By Poornima Gupta SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 8:45pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook on Monday replaced the heads of its software and retail units in the company's biggest executive shake-up in a decade following embarrassing problems with its new mapping program and unpopular store-related decisions. Software chief Scot...

By Steve Holland DAVENPORT, Iowa | Mon Oct 29, 2012 8:16pm EDT DAVENPORT, Iowa (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was about to go on stage in Ohio on Monday when he decided to abruptly shift the tone of his campaign given the potentially lethal impact of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. With the storm bearing down, Romney...

By Alistair Barr SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 7:26pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - PayPal is cutting about 325 jobs as part of a major reorganization by its new president, David Marcus, designed to regain an innovative edge and head off rising competition. PayPal, the online payment pioneer owned by eBay Inc, said on Monday the full-time jobs...

By Jeff Mason and Steve Holland WASHINGTON/DAVENPORT, Iowa | Mon Oct 29, 2012 7:09pm EDT WASHINGTON/DAVENPORT, Iowa (Reuters) - President Barack Obama suspended campaigning and returned to Washington on Monday to oversee the response to Hurricane Sandy, while his Republican rival Mitt Romney curtailed political events to show respect for the stor...

LOS ANGELES | Mon Oct 29, 2012 6:21pm EDT LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Animated TV comedy satire "South Park" is taking aim at a disgraced icon who seems a lot like seven-time Tour de France winning cyclist Lance Armstrong. In a teaser clip released on Monday by Comedy Central, an episode titled "A Scause for Applause" shows residents of the fictional America...

By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 6:11pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The agenda at a secretive conference on protecting critical infrastructure from computer attack was curtailed at the last minute last week, underscoring the legal challenges of sharing such information, much less getting companies to respond to it. Two talks abou...

By Noel Randewich SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 6:08pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc plans to use technology from Britain's ARM Holdings Plc to make energy-efficient processors for servers, a growing business that the troubled chipmaker hopes will help offset weakness in the struggling PC industry. AMD will expand it...

By Mark Felsenthal WASHINGTON | Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:55pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the U.S. East Coast little more than a week before the presidential election, President Barack Obama's fortunes may in part depend on how well a former volunteer firefighter from Florida does his job. Craig Fugate, a former paramedi...

By Grzegorz Szymanowski and Christian Lowe WARSAW | Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:41pm EDT WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's Supreme Court opened the way on Monday for a blasphemy verdict against a rock musician who tore up a Bible on stage, a case that has pitted deep Catholic traditions against a new desire for free expression. Adam Darski, front man with a hea...

By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:40pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A high-profile cybersecurity company that has pledged to respond to hackers with unusual aggression has hired the former commanding officer of a top U.S. information-warfare unit to spearhead the most direct counter-attacks. CrowdStrike said the retired Air Force...

By Ransdell Pierson Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:39pm EDT (Reuters) - Levels of a protein believed to be a main cause of Alzheimer's disease rose in the blood of patients treated with Eli Lilly's experimental drug in late-stage trials, suggesting the protein, beta amyloid, was removed from the brain as intended, researchers said on Monday. Lilly in August disclosed...

By Piya Sinha-Roy LOS ANGELES | Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:19pm EDT LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - After almost a decade in which torture films dominated the box office, horror movies are returning to ghostly thrills with a new slew of low-budget productions making big money for studios. The success of 2009's "Paranormal Activity" - which was made for $15,000 a...

NEW YORK | Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:17pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Anderson Cooper's venture into daytime is coming to an end after just two seasons after failing to find an audience in the crowded daytime talk show market. Warner Bros Television, which syndicates "Anderson", said on Monday the show will not be renewed after the current season ends in the summe...

SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:11pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Baidu Inc, China's largest search engine company, posted its slowest quarterly revenue growth in more than two years, hurt by slowing sales as economic growth slows. Baidu said on Monday that revenue in the third quarter was $994.6 million, up 49.7 percent from the year-ago period.For ...

By Frederik Joelving NEW YORK | Mon Oct 29, 2012 5:01pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Cancer doctors often refer their patients to palliative care very late in the course of disease, according to a new survey from Canada. About a third of oncologists said they refer patients to palliative care, or hospice, when they diagnose a cancer that has s...

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK | Mon Oct 29, 2012 4:16pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Acupuncture may help relieve fatigue in women who've had breast cancer, a new UK study suggests. Researchers found that women who attended six weekly acupuncture sessions had greater improvements in fatigue as well as anxiety, depression and quality of life, com...

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK | Mon Oct 29, 2012 4:14pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Heart attacks dropped by one-third in one county in Minnesota after two smoke-free workplace ordinances went into place, a new study shows. The lead researcher on the work said that decline was likely due to less secondhand smoke exposure in restaurants and bars...

By Frederik Joelving NEW YORK | Mon Oct 29, 2012 4:13pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Weight-loss programs can help even very young children slim down, and it appears that acting early may improve the odds of success, according to a pair of new studies. "What they are showing is a pretty consistent trend that if we were to intervene early, we c...

MARSEILLE, France | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:55pm EDT MARSEILLE, France (Reuters) - The Frenchman who sparked a global health scare by selling substandard breast implants has been released from jail under court supervision pending a trial next year, a judicial source said on Friday. Jean-Claude Mas, who faces charges of causing involuntary bodily harm and aggr...

By Sarah McBride SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:50pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Venture capitalists are proving a less reliable source of cash for President Barack Obama during this election, according to fundraising data, even though he has raised a record amount of cash overall. Through September 30, Obama collected $552,758 from these d...

