China wants to stop profiteering at temple sites

BEIJING (AP) — China is telling tourist-favored Buddhist temples: Don't let money be your mantra.Authorities announced a ban this week on temples selling shares to investors after leaders of several popular temples planned to pursue stock market listings for them as commercial entities. Even the Shaolin Temple of kung fu movie fame was once rumored to be planning a stock market debut — and critics...

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Google unveils first 10-inch Nexus tablet

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc unveiled a larger version of its Nexus-branded tablet computer on Monday, and updated its mobile gadget and online content offerings as competition with Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp heats up ahead of the holiday sales season. The device follows a spate of new product launches by the technology leaders in recent weeks, including Apple's...

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'Anderson Live' to end after 2 seasons

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Anderson Cooper's daytime talk show will be wrapping after two seasons.Warner Bros. said Monday that the marketplace made it increasingly difficult for "Anderson Live" to "break through" to viewers despite format changes.The show switched to live broadcasts in its second year but struggled to match the ratings performance of daytime frontrunners including "Ellen" and "Live! With...

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China passes law to curb abuse of mental hospitals

BEIJING (AP) — China's legislature on Friday passed a long-awaited mental health law that aims to prevent people from being involuntarily held and unnecessarily treated in psychiatric facilities — abuses that have been used against government critics and triggered public outrage.The law standardizes mental health care services, requiring general hospitals to set up special outpatient clinics or provide...

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Northeast hunkers down ahead of Hurricane Sandy

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Hurricane Sandy wheeled toward land as forecasters feared Monday, raking cities along the Northeast corridor with rain and wind gusts, flooding shore towns, washing away a section of the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and threatening to cripple Wall Street and New York City's subway system with a huge surge of corrosive seawater.By midday, the storm was picking up speed and was...

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UN says 22,000 displaced in Myanmar unrest

SITTWE, Myanmar (AP) — Victims of Myanmar's latest explosion of Muslim-Buddhist violence fled to already packed displacement camps along the country's western coast Sunday, with a top U.N. official saying the unrest has forced more than 22,000 people from their homes.State television reported the casualty toll has risen to 84 dead and 129 injured over the past week in nine townships in Rakhine state....

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SAP eyes "long" period of high sales growth: report

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Broadway takes few chances with superstorm coming

NEW YORK (AP) — Broadway took the threat of the mammoth storm seriously, with theater owners canceling all Sunday evening and Monday performances of shows like "The Book of Mormon" ''Once" and "Mama Mia!" long before a drop of rain fell in Times Square.

"The safety and security of theatregoers and employees is everyone's primary concern," said Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of The Broadway League, which represents producers.

Forecasts called for rain late Sunday or early Monday, and subway and public transportation service is to be halted Sunday evening, potentially stranding theatergoers. Refunds will be made available from the point of purchase.

Off-Broadway shows including "Stomp," ''Bad Jews" and "Golden Child" were also canceled Sunday night. Most matinees on and off Broadway stayed open. Mondays are usually very light on Broadway, with most shows having that as their day off.

Some Broadway shows had no evening shows scheduled Sunday, including "Cyrano de Bergerac," ''Annie," ''Chaplin," ''Enemy of the People," ''Once," ''Jersey Boys" and "Nice Work If You Can Get It."

It was the most disruptive storm for the theater community since the threat of Hurricane Irene in late August 2011 prompted producers to cancel matinee and evening performances on Saturday and Sunday. While that hurricane mostly fizzled over New York, every show lost money because they were mostly limited to five or six performances that week.

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FDA: Pharmacy tied to outbreak knew of bacteria

WASHINGTON (AP) — Staffers at a pharmacy linked to the deadly meningitis outbreak documented dozens of cases of mold and bacteria growing in rooms that were supposed to be sterile, according to federal health inspectors.

In a preliminary report on conditions at the pharmacy, the Food and Drug Administration said Friday that even when the contamination at New England Compounding Center exceeded the company's own safety levels, there is no evidence that staffers investigated or corrected the problem. The FDA uncovered some four dozen reports of potential contamination in company records, stretching back to January this year.

The report comes from an FDA inspection of the Framingham, Mass.-based company earlier this month after steroid injections made by the company were tied to an outbreak of fungal meningitis. FDA officials confirmed last week that the black fungus found in the company's vials was the same fungus that has sickened 338 people across the U.S., causing 25 deaths.

The New England Compounding Center's lawyer said Friday the pharmacy "will review this report and will continue our cooperation with the FDA."

Compounding pharmacies like NECC traditionally fill special orders placed by doctors for individual patients, turning out a small number of customized formulas each week. They have traditionally been overseen by state pharmacy boards, though the FDA occasionally steps in when major problems arise. Some pharmacies have grown into much larger businesses in the last 20 years, supplying bulk orders of medicines to hospitals that need a steady supply of drugs on hand.

The FDA report provides new details about NECC's conditions, which were first reported by state officials earlier this week. The drug at the center of the investigation is made without preservative, so it's very important that it be made under highly sterile conditions. Compounding pharmacies prepare their medications in clean rooms, which are supposed to be temperature-controlled and air-filtered to maintain sterility.

But FDA inspectors noted that workers at the pharmacy turned off the clean room's air conditioning every night. FDA regulators said that could interfere with the conditions needed to prevent bacterial growth.

Inspectors also say they found a host of potential contaminants in or around the pharmacy's clean rooms, including green and yellow residues, water droplets and standing water from a leaking boiler.

