Apple sells three million iPads over first weekend

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American composer Elliott Carter dies at age 103
















(Reuters) – Classical composer Elliott Carter, who twice won Pulitzer Prizes in a career that spanned more than 75 years, died on Monday in New York at age 103, music publisher Boosey & Hawkes said.


Carter was awarded Pulitzer Prizes in 1960 and 1973 for string quartet compositions. He composed 158 works, including several at over 100 years of age. One composition for chamber orchestra is scheduled for a world premier in February.













“The great range and diversity of his music has, and will continue to have, influence on countless composers and performers worldwide,” the publisher said. “He will be missed by us all but remembered for his brilliance, his wit and his great canon of work.”


He was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 1998 and celebrated his 100th birthday at New York‘s Carnegie Hall in 2008 with a new work performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.


Carter was presented the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the United States, in 1985. He also received national honors from Germany and France.


(Reporting by David Bailey; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Mohammad Zargham)


Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Unlikely Model for H.I.V. Prevention: Adult Film Industry


Stephanie Diani for The New York Times


INDUSTRY DATABASE Shylar Cobi, right, a film producer, confirmed test results of the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya.







LOS ANGELES — Before they take off all their clothes, the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya go through a ritual unique to the heterosexual adult film industry.




First, they show each other their cellphones: Each has an e-mail from a laboratory saying he or she just tested negative for H.I.V., syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea.


Then they sit beside the film’s producer, Shylar Cobi, as he checks an industry database with their real names to confirm that those negative tests are less than 15 days old.


Then, out on the pool terrace of the day’s set — a music producer’s hilltop home with a view of the Hollywood sign — they yank down their pants and stand around joking as Mr. Cobi quickly inspects their mouths, hands and genitals for sores.


“I’m not a doctor,” Mr. Cobi, who wears a pleasantly sheepish grin, says. “I’m only qualified to do this because I’ve been shooting porn since 1990 and I know what looks bad.”


Bizarre as the ritual is, it seems to work.


The industry’s medical consultants say that about 350,000 sex scenes have been shot without condoms since 2004, and H.I.V. has not been transmitted on a set once.


Outside the world of pornography, the industry’s testing regimen is not well known, and no serious academic study of it has ever been done. But when it was described to several AIDS experts, they all reacted by saying that there were far fewer infections than they would have expected, given how much high-risk sex takes place.


“I don’t think there’s any question that it works,” said Dr. Allan Ronald, a Canadian AIDS specialist who did landmark studies of the virus in prostitutes in a Nairobi slum. “I’m a little uncomfortable, because it’s giving the wrong message — that you can have multiple sex partners without condoms — but I can’t say it doesn’t work.”


Despite the regimen’s apparent success, California health officials and an advocacy group, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, are trying to make it illegal to shoot without condoms. They argue that other sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the industry, though the industry trade group disputes that.


In January, the city of Los Angeles passed a law requiring actors to wear condoms. A measure to do the same for the whole county is on the ballot on Tuesday.


Producers say the condom requirement will drive them out of business since consumers will not buy such films. Local newspapers like The Los Angeles Times oppose the ballot measure, calling it well-intentioned but unenforceable, and warning that it could drive up to 10,000 jobs out of state.


Very frequent testing makes it almost impossible for an actor to stay infected without being caught, said Dr. Jacques Pepin, the author of “The Origins of AIDS” and an expert on transmission rates. “And if you are having sex mostly with people who themselves are tested all the time, this must further reduce the risk.”


When the virus first enters a high-risk group like heroin users, urban prostitutes or habitués of gay bathhouses, it usually infects 30 to 60 percent of the cohort within a few years, studies have shown. The same would be expected in pornography, where performers can have more than a dozen partners a month, but the industry says self-policing has prevented it.


“Our talent base has sex exponentially more than other people, but we’re all on the same page about keeping it out,” said Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, one of the biggest studios.


Performers have to test negative every 28 days, although some studios recently switched to every 14.


If a test is positive, all the studios across the country that adhere to standards set by the Free Speech Coalition, an industry trade group, are obliged to stop filming until all the on-screen partners of that performer, all their partners, and all their partners’ partners, are found and retested. In 2004, the industry shut down for three months to do that.


