Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

Read More..

Jenni Rivera jet linked to troubled company and executive

So far, this much is clear: Jenni Rivera, one of the most celebrated artists in the Latin world, died when her private jet went into a dive. The plane plummeted nose-first, 28,000 feet in 30 seconds, leaving its wreckage — and the remains of Rivera and six others — splayed across the side of the mountain like a wash of pebbles.

The investigation at the remote Mexican crash site is now in full swing, and authorities have not said whether they suspect maintenance problems or pilot error. But scrutiny has fallen on the plane and its pilots, one of whom was 78 years old. Interviews and documents link the jet to a troubled company — and an executive who was once imprisoned for faking the safety records of planes he bought from the Mexican government and sold to private pilots in the United States.

According to federal aviation records, the Learjet 25 carrying Rivera from a performance in Monterrey, Mexico, was built in 1969 and was owned by a Las Vegas company called Starwood Management LLC.

A Starwood executive, Christian E. Esquino Nunez, was accused of conspiring with associates in the 1990s and 2000s to falsify records documenting the history of planes they bought and sold — tail numbers, inspection stamps and logbooks. Esquino's "fraudulent business practices ... put the flying public at risk," federal authorities argued in documents obtained by The Times.

"We had a forewarning that this is what he is," Timothy D. Coughlin, an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, said. "Essentially they would manufacture the records ... that would indicate that maintenance was up to date. They would create them out of whole cloth." Once Esquino brought the planes across the border for sale, "it was open season," Coughlin said.

Coughlin prosecuted the case against Esquino in 2005, resulting in a guilty plea that sent Esquino to a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif., for two years.

After his release from prison, Esquino was deported from Southern California to his native Mexico, where he lives today.

For 20 years, Esquino has been embroiled in a briar of legal allegations, many involving airplanes — a bankruptcy and a restraining order, criminal indictments and civil judgments, cocaine-distribution charges, even a role in an alleged conspiracy to airlift relatives of the late Moammar Kadafi out of Libya.

On Wednesday, Esquino told The Times by telephone from Mexico City that the flight was not a charter as authorities have said. Rather, Rivera was in the final stages of buying the plane from Starwood for $250,000; the flight was offered as a free "demo."

Esquino, 50, described himself as Starwood's operations manager, and said he understood why his past would place him under scrutiny in the wake of the accident.

"Obviously my past — there is a story to it," he said. "It's unavoidable that they are going to look at my past.... I think it's fair to bring it up right now and question it."

However, he said, the jet was perfectly maintained. He said the only conceivable explanation for the crash was that pilot Miguel Perez Soto suffered a heart attack or was incapacitated in some way, and that a younger co-pilot, Alejandro Torres, was unable to save the plane. (Authorities stressed that they have not determined a cause of the crash or whether the plane had any problems.)

"We're all grieving," Esquino said. "I'm definitely very sorry that this happened."

Esquino said it was not a mistake to put a 78-year-old pilot at the helm of the flight. Perez had a valid license to fly in Mexico, authorities said Wednesday, but U.S. aviation sources said that in the United States, Perez was licensed to fly only under conditions that didn't require the use of instruments and was not allowed to carry passengers for hire.

Esquino said he had known and trusted Perez for 30 years. "I couldn't think of anyone more qualified," he said.

Rivera, 43, a famed Mexican American performer, mother of five and master of a growing international business empire, was killed Sunday when the private jet carrying her and four members of her entourage crashed near Iturbide, Mexico.

Rivera had sold 20 million albums, lived in a massive estate in Encino, was preparing to make her American network television debut and was at the height of her career.

The same plane, according to U.S. aviation records, sustained "substantial" damage in 2005 when a fuel imbalance left one wing tip weighing as much as 300 pounds more than the other. The unnamed pilot, despite having logged more than 7,000 hours in the air, lost control while landing in Amarillo, Texas, and struck a runway distance marker. No one was injured.

Esquino called that accident "minor" and said the plane had flown without issue for 1,000 hours since then.

