Malaria vaccine disappoints in African babies trial

LONDON (Reuters) – A GlaxoSmithKline experimental malaria vaccine touted as a new weapon in the fight to eradicate the deadly disease proved only 30 percent effective when given to African babies in a crucial clinical trial.

The surprisingly poor result leaves uncertain whether the vaccine will have a useful role to play in fighting the mosquito-borne disease that kills hundreds of thousands of children a year.

Philanthropist Bill Gates, who has helped fund its development, said further data was needed to determine whether and how the vaccine might be used.

“The efficacy came back lower than we had hoped, but developing a vaccine against a parasite is a very hard thing to do,” he said in a statement.

Results from the final-stage trial with 6,537 babies aged six to 12 weeks showed the vaccine provided “modest protection”, reducing episodes of the disease by 30 percent compared to immunization with a control vaccine, researchers said on Friday.

That efficacy rate one year after vaccination is less than half the 65 percent reported in a smaller mid-stage trial in 2008 that followed babies of a similar age for six months.

It is also a lot less than the 50 percent seen last year in a large Phase III trial involving children aged five to 17 months.

Vaccinating babies, rather than toddlers, is the preferred option, since the new vaccine could then be added to other routine infant immunizations. A separate program for older children would involve a lot of extra costs.

Despite the limited success, Britain’s top drugmaker said it would push ahead with developing the vaccine, called RTS,S or Mosquirix, and Chief Executive Andrew Witty said he still believed it would be an important tool in fighting malaria.

GSK does not expect to make any significant profit from the vaccine, which would only be sold in poor countries.

WORTH BUYING?

Given the target market, it is governments and international groups that will have to fund the vaccine’s roll-out and they will need more evidence before deciding that it is worth buying.

“We will have to have more information to give us a clearer idea as to how useful this vaccine will be,” said Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance, which funds bulk-buy vaccination programs for poorer nations.

In particular, Berkley told Reuters he wanted to see longer-term data, including the effect of booster shots, and an analysis of how the vaccine performed in different settings, which might show if it was suited for particular locations.

The setback comes two months after disappointing results with a vaccine against dengue fever, another mosquito-borne disease that is proving a formidable enemy.

Details of the malaria trial were presented at a medical meeting in Cape Town and published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Malaria is caused by a parasite carried in the saliva of mosquitoes. It is endemic in more than 100 countries worldwide and infected around 216 million people in 2010, killing around 655,000 of them, according to the World Health Organisation.

Control measures such as insecticide-treated bednets, indoor spraying and the use of combination anti-malaria drugs have helped cut the numbers of malaria cases and deaths significantly in recent years, but experts say an effective vaccine is vital to complete the fight against the disease.

The RTS,S vaccine is designed to kick in when the parasite enters the human bloodstream. By stimulating an immune response, it can prevent the parasite from maturing and multiplying in the liver. Without that immune response, the parasite gets back into the bloodstream and infects red blood cells, leading to fever, body aches and in some cases death.

Other teams of scientists around the world are working on other potential malaria vaccines which work in different ways, but RTS,S is by far the furthest ahead in development.

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DIY homes ‘should be made easier’

7 November 2012 Last updated at 19:06 ET

By Kevin Peachey Personal finance reporter, BBC News

Homeowners should not consider it a “pie in the sky dream” to build their own property, according to the new housing minister.

Mark Prisk told mortgage lenders that self-built homes should be considered as one way to boost the UK housing market.

He said that only about 10% of new UK homes were self-built, compared with 60% in France and Germany.

But homebuilders and lenders said this would only ever be a niche market.

Building fund

Self-build has become more prominent through television shows such as Grand Designs and generally they involve an owner buying a plot of land and then hiring an architect to design a property.

Mr Prisk reaffirmed the government’s push for self-built homes at a conference in London organised by the Council of Mortgage Lenders.

He said that the UK was also well behind countries such as the US where 45% of new homes were self-built.

Continue reading the main story

A group of residents in Ashley Vale, in Bristol, were worried about the redevelopment of a former scaffolding site in the area.

So they formed a not-for-profit community action group which bought and developed the site itself.

When building work began on 20 self-built homes in 2001, the people involved had no trouble raising the finance.