It has had briefer shutdowns in each of the last four years.


In 2009 and 2010, no other infected performers were found. Coalition representatives said an infected woman in 2009, from Nevada, may have had an infected boyfriend, and offered evidence that a man infected in 2010 in Florida had worked outside the industry as a prostitute. The 2011 test was a false positive.


A shutdown in August came after several actors got syphilis, not H.I.V. All performers were given a choice: Take antibiotics, or pass two back-to-back syphilis tests 14 days apart.


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Wal-Mart, Target a sibling retail rivalry









WASHINGTON—





— Along interstate highways and in suburban town centers, sometimes separated by nothing more than parking lots, stand the warring titans of modern retail, shilling flat-screen televisions next to fortified milk.

Here, they battle for the heart and wallet of the American shopper. And your allegiance is as telling as your taste in cable news or the contents of your Netflix queue: Are you cloaked in Target's bull's-eye red or Wal-Mart's royal blue?





Each has its loyalists — and no wonder. The stores market vastly different versions of American exceptionalism: Wal-Mart champions efficiency, thrift. Target offers style, aspiration. Wal-Mart gives us low prices on everything we need; Target tells us what we want.

Yet the companies have much in common.

"The remarkable thing is that 80 percent of the stuff in Target and Wal-Mart is identical." said Charles Fishman, author of "The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works — and How It's Transforming the American Economy." The prices are often identical too. The most recent comparison by Bloomberg Businessweek found only a 46-cent difference between the two retailers per $100 of purchases. (You'll save that 46 cents at Target, although Wal-Mart usually wins independent price comparisons.)

Target and Wal-Mart are, in short, the fraternal twins of American retail — sharing much of the same DNA, yet strikingly different.

Four stores and 50 years ago, Target, Wal-Mart, Kmart and Kohl's all sprouted up in America's heartland. The economy was booming and the concept ingenious: replace seasonal sales by selling discounted goods year-round.

The retail revolution came before the civic one, with a growing middle class lapping up toasters and Tide for cheap, cheap, cheap. Discounters catered to the haves and have-mores, anticipating, and cultivating, the have-it-now culture that characterizes modern consumerism.

For Wal-Mart and Target, success was born of the Southern and Midwestern values championed by their respective founders. Sam Walton couldn't have known his discounter would one day become the world's largest private employer. And the brothers Dayton wouldn't have guessed that Target would democratize design for an entire country.

Instead, they possessed an intuitive sense of what drives every customer, characterized by Natalie Gutierrez, 30, as she browsed ottomans in a Target in the nation's capital a few Sundays ago.

"I already have everything I need," Gutierrez said. "But I always like to come in and see if there's something I may want."

Upscale discounter

In 1962, the Dayton Co. opened its first Target store, at 1515 W. County Road B in Roseville, Minn. The five grandsons of company founder George Dayton hatched the idea for an upscale discount chain based on their existing low-priced Downstairs Store.

"What made them so successful is that they've been very clever at executing on their core mandate: They are the upscale discounter," said Laura Rowley, author of "On Target: How the World's Hottest Retailer Hit a Bull's-Eye."

"Bruce Dayton used that language in 1962. The family understood the department store model and made investments in customer service."

Even at inception, customers responded to Target's friendly and modern atmosphere.

"Doug Dayton first heard it called 'tar-JAY' in 1962," Rowley said. The tongue-in-cheek French pronunciation would stick and further the store's cheap-chic ethos.

A few months later, Walton left behind his Ben Franklin five-and-dime franchises to start Wal-Mart Discount City at 719 Walnut Ave. in Rogers, Ark. In the beginning, Walton was relatively cautious while scouting future sites, hopping into a glorified crop-duster to survey small towns in the rural South. Wal-Mart wouldn't grow with its signature ferocity until the 1970s and '80s.

"He was paying attention to places where nobody else was," said Alan Dranow, senior director for heritage and marketing at Wal-Mart. "Everyone thought you had to go to urban areas or towns of 50,000. Sam said, 'I disagree.' He wanted to serve the underserved. So Wal-Mart grew in rural areas before everyone knew what was happening."

What was it about 1962? Was it the housewives? The novelty of suburban shopping?





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