Starwood formed in March 2007, two months after Esquino was released from prison. He probably knew, federal officials said Wednesday, that he would be unable to receive a license to buy and sell U.S.-registered aircraft following the federal charges and his deportation. Nevada employment records list Esquino's sister-in-law, Norma Gonzalez, as the sole corporate officer of Starwood. But according to allegations contained in court documents, it was Esquino — who has operated at times under the name Eduardo "Ed" Nunez — who was actually running the show.

Read More..

Hallelujah! Google Maps Returns to Apple's iPhone

The wait is now, finally over. Google Maps is in Apple’s App Store, available for both the iPhone and iPad, bringing hope to those who have been having trouble getting around since the Apple mapocalypse.

Google’s app, which arrived late Wednesday night, improves on the Google-powered maps app that Apple shipped included in iOS before version 6 — when Apple ditched Google to go out on its own.
The most important new feature, of course, is turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation.

Unlike Apple’s maps app, Google’s navigation feature isn’t integrated with Siri. But it’s also much less likely to direct you into the Pacific ocean.

Other differences: Google Maps uses Zagat listings, and Google’s own local search, for charting and rating restaurants and retailers, while Apple uses Yelp. And if you have a Google account you can sign in to sync searches, directions, and favorite places between your iPhone, iPad and other computers.

Public transit, a glaring omission from Apple Maps, shows up on iOS’s Google Maps too. So bus, subway, train, walking and driving directions are all here. And what would Google Maps be without Street View integration? Google Maps on iOS has that too, with the ability to view 360-degree panoramas of both outside streets and the inside of businesses.

Google is also releasing a Google Maps SDK for iOS, which will allow third-party app developers to incorporate Google Maps inside of Apple Maps. The new Google Maps app runs on any iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that can run iOS 5.1 or newer and its available in 40 countries and 29 languages.

Read More..

Rock legends take to New York stage for storm Sandy victims

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and Alicia Keys were among the musical stars headlining an all-star benefit concert for victims of Superstorm Sandy on Wednesday, in what producers promised was “the greatest line-up of legends ever assembled on a stage.”

Organizers said the “12-12-12″ concert at New York‘s Madison Square Garden was being distributed to nearly 2 billion people worldwide through television feeds, radio and online streaming.

“How do I begin again? My city’s in ruins?” Springsteen sang. He was joined by fellow New Jersey native Jon Bon Jovi for “Born to Run,” ushering in a night of musical duets.

Next up, Roger Waters performed alongside Eddie Vedder, and Paul McCartney was due to jam later in the evening with Dave Grohl.

“This has got to be the largest collection of old English musicians ever assembled in Madison Square Garden,” Mick Jagger told the crowd. The Stones performed “You Got Me Rocking” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

To help with the fundraising, celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Kristen Stewart, Jake Gyllenhaal, Chelsea Clinton and Billy Crystal took part in a telethon during the concert, which was expected to last four to five hours.

Comedian Adam Sandler took the stage for a Sandy-themed spoof on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” rhyming the title with “Sandy, Screw Ya!”

Backstage, actress Susan Sarandon recounted losing power in her New York home but said that was a small hardship compared with the real victims who lost their homes.

Steven Van Zandt, guitarist of the E Street Band, scolded “the oil companies” and “Wall Street guys” for not doing more to help.

“Even with the music business not what it used to be … we are proud to be here,” he said.

Before the concert, producer John Sykes said $ 32 million had already been raised from ticket sales and sponsorships. Organizers are hoping to raise tens of millions more.

It was being broadcast live on television, radio, movie theaters, on Facebook and iHeartRadio, and streamed on digital billboards in New York‘s Times Square, London and Paris.

EXPANDING FUNDRAISING’S REACH

More than 130 people were killed when Sandy pummeled the East Coast of the United States in October. Thousands more were left homeless as the storm tore through areas of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, causing billions of dollars in damage.

Throughout the show, celebrities shared memories of growing up in New York City or the Jersey Shore, and offered shout-outs to first responders.