Borrowing became more difficult when five bungalows were built about five years ago.

But in the third phase of the project two years ago, they only secured mortgages for flats and a community space when the building work was completed.

Despite the increasing difficulty in securing finance, Johanna Nicholls, who chairs the group, said that they were looking for new plots to build more affordable homes.

The government has set aside a £30m investment fund to promote self-build. Sites in North East Derbyshire and Peterborough have recently been approved for a slice of the funding.

The opportunity for individuals and communities to build their own homes was now a realistic option, he said, and lenders should give them the chance.

“I’m not pretending self-build is the entire answer, but it is an element I want to encourage you to incorporate,” he told the audience of mortgage lenders.

‘Crisis’

He said that the number of self-build mortgage products had increased.

However, the fact that these still numbered just over 20 meant that many in the industry only regarded this as niche part of the market, and nothing like sufficient to make a dent in the housing shortage.

“We welcome everyone building houses,” said Stewart Baseley, of the Home Builders Federation.

“There is plenty of room on the pitch for all these balls to be kicked about. But self-build is not the solution that will solve the housing crisis.”

Mark Clare, group chief executive of Barratt Developments, the UK’s biggest housebuilder, said that self-built homes still needed to be financed and expertise needed to put them up.

He said that there would be a one million shortfall of homes by the end of the year.

Some 110,000 homes were being built, but 250,000 new households were being created, as people lived for longer and got married later.

“This is going to get worse before it gets better,” he said.

Mr Baseley said that three times as many homes were built in the 1950s and 1960s, about half of which were for council housing.

“We are in the midst of a housing crisis,” he said.

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Ghana building collapse traps dozens, kills 1

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — A five-story shopping center built earlier this year in a bustling suburb of Ghana‘s capital collapsed Wednesday, killing at least one person and leaving several dozen people trapped in the rubble, authorities and eyewitnesses said.

Rescue crews used cranes to try and remove debris from the top of the building amid fears that machinery sifting through the wreckage could injure trapped survivors. Crowds of bystanders gathered as rescuers sifted through cement and glass.

The fatality at the Melcom Shopping Center at Achimota, a suburb of Accra, was confirmed by Public Affairs Officer of the Ghana Fire Service Billy Anaglate. “We are still working to find out the fate of others who may be trapped under,” he said.

Other officials told The Associated Press that the death toll was likely to rise.

An AP reporter at the scene saw at least one man pulled from the debris, covered in dust and who was then whisked into an ambulance.

A Greater Accra Regional Public Affairs officer, deputy superintendent Freeman Tettey, confirmed that one person died and told the AP that 51 have been rescued and sent to hospitals around the capital.

“I was on my way to the shop when l saw it crumpling down,” Kojo Boadi, an eyewitness, said.

President John Mahama declared the scene a disaster zone and cut short his election campaign in the north of the country to be able to visit the site. The presidential election is scheduled for December.

The five-story store opened in February is part of the Melcom chain owned by Indian immigrant magnate, Bhagwan Khubchandani. His late father arrived in Ghana in 1929 as a 14-year-old to work as a store boy in the-then Gold Coast.

The store sells a variety of cheap, imported household goods and appliances that are popular with working-class Ghanaians.

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BlackBerry 10 maker dismisses ‘dead on arrival’ comment about new device

OTTAWA – Research In Motion turned to core supporters Wednesday in Ottawa, hoping to upsell its new BlackBerry 10 operating system as the company’s shares fell after a biting report from a securities analyst.

The company (TSX:RIM) invited federal politicians and their staff to a sneak preview of the yet-to-be-released devices, an event that RIM’s Canadian managing director acknowledged was a bit like preaching to the converted.

“Government is a critical constituency for RIM and for BlackBerry,” said Andrew MacLeod.

“It’s where we got our start, in many ways, and it’s an area that we are going to continue to innovate and deliver value.”

RIM shares fell by more than eight per cent Wednesday to $ 8.23 after a report from an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities warned the BlackBerry 10 software may be “dead on arrival.”

“We believe BB10 is likely to be DOA,” James Faucette was quoted saying in a research note obtained by Bloomberg. “We expect the new operating system to be met with a lukewarm response at best.”

