” The tags are spinoffs of “thinspo” and “thinspiration” pictures and videos, which have been banned from many sites for promoting anorexia.

“Lifted b4 school today felt good but was weak as hell,” wrote one boy who said he was 15 and from Tallahassee, Fla., on a message board on Bodybuilding.com in September, saying he bench-pressed 245 pounds. “Barely got it.”

Many of these boys probably see themselves in Mike Sorrentino, “The Situation” from the “Jersey Shore” series on MTV, or the Adam Sackler character, on the HBO series “Girls,” who rarely wears a shirt or takes a break from his crunches.

Mr. Abusheikh, for instance, has a Facebook page full of photos of himself shirtless or showing off his six-pack abs. At his high school, participation in the annual bodybuilding competition hit an all-time high of 30 students this year.

“They ask us about everything,” said Peter Rivera, a physical education teacher at Fort Hamilton High School who helps oversee the competition. “How do I lose weight? How do I gain muscle? How many times a week should I work out?” Some boys want to be stronger for sports, Mr. Rivera said, but others “want to change their body type.”

Compared with a sedentary lifestyle of video games and TV, an obsession with working out may not quite qualify as a health hazard. And instructors like Mr. Rivera say most boys are eager for advice on the healthiest, drug-free ways to get in shape.

With so little known about supplements, it can be difficult, particularly for teenagers, to make wise decisions.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 19, 2012

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect nationality for the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. He is Portuguese, not Brazilian. Because of an editing error, it misstated the number of boys included in the survey. The researchers interviewed 2,793 boys and girls, not 2,800 boys. It also described incorrectly the title of Dr. Shalender Bhasin. He is a professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, not at the Boston Medical Center.

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