“Watching my hometown get pummeled was devastating to watch,” said actor-comedian Crystal, who grew up on Long Beach, Long Island. “It’s a helpless feeling of what’s in store for us maybe in the future.”

Sykes was also involved with “The Concert for New York City” after the September 11, 2001, attacks, which raised more than $ 30 million for charity.

He said technological advances over the past decade had exponentially changed the reach of fundraising.

“We have both traditional and new media behind us in a way that we’ve never had before, and that is really going to be the ‘x-factor’ on how much money we can raise for the victims,” he said.

Donations raised from the concert produced by Clear Channel Entertainment and the Weinstein Co, will go to the Robin Hood Relief Fund, which will provide money and materials to groups helping people hardest hit by the storm.

(Additional reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant, Patricia Reaney and Peter Cooney)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

‘How to Survive a Plague’ Provides a Silver Lining on AIDS

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

The director David France in Los Angeles last week.

LAST Wednesday night, David France, the director of the documentary “How to Survive a Plague,” made his way to the Open Society Institute in Columbus Circle for a question-and-answer session and a screening of his film, which is about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Afterward, he was mobbed by well-wishers and advice-seekers.

First came a woman named Naomi Schegloff, who explained that she was a director of a project called the Graying of AIDS, aimed at helping older people with H.I.V. “Can we do the card-trade thing?” she asked Mr. France, who was wearing a gray blazer over a sweater and a pair of jeans.

Of course they could.

Next up was a man in his 50s, who said he was making a self-financed film about “cannabis prohibition” and “the war on drugs.”

“Your piece is fabulous,” the man said, before requesting a card exchange as well. “Really important.”

After that was another fellow who wanted to take the movie to South Africa to screen for local activists and people working in medical care, and suggested the third weekend in February.

“That sounds good,” said Mr. France, 53, before correcting himself.

“So we know we’re busy on the 23rd,” he said. “We’re hoping we’re going to be busy on the 24th, too.”

After all, that is Oscars weekend, perhaps the culmination of an already-heady awards season.

First came prizes from the Gotham Independent Film Awards and the Boston Society of Film Critics, both of which recently voted “How to Survive” the best documentary of 2012.

Then, on Nov. 27, Mr. France received word that the Independent Spirit Awards, given out the day before the Oscars, had nominated his film for Best Documentary. On Dec. 3, the documentary wing of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the film had made its shortlist as well, pulling in front of roughly 100 other eligible films and now in contention with 14 filmmakers for the coveted 5 slots. (The final list of nominees will be announced in January.)

Pretty good, given that until fairly recently, Mr. France’s main connection to the entertainment industry was via his partner of 18 years, Jonathan Starch, a producer at “Law & Order: SVU.”

But in 2008, Mr. France wrote a jaw-dropping piece for New York magazine about a promising young doctor named Gabriel Torres, who ran the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital for much of the ’90s, then descended into drug addiction shortly after antiretrovirals came onto the market.

In the article, Mr. France found not an anomaly, but a textbook case of a person who had battled the worst years of the epidemic, only to find himself lost and confused about where to go and what to do once the crisis abated.

“I think just about everybody who lived through that is wounded,” said Mr. France, smoking a cigarette and walking over to a bar in the Hudson Hotel for a chat after the crowd at the Open Society Institute dispersed. “It’s especially true of the people who were on the medical front lines. Because the work they were doing was life and death.”

Moreover, to Mr. France’s additional dismay, little credit had been given to the activists who worked tirelessly throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, in many cases laying down in the streets to try to bring attention and money to the disease.

So he set out with a small film crew and began collecting video footage from the era. He also met with more than a dozen prominent activists and veterans of the movement who appear in the film, which charts the journey of the disease from the first days, when a rare skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma began mysteriously appearing on the bodies of gay men all over New York, until the advent of antiretrovirals 15 years later.