MacLeod dismissed Faucette as “not a fan” and as just one voice in a varied landscape of people looking at the new platform.

“Two other analysts came out this week with some very, very positive reactions to the platform and some positive reactions to our prospects,” MacLeod told The Canadian Press.

“We’re focused on delivering value and innovating, and we think if we do that, then we’ll get the rest of the stuff to follow.”

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s stock had been on a rally of late, lifting steadily in the past week to a four-month high. Wednesday’s tumble nearly wiped out all of those gains.

Besides showcasing the BB10 for politicos and business people, RIM was planning to announce Thursday how it would migrate some of the key security features of its current suite of devices to the new model.

“We’re really going to make sure the core DNA — what made Blackberry so attractive to government customers, to enterprise customers — will of course be a key part of the BlackBerry 10 and architecture and system moving forward,” said MacLeod.

Meanwhile, the company said it had won U.S. security clearance for devices based on the new platform.

RIM announced early Thursday that it had received the crucial Federal Information Processing Standard certification, known as FIPS 140-2.

The certification would enable government agencies to deploy the new devices.

“This is the first time BlackBerry products have been FIPS certified ahead of launch,” RIM said.

Many political staffers, journalists and others swear by the BlackBerry over other devices for one main reason —its keyboard, which can make writing on the fly fast and easy compared with the touch screens offered by RIM’s competitors.

The BB10 line will include a touch screen option, but RIM maintains that its operating system will make typing faster than on other smart phones.

The company said earlier this month that its new BlackBerry smartphones were being tested by 50 phone carriers around the world.

RIM aims to have the new devices on store shelves in the first quarter of 2013, after the crucial holiday tech sales season.

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“Ode to Joy” for Royal Philharmonic Society’s 200th

LONDON (Reuters) – The British music society that commissioned Beethoven to write his Ninth Symphony and its “Ode to Joy” announced on Wednesday it will celebrate the society’s 2013 bicentenary by showing off its manuscript of the work on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Royal Philharmonic Society, founded in London in January, 1813, also will sponsor performances of Beethoven’s last symphony, splash out on commissions of new music and will digitize its archive held at the British Library, the society announced in the London pub where its founders used to meet.

“Some of the most famous works in the classical repertoire were either commissioned by the Philharmonic Society or premiered in the UK at Philharmonic Society concerts,” John Gilhooly, the society’s Irish chairman, told reporters.

“Works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner and Delius, Debussy and Shostakovich, to name but a few,” Gilhooly continued, adding that the society had commissioned “over 60 composers in the last decade alone”.

The society will participate in exhibits in New York and London featuring manuscript versions of Beethoven’s last symphony which contains the “Ode to Joy” that has become a theme song for world peace and freedom.

The society’s archives record that in 1817 it paid Beethoven 50 guineas for the work. The society, which is not publicly funded and is financed by donations, got the “royal” tag in its centenary year.

Gilhooly said a much-photographed and copied bust of Beethoven that the society owns would be making a return visit to concert stages after having been squirreled away in the RPS headquarters for most of the past 30 years.

“It’s going to be a bit like the Olympic torch,” Gilhooly said. “It’s busted out in preparation for a grand tour.”

Founded by a group of professional musicians to make classical music available to a wider audience, the RPS said it was commissioning 16 new works by such prominent composers as Harrison Birtwistle, Wolfgang Rihm and Magnus Lindberg, some of them in conjunction with the Britten-Pears Foundation which is celebrating the centenary of British composer Benjamin Britten.

“I very much admire that they are sponsoring young composers, older composers, making it possible that music, even avant garde or little known music, is written and performed,” Alfred Brendel, one of the world’s most distinguished pianists and a RPS gold medal recipient, who retired from public performance several years ago, told Reuters at the launch event.

The exhibit of letters and manuscripts will be mounted in cooperation with the British Library and the Morgan Library and the Juilliard School of music in New York, which holds another copy of the Beethoven Ninth.

The American and British manuscripts of the symphony, annotated by Beethoven, will be seen together side by side for the first time since 1824 in New York later in the year, the society said.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

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Climate change threatens sweet smell of morning coffee

LONDON (Reuters) – Rising temperatures due to climate change could mean wild arabica coffee is extinct in 70 years, posing a risk to the genetic sustainability of one of the world’s basic commodities, scientists said.