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:50pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc's Silicon Valley headquarters are far away from the eye of Hurricane Sandy, yet for employees of the social networking company, the storm hit home. After nearly six months of watching helplessly as the value of Facebook's stock crumbled, Faceboo...

By Nick Carey CHILLICOTHE, Ohio | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:46pm EDT CHILLICOTHE, Ohio (Reuters) - Ohio's Senate race has become one of the most expensive in the country in the 2012 election campaign, as money pours into the state to help a young Republican challenger come within striking distance of Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown. Ohio, a key prize...

By Richard Balmforth KIEV | Mon Oct 29, 2012 1:21pm EDT KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich's party was on course on Monday to secure a new parliamentary majority, but international monitors condemned the election as flawed and said the country had taken a step back under his leadership. Exit polls and partial results from Sund...

By Michael Stott MOSCOW | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:40pm EDT MOSCOW (Reuters) - Two women from punk band Pussy Riot sentenced to jail for an anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral face harsh, Soviet-style prison camps where their lives may be in danger due to a lack of medicine and no hot water amid sub-zero winter temperatures, according to a recentl...

By Oliver Holmes and Khaled Yacoub Oweis BEIRUT/AMMAN | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:26pm EDT BEIRUT/AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian jets bombed parts of Damascus on Monday in what residents said were the capital's fiercest air raids yet, at the end of what was supposed to be a four-day truce. "More than 100 buildings have been destroyed, some leveled to the grou...

By Jonathon Burch ANKARA | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:22pm EDT ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse thousands of secularists protesting at a banned rally in the capital on Monday against what they see as an increasingly authoritarian and Islamist government. The scenes of chanting men and women draped in Turkish f...

Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:18pm EDT (Reuters) - The deadly meningitis outbreak tied to steroid injections from potentially tainted medications spread to a 19th state on Monday with the first case reported in Rhode Island, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Only four of the 23 states that received some of the medication have not reported cases of fungal ...

By Malathi Nayak SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:07pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Monday demand for the company's new Windows 8 operating system, released to the public on Friday, was running at a higher rate than its last release, Windows 7. "We're seeing preliminary demand well above whe...

By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:58pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Securities regulators are taking a closer look at Nasdaq OMX's $62 million plan to compensate brokers who suffered losses from the exchange operator's botched handling of Facebook's initial public offering. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it was ins...

By Matt Spetalnick WASHINGTON | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:56pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday urged East Coast residents in the path of Hurricane Sandy to heed evacuation orders and assured them the government was ready to respond swiftly, but he warned them it would take a long time to clean up in the storm's aftermath. Scr...

By Allyn Fisher-Ilan JERUSALEM | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:37pm EDT JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday overcame opposition within his party to an alliance with a far-right group that opinion polls predict will help him triumph in a January election. Netanyahu had angered many Likud party faithful with a surprise an...

LOS ANGELES | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:35pm EDT LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Country-pop star Taylor Swift will co-host the Grammy nominations live on television from Nashville, the capital of country music, the Recording Academy said on Monday. Swift, 22, who has won six Grammy awards, will join rapper-actor LL Cool J to announce nominees in some of the major cate...

By Alexandra Ulmer and Antonio De la Jara SANTIAGO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:31pm EDT SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chilean voters punished President Sebastian Pinera's conservative bloc in municipal elections Sunday, paving the way for a possible comeback by the left in next year's presidential ballot. Pinera took power in 2010, ending 20 years of rule by the...

By Thomas Escritt THE HAGUE | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:20pm EDT THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's Liberals agreed a coalition with the Labour Party on Monday and vowed to follow a path of austerity. Outlining nearly 16 billion euros ($20.65 billion) of cuts over the next four years, the two party leaders said the measures were nee...

NEW YORK | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:15pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Green Day said on Monday they are canceling their fall club tour and postponing early 2013 dates as frontman Billie Joe Armstrong continues treatment for substance abuse. "Obviously the timing for this isn't ideal, but Billie Joe's well-being is our main concern," band member Mike Dirnt said in ...

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Oct 29, 2012 2:06pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc unveiled a larger version of its Nexus-branded tablet computer on Monday, and updated its mobile gadget and online content offerings as competition with Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp heats up ahead of the holiday sales season. The d...

By Susana Ferreira PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti | Mon Oct 29, 2012 1:53pm EDT PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) - As Hurricane Sandy barreled toward the U.S. East Coast on Monday, the full extent of the storm's havoc on Haiti was just beginning to emerge. Extensive damage to crops throughout the southern third of the country, as well as the high potential...

MUMBAI | Mon Oct 29, 2012 1:46pm EDT MUMBAI (Reuters) - Despite the slick special effects, creation of a fake tiger and shooting underwater, the toughest part of making "Life of Pi" was telling the story, director Ang Lee said Monday. The Academy Award-winning director who is in Mumbai to promote his latest project, based on the bestselling novel of the ...

By Karolina Tagaris and Renee Maltezou ATHENS | Mon Oct 29, 2012 1:21pm EDT ATHENS (Reuters) - A prominent Greek journalist who published the names of more than 2,000 wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts appeared in court on Monday to stand trial for violating data privacy laws in a case which aroused international concern. Costas Vaxevanis, e...

By Andrew Quinn ALGIERS | Mon Oct 29, 2012 1:16pm EDT ALGIERS (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed regional power Algeria on Monday to support an Africa-led military intervention in northern Mali, a senior U.S. official said. Clinton's one-day visit comes amid mounting international pressure on Algeria over the crisis in Ma...