Among those interviewed are Larry Kramer, the playwright and co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis; David Barr, a founding member of the Treatment Action Group and the Act Up/New York Treatment and Data Committee; Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Garance Franke-Ruta, who helped found Countdown 18 Months, a group that pressured pharmaceutical companies to speed up the process of developing AIDS drugs.

“I think it’s very difficult for anything to capture the awfulness of those years, but this movie comes close,” said Ms. Franke-Ruta, now an editor at The Atlantic.

Then, when the film was done and edited, Mr. France took it to Sundance, where buzz followed almost immediately.

As the fledgling filmmaker tells it, he could not save those who had fallen, but he at least thought he could honor them. And certainly, Mr. France knew their stories well. He came to New York in 1981 from Kalamazoo, Mich., which at the time was hostile to gay men and lesbians, he said. Then, within a week of his arrival and move to the East Village, the first report of AIDS hit the pages of this newspaper.

“I came to New York to be free, and that’s what met me,” said Mr. France, now sitting in the bar and sipping a glass of wine.

Read More..

Joe Allbritton, TV and Banking Titan, Dies at 87

Joe L. Allbritton, a Texas financier who at age 50 became a television and newspaper baron in Washington, then climbed the city’s social hierarchy as he transformed himself into the foremost banker to Embassy Row, died on Tuesday in Houston. He was 87.

The cause was a heart ailment, said Frederick J. Ryan Jr., the president of Allbritton Communications, which is based in Arlington, Va. Mr. Allbritton lived in Houston in his retirement.

After early success in the banking business in the Southwest, the diminutive Mr. Allbritton — he stood barely 5 feet tall — expanded in 1974 with the purchase of The Washington Star, the city’s feisty, conservative-leaning No. 2 paper after The Washington Post. The deal included the local ABC television affiliate.

His foray into the Washington publishing scene — he had never before stepped into a newspaper office — was short-lived. In 1978, he was forced to sell The Star after the Federal Communications Commission barred common ownership of broadcast and newspaper properties in the same market. (The buyer was Time Inc., which closed the paper in 1981.)

But keeping the TV station, WMAL, proved a bonanza. It became highly profitable as WJLA — he changed the call letters, using his initials — and it was the foundation of Allbritton Communications, which today has TV outlets in Harrisburg, Pa.; Little Rock, Ark.; and a half-dozen other cities, as well as other media properties.

His son, Robert, now heads the company and in 2007 founded Politico, the news Web site and newspaper devoted to politics.

Briefly retired after selling The Star, Mr. Allbritton found himself bored and decided to return to banking.

A friend invited him to invest in the venerable Riggs National Bank, Washington’s biggest financial institution and one with a rich history. It had provided financing for Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph and the gold used to purchase Alaska. Some two dozen presidential families had banked there. Mr. Allbritton wound up with a 40 percent controlling interest.

Riggs became his fief, its board larded with relatives and friends, and the vehicle for his frequent travels to exploit his top-level foreign connections, including a close one with Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator.

He transformed Riggs from a traditional deposit-and-loan institution into a niche asset manager and private banker to the carriage trade. It boasted of being “the most important bank in the most important city in the world.”

Its fortunes waned, however, as competition increased and Riggs became enmeshed in money-laundering investigations. One resulted in a $25 million fine for what the authorities called “willful and systemic” violations of laws governing cash reporting. Federal regulators said the bank had failed to actively monitor transfers through Saudi Arabian and Equatorial Guinean accounts, which were considered possible conduits for terrorist funds or the proceeds of graft.

Mr. Allbritton refused numerous offers to buy Riggs, but under pressure from an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission involving oil money from Equatorial Guinea, he succumbed and sold the bank in 2005 to the PNC Corporation.

Besides his son, Robert, who at one time was chief executive of Riggs, Mr. Allbritton is survived by his wife, the former Barbara Jean Balfanz, whom he married in 1967, and two grandchildren.

Joe Lewis Allbritton was born in D’Lo, Miss., near Jackson, on Dec. 29, 1924, to Lewis A. Allbritton  and the former Ada Carpenter. As a youngster during the Depression he stirred orange juice for $1 a day at a local bottling plant. While in junior high school he moved with his parents to Houston, where he worked after school each day in the cafe opened by his father.