Although commercial coffee growers would still be able to cultivate crops in plantations designed with the right conditions, experts say the loss of wild arabica, which has greater genetic diversity, would make it harder for plantations to survive long-term and beat threats like pests and disease.

A study by researchers at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in collaboration with scientists in Ethiopia found that 38 to 99.7 percent of the areas suitable for wild arabica will disappear by 2080 if predictions of rising temperatures pan out.

Because coffee is a highly climate-dependent crop, the increase of a few degrees of average temperature in growing regions can put at risk the future of Arabica coffee and the livelihood of millions of people who grow and produce it.

“The extinction of arabica coffee is a startling and worrying prospect,” said Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, who led the study.

In a telephone interview, he said the findings made it even more important for organizations such as the World Coffee Research collaboration to continue work to improve the genetic strength of cultivated arabica by preserving wild types.

Researchers used computer modeling to analyze the influence of rising temperatures on the geographical distribution of wild arabica coffee.

The results, published in a the Public Library of Science journal PLOS ONE, showed a “profoundly negative influence” on the number and extent of wild arabica populations, the researchers said.

The researchers conducted two types of analysis. In the locality analysis, they found that the best outcome was for a 65 percent fall in the number of pre-existing bioclimatic ally suitable localities and the worst was for a 99.7 percent drop by 2080.

In the area analysis, the best outcome was a 38 percent reduction in suitable growing regions and the worst case was a 90 percent reduction by 2080.

Davis said the predictions were conservative, since the modeling did not factor in large-scale deforestation now taking place in Ethiopia and South Sudan, another Arabica coffee region.

“The models assume intact natural vegetation, whereas the highland forests of Ethiopia and South Sudan are highly fragmented due to deforestation,” the researchers wrote.

“Other factors, such as pests and diseases, changes in flowering times, and perhaps a reduction in the number of birds (which disperse the coffee seeds), are not included, and these are likely to have a compounding negative influence.”

Cultivated arabica coffee accounts for slightly more than 60 percent of global coffee production, with about 4.86 million tones produced this year and valued at around $ 16 billion in wholesale trade.

Exports of coffee also are crucial to the economies of countries including Brazil, Sudan and Ethiopia, where arabica coffee is thought to have originated.

(Additional reporting by Nigel Hunt; editing by Jane Baird and William Hardy)

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Major markets flat on Obama win

7 November 2012 Last updated at 03:31 ET

Continue reading the main story

Major share markets were little changed after US President Barack Obama won a second term in office.

The UK’s main share index, the FTSE 100 rose by just 16 points in early trading, while Japan’s Nikkei ended down by two points.

The US dollar fell slightly, with the euro rising to $ 1.286 from $ 1.281.

Investor attention is now likely to focus on President Obama’s need to secure a deal with the US Congress over looming tax rises and spending cuts.

With the Republicans maintaining a majority in the House of Representatives, this may make negotiations to try to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff more difficult.

This could see nearly $ 600bn (£375bn) of tax increases and spending cuts hit the US economy in January.

The fear is that the tax increases and spending cuts that could be enacted if there is no agreement over deficit reduction may derail a fragile US economic recovery, and in a worst case scenario even push the economy into a recession.

“We head into the fiscal cliff, trying to find compromise where it wasn’t possible before,” said Rob Ryan, director of markets strategy, Asia-Pacific for Royal Bank of Scotland in Singapore.

Germany’s Dax index was up 48 points in early trading, while France’s Cac had rise by 35 points.

Broader concerns

Continue reading the main story

With Greece there are always a number of stages with any vote. It is a prolonged process to reach any conclusion”

End Quote Justin Harper IG Markets

The spending cuts and increased taxes are not the only concern among investors.

The US economy has been battling various other issues, not least the high levels of unemployment in the country, which have dented consumer sentiment and impacted growth.

Despite encouraging jobless numbers last week, unemployment continues to hover close to 8%.

There are concerns amongst some analysts that the jobs market may not improve anytime soon and that the recovery in the US will remain weak.

That does does not bode well for Asian economies as they rely heavily on US demand for exports and overall growth.