Additionally, inspectors found "greenish yellow discoloration" inside an autoclave, a piece of equipment used to sterilize vials and stoppers. In another supposedly sterile room inspectors found a "dark, hair-like discoloration" along the wall. Elsewhere FDA staff said that dust from a nearby recycling facility appeared to be drifting into the pharmacy's rooftop air-conditioning system.

The FDA on Friday declined to characterize the severity of the problems at NECC, or to speculate on how they may have led to contamination of the products made by the pharmacy. FDA emphasized that the report is based on "initial observations" and that the agency's investigation is ongoing.

The agency also provided new details about the pharmacy's handling of the steroids it recalled last month. The company recalled three lots of steroids made since May that totaled 17,676 single-dose vials of medicine — roughly equivalent to 20 gallons. The shots are mainly used to treat back pain.

According to the agency's report, the pharmacy began shipping vials from the August lot to customers on Aug. 17. That was nearly two weeks before the pharmacy received test results from an outside laboratory confirming the sterility of the drug. When FDA scientists went back and tested the same lot this month, they found contamination in 50 vials.

Outside experts said the report paints a picture of a dysfunctional operation.

"The entire pharmacy was an incubator of bacteria and fungus," said Sarah Sellers, a former FDA officer who left the agency in 2008 after unsuccessfully pushing it to increase regulation of compounding pharmacies. She now consults for drug manufacturers. "The pharmacy knew this through monitoring results, and chose to do nothing."

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Analysis: Fiscal cliff could hit economy harder than many expect

By Jason Lange

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States runs the risk of a recession far deeper than many investors and policymakers may think if lawmakers fail to avert looming tax hikes and cuts to public spending.

Absent action by Congress, the country will face the so-called fiscal cliff at the start of next year, a combination of lower spending and higher taxes that is expected to extract about $600 billion from the economy.

Many economists think every dollar of deficit reduction will subtract nearly the same amount from economic growth.

By that measure, the current course could cause the economy to contract by 0.5 percent in 2013, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that have been largely embraced by Wall Street and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

But research by economists in academia and at the International Monetary Fund suggests a dollar of deficit reduction could drain as much as $1.70 from the economy, making the prospective belt tightening much more dangerous.

"You can take that 0.5 percent contraction and double it," said Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

These researchers suspect fiscal contractions take a bigger-than-normal bite from economies when interest rates are very low, as is the case at the moment in the United States and in much of the developed world.

One explanation, Eichengreen said, is that when rates are higher, central banks can easily lower them to provide a counterweight to austerity. But when rates are near zero, as they are in the United States, it's harder to ease the pinch.

Historical data suggests higher taxes or lower government spending normally lead households to cut back on purchases only modestly. In the three decades through 2009, a dollar in government austerity would suck only half that from the economy, according to IMF research published this month which examined fiscal policy in 28 countries.

But economies around the world appear to be acting differently since the Great Recession. The IMF said it appeared that every dollar of recent fiscal consolidation has drained anywhere from $0.90 to $1.70 from economies.

The IMF said this suggested central banks have been having difficulty offsetting the impact from tighter budgets.

That could well be the case in the United States as well. The Fed pushed overnight rates to near zero in December 2008 and has resorted to the unconventional policy of purchasing government and housing-related bonds to revive the economy.

The central bank's chairman, Ben Bernanke, has acknowledged he would not be able to fully offset the pain if the economy runs into the "fiscal cliff."

With the U.S. jobless rate at 7.8 percent and the recovery still shaky, the possibility of a greater-than-expected hit to activity might be food for thought for lawmakers, who will be looking to cut some sort of deal on the budget before year end.

LET'S MAKE A DEAL

There's little room for error. Forecasters expect economic growth next year of just 2.1 percent, with the jobless rate edging down only slightly.

As it is, economists believe even the level of danger outlined by the nonpartisan CBO will be enough to propel lawmakers, who are deeply divided over taxes and spending, to reach an accord, although signs have yet to emerge that a deal is starting to gel.

"No political party wants to go down in history as the one that triggered the second half of the worst recession since the Great Depression," said Paul Dales, an economist with Capital Economics in London.

Capital Economics expects Congress will allow just under $100 billion in fiscal tightening, which it thinks would knock the same amount off gross domestic product (GDP).

Yields on U.S. government debt suggest investors as a whole are betting on even less tightening next year, according to research by analysts at Bank of America.

Bank of America itself expects lawmakers will allow much of the fiscal cliff to transpire, leading to about $325 billion in budget tightening, enough in their view to stall job growth.

Like Capital Economics and many other research units in the financial world, Bank of America presumes every dollar of tightening would drain the economy by about the same amount, although it says a bigger effect is possible.

"The economic impacts could be worse than our baseline assumptions," said Michael Hanson, an economist with the bank in New York.

Eichengreen and others who have studied economic data from the Great Depression, another time central banks were constrained, found the drag from a tightening of fiscal policy was much higher at the time. Eichengreen thinks currently the so-called multiplier is about 1.7, in line with the upper range of the IMF's estimate.

If he is right, even avoiding just half of the fiscal cliff would not be enough to steer the economy clear of recession.

Earlier this month, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell argued for not "a penny less" than $109 billion in budget tightening next year. But even a tightening in the budget of that magnitude would have an outsized effect if Eichengreen and others are on the mark.

"It would make more sense to assure a strong self-sustaining recovery before embarking on significant fiscal consolidation," Goldman Sachs economists said in a recent report that summarized research pointing to heightened risks of budget slashing.

(Reporting by Jason Lange; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Sandra Maler)

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