In high school he was a champion debater. He left Baylor University after a year to serve in the Navy from 1943 to 1946.

Mr. Allbritton returned to take a law degree at Baylor and opened a small office, but after a few years he discovered that he did not like what he called “the environment of practicing law” and gravitated toward business.

He made a killing in real estate selling land for a freeway between Houston and Galveston. He then organized and ran the San Jacinto Savings and Loan. Within 15 years he had acquired and merged his way to Texas banking eminence as the biggest shareholder in First International Bancshares of Dallas.

His reach extended as far as Los Angeles, where he acquired Pierce National Life Insurance and Pierce Brothers, a regional chain of 60 funeral homes, the largest in the area.

Having made a fortune and deciding that prospects for Texas banking were limited, Mr. Allbritton sold his shares and turned his attention in the early 1970s to Washington, where he found what he considered an undervalued TV property whose profits he figured could be used to support The Star.

“Opportunities in a community are rarely seen by the people who grew up there,” he later told Washingtonian magazine.

Mr. Allbritton also owned The Hudson Dispatch in New Jersey from 1977 to 1985; it was eventually merged into The Jersey Journal.

Mr. Allbritton’s chief avocation was racehorses. His Lazy Lane Farms in Upperville, Va., produced Hansel, winner of the 1991 Preakness and Belmont Stakes, the final two-thirds of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown.

But none from his stable ever won the Kentucky Derby, a goal he called “one great ambition yet unfulfilled.”

Daniel E. Slotnick contributed reporting.

Read More..

Ravi Shankar, sitar master, dies at 92

Ravi Shankar was already revered as a master of the sitar in 1966 when he met George Harrison, the Beatle who became his most famous disciple and gave the Indian musician-composer unexpected pop-culture cachet.

Suddenly the classically trained Shankar was a darling of the hippie movement, gaining widespread attention through memorable performances at the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock and the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.

Harrison called him "the godfather of world music," and the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin once compared the sitarist's genius to Mozart's. Shankar continued to give virtuoso performances into his 90s, including one in 2011 at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

PHOTOS: Ravi Shankar | 1920 - 2010

Shankar, 92, who introduced Indian music to much of the Western world, died Tuesday at a hospital near his home in Encinitas. Stuart Wolferman, a publicist for his record label Unfinished Side Productions, said Shankar had undergone heart valve replacement surgery last week.

Well-established in the classical music of his native India since the 1940s, he remained a vital figure on the global music stage for six decades. Shankar is the father of pop music star Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar, his protege and a sitar star in her own right.

Before the 1950s, Indian classical music — with its improvised melodic excursions and complex percussion rhythms — was virtually unknown in America. If Shankar had done nothing more than compose the movie scores for Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy in the 1950s, he "would be remembered and revered," Times music critic Mark Swed wrote last fall.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

Shankar was on a path to international stardom during the 1950s, playing the sitar in the Soviet Union and debuting as a soloist in Western Europe and the United States. Two early albums also had considerable impact, "Three Classical Ragas" and "India's Master Musician."

During his musical emergence in the West, his first important association was with violinist Menuhin, whose passion for Indian music was ignited by Shankar in 1952. Their creative partnership peaked with their "West Meets East" release, which earned a Grammy Award in 1967. The recording also showed Shankar's versatility — and the capacity of Indian music to inspire artists from different creative disciplines.

He presented a new form of classical music to Western audiences that was based on improvisation instead of written compositions. Shankar typically played in the Hindustani classical style, in which he was accompanied by a player of two tablas, or small hand drums. Concerts in India that often lasted through the night were generally shortened to a few hours for American venues as Shankar played the sitar, a long-necked lute-like stringed instrument.