Euro woes

Investors have also been wary of the developments in the eurozone, where the Greek Parliament is set to vote on further budget cuts on Wednesday.

The parliament will vote on 13.5bn euros ($ 17.3bn; £10.5bn) of spending cuts, which include tax increases and cuts to pensions.

These cuts are key to determining whether Greece can get the next 31.5bn euro tranche of its European and International Monetary Fund rescue package.

Greece has warned that without this money, which will be used largely to recapitalise the country’s banks, it will be bankrupt by the middle of the month.

However, there have been protests in Greece against the proposed cuts.

Analysts said that there were fears that it may take some time before Greece is given the money.

“With Greece there are always a number of stages with any vote. It is a prolonged process to reach any conclusion,” said Justin Harper of IG Markets.

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Canada firms to capitalize on nuclear trade with India

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Canadian firms will be able to export uranium and nuclear reactors to India for the first time in almost four decades under an agreement between the two nations, their prime ministers said, but more work is needed to implement the deal.

Once implemented, the agreement will end a ban on nuclear cooperation Canada imposed in 1976 after India secretly exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1974, commonly called the “Smiling Buddha”, using material from a Canadian-built reactor in India.

“Being able to resolve these issues and move forward is, we believe, a really important economic opportunity for an important Canadian industry, part of the energy industry, that should pay dividends in terms of jobs and growth for Canadians down the road,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Tuesday on a visit to New Delhi.

A negotiator with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the talks, said that what remained was a careful legal review of the language; translation into French and Hindi; and then a signing.

This is not expected to take very long, he said. The two sides have set up a joint committee to liaise on nuclear issues, but he said it would not be negotiating.

India aims to lift its nuclear capacity to 63,000 MW in the next 20 years by adding nearly 30 reactors. The country currently operates 20 mostly small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4,780 MW, or 2 percent of its total power capacity, according to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited.

Canada’s ambassador to India, Stewart Beck, said on Monday his country wanted to be able to track all nuclear material, but that India felt it only needed to report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It was not clear who made concessions in the talks and how effective the safeguards would be to ensure that Canadian material did not get used again for making nuclear weapons.

However, the CNSC official said India would now be required to notify Canada of any transfers to a third country and trade could only go to facilities that are safeguarded by the IAEA.

PROBABLY BEATING AUSTRALIA

Harper said the CNSC had worked to “achieve all of our objectives in terms of non-proliferation”.

Canada is in a race against Australia, its strategic ally but a commercial rival in the uranium business. Australia is also trying to nail down safeguards under which it too could sell uranium to India.

“We are effectively ahead of the Australians,” the CNSC official said, noting however that Russia and Kazakhstan were already supplying into India.

Opening up the Indian market would be a big help to Canada’s Cameco Corp, which is the world’s largest publicly traded uranium producer but which recently cut its long-term output targets due to the Fukushima disaster.

“Anytime we can reduce the roadblocks to selling our product around the world is always helpful,” Cameco chief executive Tim Gitzel told Reuters in Canada. “It opens a new market for us with the appropriate safeguards in place. So this is good news.”

Another potential beneficiary is Canadian engineering firm SNC Lavalin Group Inc, which bought the government’s commercial nuclear division, which designed the Candu reactor that is in use in numerous countries.

“As far as the sales of reactors goes, we would normally now request that Canada be accorded the same treatment as the Russians, the French and the Americans and that a site be designated in India for the implementation of at least a twin- unit Candu nuclear power station,” SNC Lavalin International President Ronald Denom, part of Harper’s delegation in India, told Reuters.

He also said it should open up the market to service the existing reactors in India.

Harper also said Canada welcomed foreign investment, after the country temporarily blocked Malaysian state oil firm Petronas’ C$ 5.17 billion ($ 5.19 billion) bid for gas producer Progress Energy Resources on October 20.

Late on Friday, Canada extended to December 10 its review of a $ 15.1 billion bid made in July by China’s CNOOC Ltd for Canadian energy producer Nexen Inc.

“Those decisions have to be taken looking at the global evolving economy in which we operate,” Harper said.

($ 1 = C$ 0.9965)

(Additional reporting by Julie Gordon in Toronto; Additional writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Michael Roddy)

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Quiet media night explodes suddenly, Rove protests

NEW YORK (AP) — Careful media coverage of a close presidential election Tuesday exploded so suddenly Tuesday that it left the bizarre spectacle of Fox News Channel analyst Karl Rove, a major fundraiser for Republican Mitt Romney, publicly questioning his network’s declaration that President Barack Obama had been re-elected.

ABC News was also frantically trying to repair a power outage that left much of its set inoperable precisely at the time the election was being decided.

For several hours, election coverage resembled the run-up to a Super Bowl, with plenty of talk signifying little. Then NBC News, at 11:12 p.m. ET, was the first to declare Obama had won by virtue of winning the battleground state of Ohio. “He remains president of the United States for a second term,” said anchor Brian Williams.

Other networks followed suit, including Fox five minutes later. But Rove, the former top political aide to President George W. Bush whose on-air presence on Fox this campaign raised some eyebrows because of his prominent role supporting Romney, suggested the call was premature.

“We’ve got to be careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the candidates and a quarter of the vote left to count … I’d be very cautious about intruding in this process,” said Rove, a behind-the-scenes player in the wild 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore that took weeks to decide. (Gore was on TV Tuesday, too, as anchor of Current TV’s election coverage).

It left Rove’s colleagues struggling for words.

“That’s awkward,” said co-anchor Megyn Kelly. She then went backstage to interview on camera two men who were part of Fox’s team in charge of making election calls. They had concluded that based on the precincts where votes were left to be counted, Romney couldn’t beat Obama.

Later, Rove tried to make light of the encounter. “This is not a cage match,” he said. “This is a light intellectual discussion.”

As the evening had progressed for Fox and it became clear that Romney, the clear favorite of most of its audience, would find it hard to win, commentators like Sarah Palin and Peggy Noonan looked stricken.

“This was the referendum that Mitt Romney wanted on Barack Obama,” said Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman on MSNBC. “And guess what? Barack Obama won the referendum. And that’s pretty darned emphatic.”

Much of ABC’s New York election studio was left powerless for about 20 minutes at the height of Tuesday’s coverage. The network didn’t inform viewers, and tried to compensate by taking anchors Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos away from their desks, and cutting away to crowd shots at Times Square.

Sawyer’s relaxed, folksy delivery in her first presidential election night as anchor drew considerable social media attention. The rock group They Might Be Giants tweeted: “and Diane Sawyer declares tonight’s winner is … chardonnay!”

Sawyer and Stephanopoulos were a new election anchor team for ABC, and Scott Pelley led the CBS coverage. Of the three anchors for the biggest broadcast networks, only NBC’s Williams was a returnee from 2008.

But it was a far different media world anyway. 2012 was notable for the vast array of outlets that an interested consumer could command to create their own media experience on multiple screens. Web sites offered deep drill-downs in data and social media hosted raucous conversations.

“If you started a drinking game with the words ‘exit poll’ in it, please stop now. You will die!” tweeted TV critic Tim Goodman.

Obama’s Twitter account tweeted a picture of the president hugging First Lady Michelle Obama, and within 45 minutes it was retweeted more than 300,000 times.

Earlier in the evening, journalists took special care not to rely too heavily on exit polls. Perhaps they remembered how misleading exit polls in 2004 led TV networks astray then or perhaps, in CBS’ Bob Schieffer’s words, its results this year were too contradictory.

News outlets carefully parsed information and sometimes used the same facts for contradictory conclusions.

Fox News analyst Brit Hume noted an exit poll finding that 42 percent of voters said Superstorm Sandy was an important factor in their vote, suggesting that was a positive for Obama since he was widely considered to have been effective in his response. With the same information, the web site Politico headlined: “Exit Survey: Sandy Not a Factor.”

There was a certain amount of vamping time, too. Glenn Beck’s online network, The Blaze, had a blackboard straight out of the 1960s as a tote board. Beck killed time on the air by asking for cookie dough ice cream from the on-set food bar.

“Waffle cone, please,” Beck said.

When Sawyer asked David Muir for the latest news from the Romney campaign, he reported the family had pasta for dinner and the candidate indulged in his favorite peanut butter and honey sandwich.