At first, he especially appealed to fans of jazz music drawn to improvisation. He recorded "Improvisations" (1962) with saxophonist Bud Shank and "Portrait of a Genius" (1964) with flutist Paul Horn, gave lessons to saxophonist John Coltrane (who named his saxophone-playing son Ravi), and wrote a percussion piece for drummer Buddy Rich and Alla Rakha.

On the Beatles' 1965 recording "Norwegian Wood," Harrison had played the sitar and met Shankar the next year in London.

Shankar was "the first person to impress me," among the impressive people the Beatles met, "because he didn't try to impress me," Harrison later said. The pair became close and their friendship lasted until Harrison's death in 2001.

Harrison was instrumental in getting Shankar booked at the now legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. They partnered in organizing the Concert for Bangladesh and were among the producers who won a Grammy in 1972 for the subsequent album. They toured together in 1974, and Harrison produced Shankar's career-spanning mid-1990s boxed set, "In Celebration."

But Shankar came away from his festival appearances with mixed feelings about his rock generation followers. He expressed hope that his performances might help young people better understand Indian music and philosophy but later said "they weren't ready for it."

"All the young people got interested … but it was so mixed up with superficiality and the fad and the drugs," Shankar told The Times in 1996. "I had to go through several years to make them understand that this is a disciplined music, needing a fresh mind."

When Shankar was criticized in India as a sellout for spreading his music in the West, he responded in the early 1970s by lowering his profile and reaffirming his classical roots. He followed his first concerto for sitar and orchestra in 1971 with another a decade later.

"Our music has gone through so much development," Shankar told The Times in 1997. "But its roots — which have something to do with its feelings, the depth from where you bring out the music when you perform — touch the listeners even without their knowing it."

In the 1980s and '90s, Shankar maintained a busy performing schedule despite heart problems. He recorded "Tana Mana," an unusual synthesis of Indian music, electronics and jazz; oversaw the American premiere of his ballet, "Ghyanshyam: The Broken Branch"; and collaborated with composer Philip Glass on the album "Passages."

Read More..

A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 12

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

Read More..

Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar dies at 92

NEW DELHI (AP) — Ravi Shankar, the sitar virtuoso who became a hippie musical icon of the 1960s after hobnobbing with the Beatles and who introduced traditional Indian ragas to Western audiences over a 10-decade career, died Tuesday. He was 92.

A statement on the musician’s website said he died in San Diego, near his Southern California home. The musician’s foundation issued a statement saying that he had suffered upper respiratory and heart problems and had undergone heart-valve replacement surgery last week.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also confirmed his death and called Shankar a “national treasure.”

Labeled “the godfather of world music” by George Harrison, Shankar helped millions of classical, jazz and rock lovers discover the centuries-old traditions of Indian music.

He also pioneered the concept of the rock benefit with the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh. To later generations, he was known as the estranged father of popular American singer Norah Jones.

His last musical performance was with his other daughter, sitarist Anoushka Shankar Wright, on Nov. 4 in Long Beach, California; his foundation said it was to celebrate his 10th decade of creating music. The multiple Grammy winner learned that he had again been nominated for the award the night before his surgery.

As early as the 1950s, Shankar began collaborating with and teaching some of the greats of Western music, including violinist Yehudi Menuhin and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. He played well-received shows in concert halls in Europe and the United States, but faced a constant struggle to bridge the musical gap between the West and the East.

Describing an early Shankar tour in 1957, Time magazine said. “U.S. audiences were receptive but occasionally puzzled.”

His close relationship with Harrison, the Beatles lead guitarist, shot Shankar to global stardom in the 1960s.

Harrison had grown fascinated with the sitar, a long necked, string instrument that uses a bulbous gourd for its resonating chamber and resembles a giant lute. He played the instrument, with a Western tuning, on the song “Norwegian Wood,” but soon sought out Shankar, already a musical icon in India, to teach him to play it properly.

The pair spent weeks together, starting the lessons at Harrison‘s house in England and then moving to a houseboat in Kashmir and later to California.

Gaining confidence with the complex instrument, Harrison recorded the Indian-inspired song “Within You Without You” on the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” helping spark the raga-rock phase of 60s music and drawing increasing attention to Shankar and his work.

Shankar’s popularity exploded, and he soon found himself playing on bills with some of the top rock musicians of the era. He played a four-hour set at the Monterey Pop Festival and the opening day of Woodstock.

Though the audience for his music had hugely expanded, Shankar, a serious, disciplined traditionalist who had played Carnegie Hall, chafed against the drug use and rebelliousness of the hippie culture.

“I was shocked to see people dressing so flamboyantly. They were all stoned. To me, it was a new world,” Shankar told Rolling Stone of the Monterey festival.

While he enjoyed Otis Redding and the Mamas and the Papas at the festival, he was horrified when Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire.

“That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God,” he said.

In 1971, moved by the plight of millions of refugees fleeing into India to escape the war in Bangladesh, Shankar reached out to Harrison to see what they could do to help.

In what Shankar later described as “one of the most moving and intense musical experiences of the century,” the pair organized two benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden that included Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr.

The concert, which spawned an album and a film, raised millions of dollars for UNICEF and inspired other rock benefits, including the 1985 Live Aid concert to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia and the 2010 Hope For Haiti Now telethon.

Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury was born April 7, 1920, in the Indian city of Varanasi.

At the age of 10, he moved to Paris to join the world famous dance troupe of his brother Uday. Over the next eight years, Shankar traveled with the troupe across Europe, America and Asia, and later credited his early immersion in foreign cultures with making him such an effective ambassador for Indian music.

During one tour, renowned musician Baba Allaudin Khan joined the troupe, took Shankar under his wing and eventually became his teacher through 7 1/2 years of isolated, rigorous study of the sitar.

“Khan told me you have to leave everything else and do one thing properly,” Shankar told The Associated Press.

In the 1950s, Shankar began gaining fame throughout India. He held the influential position of music director for All India Radio in New Delhi and wrote the scores for several popular films. He began writing compositions for orchestras, blending clarinets and other foreign instruments into traditional Indian music.

And he became a de facto tutor for Westerners fascinated by India’s musical traditions.

He gave lessons to Coltrane, who named his son Ravi in Shankar’s honor, and became close friends with Menuhin, recording the acclaimed “West Meets East” album with him. He also collaborated with flutist Jean Pierre Rampal, composer Philip Glass and conductors Andre Previn and Zubin Mehta.

“Any player on any instrument with any ears would be deeply moved by Ravi Shankar. If you love music, it would be impossible not to be,” singer David Crosby, whose band The Byrds was inspired by Shankar’s music, said in the book “The Dawn of Indian Music in the West: Bhairavi.”

Shankar’s personal life, however, was more complex.

His 1941 marriage to Baba Allaudin Khan‘s daughter, Annapurna Devi, ended in divorce. Though he had a decades-long relationship with dancer Kamala Shastri that ended in 1981, he had relationships with several other women in the 1970s.

In 1979, he fathered Norah Jones with New York concert promoter Sue Jones, and in 1981, Sukanya Rajan, who played the tanpura at his concerts, gave birth to his daughter Anoushka.

He grew estranged from Sue Jones in the 80s and didn’t see Norah for a decade, though they later re-established contact.

He married Rajan in 1989 and trained young Anoushka as his heir on the sitar. In recent years, father and daughter toured the world together.

When Jones shot to stardom and won five Grammy awards in 2003, Anoushka Shankar was nominated for a Grammy of her own.

Shankar, himself, has won three Grammy awards and was nominated for an Oscar for his musical score for the movie “Gandhi.” His album “The Living Room Sessions, Part 1″ earned him his latest Grammy nomination, for best world music album.

Despite his fame, numerous albums and decades of world tours, Shankar’s music remained a riddle to many Western ears.

Shankar was amused after he and colleague Ustad Ali Akbar Khan were greeted with admiring applause when they opened the Concert for Bangladesh by twanging their sitar and sarod for a minute and a half.

“If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more,” he told the confused crowd, and then launched into his set.