The media personality with perhaps the most on the line was Nate Silver of The New York Times, whose FiveThirtyEight blog was sought out by 20 percent of the people who visited the newspaper’s website on Monday. He has used statistical data throughout the campaign to predict an Obama victory and by Tuesday, had forecast a 90.9 percent chance that Obama would win.

After Obama’s victory became clear, Gavin Purcell, producer of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” tweeted that “Nate Silver is the only white male winning tonight.” CNN’s Piers Morgan tweeted Silver an invitation to appear on his show Wednesday.

___

Television Writers Frazier Moore in New York and Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Election over but final Florida results still not in

MIAMI (Reuters) – Americans gave President Barack Obama a second term in office, but it still wasn’t clear early on Wednesday whether the president won the key battleground state of Florida.

The vote in the state, which introduced the terms “hanging chads” and “butterfly ballots” to the masses in its historic 2000 presidential election, was too close to call long after Republican challenger Mitt Romney conceded his loss.

Early Wednesday morning Obama was edging out Romney by about 45,000 votes, or 0.53 percentage points, out of a total of 8.27 million votes cast in Florida, with about 99 percent of the votes counted.

“It’s 1:42 in the morning and I just heard there are still people voting in Miami-Dade County,” tweeted Chris Cate, spokesman for Florida‘s Secretary of State, who is responsible for elections. “Kudos to their commitment to voting!”

The head of elections for Florida‘s Miami-Dade County, which accounts for about 10 percent of the state’s 12 million registered voters, said final results would not be available until Wednesday afternoon.

Until then, it may not be totally clear whether Obama won the state, which he carried in 2008.

At one church in Miami hundreds of voters were still in line when polls were due to close at 7 p.m.

“I believe that Obama is doing a good job and he’s going to do a better job,” said Michele Adriaanse, 59, who arrived to vote at 6.30 p.m. and finally cast her ballot shortly before midnight. “If we don’t give him the chance, things will go back to how they were,” she added.

Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Penelope Townsley told reporters the delay was due to “an extremely high volume of absentee ballots” and because long lines forced some precincts to remain open hours after their official closing time.

Florida accounts for 29 of the 270 votes in the electoral college a candidate needs to win the presidency. That is more than any other swing state, and by many accounts the fourth-largest state was a must-win for Romney.

Most recent polls had given Romney an edge over the incumbent in Florida, where the economic recovery has been slower than in other states and long-term unemployment has reached record highs.

But registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Florida by about 5 percentage points and Romney faced multiple headwinds in the state.

A plan by Romney’s vice presidential running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, to change the Medicare health insurance program for seniors was among the factors often cited as holding back Romney’s campaign in the retiree-heavy state.

He also suffered from an inability to make inroads among Hispanic voters, outside of the state’s conservative Cuban-American community.

Florida propelled former President George W. Bush to a wafer-thin victory in 2000 when he won the state by 537 votes.

SLOW-GOING

Complaints about voting procedures, long lines to cast ballots, restrictions on early voting and some possible irregularities have been heard repeatedly across Florida. There have been no claims of anything widespread or problematic enough to cast doubt on the credibility of the Florida outcome.

It also was not immediately whether U.S. Representative Allen West – the firebrand Republican lawmaker known for his blistering attacks on Obama and other Democrats – had won one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races.

West, a darling of the conservative Tea Party movement, had amassed one of the largest campaign war chests among House Republicans. His known supporters included organizations like Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political advocacy group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.

But he faced a tough re-election challenge against Democrat Patrick Murphy, who had hammered the first-term Republican for the intransigence that led to gridlock in Washington.

Early Wednesday morning, West, 51, was trailing by 2,000 votes out of the 318,000 ballots cast.

Murphy, a 29-year-old businessman and political newcomer, had strong backing from party headquarters and was one of the best-funded Democratic challengers in the country.

A certified public accountant whose father runs a construction company in Miami, Murphy turned the race into a referendum on West, calling the Republican an extremist member of a “do-nothing” Congress.

The battle in Florida‘s new 18th district was seen as a test of whether a high-profile – some say polarizing – conservative could win one of the biggest swing districts in a perennial swing state.

(Reporting by Tom Brown; Additional reporting by David Adams; Editing by Paul Simao)

Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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