___

Ravi Nessman reported from Bangkok.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Well: Why Afternoon May Be the Best Time to Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Does exercise influence the body’s internal clock? Few of us may be conscious of it, but our bodies, and in turn our health, are ruled by rhythms. “The heart, the liver, the brain — all are controlled by an endogenous circadian rhythm,” says Christopher Colwell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Brain Research Institute, who led a series of new experiments on how exercise affects the body’s internal clock. The studies were conducted in mice, but the findings suggest that exercise does affect our circadian rhythms, and the effect may be most beneficial if the exercise is undertaken midday.

For the study, which appears in the December Journal of Physiology, the researchers gathered several types of mice. Most of the animals were young and healthy. But some had been bred to have a malfunctioning internal clock, or pacemaker, which involves, among other body parts, a cluster of cells inside the brain “whose job it is to tell the time of day,” Dr. Colwell says.

These pacemaker cells receive signals from light sources or darkness that set off a cascade of molecular effects. Certain genes fire, expressing proteins, which are released into the body, where they migrate to the heart, neurons, liver and elsewhere, choreographing those organs to pulse in tune with the rest of the body. We sleep, wake and function physiologically according to the dictates of our body’s internal clock.

But, Dr. Colwell says, that clock can become discombobulated. It is easily confused, for instance, by viewing artificial light in the evening, he says, when the internal clock expects darkness. Aging also worsens the clock’s functioning, he says. “By middle age, most of us start to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep,” he says. “Then we have trouble staying awake the next day.”

The consequences of clock disruptions extend beyond sleepiness. Recent research has linked out-of-sync circadian rhythm in people to an increased risk for diabetes, obesity, certain types of cancer, memory loss and mood disorders, including depression.

“We believe there are serious potential health consequences” to problems with circadian rhythm, Dr. Colwell says. Which is why he and his colleagues set out to determine whether exercise, which is so potent physiologically, might “fix” a broken clock, and if so, whether exercising in the morning or later in the day is more effective in terms of regulating circadian rhythm.

They began by letting healthy mice run, an activity the animals enjoy. Some of the mice ran whenever they wanted. Others were given access to running wheels only in the early portion of their waking time (mice are active at night) or in the later stages, the equivalent of the afternoon for us.

After several weeks of running, the exercising mice, no matter when they ran, were found to be producing more proteins in their internal-clock cells than the sedentary animals. But the difference was slight in these healthy animals, which all had normal circadian rhythms to start with.

So the scientists turned to mice unable to produce a critical internal clock protein. Signals from these animals’ internal clocks rarely reach the rest of the body.

But after several weeks of running, the animals’ internal clocks were sturdier. Messages now traveled to these animals’ hearts and livers far more frequently than in their sedentary counterparts.

The beneficial effect was especially pronounced in those animals that exercised in the afternoon (or mouse equivalent).

That finding, Dr. Colwell says, “was a pretty big surprise.” He and his colleagues had expected to see the greatest effects from morning exercise, a popular workout time for many athletes.

But the animals that ran later produced more clock proteins and pumped the protein more efficiently to the rest of the body than animals that ran early in their day.

What all of this means for people isn’t clear, Dr. Colwell says. “It is evident that exercise will help to regulate” our bodily clocks and circadian rhythms, he says, especially as we enter middle age.

But whether we should opt for an afternoon jog over one in the morning “is impossible to say yet,” he says.

Late-night exercise, meanwhile, is probably inadvisable, he continues. Unpublished results from his lab show that healthy mice running at the animal equivalent of 11 p.m. or so developed significant disruptions in their circadian rhythm. Among other effects, they slept poorly.

“What we know, right now,” he says, “is that exercise is a good idea” if you wish to sleep well and avoid the physical ailments associated with an aging or clumsy circadian rhythm. And it is possible, although not yet proven, that afternoon sessions may produce more robust results.

“But any exercise is likely to be better than none,” he concludes. “And if you like morning exercise, which I do, great. Keep it up.”

Read More..